Another socialist blog

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has urged the U.S. government to create blacklists of condemned political speech — not only by those who advocate violence, but also by those who believe that U.S. government actions may encourage violent reprisals. The latter group, which Friedman called “just one notch less despicable than the terrorists,” includes a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.

I’m proud to be among the despicable, though I can hardly claim to be bravely standing alone.

The “despicable” idea that there may be a connection between acts of terrorism and particular policies by Western countries is one that is widely held by the citizens of those countries. Asked by the CNN/Gallup poll on July 7, “Do you think the terrorists attacked London today mostly because Great Britain supports the United States in the war in Iraq?” 56 percent of Americans agreed. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll (7/7-10/05), 54 percent said “the war with Iraq has made the U.S….less safe from terrorism.” Since they see a connection between Iraq and terrorism, a majority of Americans are what Friedman calls “excuse makers” who “deserve to be exposed.”

Friedman’s column urged the government to create quarterly lists of “hatemongers” and “excuse makers”–as well as “truth tellers,” Muslims who agree with Friedman’s critique of Islam. Friedman’s proposed list of “excuse makers” would have to include his New York Times colleague Bob Herbert, who wrote in his July 25 column, “There is still no indication that the Bush administration recognizes the utter folly of its war in Iraq, which has been like a constant spray of gasoline on the fire of global terrorism.”

Bill O’Reilly has called for outright criminalization of opposition to the war (Radio Factor, 6/20/05):

You must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq War and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9/11, is a traitor. Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.

There you have it. We must destroy freedom to save it.

The US should cut its losses, pull out of Iraq promptly and never again use its military might to build a nation according to its own values, according to former CIA chief John Deutch. That’s a pretty damning pronouncement coming from someone who used to hold George H.W. Bush’s job as head of the United States’ covert army. These are the guys who intervene in other countries for a living. If they think the war is hopeless, it’s really hopeless. Gradually more and more members of the ruling class are speaking aloud of the need to get out.

Several commentators quoted by ZNet

…take issue with the conventional assumption that the U.S. military presence is a stabilising factor without which Iraq’s descent into civil war would be more certain or bloody.

They also argue that the administration’s argument [for] Washington’s global “credibility” is outweighed by other considerations, including the damage that the continued U.S. presence does to U.S. interests in the Arab and Islamic world more generally and the reduced ability of the U.S. to deal with other important security challenges while it remains bogged down in Iraq.

As noted by Deutch, continued investment in a losing proposition could result in “an even worse loss of credibility down the road.”

Of course Deutch thinks the U.S. has some credibility to lose, with which I strenuously disagree.

In the wake of the July 7 terrorist bombings in London, Tony Blair has been at great pains to deny that British foreign policy contributed in any way to the attacks. This is especially difficult to pull off in the face of the recent report from Chatham House, Security, Terrorism and the UK, which says what seems so obvious: Britain’s alliance with the United States has made Britain a target.

The report … says that the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the US and has closely supported the deployment of British troops in the military campaigns to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam’s regime in Iraq.

The report claims that there is “no doubt” that the invasion of Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK and for the wider coalition against terrorism. According to the paper, the situation in Iraq has “given a boost to the Al-Qaeda network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising”, whilst providing an ideal targeting and training area for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

No surprise there. That’s what we predicted before Bush started the war in Iraq, and before he started the war in Afghanistan. So what are Blair and Bush doing to misdirect attention away from the elephant in the room?

Simple. To any question about the causes of the attacks, they respond as if they’d been asked about justification for the attacks. That way they get to deflect any examination of their own actions, and repeat over and over for the cameras that there is no justification for terrorism. Of course there isn’t any excuse for terrorism. We didn’t ask you whether you thought there was an excuse. We asked whether you provoked it. A Chatham House representative, to her credit, kept her own eye on the ball:

Clearly the British and American governments will continue to lower this discussion to new intellectual lows. It’s as if nothing they’ve ever done has ever provoked anger in the world.

Indeed. What Blair, Bush and their political allies want you to believe is that terrorism exists for no reason at all. Terrorists are just evil people, they tell us, and there’s no sense examining their motives any further than that. It’s a neat, tidy formula, perfect for the pliant citizens of the empire, simultaneously dismissing curiosity about the world abroad, and critical thought about the government at home.

