Recently, I got an interesting email from Pedro of The Happy Carpenter Blog, who has been soliciting responses from liberals to some questions he's had. I thought I would go ahead and post both his questions and my responses to them here, for anyone who has intersted. Just FYI, this is the reply exactly as I sent it to him, except formatted for HTML rather than the plain text I use for e-mail. I have to give Pedro credit, while a few of the questions may have a bit of a "tricky"-type slant to them, he does seem to be sincerely interested in hearing what we have to say (he has also posted these questions as a thread at his blog, if you wish to add your own thoughts) and from my own experience and what I've seen at his blog, he's one of the more civil conservatives I've run across. I appreciate his taking time to ask these questions and to read the responses (and as with most things I write, this one runs a bit to the long-ish side. I've been accused of having a motto of "Why use 2 short words when 10 perfectly good long ones will do?")
Pedro's questions are indented and bolded, my comments are normal text, and quotes I'm using to support my arguments are indented and italicized (like normal.)
I got into blogging recently because I needed help answering the question, How could nice people be against the war in Iraq?Yes, the dialog between Left and Right has degenerated. In fact it has all but disappeared. Maybe you can help me in my humble attempt to restore it. Maybe we do have common ground, but I gotta be honest with you – I don’t get it.
I have to be honest - I've found almost no one on the pro-war side who is sincerely trying to discuss or understand, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and see if I can help explain - at least for myself - why I've opposed the war in Iraq.
One thing I do want to clear up, though - and this is a common misunderstanding I've run across. Many assume that if someone opposed the war in Iraq they also opposed the war in Afghanistan. Thinking back, though, remember that there weren't the massive protests, calls for trying to find a peaceful solution or world-wide anger that we saw in the run-up to Iraq. I, and many, many other who opposed the war in Iraq, actually supported the war in Afghanistan. In fact, the only problem I, at least, have had with the Afghani campaign is that we've provided almost NO followthru - largely because of all the attention being paid to Iraq.
As for invading and kicking out the Taliban, I supported that whole-heartedly because it was very clear that they were providing aid to bin Laden and Al Qaeda - who were, after all, the one's who had attacked us. We were not making a war of aggression, there, but were attacking in response to an attack that they had clearly facilitated. For me, that is perhaps the most crucial difference at all. There was no question of their complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and for that, they deserved to face all the wrath and might this nation can bring to bear.
I’ve been reading a lot of blogs since the war began, and I know a lot about the arguments, but I would sincerely like some answers to questions like the following:
- Why is it bad that the mass graves of Iraq are being emptied instead of filled?
- Why is it bad that a criminal-against-humanity is in custody?
- Why, given the on-going mass murder by the Ba’athists, is it bad to give up on demonstrably fruitless negotiations?
- How long are you willing to wait for sanction to work, given the on-going murder rate by Saddam Hussein?
- Why is it bad that the Taliban is not murdering women during soccer games any more?
I don't consider ANY of these things to be "bad" at all, and if we had to prosecute this war, then I'm glad at least something beneficial has come out of it. I do not, however, feel that these things justify the loss of life of our countries young men and women, nor do I believe it justifies putting them at risk. Interestingly, Paul Wolfowitz - one of the main proponents of the war - agrees we me on that point.
Here is a quote from the Department of Defense's transcript of an interview Wolfowitz gave to Vanity Fair. This is NOT the reporter's interpretation, but is taken directly from the DOD's posted transcript of the interview itself. I am providing both the full question and full response so that you can see the exact context. The only things I have deleted are a couple places where Wolfowitz had to answer phone calls during the interview. If you want to verify what I'm putting here, it can be found at http://www.dod.gov/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html near the end of the interview:
Q: Was that [Being able to remove the soldiers from Saudi Arabia] one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but [...] there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. [...] The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.
This doesn't mean that I'm not happy to see those improvements happen, nor does it mean that I wanted to see them continue. I simply wanted us to find a much better way to get Saddam out of office.
As for how long I'd wait for sanctions to work, I can't really answer that. We'd already waited 12-years, and then all of a sudden this was such an emergency we had to pretty much drop our search for bin Laden (who's group has planned and carried out quite a few attacks against other countries during the time we've been focusing on Iraq. Sanctions probably weren't the answer - but we could have tried to come up with other means of trying to force him our.
It's also important to keep in mind that Saddam was NOT the only murdering thug running a country as a totalitarian dictator, killing and/or torturing his own citizens and defying international law. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (who has equated himself with Hitler), Charles Taylor of Liberia (who was removed from power over the summer though international pressure and internal pressure from the Liberian people), Karamov in Uzbekistan (who, even though he forbids opposition parties, has severely curtailed civil rights and has killed at least 2 people by boiling them alive, is considered a US ALLY). Yet we have not chosen to invade any of THESE countries to help their people or stop the carnage. I have no doubt there are more examples. And don't forget that just recently, when the current leader of Taiwan wanted to hold a referendum to allow the people of Taiwan decide if they wanted to tell China to stop pointing missiles at them and renounce violence in their quest to keep Taiwan as a part of greater China (a resolution which would not have been binding nor have had ANY kind of real world effect, except to let the Chinese know how they feel about the matter), China responded by saying if the question were to be put on the ballot, they'd even risk losing the 2008 Olympics if necessary to use force against Taiwan - and that it might even possibly consider it a reason to go to WAR with Taiwan, President Bush harshly rebuked the Taiwanese President and told him not to take this step (which would be seen by some as a Taiwan trying to take a step toward freedom and Democracy) but only cautioned China not to respond with violence.
The point of all that, being that, while I want to see people free and safe all over the world, there are many places where that isn't happening, and only one in which we decided to intervene. It's a fact that we simply cannot intervene in every situation where people are being mistreated by their leaders. I personally believe that we should ONLY intervene in those situations where the citizens are making it clear that they want our assistance. The Liberians would gather outside at the US Embassy and literally BEG for our help, and even as the rest of the world moved in to force Taylor out violently if necessary, we could only spare them 20 soldiers. Even in a severely repressive regime, there ARE ways for people to get the word out to the rest of the world if they are desperate for help. There wasn't any such indication from the Iraqi people. We're trying to force our concept of democracy on a people who may have something entirely different in mind for what they want in a government. We tell them they can have any kind of government they want, but then rule out an Islamic theocracy - that doesn't help our credibility.
To cap it all off, even though Saddam himself is no longer able to kill his own people, the situation there now has other Iraqis killing Iraqis who are helping us, and because we don't really have any good way to tell the helpful Iraqis from the ones trying to kill us, we end up killing who-knows-how-many innocent Iraqis on a fairly regular basis. I don't see this as much of an improvement. There's no way to know how long this will go on - and even once we do get some kind of government up and running and are able to pull out, there's always the possibility that civil war will break out.
As for the proffered justifications for the war, I'll start with the WMD issue.
IF we had actual, current proof that actually possessed WMD or was in the process of obtaining/manufacturing them, I would have supported the war. The President has admitted, however, that we were working from the same evidence that had led President Clinton to bomb Iraq in 1998. And Rumsfeld has said that we had no new evidence, just that we were looking at old evidence in the new light of the 9/11 attacks. The problem with that is that even in January - 3 months before we launched the Iraqi war, President Bush said flat out that we could not make the claim that there was any tie between Saddam and 9/11 - and if we couldn't make that claim, then there wasn't any "new light" to be looking at the evidence through. (I'll address the 9/11 - al Qaeda aspect in just a moment)
From the Boston Globe, 7/9/2003 (original story no longer available): He [Bush] leaned forward on a podium shared with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and said angrily: ''Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him.''
From ABC News.com, 7/8/2003:
"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light "through the prism of our experience on 9/11."
Additionally, in 2001, Colin Powell said, during a press conference, that Iraq was not a threat to the US and was barely a threat to its neighbors because of the sanctions that were in place, which he said were working. This was 3 years after we had bombed Iraq in order to destroy any WMD they had at the time, and 7 months before 9/11. Note also that Powell says that he believes any weapons Saddam did have were pointed at his neighbors, and NOT at America.
From the US Department of State website transcript of a 2/24/01 press conference by Colin Powell regarding a trip to Egypt:
The Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.[...] May I just add a p.s. that if I was a Kuwaiti and I heard leaders in Baghdad claiming that Kuwait is still a part of Iraq and it's going to be included in the flag and the seal, if I knew they were continuing to try to find weapons of mass destruction, I would have no doubt in my mind who those weapons were aimed at. They are being aimed at Arabs, not at the United States or at others. Yes, I think we should...he has to be contained until he realizes the errors of his ways.
