A Welcoming Community
I’m so glad we had this time together
Just to have a laugh and sing a song
Seems we just get started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say “So long”.– Joseph H. (“Joe”) Hamilton for the Carol Burnett Show
Au revoir…
________________________
I’ve moved into my new home and, yes, I’m leaving Booman Tribune.
During wartime, when is killing rightly seen as murder as opposed to what constitutes normal warfare? One would think the lines between the two are quite distinct, but the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have muddied that difference.
The policies of the US administration and, more specifically, Bush’s decisions to opt out of the International Criminal Court and to make new rules governing the rights of “enemy combatants” in defiance of the Geneva Conventions has left soldiers on all sides in a legal no-man’s land.
Summary of the definition of murder under the Geneva Conventions:
Murder is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, both in cases of internal conflicts (Convention I, Art. 3, Sec. 1A), wounded combatants (Convention I, Art. 12), civilians in occupied territories (Convention IV, Art. 32), civilians in international conflicts (Protocol I, Art. 75, Sec. 2Ai) and civilians in internal conflicts (Protocol II, Art. 4, Sec. 2A).
On Monday, a Canadian teen being held at Gitmo for 3 years was charged with murder for killing a US soldier when he allegedly threw a grenade at him at an Al Quaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002 during a gun battle in which he was shot three times. He was 15 at the time of the incident.
Via Common Dreams, June, 2005 (reprint of a Toronto Star article):
In February, his U.S. lawyer told reporters the teenager had been used as a human mop to clean urine on the floor and had been beaten, threatened with rape and tied up for hours in painful positions at Guantanamo Bay.
More from the Toronto Star article:
Khadr’s Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney said yesterday he has regularly raised concerns with Ottawa about the teen’s treatment at Guantanamo and use of his client’s medical records.
“This conduct is a blatant disregard by both Canada and the U.S. to recognize the special status international treaties and human rights law accords children and youths,” Edney said yesterday.
Obviously, there are many disturbing questions in this case. Fundamentally though, should a person in a gun battle with an army not be allowed to defend himself by any means necessary?
Just as the Bush administration’s latest push for allowing the CIA to use torture ignores the fact that such an exemption calls for retribution by others to torture US soldiers and citizens, the twisting of the definition of murder during wartime would seem to allow US troops to be charged with that crime as well in circumstances such as Khadr’s. That type of policy defies logic.
Canada will keep pushing to ensure that Khadr is treated humanely and that he has proper legal representation but it is fighting an uphill battle with a US government that has no regard for anyone’s rights.
If Omar Khadr is found guilty, he faces the death penalty.
Read more about Khadr’s family background here and here.
“We do not torture”, said George Bush in Panama today.
Raise your hand if you believe him.
If the CIA does not torture people in their secret prisons and with detainees still reporting such vile acts, why is Bush so opposed to McCain’s amendment to ban the practice for the CIA?
Via the BBC:
He said enemies were plotting to hurt the US and his government would pursue them, but would do so “under the law”.
Under whose law? His?
On Sunday, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture urged European officials to conduct high-level investigations into the allegations [of secret prisons].
“We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice,” Mr Bush said at a joint news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos.
[…]“We do not torture and therefore we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it more possible to do our job,” Mr Bush said.
Bringing them to justice? Where? How? By detaining people incognito ad infinitum beyond the reach of regular courts? Just how many of these “terrorists” have been brought to justice?
If you truly want to your job, Bush, stop torturing people! The more you do it, the more you put all coalition troops at risk – everywhere.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS announced today that it will hear the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Bin Laden’s former driver, sometime next year. I wonder what Samuel Alito thinks about the legal status of “enemy combatants” and these “military tribunals”. We already know what Chief Justice John Roberts thinks:
As a member of a three-judge panel on the D.C. federal court of appeals, Roberts signed on to a blank-check grant of power to the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists without basic due-process protections.
If Roberts is the grand consensus builder he claims to be, Hamdan had better not hold his breath. He’s already doomed.
Chat. Yap. Blabber. Carry on. Pontificate. Speechify. Vent. Rant. Prattle. Reason. Sass. Soliliquize. Spout off. Yak. Intone. Opine. Blab. Confess. Purge. Squeal. Inform. Amuse.
Monday’s Washington Post has yet another story, “Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy”, about Cheney’s hard line stance against McCain’s anti-torture amendment. This article raises the stakes a bit though.
WaPo’s Dana Priest (who broke the story about the secret CIA prisons) and Robin Wright reveal through their sources that those who oppose Cheney now include Condi Rice, acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England and Elliot Abrams. They also state that:
Personnel changes in President Bush’s second term have added to the isolation of Cheney, who previously had been able to prevail in part because other key parties to the debate — including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet Miers — continued to sit on the fence.
Gonzales sat on the fence? Sorry, but he fell off that fence a long time ago and landed squarely in Cheney’s lap. As for Miers, now that she’s withdrawn her nomination for SCOTUS, we’ll never know exactly what her role was in all of this. Even if she had made the hearings, the WH would have claimed executive privilege anyway.