OK, let me see if I have this straight. Joseph C. Wilson IV is a former diplomat who traveled to Africa on behalf of the C.I.A. before the Iraq war to investigate reports concerning Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire nuclear material. Wilson publicly disputed one of the administration’s claims about the Iraqi nuclear program.

Karl Rove retaliates by leaking to the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, is a CIA agent.

The White House pretends great outrage and begins an “investigation” of the leak. White House press secretary Scott McClellan explicitly denies that Rove did it. The President says, repeatedly, that whoever DID do it would be fired.

Now Rove admits it. And the White House suddenly has a new policy, which is that they won’t answer any questions about it, or even admit to their own earlier remarks.

Under often hostile questioning, Mr. McClellan repeatedly declined to say whether he stood behind his previous statements that Mr. Rove had played no role in the matter, saying he could not comment while a criminal investigation was under way. He brushed aside questions about whether the president would follow through on his pledge, repeated just over a year ago, to fire anyone in his administration found to have played a role in disclosing the officer’s identity.

I’m no friend of the CIA. It’s a criminal organization with a long, long rap sheet, and it should be abolished. Under a Socialist government it would be. That said, it’s worth pointing out that this administration apparently will stop at nothing to manipulate the press, silence its critics, and cover up its own lies. They’re shameless. And those who support them knowing this, need to be ashamed.

Let’s raise a glass to America’s allies in the war against terrorism, who are helping us make the world a better place. Right?

Mukhtaran Bibi is a Pakistani woman who was the victim of a notorious gang rape. The rape was ordered by officials of her own tribe, as punishment for a crime her brother was alleged to have committed. To punish her brother, she was sentenced to be raped by four men and made to walk home undressed in front of the whole village.

Bibi has become an activist working to stop violence against women. She was scheduled to visit the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women in the United States soon. But the Pakistani government—our allies in the war against terror, remember—don’t want her to talk about that, apparently. Pakistan placed her under house arrest, then coerced her into giving a news conference in which she denied wanting to leave the country.

Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan—another of America’s allies in the so-called war on terror, 700 people were massacred by government troops in a crackdown against dissidents. President Islam Karimov said the dead, many of them unarmed women and children, were “Islamic radicals” and “criminals.” Karimov bans opposition parties, has jailed 6,000 dissidents, and tortures many of them.

Good thing Karimov is on our side in the struggle against evil dictators. Because America takes that democracy shit very seriously.

The Register has a story about how Tommy Hook, a Los Alamos Laboratory employee, was beaten up on Saturday night, apparently in an attempt to keep him quiet about alleged financial irregularities he uncovered at the facility.

Nothing was take from his car, and his wallet was not stolen. His lawyer Robert Rothstein of New Mexico law firm Rothstein, Donatelli, Hughes, Dahlstrom, Schoenburg & Bienvenu, argues that with no other obvious motive, it looks like the attack is related to his whistle-blowing.

“It is clear to us that this was a message,” Susan Hook told AP.

Hook also has a lawsuit pending against the laboratory, in which he accuses managers of the facility of making his life, and that of another whistle-blower, Chuck Monato, so unpleasant that they would quit their jobs.

The New York Times reports on the details of two Afghan prisoners tortured to death by American jailers at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. A 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the top of his cell for much of a four-day period, and was repeatedly beaten by guards for several days. “Most of the interrogators,” reports the Times, “had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Another prisoner named Habibullah was also chained to the ceiling of his cell as well as being repeatedly beaten for “noncompliance.” It isn’t clear that Habibullah had any idea what his captors were ordering him to do, since the MPs were assigned no interpreter of their own. Specialist Brian E. Cammack beat Habibullah when Habibullah was both chained and either unconscious or already dead. “It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” said the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, who later examined Habibullah.

This would be a good time to look up the word systematic in a dictionary, and then wave the Times’ article in front of your own member of Congress. They’ve got time to hold hearings on baseball, so they clearly have plenty of time to hold hearings on the U.S. government’s torture policy.

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.