So, if, as Powell said just a few months before 9/11 sanctions were working and had contained Saddam sufficiently that he was not a threat, and given that we were working from 5-year-old intelligence (that had ALREADY been acted on by an earlier administration) AND we had NO new intelligence indicating that Saddam actually had WMD or was trying to obtain or build them, I can't consider the war justified on the claim of Saddam having WMDs - especially when you take into account that, during what little time the UN Inspections had prior to the war, even with the BEST intelligence we could given them about where WMD were likely to be found, they were unable to find any indication of WMD and considered our intelligence to be "garbage." Then, add to the mix the fact that many pieces of "evidence" were discredited so quickly after being presented (the African uranium purchase that was based on forged documents and had been determined to be non-viable a year before it made it into the President's State of the Union address, the aluminum tubes that were allegedly for making nuclear centrifuges, but which many experts quickly pointed out were entirely wrong for that purpose, the "drones" that turned out to be little more than model planes with roughly a 5 foot wingspan and no ability to be used for any kind of attack on the US, etc.) there was absolutely NO reason to believe the claims that we "knew" he had anything, and we CERTAINLY didn't have enough "evidence" to go to war on.
As for the claims about Saddam being affiliated with al Qaeda, so far, there is absolutely no evidence to indicate that he was. The one group in Iraq that is believed to have ties to al Qaeda was located in the Northern Kurdish territory, which was NOT under Saddam's control, and the group was opposed to Saddam. They were not there by his invitation, and they wanted him out of power. It's also known that bin Laden wanted Saddam out of power, so it's doubtful he would provide al Qaeda with much assistance or any weapons, since there would have been the risk that they might end up being used against HIM to achieve bin Laden's goal of an Islamic theocracy in Iraq. The stories of a possible meeting between Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague have been discounted, and the FBI has determined that Atta was in Florida at the time the meeting supposedly took place.
True, it IS known that Saddam has provided support for and paid the families of suicide bombers among the Palestinian terrorists who are attacking in Israel. This, however, would be a justification for ISRAEL to attack Iraq, not for the US to do so. If Israel wants to retaliate against Saddam for his part in those bombings, then they need to have the courage to participate in it. (And yes, I know exactly how bad that could be and I am quite glad they didn't. But it doesn't change the fact that just because it's a justification for Israel to go to war, it isn't justification for us - especially in the absence of any other justifications.)
As for the 9/11 attacks themselves, at a joint press conference with Tony Blair, BOTH Bush and Blair acknowledged that they could not make the claim that Saddam was involved in the attacks. This is from the White House website's transcript available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030131-23.html
Q One question for you both. Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September the 11th?THE PRESIDENT: I can't make that claim.
THE PRIME MINISTER: That answers your question.
This was reaffirmed the week of September 17th by both President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This quote is taken from a page of my blog because the original source I had for it has moved the article to their paid archives. If you wish to verify it, though, you can probably enter a part of it into Google and find it that way.
Today, Bush said:"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said. "What the vice president said was is that he [Saddam] has been involved with al-Qaida."
When asked about the matter on Tuesday, Rumsfeld had responded:
"I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that."
So, those are the reasons why I did not and cannot support this war, even though I had no problem with the war against Afghanistan.
On to your other questions.
Those and other questions like them are the really fundamental questions I cannot explain. Then there are other questions that sound a little more contentious, but still defy my ability to explain the Left’s position, such as: Why is it more important for the Republicans in general and GWB in particular to fail than it is to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq?
I don't believe that it is. I do not like and have no respect for Republicans in general, but my opposition to the Iraqi war is completely independent of my party affiliation - just as my support for the Afghanistan war is. While I don't believe that we should have fought the war in Iraq, once we went in there, I wanted to see us succeed and to be able to get in and back out as quickly and with as few deaths as possible.
I have also repeatedly made clear that my opposition to the war is separate from my feelings for our troops fighting it. Our soldiers have my full support and always will unless THEY initiate an illegal action - which is very rare. They don't get to choose where they're assigned, and I consider each and every one of them to be someone worthy of my sincere respect for their willingness to risk their lives for this country, even if our government decides to send them someplace where we have no business going.
Why is the assertion that preventing weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of terrorists is a vital national interest of the United States controversial?
As a general assertion, I don't think the CONCEPT of preventing terrorists from getting WMD to be controversial at all. The problem in THIS SPECIFIC CASE is that there was absolutely NO SUBSTANTIAL OR VIABLE EVIDENCE to show that there was ANY danger of that happening. As I discussed above, virtually every piece of evidence the government offered was found to be unreliable or flat-out wrong, or it was 5 years old, and pre-dated the bombings we had made to destroy what weapons he had. If the administration had been able been able to provide any evidence that withstood scrutiny and which substantiated their claims, I would have supported the war, but it just wasn't there (and we now see why)
My brother in law is a very liberal Jew. I cannot understand why he, like so many Jews, is against the war on terror given that the first nuclear target of the muslim terrorists is probably Tel Aviv and the second, New York.
Being Pagan, I can't answer for a Jew. I'm sorry, but I just don't have the foundation to even speculate on that.
Even now, after unprecedented victories (I write this on December 22, 2003) the President and his policies are still being slammed by the left. Why?
Because capturing Saddam isn't that big of a deal. He wasn't a threat to us while he was in power and he certainly wasn't one after he was deposed. Symbolically, his capture will likely mean something to the Iraqi people, but even as Bush himself said, there's no guarantee that his capture will slow or end the violence in Iraq.
As for other policies, there are many I'm ideologically opposed to, I don't agree with his taxation priorities, I am outraged by the unprecedented amount of secrecy he insists upon, I'm tired of the way he will say one thing at a photo-op and then later fails to follow through (for example, pledging a sizable sum for fighting against AIDS and then only actually requesting 1/3 of that amount, or saying he supports AmeriCorp and plans to increase their budget just before he cust their funding drastically), I'm worried by the problems he left in his wake in Texas - the failure and misleading statistics of the "No Child Left Behind" program implemented there, the budget crisis due to his tax cuts, and other issues, I'm embarrassed at the way America's standing in the world has gone from being reasonably good to being in the toilet, I resent the fact that he's made America look like little more than a schoolyard bully, I'm bothered by the way his administration sends conflicting messages (such as the Pentagon telling certain countries they can't participate in the rebuilding of Iraq, and then having the State department ask that they consider forgiving Iraq's debts to help US out), I'm angry at the way it's so obvious that his primary concerns are giving big business pretty much anything they want, rewarding his buddies and those who contribute to his campaign. I could go on, but the basic point is that even if he'd fought the war in Iraq for the right reasons and even if the war had gone well, there are so many other issues that are important to me and to this country on which I disagree with him that there's no way I could support his Presidency.
None of the anti-war predictions of mass civilian death, refugees, mass terrorist attacks, famine, dogs & cats living together, etc., have come to pass. Yet it is very rare to find a person who was against the war before it started but willing to admit it was on balance a good thing. Why? Shouldn’t there be many people like that?
Actually, for myself, what we're seeing is pretty much EXACTLY what I expected would happen. I don't make a lot of predictions, but I did express some concerns for how the war might come out, but this is pretty much exactly how I thought it would go. And, no, on balance it wasn't a good thing because - as noted above - even though some good came out of it, it wasn't justifiable (and it was clear even before the war that it wasn't justifiable - that's why so many were opposed to it), it diverted us and our resources from being able to track down and destroy the REAL threat, which is bin Laden, it has cause SO much damage to America's reputation, making it harder for us to get help in the future if we need it, and is costing the lives of far too many of our soldiers. Remember, even Wolfowitz said that Iraqi freedom BY ITSELF (and it's the ONLY possible justification left) wasn't a reason to risk our soldiers, especially in the capacity that we did.
Sure, war is bad, but some things are worse. Aren’t they?
Yes, but in this case, taking it all into account, I believe that war was the worst option and the worst outcome, even if it does result in some good. It's much like how if someone dies of some new disease - their death may allow medical science to understand, identify and treat this new illness, but that doesn't mean that I'm glad the person is dead or that I think their death is necessarily a good thing. It happened and good came out of it - and I wouldn't want to see all the others who were treated for the disease to have died - but I will still mourn the death itself.
What’s up with Canada?
Not being a Canadian, I can't answer on their behalf.
I’ve tried asking questions like these before, one-on-one and in the comments section of various blogs, but invariably I get sneers and jeers. One nice European replied that it would be fruitless for us to correspond. Please believe me: I am not looking for argument – there’s plenty of that – but for understanding. Yes, ultimately I’d like to persuade you to agree with me, but for now I seek only enlightenment.
Ok, so I'm in slight shock here. It's exceedingly rare that someone in the Bush administration does something that I approve of - and it's basically unheard of for John Ashcroft to do anything I like, so the announcement today that not only has Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame investigation, there's also been a special prosecutor named as well just about floored me.
Like many, I'd been worried that this investigation was just quietly being dropped behind the scenes and that soon we'd hear that they just weren't able to find out anything substansive and that would be the end of that. Today's announcement, though, says that that's not the case at all.
