Another socialist blog

This week, under intense political pressure, Newsweek retracted its story about how U.S. guards at Guantanamo desecrated the Koran. Conservatives are bashing Newsweek like a piñata with apparent glee—they get to trash the liberal media, intimidate any reporters who might be working on the next torture story, and wrap themselves in the flag, all at the same time. The official line is that the Koran desecration story is false, and by implication all other reporting about the U.S. torture policy is also false.

But whatever corners the magazine cut in getting its story to print, fact remains that Americans at Guantanamo have been desecrating the Koran as a means of psychological torture of Muslim prisoners. There are many more sources for this than just Newsweek’s unreliable anonymous source, and the reports have been around for a long time. Molly Ivins runs through a short list:

The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran.

…

The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, “Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal,” reported the Financial Times. “They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Koran and throw them in the toilet. …” said the released prisoner.

…

The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by “guards’ handling copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp’s loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer’s apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.”

Ivins has it right: the seventeen people who died in those riots didn’t die because of anything Newsweek did. They died because of what our government did.

The arrest of Abu Faraj al-Libbi last week has been hailed by the Washington propaganda machine as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice said he was “a very important figure.” Whoops and backslaps all around, because it looks like the Bush administration finally caught a break after its long streak of worsening news on global terrorism.

Except that they didn’t catch a break, because the guy’s not a major terrorist at all. He didn’t even rate a place on the FBI’s most wanted list. The Bush adminsitration is hyping his arrest because they need a big flashy arrest to distract us from an endless stream of bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan. As to al-Libbi’s absence from the FBI’s most wanted list, a conspicuous omission given that he’s supposed to be the number 3 man in Al Qaeda, the FBI explains it away, with a straight face, thus: “We did not want him to know he was wanted.”

A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.”

Right-wingers seem to have a favorite debate tactic: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, make shit up. Bill O’Reilly uses it (pardon the term) liberally.

O’Reilly apparently needed to come across as tough on crime the other day. So when the Houston Chronicle, in an editorial, criticized Florida’s new sex offender law, he lambasted them for saying the law was too harsh. He complained that the editorial advocated “community service” for sexual predators. He read a long quote from the editorial that appeared to back up his points. And he accused a guest on his show from trying to “mislead” his listeners by saying otherwise.

Trouble is, none of what O’Reilly said about the editorial was true. The Chronicle never said the law was too harsh, certainly never called for community service for sex offenders. They did say the law should be more effective in preventing crime, which you might think would be enough to get you some points with a rabid law and order right-winger. Even the words he claimed to be quoting from the editorial, did not appear anywhere in the piece, nor did they appear anywhere in the Chronicle ever.

In its response, the Chronicle charitably suggests that O’Reilly confused their editorial with someone else’s. I think he made it up out of whole cloth, which is not out of character for a liar like Bill O’Reilly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson could have been talking about Bill O’Reilly when he said,

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Thanks to the Chronicle for the Emerson quote.

Fun quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his Presidential papers (November 8, 1954):

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

So many examples of right-wing Christian hypocrisy lately! If all the satirists went on strike we would hardly notice.

Spokane Mayor Jim West, an outspoken anti-gay Republican, turns out to be gay. West, who has pushed anti-gay legislation and a bill to outlaw sex among teenagers, apparently was cruising the Internet for teenage guys from his office. “‘I didn’t masturbate in my office,’ he insists with Clintonian specificity.” While not happy to be outed, West is dwelling on the fact that he’s gay, hoping to divert attention from the fact that he’s accused of being a serial pedophile.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, the Governor Matt Blunt has signed legislation enacting Medicaid cuts that will eliminate health insurance coverage for about 100,000 parents, people with disabilities and elderly people. Faced with the criticism that the cuts are simply morally wrong, the governor (a devout Christian) brazens it out and insists that cutting health care for the poor is morally correct because raising taxes is wrong. Indeed, Jessica Robinson, the governor’s press secretary, has argued that the cuts are actually good for the poor, by providing an incentive for them to get job training. As Dave Barry might say, I am not making this up.

When he’s our terrorist.

Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA operative, is wanted in Venezuela for bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976, in which 73 people were killed. Posada Carriles has also boasted of being responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Havana tourist spots in the 1990s. He’s reportedly in the United States seeking asylum, which will put the nominally anti-terrorist Bush administration in a bit of a spot.

If the right-wing political hacks in the Bush administration had any shame or conscience at all, they’d comply with our extradition treaty with Venezuela and send this terrorist to be tried in a court of law. Or, the fact that he’s anti-Castro might get him a Get Out of Jail Free card from the White House. Hell, if Jeb Bush needed votes Posada might even get a pardon.

Perhaps they actually do feel embarrassment, though: State Department official Roger Noriega claims the Bush administration doesn’t know for sure if Posada is in the United States. Uh huh.

Oh, I’ll be getting Mom a card this year. But Mother’s Day is not one of those several holidays created by Hallmark to get me to part with my money. It was an invention of Julia Ward Howe, the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and a 19th Century peace activist. Her original proclamation of the holiday:

Arise then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

‘We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

‘Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause.

‘Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.

‘We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

‘From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says “Disarm! Disarm!”

‘The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

‘Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.’

As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

As Kansas’ School Board stages a one-sided hearing on evolution versus creation (one-sided because the pro-science side refused to participate), it’s nice to have this article from Scientific American handy. It is aptly titled 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense (pdf).

New rule: if you are ordered to torture prisoners, it’s OK to torture them. Pfc. Lynndie England, who was prepared to plead guilty to conspiracy in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, has now gotten a mistrial instead. England was not permitted to plead guilty in the face of evidence that she may have thought she was following orders. This is a bizarre twist, since her co-conspirator Spc. Charles Graner Jr. insisted that he’d been following orders, and he was found guilty as hell. The refusal to accept England’s guilty plea flies in the face of the well-known Nuremburg standard: following orders is no defense.

George W. Bush himself laid out the proper standard with unaccustomed clarity, days before he started the war: “ War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’” Of course, he was talking about Iraqi war criminals.

That said, it is also a war crime to give the orders. Whether or not Lynndie England walks, the vastly larger injustice is that the people who gave the orders for systematic torture of prisoners are not just left unpunished, but are prospering. When George W. Bush is on trial for crimes against humanity, then we can talk about how America stands for the rule of law.