So, what’s Rice doing opposing Cheney? Apparently, she’s concerned about her dear leader’s policy agenda. We all know what a faithful Bush lapdog she is. But – one really has to wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. It seems to me that if Rice was so opposed to these repressive detention and torture policies all along, she would have said so. And what about Bush? He had threatened to veto the defense appropriations bill if it included McCain’s anti-torture amendment.
Why this sudden change of heart for Rice? Frankly, I don’t believe she’s had one. She has co-signed everything Bush has done – without exception. I think that whoever is speaking to WaPo on her behalf is full of it. The article states:
At the same time Rice has emerged as an advocate for changing the rules to “get out of the detainee mess,” said one senior U.S. official familiar with discussions. Her top advisers, along with their Pentagon counterparts, are working on a package of proposals designed to address all controversial detainee issues at once, instead of dealing with them on a piecemeal basis.
[…]
“The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground,” said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue…
Regain the moral high ground? I thought the neocons already believed they owned the piece of property the moral high ground sits on. Not only that – it’s tax exempt and they rent it out to religious wingnuts when it suits their purposes.
Whatever is going on, it must be hell working around Cheney. His approval ratings are at 19%. He’s VP of Torture now and he’s hanging on to this issue with a death grip. How can Bush possibly stop this massive hemorrhaging? It’ll ruin his “tough-guy” image if he goes soft on torture. Maybe McCain’s wife is a covert CIA agent who’ll be outed soon too.
“Detainee mess” indeed. There’s no way Rice will be able to charge in and fix this one for her husband…I mean “president”.
Time magazine takes a look at a Roveless Bush in its article, A White House Without Rove?, and envisions a meltdown.
He’s weary. His wife and only child, who is approaching college, miss him. He has monstrous legal bills. His unique bond with the President is under stress. His most important work is done.
Awww…poor guy.
Yeah, right!!
Spending your life manipulating people, intel and the public is bound to make you “weary” sooner or later, one would think. Time could have summed up that paragraph in two words: Rove’s toast.
And what will happen if Turdblossom leaves if (when) he gets his grubby hands slapped with an indictment or two by Patrick Fitzgerald?
If he leaves, he will not be alone. Several well-wired Administration officials predict that within a year, the President will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new Treasury Secretary and maybe a new Defense Secretary.
A new Defense Secretary? Really? Promise? Can we get one for Christmas 2005? Please?
And Scotty? Scotty would abandon ship too? Darn I know I’ll miss him! I hope they find someone just as entertaining. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you’re lying your ass off. You have to give Scotty props for that.
That Snowy guy who heads the Treasury department needs to go too. What’s he done for America lately?
Time makes this assertion:
And he’s [Rove] got one constituency rooting for him, the conservatives who rely on him to be their voice.
Since 1999 Bush and Rove have imagined engineering a decades-long G.O.P. majority in America. But Republicans fret these days about losing the House or Senate in next year’s midterm elections. So if Rove does head out, he may leave behind a wounded President who faces the prospect of having to abandon some of the pair’s Texas-size dreams.
There’s something perverse-sounding about that last bit: some of the pair’s Texas-size dreams. They sound like a couple headed for an ugly divorce after one of them found out the other had an affair. Then again, one did – the Plame affair.
If you choose to stand on the moral high ground, prepare to be struck down by lightning especially if you are a shameless right-wing hypocrite.
Bill Bennett, one of the right-wing’s moral embarrassments and already fried by a couple of lightning bolts himself, has decided that we on the left aren’t outraged enough by the recent leak of the revelations of secret CIA prisons.
Yes – that Bill Bennett – author of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories who was outed as a problem gambler in 2003 and who, in September, 2005, stated that you could reduce the crime rate if you aborted all black babies.
In the National Review, Bennett writes:
Item: Dana Priest of the Washington Post writes a front-page story on Wednesday headlined, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. Pay close attention to the second sentence of the story: “The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.”
“Secret”! “Covert”! So after the press and the Left make a meal of the allegation that people in the White House might have leaked the name of a covert operative, and after we find out that Plame was indeed not a covert operative under the law, the Washington Post — by its own admission — can print classified information that involves covert CIA activity?
This is an outrage.
Damn straight it’s an outrage, but Bennett aims his outrage at the left for opposing the leak of CIA covert agent (and she was a covert agent at the time, Bennett) Valerie Plame’s name in 2003 and not raising an equal stink about this leak about the secret prisons.
Pure, right-wing hypocrisy.
What Bennett and so many right-wing apologists fail to understand is that the Bush administration is breaking international laws by holding detainees in those secret prisons, but we all know how much regard Republicans have for the rule of law.
The real outrage is that people like Bennett, who stand on their holier-than-thou podiums and scream to their drooling crowds, don’t understand the concept of treating people like human beings. They placed Valerie Plame in serious jeopardy and they’re treating detainees like non-persons. Even animals have more rights.
Save your faux outrage, Bennett. If we on the left want lessons about morals, you’re one of the last people we would ever turn to. Why don’t you write an article defying Bush and Cheney’s torture policies and secret hellholes? Maybe then, we’ll listen. Until then, you’re just another shill trying to score political points off your dear leader’s absolute failure to be a human being with a conscience. That’s “conscience”, Bennett. Look it up in the dictionary. It’s somewhere between “compassionate” and “conservative”.