Admittedly, though, the explaination offered by James Comey -the number 2 man in the Justice Department who will now be running the investigationfor the recusal and appointment of a special prosecutor - was a bit enigmatic.
"The attorney general in an abundance of caution believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of the circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the investigation," Comey said. "I agree with that judgment."It makes me wonder if something has been uncovered that indicates someone with specific ties to John Ascroft might be directly involved in the revealing of Plame's identity as a CIA operative. If that is the case (and this is just my own speculation) my first guess would be that it's Karl Rove, given that he has previously worked on John Ascroft's campaigns.
In any event, it's good to know that they are still investigating the situation and that it's being taken seriously enough to bring in a special prosector. Hopefully, whomever was responsible will be found and duly punished for any crime they mave had committed.
Kynn of Shock and Awe has posted an interesting piece about the concept of Nationalistic Christianism - the melding of patriotism and religion into the view that America is God's Chosen nation and the implementer of his will.
I have long grown weary of the arrogance that the leaders of this country show on such a regular basis. It is pure folly to think that we are somehow more special than any other nation on Earth - especially since the Bible - the book the very people promoting this ideology claim to look to for guidance - says nothing about America at all. If we were to be the "greatest nation" and the "instrument of God's will" and all that, wouldn't God have found a way to include that in His book?
It reminds me of a man I knew several years ago, back when Pat Robertson was running for president. He was convinced that we could know when Jesus was going to return. Well, we could have a reasonable idea of it. He pointed out that the Bible only says that we cannot "know the day or the hour" of Christ's return, but that doesn't mean we can't know the month and year. He said that based on his calculations, Christ was either going to return in June or July of 1998 or June or July of 1999. He said that what would determine which of those two date-ranges it would actually be would be determined by - get this - who America elected to be President.
Now, the biggest problem I saw with his theory is that if America's election was going to determine the date of the Second Coming, shouldn't that date have to be sometime AFTER the election? That right there should have knocked the 1998 dates out of contention. But the other thing that bothered me greatly was that this guy was saying that our country is so incredibly important that our POLITICAL decisions would determine the fate of the entire world - not just in a militaristic, political or economic context, but the whole ball of was was in our hands. I just couldn't comprehend how anyone could thing that this country was THAT important to anyone - even God.
It also scares, me, though, because when our leaders buy into this notion, it gives them grave amounts of hubris when it comes to pushing their beliefs and desires through. They don't seem to stop to question if what they plan to do is truly inspired by God, or if they've just fooled themselves into believing that God wants exactly what they happen to desire most themselves. We see this quite clearly with President Bush and his push to invade Iraq. He wanted this war so badly that nothing - not the truth, not international pressure and disapproval, not logic, not ANYthing - would stand in his way.
It seems to me, though, that if the war in Iraq were truly of God's will, that God would assure that his goals were met once the war was underway. If I remember my Bible study correctly, when God would grant his armies victory, the win would be decisive, and the conquerers were able to pretty much set up shop and get down to business without a lot of fuss about it. Instead, we're now in a position where we we may have overthrown the government, but we're failing miserably with the "setting up shop" part of the equation. Add in the administration's mandate to hand power over to the Iraqis by July (so that we'll technically be "out of there" in time for the fallout to avoid affecting Bush's re-election chances) whether our objectives (which, if we are truly on a mission from God here would also be GOD's objectives) are met or not, and it seems to me that this wasn't really a God-mandated war at all.
At last, the citizens of this good country will get a real look at what's going on in the White House. President Bush's dog, Barney (that little terrier he's always carrying around) has decided to keep a blog of his own, giving us a peak into the inner workings of Bushland.
So far, he's shared with a little story about himself, the excitement of having Silly Daddy and Mommy get him a special tree, Pet blogging and his great adventure with a fun white powder.
That Barney would take the time to give us such a candid look into the inner working of the White House is a great initiative on his part, and maybe, finally, we'll be able to understand just what makes this administration tick!
I woke up a bit ago to find an interesting present in my e-mail stocking - a trackback ping to an post I made several months ago. From the short snippet I see in my email, it looked, I must say, kind of odd... the post that was being trackbacked had been about the debate over the 10 Commandments monument in Alabama, but the trackback entry itself was called "I got blog spam for Christmas.", so I figured, "why not" and set off to see what it was all about.
Roj of meta-roj had apparently received a blog spam from a fellow named William Cooper who's trying to sell a book. Not only had she tracked down what he was selling, but she went even further, using her log entry information, and provides one of the funniest and most imformative posts I've read in a while. While doing her research, she found several blogs (including mine) that this cretin had hit, and decided to give us trackback pings as "Christmas presents" so we could be sure to take out the trash. See, Cooper is crafty - he didn't make the URL for his book a link - he just typed in the plain URL under his signature - making it much easier to overlook.
I've gone ahead and left Cooper's comment itself (which is mainly a weird string of Bible verses), but am editing out his URL. Now, I normally only edit comments for format - such as putting in paragraphs or taking out hard carriage returns so the comment will wrap properly, regardless of screen size - but I don't edit for content or clean up anyone's spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. I just make it easier to look at. But in this case, I'm making an exception because, even though *I* can't figure out for sure what he's trying to say with his data dump, someone else might find it interesting - but I won't let him use my site for advertising.
Anyway, my thanks to Roj for the tipoff, and figured I'd give her a return-trackback for her efforts! :)
This is just depressing. 365gay.com has published an article about charges from the Public Empoyees for Ethical Responsibility advocacy group that the current national director of parks is making significant - and offensive - changes to the tapes available for display at the national parks, plaques on display at the Grand Canyon and even books sold in the gift shops.
Environmental Media Services (EMS) also has an article on the changes, and provides a good outline of them:
This July, NPS Deputy Director Donald Murphy, ordered the Grand Canyon National Park to return three bronze plaques bearing biblical verses to public viewing areas on the Canyon's South Rim. Murphy overruled the park superintendent who had directed the plaques' removal based on legal advice from the Interior Department that the religious displays violated the First Amendment. In a letter to the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, the group sponsoring the plaques, Murphy apologized for "any intrusion resulting from" the temporary removal of the plaques quoting Psalms 68:4, 66:4 and 104:24 and pledged "further legal analysis and policy review" before any new action is taken.In other words, they're going to engage in more of the historical revisionism that Bush claims to deplore so much, remove anything that conservatives (and, in particular, conservative Christians) might not like, and add things conservatives (and conservative Christians) will like. It sort of reminds me of a dog our family had for years. If she'd done something she knew we didn't like, she'd go run and try to find something to hide her head under, apparently under the delusion that if she couldn't see us, we wouldn't be able to see her. In this case, though, they're trying to hide some events in the hopes that they'll just go awayThis fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, "Grand Canyon: A Different View" for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis.
Last month, the Park Service announced that it would alter an eight-minute video containing photos and footage of demonstrations and other events taking place at the Lincoln Memorial. Conservative groups have asked to cut out footage of gay rights, pro-choice and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations because it implies that "Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion 'rights' as well as feminism." The Park Service has promised to develop a "more balanced" version that include rallies of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial.
May the Gods grant you a happy and healthy holiday season that last throughout the next year!
And for anyone curious about the roots of some of our modern "Christmas" decorations, here's an article you might want to check out on Celebrating Jul "the Viking Way"
Wassail!
OSLO, Norway (AP) -- If the Vikings had seen pictures of Santa Claus cruising the skies in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, they probably would have assumed he was catching a ride with Thor, the Norse god of thunder.According to Viking traditions, which carry over into modern Scandinavian Jul -- or Yule -- celebrations, Thor's personal transport was a flying wagon pulled by a team of horned goats.
"The idea of St. Nicholas got very much mixed in with Thor's transport when it comes to the sled with flying reindeer," said Helge Soerheim of the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger.Some say the idea of Father Christmas or Santa bringing gifts stems from Norse mythology, too, since the most powerful of the Viking gods, Odin, was credited with doing the exact same thing, according to the Norwegian research magazine Forskning.
Being something of a true crime buff, I've been reading some of the stories in the UK press about the trial of Ian Huntley who was recently tried for the murder of two young girls in Soham.
The Sunday Herald, a Scottish paper, is running a number of articles on the case, including one by Denise Mina, who is described as an award winning crime novelist. I don't know anything about her books, but in an article discussing the role of Huntley's girlfriend, Maxine Carr, in the crime, she notes that the defense tried to use Carr's relationship with Hunley to prove his innocence, claiming that if he had been guilty, Carr could not have a sexual relationship with him in the dayse after the murder as doing so would go against “every natural female instinct”.
[If women have a natural instinct not to be sexual with murderers, someone obviously has forgotten to tell the jail groupies who seem to flock to notorious killers here in the states, though that's another story all together.]
Mina then provides a wonderful comment that applies not only to this case, but also to other situations - such as politics - where the main argument against it is that "it's not natural":
We should be suspicious when anyone anywhere argues that anything is natural. Nature has been used to justify slavery, homophobia and keeping the working classes in their place. Appeals to nature never mean giving up penicillin or clean water, it is a hollow term that saves right-wing polemicists and scoundrels the trouble of coming up with a rational argument.Exactly!
I got this from a post today at morons.org. If you've never been there, you should check it out. They point out when people are being, well, morons (particularly if their in the news) as well as offer commentary on a variety of subjects.
This one just has me outraged:
Back in July we reported that North Carolina continued to target gays for legal persecution despite the nullification of "sodomy" laws by deciding that they'd just arrest people who talk about engaging in "sodomy" in public even if they actually have sex in a private home, even though their private, consensual sexual behaviour cannot be criminalized.There's more, including a very funny "one-act play" demonstrating exactly where something like this could lead.Now Virginia has hopped on the "conspiracy to commit sodomy" bandwagon, and is also arresting gay men for talking about having sex in public places. They're going after men hooking up in book stores and other cruisy locations, even though they're not having sex in public. This is an obvious violation of these guys' right to freedom of speech and association, but clearly if the state doesn't care about arresting folks for talking about something that isn't itself illegal, they don't give a damn about the rights of the victims of their sex shop trolling under the First Amendment.
CBS News is reporting that Thomas Kean, chairman of the commission on 9/11, has said that the attacks on 9/11 could, and should, have been prevented.
"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," said Thomas Kean.It's not clear at this point if those who failed to either predict, discover or prevent the attacks were members of the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, or some of both, but given how hard the Bush administration tried to prevent the investigation from even being initiated, I suspect that at least some of the blame belongs with them."As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not something that had to happen."
Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.
"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed," Kean said.
Either way, the people who failed to prevent this tragedy should be identified, publicly named and never again put in a position where the public's safety rests in their hands - regardless of which party they belong to.
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank published and article today on the White House's tendency to try and rewrite history.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, administration Web sites have been scrubbed for anything vaguely sensitive, and passwords are now required to access even much unclassified information. Though it is not clear whether the White House is directing the changes, several agencies have been following a similar pattern. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead. The National Cancer Institute, meanwhile, scrapped claims on its Web site that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer. And the Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant's report that had been posted on its Web site.This is something I've been trying to keep track of for a while, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to post a collection of links to the posts I've made on this previously. They contain links to stories on other sites, as well as to several screenshots I've been uploading for reference.
Harold Meyerson has an editorial in today's Washington Post that does a great job of explaining why, even though the deposing and capture of Saddam Hussein is a great event, it still is not sufficient to justify the war as a whole. Meyerson expresses a great deal of what I've felt for a long time now - but does it a lot better.
So the case against the war was necessarily a complex one. If the only factor had been ridding Iraq of its Baathist thugocracy, why, of course, the war merited support. But supporting the war also meant supporting a new national doctrine in favor of preventive -- that is, discretionary -- wars. It meant the shredding of the United Nations and NATO and the very idea of international institutions, the rejection of long-term alliances, the normalization of unilateral and discretionary wars in what was already a dangerous world. It meant acquiescing to the idea that the president can lie this nation into war. It meant an overextension of our armed forces that emboldened North Korea in threatening its neighbors and China in threatening Taiwan. It meant the transformation of the United States from a land admired throughout the world into a nation, by the evidence of all available polling, almost universally feared. Call those externalities if you will, but they sure do add up.Conservatives and other war supporters are always trying to take this kind of a stance as saying that I (and others who feel the same way) actually support Saddam. That's not the case at all. I don't support him or his regime in the least. But I also don't support the way the US has lost so much of the respect we used to have in the world. I especially don't support a world in which leaders can proclaim themselves free to engage in wars of aggression on false pretenses. Saddam killed hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of his own people. But how many MORE people might die as other countries look at the US example, and say to themselves "Hmmmm... I could just tell everyone this is why we need to invade, present a bunch of unsubstantiated or clearly questionable or even outright false material and claim it's evidence of why the war is needed and then go ahead and attack even if everyone else objects By the time anyone can prove I've lied, the war will be underway and I'll have what I want - and it won't matter, because I can just say I'm following America's example!"[...]
And so it is for those of us who had no illusions about Hussein, and believed that if the United States went to war, it could surely overthrow him -- but opposed the war anyway. The ousting of the Baathists is not just good in itself; it's great in itself. But it was never simply "in itself," of course. Ousting Hussein as Bush undertook the task also required a rewriting of the norms of international conduct in favor of wars of choice, and the norms of domestic discourse in favor of systematic presidential deception, of waging a war on false pretenses. From the vantage point of any street corner in Baghdad, these changes, I acknowledge, may seem damned inconsequential. But we are not in Baghdad, and what were imperatives there were always choices here.
Saddam was a horrific monster. But so is this new precedent we have set with the way we went about taking him out of power.
In an article at Morons.org, writer Spatula posts about a company in North Carolina that's being harassed because they refuse to discriminate against gays. The post includes the following quote from the company's CEO - and I just think it's a good enough answer that it needs to be shared:
And of course, for creating such an environment and supporting equal rights, openly-gay CEO Robert Page receives hate mail from neocon robots which says things like, "You should support family values, not the homosexual agenda."The company is Replacements, a firm which offers replacement pieces for dinnerware lines that have been discontinued by their manufacturers. If you like their CEO's attitude and need a few more plates to complete your service, you might want to check them out.To which he responds that his "company believes all people are deserving of dignity, respect, and equal treatment. If that is also what you consider to be the homosexual agenda, I proudly support it."
A debate that started even before the events of 9/11 is growing closer to resolution. For years, Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club (among others, I believe) have been trying to gain access to documents regarding the Energy Task Force that Dick Cheney led during the early months of the administration. This task force helped define the Bush administrations energy policies, and it is thought that many members of the task force were executives from the energy industry, which could lead to a serious conflict-of-interest and questions about the appropriateness of their recommendations.
Many of the questions that are being asked are due to the timing of the task force's recommendations and the Bush administration's refusal to institute caps in energy prices during the energy crisis in California that caused so many problems, and has since been demonstrated to have been the result of illegal market manipulation. If the decision not to assist California during the crisis came at the behest of energy executives (in particular, Ken Lay of the now bankrupt Enron) whose companies were engaging in the manipulation, it could raise further question about whether or not the decision not to help California was made in order to allow these companies to continue with their market manipulation scheme.
In an attempt to prevent these records from being released, Cheney is now taking his appeal to the Supreme Court:
Cheney filed the appeal in the energy dispute, arguing that neither he nor the president should have to obey a court order to begin disclosing the contacts that private industry executives had with members of the task force who fashioned the administration's energy policy.Of course, Cheney's argument seems to ignore the fact that the reason we have executive, judicial and legislative branches that are separate from each other largely to ensure that they can second-guess each other and maintain the long-cherished practice of "checks and balances."The main argument of Cheney's appeal is that the Constitution's separation of powers among the three branches of government means that the judicial and congressional branches lack authority to second-guess the president, the vice president, and other aides when they are deciding how to use executive powers.
The administration is making similar claims in a variety of court cases challenging the president's handling of the war on terrorism.
I've pointed out before that the issues regarding the problems with electronic voting machines is something that everyone should be concerned about because they could cause problems (or be misused) in any electoral race, in any location, at any time, without any regard for party. It's still a bit disquieting, though, that so many of the companies making these machines have ties to a number of Republicans. As a result, this cartoon made me giggle.
Fast Company has a fascinating article on the quandary many manufacturers and wholesalers find themselves in because of the huge success - and resultant power - of Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart itself is known for continuous improvement in its ability to handle, move, and track merchandise. It expects the same of its suppliers. But the ability to operate at peak efficiency only gets you in the door at Wal-Mart. Then the real demands start. The public image Wal-Mart projects may be as cheery as its yellow smiley-face mascot, but there is nothing genial about the process by which Wal-Mart gets its suppliers to provide tires and contact lenses, guns and underarm deodorant at every day low prices. Wal-Mart is legendary for forcing its suppliers to redesign everything from their packaging to their computer systems. It is also legendary for quite straightforwardly telling them what it will pay for their goods.It's interesting to get a look at the effect dealing with Wal-Mart can have on retailers. The article notes that, to an extent, Wal-Mart's low prices have helped keep inflation down in recent years. At the same time, however, their demands for low wholesale costs from their suppliers has forced many companies to move jobs overseas - leaving Americans out of work.[...]
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
I'm neither an economist nor a business wiz, but to me it would make more sense for Wal-Mart to try to work with their suppliers to find a point where the cost is as low as it can be before the retailer would have to start shipping jobs overseas. This would not only benefit America as a whole, greatly - it would do a lot to help ease the current unemployment rate - but it would also help Wal-Mart because even if their prices are low, someone who is out of work isn't going to be able to buy anything. In addition, if someone lost their job because Wal-Mart's demands forced their employer to outsource their work to other countries, that person is less likely to want to do business with Wal-Mart.