Craig Newmark, owner of Craigslist, the internet’s largest free classified ads site, recently shared his thoughts about the online, grassroots community journalism movement with Grade the News.
One community journalism site offers this definition:
We choose to define it as the reporting of news and information for a certain geographic area… a community, if you will, with the purpose to serve the best interests of that certain group. As an old Publisher friend once said, “Make them happy… make them mad… but whatever you do… make them think.”
With the growing distrust of the mainstream media, so amplified by Bush administration propaganda pushing of the NYT’s Judith Miller in her biased WMD “reporting”, there’s a new niche for citizen journalists beyond what specialized blogs have to offer.
Of course, community journalism is far from a new phenomenon but it has often fallen prey to the pressures of capitalism and the whims of its advertisers in order to survive. If you were to clip the ads out of most newspapers these days, you’d find a small amount of actual content left. That’s where citizen journalists can step in and make a difference. They can also provide a much truer sense of community sentiment than is often presented in mainstream publications.
Newark talks about his interest in Wikipedia as a good example of citizen-driven efforts to report the facts to the public. Wikipedia is not without its problems, however, as one its founders recently admitted. Its architecture and user-driven input style make it vulnerable to quality issues. It’s an ambitious effort to write history as it happens and still serves as a valuable resource for many surfers as long as it’s understood that it is not the be all and end all of factual information available on the internet.
(Note: you can host your own wiki on any topic here. A valuable resource!)
Newark also points to a few examples of more familiar styles of community sites as examples of how well they can work: Backfence in Virginia, Bayosphere, and the Northwest Force. Marty Aussenberg, who has now contributed some articles to Booman Tribune, often writes for the Memphis Flyer. I’m sure there are many such online publications out there that now complement locally printed newsletters and newspapers that offer a much broader reach via the internet.
So, while we in the political blogosphere often target the MSM and corporate publishing houses as we seek to participate in raising consciousness about our issues, often to be met with frustration, we should not forget these smaller locals that also need input and serve as clearinghouses for focusing on local happenings. They’re a valuable resource and they speak to the heart of political action: think globally, act locally.
Does your community offer such a site that is not connected to corporate America?
Subpoenas, indictments, indictments, subpoenas…step right up…you could be the next contestant in the Corruption is Wrong (and indictable) game.
Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) has received a subpoena for documents he has related to the Abramoff scandal.
Abramoff was recently indicted on wire and mail fraud charges in Florida stemming from his acquisition of a casino boat chain. He remains under investigation in Washington by a task force of federal agencies led by the Justice Department. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee have also been conducting separate inquiries into Abramoff.
Ney has been an Abramoff shill for quite some time:
* “In 2000, he inserted statements into the Congressional Record on two occasions that may have helped Abramoff in his dealings with Sun Cruz, the Florida casino boat chain. In one statement, he praised Abramoff’s then-partner Adam Kidan, who was indicted with Abramoff in Florida earlier this year.”
* “In August 2002, Ney accompanied Abramoff on a golfing trip to Scotland paid for by Abramoff’s Indian tribe clients.”
* “Ney has also been accused of trying to insert a provision into the 2002 Help America Vote Act that would have helped one of Abramoff’s Indian tribe clients, the Tigua tribe of El Paso, reopen its casino. The provision was never included in the bill, but Ney did receive over $30,000 in contributions from the Tiguas.”
* “After Ney approved a 2002 license for an Israeli telecommunications company to install antennas for the House, records show the company paid Abramoff $280,000 for lobbying. Records obtained by the Post show the firm donated $50,000 to a charity Abramoff used to hide payments for lobbying activities.”
He was duped!, Ney says. Duped!
Speaking of Abramoff’s tentacles, one of our favourite indictees (is that a word?), Tom DeLay, was further exposed as an underhanded ass in the NYT today:
Representative Tom DeLay asked the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to raise money for him through a private charity controlled by Mr. Abramoff, an unusual request that led the lobbyist to try to gather at least $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations, according to newly disclosed e-mail from the lobbyist’s files.
read excerpts from the e-mails in the NYT article…
Winning contestants in the Corruption is Wrong (and indictable) game are given an all-expense paid trip to jail along with several special perks including: new t-shirts and runners (shoe laces not included), a pad of paper to scribble “this is all the Democrats’ fault” all over, a new (big) friend named “Bubba”, a job in the prison laundry where they can sweat off their excess scum, a Bible (so they can actually read what it really says), and eventual conjugal visits with their Stepford spouses.
Good times…good times…
Update [2005-11-4 22:23:20 by catnip]:: In case you missed the news, FOX News paid almost $14,000 to have Tom “my tastes are very expensive” DeLay fly to Sugarland, TX in October – the weekend Tommy appeared on FOX News Sunday after his indictment. It’s listed as “officially connected travel”, but we already knew that FOX was “officially connected” to the Republicans via their continual propaganda IV drip.
(via the folks at PoliticalMoneyLine)
Good to know that DeLay will have someone sending him canteen money in prison. We can all sleep well now.