Initially, Wal-Mart would probably suffer some loss of sales if their prices went up, but if they promoted the fact that they are doing this in order to save American jobs, that would certainly help people be more willing to continue shopping there. In addition, once people got more used to the prices being a bit higher, customer would soon return.
Of course, I doubt that will happen, but it would seem to me to that it would be a far better situation for all involved.
Congratulations to our Armed Forces fighting in Iraq for their capture of Saddam Hussein. While I still believe that the war itself should not have been fought, I am glad that some good has come of it.
My greatest hope right now is that, as Sen. Ike Skelton from MO put it, is that his capture will "take the wind out of the sails of the Ba'ath resistance." I would love to see fewer of our men and women dying over there, and for the Iraqis to begin to be able to truly begin their recovery from our war efforts. It's by no means certain, though, that those hopes will be fulfilled - and even if the Ba'ath resistance does falter, we don't know for sure who all we're fighting against right now. The Reuters article notes that:
The White House warned, however, that Saddam's capture may not mean an end to violence, which continued hours after he was seized, with a suspected suicide car bombing that left at least 17 dead at a police station in Khalidiyah, west of Baghdad.Yes, this may help Bush's re-election chances in November - particularly if the attacks against our troops lessen. And I'll even admit that the possibility that Saddam's capture might help Bush is a bit frustrating. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way, but I do hope that my fellow liberals will be able to join me in celebrating an excellent job by our armed forces and not lament it for it's political implications. Remember - November is a ways off still and Bush isn't invincible.U.S. officials say anti-American Muslim militants affiliated to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network have become active in Iraq amid the chaos following Saddam's ousting on April 9.
I had previously posted (here and here) about Marquis Jobes, a 13-year old boy who has been missing since early November. His body was located today, and apparently he has been dead for a while.
I initially took interest in this story because it was yet another case where a minority child from a lower-income family who had disappeared with little fanfare outside the local press. I was actually somewhat surprised that the case hadn't attracted more attention. The boy's mother had been found dead, and police thought that her boyfriend may have killed her and taken the boy. There was considerable concern for Marquis' safety, as the boyfriend was considered to be violent.
A few days after Marquis went missing and his mother's body was found, however, the boyfriend was found, having been shot to death. Since that time no one has had any idea what happened to Marquis. I have to wonder if the case had gotten more exposure if, perhaps, Marquis might have been found before he died. Obviously, that's not something I can know at this point, and it may never be known, but the whole situation just really upsets me because it seems like we only ever hear about the rich, white girls who disappear and not any of the other kids, unless something truly spectacular has happened.
In any event, it's very sad news to hear that Marquis is dead. The police have said that the tip they got which led them to Marquis' body will also lead them to an arrest in the case. I hope it does.
Thanks to Cat Phillips for posting the link to this story in my comments!
In what many consider an election-year ploy to gain votes, Taiwan's democratically elected leader has proposed giving the people of Taiwan a voice in the debate about whether Taiwan is an independent nation or a province of China by voting on a referendum that would call upon China to remove missiles it currently has pointed at Taiwan and renounce the use of force to keep the island from breaking away from the mainland.
The Communist leaders of China responded by threatening to go to war if the referendum were held - even though the referendum would not be actually require that anything actually be done by China - it would just tell the leaders of China what the people of Taiwan want.) China sees the referendum as a signal that Taiwan is trying to move toward independence, something that has been an issue for over half-of-a-century.
The US maintains official relations with China, but has also pledged to help defend Taiwan if China were to take military action against it. The dispute between Taiwan and China over the referendum, therefore, puts the US in a bit of a sticky position. We don't want to anger China, but we have a commitment to Taiwan. So, what does President Bush decide to do? He warns China that "any military action against Taiwan by China would invite a forceful response from the United States, reiterating an earlier pledge to defend the island republic from potential mainland aggression", which is appropriate, but he also "cautioned Taiwan's leadership Tuesday against "comments and actions" aimed at independence, telling visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that the United States opposes such steps."
You might want to read that last part again, because it's rather important. Our President, whose administration has taken to justifying our war on Iraq by claiming we needed to bring democracy to the Middle East and freedom to the oppressed people of Iraq, tells Taiwan that we oppose any movement on their part toward independence from China and democratic freedom for themselves. One senior US official told CNN "We don't want to see Taiwan moving toward independence. We don't want to see any unilateral moves in that direction."
As a Washington Post editorial notes:
Yesterday President Bush essentially placed the United States on the side of the dictators who promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box. His gift to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring the sanguinary rhetoric of the man standing next to him. Mr. Bush had his reasons for doing so -- above all to avoid one more foreign policy crisis during an election year. But in avoiding a headache for himself, he demonstrated again how malleable is his commitment to the defense of freedom as a guiding principle of U.S. policy.While the editorial says that Bush "ignored the sanguinary rhetoric" of China, as I noted above, he has warned China that military action toward China could result in the US responding with force on Taiwan's behalf. I don't know if the WaPo editors were unaware of the warning to China when the editorial was written, if they just ignored it or if the warning was not issued until after the editorial was published, but even with Bush warning China, the rest of the comments by the WaPo editors are still, in my opinion, valid.
Why? Because even though we've committed to help defend Taiwan if China attacks them, right now, our nation is telling Taiwan that we don't want them to have independence or freedom. Right now, the Taiwanese people live with the knowledge that China has 500 missiles pointed at them, and hears that China would consider a demand from the Taiwanese people to remove those missiles and renounce the use of force to keep Taiwan as a Chinese province as justification to go to war. China has even indicated that they would be willing to accept the cancellation of the 2008 Olympics (something the government has seen as a way to show off China and improve their image worldwide) or, worse, "mass casualties", in the pursuit of such a war. Yet the United States, who is supposed to be the world's leader and defender of democracy, says we don't want Taiwan to take even as small of a step as asking its people to tell China if they want missiles pointed at them or not. Instead, we tell their leaders to back off on anything that might indicate even a small desire for independence. Our pledge to defend them is not a promise that we will help them seek or gain their freedom from a Communist government, only that we will help protect them from an aggressor. It may not sound like a big difference, but it is.
Certainly, we don't want or need a war between China and Taiwan right now. For starters, with our military spread as thin as it currently is, it would be very difficult for us to fulfill our pledge to help defend Taiwan - and its true that another foreign relations crisis would look very bad for Bush. But if our country is truly committed to world-wide democracy - if we're going to take the position that freedom is so important for one group of oppressed people that we will invade their sovereign nation and get it for them (whether they want it or not) - then it should be important enough for us to tell China in this situation that they need to back down from their warmongering rhetoric and allow the Taiwanese people to have their say.
James Towey, the director of Bush's office of "Faith-Based" Initiatives managed to anger a number of Pagans, Heathens and other adherents of what's sometimes called "Alternative Religions" recently when he recently published this question and answer set on an "Ask the White House" page at the White House website:
Colby, from Centralia MO writes:Now, I'll grant that, as of yet, there aren't a large number of Pagan groups out there running soup kitchen, homeless shelters, tutoring programs or providing other social services. While Towey seems to believe that this is because either (a) Pagan groups don't exist (they do) or (b) Pagans don't care (we do!), it's simply a matter of there not yet being that many Pagan groups that have access to the kind of funds needed for the kind of programs Towey would be evaluating.
Do you feel that Pagan faith based groups should be given the same considerations as any other group that seeks aid?Jim Towey:
I haven't run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor! Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can't be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.
Unfortunately, because there is so much prejudice against Pagans and Paganism, especially from the more fundamental Christian groups, for many people, being public about their Paganism can be a big risk. People have lost jobs or housing once it becomes known that they are Pagans, and it's sadly common that the Pagan religion of a parent becomes a factor against them in a child-custody case. In addition, I have known Pagans who have had their property vandalized or crosses burned in their yards. As a result, many people are unwilling to publically associate themselves with Paganism or Pagan groups, which can make it hard to put together a group to work on social serivce-type projects.
This, along with the fact that Paganism is still very much a growing religion, as opposed to an established one, means that many Pagan groups are quite small. In most cases, an individual group that would have the same functions as a church for a mainstream faith, has no more than maybe 15 or 20 people in it - if that. In many areas, several of these smaller church-like units (often called Covens, Hearths, Kindreds, or Groves, etc.) will band together to work on building more of a Pagan community within the area. These larger groups sponsor activities like Pagan Pride Day (usually held in September each year) or celebrations for the various Holy days that are observed each year, both to help various Pagans in the area get to know each other and also to help bring some visibility to the fact that Hey! Pagans exist! (and we're really NOT that scary!)
Oftentimes, money is raised at these larger-group gatherings for donation to various charitable causes or food-drives are held to help bolster the local food pantry.
In the past three years, Pagan Pride groups have collected 74,000 pounds of food and donated $51,000 to homeless shelters, interfaith food banks, the American Red Cross and other charities, according to the Indianapolis-based International Pagan Pride Project.Regrettably, the stigma of being Pagan has been know to make some of the organizations Pagans are trying to help turn down their donations, as they don't want to risk having other religious groups decide that they won't support them any longer if they're going to take anything from Pagans.In Chicago, pagans support a battered women's shelter. In Massachusetts, they have given $20,000 for children with AIDS.
As the Post article notes, however, the number of Pagans (especially in terms of those practicing Wicca, probably the larges and most well-known of the Pagan faiths) is growing, and fast.
According to one major study, Wiccans -- one of several subgroups of pagans -- made up the fastest-growing religion in the continental United States in the 1990s. The American Religious Identification Survey, based on a randomly dialed telephone survey of 50,281 households by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, estimated that the number of Wiccans rose 17-fold, from 8,000 to 134,000, between 1990 and 2001.Hopefully, as the Pagan faiths continue to grow, they will become more accepted and people who share the Pagan path will feel more comfortable about working with publicly-Pagan groups, and charitable organizations will be more willing to accept Pagan donations. As long as we have officials making comment that indicate that Pagans aren't caring or willing to do work on behalf of others, however, that acceptance is going to be slow.The survey also estimated that there are 33,000 Druids and 140,000 other pagans in 48 states. That adds up to about 300,000 people in what pagans call their "family of religious and magical paths."
One thing that Towey got completely wrong, though, is in saying that "Once you make it clear to any applicant that public money must go to public purposes and can't be used to promote ideology, the fringe groups lose interest. Helping the poor is tough work, and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it."
One thing common to almost all Pagan groups is that we don't try to promote our ideology. The idea of a Pagan group running a homeless shelter or soup kitchen and telling people coming in to receive aid that they must convert to a Pagan faith to get help, or even just making them listen to a religious lesson is laughable. For one thing, how on Earth would they decide exactly which path the person would have to accept or what God or Goddess to give the lesson on? There are so many that from a pragmatic standpoint, it wouldn't be feasible. More importantly, though, is the belief you will find in virtually all Pagan religions that there is no "One True Way™" and that individuals should be free to follow their conscience in matters of the spirit.
Yes, we will talk about our faith and are generally happy to educate someone about what it is we believe and why, but we don't then try to tell the person that they must believe it also. In fact, that's probably one of the main reasons why the Pagan faiths are still fairly small in terms of overall membership.
I have to say, though, I'm really glad to see that enough of a stink has been raised about this guys comments that it actually rated a story in the Washington Post. Sure, it's tucked away in the back pages, but a few years ago, it wouldn't even have gotten that much attention. The Post did a great job with the article, and managed to present a pretty balanced look at Paganism. I doubt we'll ever get an apology from Towey, though it would be nice. He certainly owes us one.
So, the President doesn't have time to go to any funerals for the soldiers killed in Iraq, and even though he talked big about being the nation's "official" hugger in order to make the point that he wouldn't risk our soldier's lives unnecessarily (since he'd be the one who'd have to hug their mother's if they died) there hasn't been much hugging from him, either, but couldn't he at least find enough time to write an actual, personal note to the families of the fallen?
No president has ever attended every funeral of every soldier. Even President Clinton was selective in his visits. He didn't want to set the precedent of having to go to every one or being seen to play favorites, his former aides recall. And yet the Bush White House has at times acted defensively about Bush's approach. Sometimes aides suggest that Clinton was just an attention seeker (which set off a new round of barbs between the Bushies and the Clintonites). Other times they point out that Bush is "writing" letters to each of the soldiers' families instead of going to the services.You know, even if it is a long-standing practice, sending a freaking FORM letter to the parents of someone who's died in the service of this country is just flat out lazy and cold. I don't care who's done it before - it was wrong then and it's wrong now.So I asked some families about the sympathy letters they had received. I assumed that they were in the Bush family style.
[...]
But those are not the letters Bush is “writing.” They are form letters. With the exception of the salutation and a reference to the fallen soldier in the text, the letters the families shared with me are all the same. Now some one has gone to the trouble of finding out if the given name of the solider and the name he or she used were different. And Bush does sign them all personally. But it would be more accurate to say he is “sending” all the families letters, a practice that goes back many presidents.
These are people who have had someone they dearly loved taken away from them, sent into danger at the President's behest and killed by whomever the country has designated as "the enemy". They will spend the rest of their lives with a huge, gaping hole where that person once was. The absolute least they should be able to expect from this country is that the President who sent their loved one off to his or her death will take a few minutes to write them a personal note of condolence on the lost.
Bush promoted himself as a "compassionate conservative." Maybe he should look up "compassionate" in the dictionary sometime. He obviously doesn't have a clue as to what it actually means.
Usually, I save quizzes like this for my personal journal where I write when I'm feeling all wiggy or goofy or depressed or pissed (about something other than politics) or just generally feel like writing and don't have a coherent topic on which to do so, but this quiz fits the spirit of this site so well, I just had to share it.
Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is
concerned that it may not get a second term.
Therefore, we are going to change the rules so
that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2
votes because Democrat is a shorter word than
Republican
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
[Special note to the FBI or any other "snoopsy" types: This quiz IS meant to be a joke. I really am NOT much of a threat to the Bush administration, unless you consider someone being morally, politically and ethically opposed to damn near everything the President and his administration have done and working as hard as I can to convince others to vote for the Democratic candidate for President in next year's elections to be a "threat." If so, please let me remind you that holding views different from the President (or the Republican party) and encouraging people to exercise their right to vote for any candidate - even if he or she isn't a Republican - are perfectly legal acts (at least for the time being, though I'm sure you're working on that), so you can't really bust me for that. Thanks!]
The following press release (including links to copies of the findings from InfoSENTRY and Compuware, who tested the voting machines on Ohio's behalf) was sent out today from the Ohio Secretary of State's office, documenting the confirmation of several security flaws within the electronic voting machines from 4 different manufacturers and stating that the Secretary of State will not be using any of the electronic voting machines until the security concerns are resolved.
This is great news as it helps point out to other states that there are problems with these machines that need to be fixed before they are suitable for general usage.
Blackwell Seeks Improvements and Additional Security Assurances from Electronic Voting Machine VendorsLinks to the documentation released by the state of Ohio in conjunction with the press release:
Tuesday, December 2, 2003COLUMBUS – Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today ordered electronic voting device vendors to resolve security weaknesses uncovered in two comprehensive examinations. Also, in the most extensive release of electronic voting device security information to date, Secretary Blackwell released the full findings of each examination.
“Today’s release of information provides voters with a check list of problems found and a road map for corrections,” Blackwell said. “In order to maintain strong public confidence in our elections systems, voters must be assured that the security risks uncovered in our reviews have been addressed and resolved,” Blackwell said.
Secretary Blackwell will seek an extension of federally mandated Help America Vote Act (HAVA) deadlines in order to provide system manufacturers time to correct deficiencies.“I will not place these voting devices before Ohio’s voters until identified risks are corrected and system security is bolstered,” Blackwell said. “Fortunately, all of the documented risks will be expeditiously corrected by each of our voting machine manufacturers. When Ohioans begin casting ballots on these electronic devices they will do so with the knowledge that the integrity of their voting system has been maintained.”
Compuware Corporation, based in Detroit, conducted a thorough technical analysis of each of the four electronic voting device vendors’ software and hardware. The review included an examination of the computer source code, and scrutiny of the potential for penetration and points of failure specific to each voting machine. Compuware examined the Diebold Election Systems AccuVote-TS, the Election Systems and Software (ES&S) iVotronic, the Hart InterCivic eSlate 3000, and the Sequoia Voting Systems AVC Edge.
In its review, Compuware identified a total of 57 potential security risks within the software and hardware tested. The risks were sorted into high, medium and low categories. Diebold Election Systems had five high potential risk areas, two medium and eight low potential risk areas. ES&S had one high potential risk area, three medium and 13 low potential risk areas. Hart InterCivic had four high potential risk areas, one medium and five low potential risk areas. Sequoia Election Systems had three high potential risk areas, five medium and seven low potential risk areas.
InfoSENTRY, based in Raleigh, NC, conducted on-site vendor inspections and interviews to assess voting system vendors’ security plans, procedures and processes. The review included all information systems security procedures utilized by voting system vendors. InfoSENTRY also assessed Ohio administrative security procedures and made recommendations for improvement.
As a result of InfoSENTRY’s review, the secretary of state will seek additional security and quality assurances with documentation from voting machine vendors. Also, the agency will ask vendors to implement industry standard security and quality practices and procedures. While citing procedural and administrative issues, InfoSENTRY advises that the identified risks are manageable and can be addressed in time to accommodate the secretary of state’s new deployment timetable.
Originally setting March 2004 for implementation in select counties, Secretary Blackwell has now identified the August 2004 special elections as the first scheduled use of new systems. County boards of elections have until January 15 to select preferred voting systems. The secretary of state’s election reform staff, working with boards of elections, will develop a new deployment schedule.
Vendors are currently in the process of making the necessary software, hardware and operational security improvements. When complete, each vendor and their voting devices must undergo additional verification testing by Compuware and InfoSENTRY and in some instances seek federal and state re-certification. Counties currently using electronic voting systems will be provided with mitigating strategies to bolster security and reduce risks.
-30-
For more information, contact Carlo LoParo at (614) 752-8110.
InfoSENTRY: Summary of Findings & Recommendations (PDF)
I hope whatever it is that makes some public officials in Kansas go batty isn't contagious. I'd sure hate to come down with it!
Following the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the Kansas Court's decision to deny an appeal for Matthew Limon who was convicted of having sex with an underaged partner and then given a sentence over 13-and-a-half times as long as the older partner of a heterosexual couple of the same ages would have gotten solely because his partner was the same gender that Limon is. See, Kansas has this really weird law called the "Romeo and Juliet" law which allows for a considerably shorter sentence (1 year, 3 months) for a person having consensual sex with a minor if the age difference between them is 4 years or less - but only if the partners are of different genders. If they're the same gender, the sentence is much greater - in Limon's case, 17 years.
Because of this summer's Lawrence v. Texas decision, however, the Kansas courts have to review Limon's case again. The state's arguments, though, leave much to be desired.
But Maag said the state Legislature had broad authority to approve of such disparities in sentencing in order to promote "traditional sexual roles."Ok, so the state wants to promote "traditional sexual roles?" I fail to comprehend in any way how punishing the older member of a gay couple more harshly than the older member of a straight couple is going to promote "traditional sexual roles." If that's they're goal, I'd think they'd find it more effective to bar women from earning more than their husbands, make it illegal for a man to do household chores, change diapers or cook, prevent women from working at all or other such draconian measures. (And if anyone from the Kansas legislature is reading this, please be aware that the above was meant to be sarcastic and not to be taken as a serious suggestion. I worry about you guys, you know?)The state argued the reasons for different punishments of similar sex acts was to promote marriage, encourage procreation and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
As for the promotion of marriage, how does jailing the older partner of any couple promote marriage in any way? If your boyfriend or girlfriend gets sent away for over a year, especially if you're in your late teens or so, odds are you're not likely to end up marrying them no or anytime in the future. In fact, I'll bet that there's a much greater chance of you finding a new boyfriend or girlfriend before the old one gets out of jail than there is of a marriage arising from this situation. This doesn't mean that I don't think that statutory rapes should be prosecuted, just that I don't think it's the best way to promote marriage.
As for their last "justification" - preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, were you aware that only gays can get or pass on STDs? Neither was I! It seems that the Kansas district attorney's office is onto some kind of hot new science here. Obviously, I'm being sarcastic again. Sexually-transmitted diseases don't affect only gays - they can affect anyone having any kind of sex with any kind of partner under pretty much any kind of conditions. Using condoms is a pretty good way to avoid most of them, but they're not foolproof. It's better to know your partners well enough to know if they actually have an STD before having sex with them, but, if you're not going to go that route, a condom is one of your better options.
If the legislature is truly interested in preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, though, they'd do better to focus on educating people about the dangers of STDs, how one gets them, what you can do to prevent them, and what can happen to you if you get one. If they really want a law-enforcement solution, then I suppose they could try arresting people who know (or reasonably should know) that they have an STD and are engaging in unsafe sexual practices. Investigating and proving that kind of a case would likely be very difficult, especially if you intend to do so without violating someone's civil rights, but to claim that jailing older homosexuals who are having consensual sex with a younger - though by no more than 4 years - homosexual is somehow going to prevent the spread of STD's is just silly.
Luckily, there is at least one non-brain-damaged judge in Kansas, and he was one of the justices hearing the case today.
"I'm just trying to come up with a reason, other than you don't like homosexuals," Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Joseph Pierron told Deputy Atty. Gen. Jared Maag, who was representing the state.Hopefully reason will prevail and Limon will soon find himself out of jail and able to get back to his normal life. The fact that he's gay shouldn't cost him an extra 15 years and 9 months.[...] But Pierron, the head of the three-judge panel, told Maag two of those reasons [ed note: referring to the reasons discussed above] were "utterly ridiculous" because the law deals with sexual acts committed by minors, which are illegal regardless of the context.
[Update 12/5/03 11:46pm - slightly rephrased a sentence in the opening paragraph to get rid of some really horrendously bad grammar. No change in context or meaning, however - except now maybe it makes sense. *g*]
A seven-year-old boy was punished for saying that his mothers are "gay" and explaining that gay is "when a girl likes a girl".
The teacher told the boy that "gay" is a bad word that shouldn't be said in school. The following week, the boy was required to attend an early-morning behavioral clinic. The ACLU said the boy was forced to write "I will never use the word 'gay' in school again."While the school wasn't immediately available for comment according to most of the articles, a story at 365gay.com noted thatChoe's letter asks the school to remove the incident from the boy's disciplinary record, refrain from restricting his speech in the future, and apologize to the boy's mother. The ACLU said an assistant principal called the mother and told her the boy had said a word so bad that he didn't want to repeat it over the phone.
On a student behavior contract form that Marcus had to fill out and give to his mother about the incident, Marcus wrote that the thing he did wrong was that he “sed bad wurds.”Note that ALL Marcus explained is that "gay is when a girl likes a girl," which is pretty much as basic of a fact as it gets. Nothing he said would contradict anything a parent might have chosen to teach their child or have given any kind of a moral context to being gay. At worst, it might make a parent address the subject of homosexuality sooner than they might like, but there's still nothing in what the child said that would prevent the parents from teaching their child either that homosexuality is a normal variation in human relationships (in terms a second-grader can understand) or that it's an abomination that God condemns.A handwritten note at the top of the form from Marcus’s teacher further explains: “He explained to another child that you are gay and what being gay means.”
On a behavior report form signed by the assistant principal, the teacher wrote, “Marcus decided to explain to another child in his group that his mom is gay. He told the other child that gay is when a girl likes a girl. This kind of discussion is not acceptable in my room. I feel that parents should explain things of this nature to their own children in their own way.”
One of the risks of allowing a child to actually interact in the world with kids from other families is that they may sometimes hear things that parents may not want them to or may not have intended to address yet. My husband tells how when he was in early grade-school, some of his classmates were asking him if he masturbated. He went home and asked his mom what that meant, and the family had their first big "sex talk." They might not have planned to discuss sex with him at that particular age, but when the question was presented, they made the best of it, and it certainly didn't hurt him any.
Likewise, now that we're getting close to Christmas, we'll soon get to hear stories of parents, teachers and administrators who are appalled when one child tells another that Santa Clause isn't real. Some parents really want their kids to believe in Santa and get angry when another child "ruins" it for them. Amazingly, the kids somehow survive the trauma and the family is still able to enjoy Christmas.
Yet even though the truth about Santa is something that many parents and teachers may think should be explained to children by their parents in whatever way the parent thinks is appropriate, I can't imagine a school ordering a child to attend an early morning "behavioural clinic" and write "I will never say that Santa isn't real in school again" repeatedly on the blackboard.
While this case involves a teacher who clearly went overboard, her explanation is that she's trying to help protect a parent's ability to teach their child as they see fit. I would imagine this is because there are a number of parents who do seem to expect the school to carefully monitor and control what other children say. Some of that may be appropriate. Children in school shouldn't be allowed to freely make cruel comments to other children, taunting or teasing them over differences in race, religion, appearance or other such things. In that regard, they should be taught basic civility, both in the home and in the school. There might be other areas in which some restraint is appropriate - for example, it probably would make sense to try and keep one child from giving another child detailed information about sexuality, drugs, alcohol or other such topics. Detailed information is something that really should be explained by parents in a moral context. But there's a significant difference between a child saying "My parents are gay and gay is when one girl likes another" and one child telling another about how to have sex, or how good having sex might be, or what kind of drugs are fun to take and so forth.
If parents don't want their children exposed to even basic facts of life, like the fact that homosexuality exists, then maybe it's best for them to home-school their children. After all, it's much easier to control what they know about the world if you simply don't let them out in it at all.
Good news on both the free speech front and in regard to the electronic voting controversies - Diebold has backed down from it's threat to sue activists and others who have been distributing copies of their internal memos on the Internet.
A Diebold spokesman promised in a conference call Monday with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel and attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that it would not sue dozens of students, computer scientists and ISP operators who received cease-and-desist letters from August to October.Diebold is reserving the right to sue others in the future if they feel it is necessary, and even though Diebold has backed down from their present threats of suits, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is still going to proceed with a suit it has filed against Diebold for their actions in intimidating web hosts and ISPs into removing the material in question.Diebold also promised not to file lawsuits against two Swarthmore College students and a San Francisco-based Internet service provider for copyright infringement, according to a motion that company attorneys filed Nov. 24 in San Jose's federal court.
"The implicit threat was, 'If you don't take this material down, we might sue,'" Seltzer said. "Without them ever needing to file a federal complaint, they got these documents taken down from a huge number of sites. It was a chill on free speech that stopped discussion of electronic voting issues without ever getting before a judge."
While the Texas redistricting battle has gotten most of the attention, it's not the only state in which Republicans were trying to push a new redistricting plan through that would favour Republican candidates. They had also pulled a similar stunt in Colorado earlier this year. According to the Washington Post, however the Colorado State Supreme court has held that the redistricting effort is unconstitutional as the Colorado constitution specifies that redistricting will occur once every 10 years in response to new census data.
In addition, the Court criticized the strategy because of the impact it might have on elected officials if they know their districts could be changed at any time.
"If the districts were to change at the whim of the state legislature, members of Congress could frequently find their current constituents voting in a different district in subsequent elections," Mullarkey wrote. "In that situation, a congressperson would be torn between effectively representing the current constituents and currying the favor of future constituents."The Colorado decision will not have any direct impact on the redistricting disputes underway in other states, as it deals only with the Colorado state constitution. It is possible, however, that other justices may be influenced by the reasoning the Colorado justices used in regards to the public policy aspects of mid-decade redistrictings. There is also a case pending before the US Supreme Court that has the potential to "try to define how large a role pure partisan advantage in a state can play in drawing election maps."
If you want to read an excellent post on the whole matter of what happened with the League of Liberals, Next of Kynn has an excellent overview with links to the major posts on the subject.
Let me just say that he also does an excellent job of expressing a great deal of what I've been feeling about the whole matter. He stuck it out longer than I did, but tried to see if he could affect real change within the group. I'm sorry that he wasn't able to.
As I've mentioned in my earlier post explaining why I was leaving the League, when I mess up, I do try to own up to it, so... I got a reminder this morning that, apparently, I had been sent a message earlier this month by Barry in which he explained that he experimenting with multiple Site Meters, though in all honesty, I don't recall having seen it.
I was part of a small group of people (maybe 3 or 4 of us, including Barry) who were discussing technical issues, and I either failed to read the message at the time (I do recall on a couple of occasions feeling a bit overwhelmed and just bulk deleting several messages rather than reading them, so it's possible it was one of the messages that just went straight to the trash) or, if I did read it, I failed to comprehend the implications of what he was doing. Since I don't remember the message at all, I don't know which it is, but either one is a significant lapse on my part. I should have been paying better attention to what was being discussed, recognized what he was doing and objected to it at the time. I sincerely regret that I did not.
Robert Novak reports on the strong-arm tactics used during the Medicare vote to try and convince at least one Republican congressman to change a "no" vote to "yes".
WASHINGTON -- During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.In other words, he was offered a bribe - in the form of support for his son's campaign - to change his vote, and then met with threats - against his son's campaign - when he refused.Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.
I'm not even sure why such tactics would be considered legal. If a lobbyist had paid for Smith's vote by donating $100,000 to his son's campaign, I believe there would be criminal charges that could have been brought against both the Congressman for accepting a bribe and the lobbyist for paying one. While Smith obviously rejected the bribe, it still seems to me that the other Congressmen who offered it to him should be eligible to face charges on at least attempted bribery - though I suspect it might be difficult to obtain proof. Somehow, given the current climate in the House, I'm not sure if anyone else would be willing to stand up and admit to having witnessed the bribe offer or the threats being made.
Novak notes that Rep. Smith was "still reeling" after having had his son's career threatened by his colleagues, but notes that when Rep. Smith spoke to his son, "Brad Smith urged his father to vote his conscience." Good for them! I'm glad to see Rep. Smith stick to his guns, and I think it speaks well of his son that he would want his father to hold firm rather than try and protect his nascent career.
It should also be noted that, traditionally, when a vote is held on a bill, there is a 15-minute time frame in which Congressmen are allowed to enter their votes. Once the 15-minutes have elapsed, the vote is closed and the results made official. There's no rule, however, that requires that the time-period for voting be only 15 minutes long. The rules say only that the Congressmen must be given at least 15 minutes in which to enter their votes, but voting can remain open for however much longer than that the leadership desires. As I said, though, traditionally, the leadership allows only 15 minutes for the votes to be cast.
When it came to the Medicare vote, however, the leadership decided to break with tradition, and ended up keeping the voting open for considerably longer - long enough, in fact, to find enough votes to pass the bill, which would have failed had the 15 minute time limit been adhered to as it has in virtually all other Congressional votes since electronic voting was introduced.
The Medicare bill was pushed through the House only after a supposed 15-minute vote was held open for nearly three hours as Bush, top administration officials and House GOP leaders cajoled and intimidated a handful of wary Republicans to switch their votes and reverse what would have been a stunning legislative defeat for the administration.And, of course, we all know what would happen if Democrats were pulling stuff like this....
Time magazine has a very depressing story this week on the treatment of prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. Some of this we've known about for a while, though having it presented all in one article is a bit unnerving, but there's also new information claiming that many - roughly 20% - of the prisoners may well be innocent, and were only incarcerated because we were offering rewards for the capture of people connected to al Qaeda and were willing to take the word of the person getting the reward as sufficient evidence of a terrorist connection.
So, lets imagine it's 2 years ago, right after the fall of the Taliban, and you're an Afghan warlord and you're a bit short on cash. You go out and grab Ali (who's just a random person you know nothing about), bring him to the US officials and say "This is Ali. He's in cahoots with al Qaeda." The US officials give you your reward, and poor Ali - who's done nothing wrong - gets shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Now, the Geneva Convention grants specific rights to prisoners of war, but the Bush administration doesn't want any of these "detainees" to have any real rights, so they decide to call Ali - and everyone else in Guantanamo Bay - "enemy combatants", which, to the best of my knowledge, is a term that hasn't yet been defined for the purpose of international law, so there are no rights spelled out for "enemy combatants." So, Ali gets shipped off to Camp X-Ray where he's been held captive for the last 2 years. As the article notes:
The detainees—660 suspects from 44 countries, scooped up in the war on terrorism—cannot challenge their arrests or plead their cases or even talk to a lawyer, because the U.S. government denies that they have those rights.Ali doesn't have a lot of options at this point. Since he can't see a lawyer, he can't prove he's innocent, and the only way he can even hope to either get out or at least get into "Camp Four", a relatively nice area of the prison, is if he provides useful information to his interrogators. Unfortunately, since he's innocent, he doesn't have any information. So there he sits.
Up until now, the only hope our hypothetical Ali, or someone like him, had, was that the government would decide he was "harmless" and release him, but while some prisoners have been release for that reason, it hasn't happened a whole lot yet. Otherwise, the outlook is pretty bleak.
Inmates arrive with no knowledge of how long they will stay, facing the possibility of trial by a military tribunal whose procedures have yet to be tested, on charges that have yet to be revealed and that carry sentences that may depend on not just what crimes they committed but what country they are from. The U.S. last week cut a deal with Australia that if its detainee David Hicks is found guilty, he will not be executed and will be allowed to have his family in the courtroom and talk to his lawyers without Americans listening in. But the Brits are pushing for more, and what about the inmates from Yemen or Pakistan or Afghanistan? Seeing the risks of multiple standards of justice, Pentagon officials said last week that they are conducting a wholesale review of the tribunal rules.A new ray of hope has come in the form of the US Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear cases filed by the families of some of the detainees that could force the government's hand. And, in a sense, it already has.
A U.S. military official tells Time that at least 140 detainees—"the easiest 20%"—are scheduled for release. The processing of these men has sped up since the Supreme Court announced it would take the case, said the source, who believes the military is "waiting for a politically propitious time to release them."The Court is expected to issue a ruling possibly in July, so apparently the "politically propitious time" will be considerably before the elections, but I have little doubt that it will come at a time when Bush has a grave need to be seen as magnanimous, with the hope that no on will notice it took us 2 years to figure out that it's likely that some of these people we've been keeping imprisoned were only handed over as a quick way for some warlord to make a buck.
Jim Henley at Unqualified Offering is also covering this story, and has a very powerful post on the matter. He notes that this seems to be another part of the Bush patterns of things turning out to be a lot worse than initially reported, even though we've had officials telling us that they're actually better. I strongly recommend taking the time to read it. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
We're told one month that most of Iraq is not just quiet but friendly and the next month, in one of those quiet friendly parts, crowds drag American bodies through the street. We're told that there's no guerrilla war, then that there is a guerrilla war but we've turned the corner, then we notice that fatal casualties among our soldiers have grown exponentially for seven months and more (but we're turning the corner again).
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