"Torture, Torture Everywhere But Don't You Make A Peep"

[Ed. note: You can find a much longer post on this torture case documentary, and on the torture brouhaha itself, at All Things Democrat, here and here including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia insisting that, despite the Constitution's 8th Amendment, we shouldn't prohibit torture - (the fat bastard, why does he HATE America and our Constitution so much?).]

The longer the far right and the Bush Administration keep insisting that torture is a "good thing" (I suspect they'd like to torture Martha Stewart, too, since I believe she votes Democrat) while they condemn anyone, anywhere, at any time for questioning its legality, morality, the future repercussions of as well as the accuracy of the information obtained from those we extraordinarily rendition, the more important it becomes for each and every one of us, as American citizens and taxpayers to learn all they can.

Unfortunately, one very good tool to understand the dynamics of torturing detainees, even very innocent ones grabbed up by mistake everyday, is an independent documentary entitled, "Taxi To The Dark Side", has been pulled from the broadcast schedule of The Discovery Channel which bought the rights to show it. "Too controversial" is the only reason given.

To suggest that Americans should not see what is being done by their own government, especially given how loudly and aggressively we have prosecuted other war criminals (and yes, I consider Bush-Cheney two of the largest of all time) for using torture, is almost as obscene as the act of waterboarding and other forms of torture itself.

Despite All The BushshitBullshit, Women in Iraq Still Suffer

Ashley Wright details some of the terrible stuff happening in Iraq that particularly target women. Mind you, before our invasion in March 2003, Iraq was perhaps the most "progressive" of the Islamic cultures toward women. But we put a stop to that! Just like Bush claimed we attacked Afghanistan to "help the women and let girls go to school" while women are at more risk there than ever before, and many (most?) girls have again disappeared from schools under threat of death.

How the bloody hell did we make Iraq even worse than it was under a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein? Sadly, the answer falls under the category of our own brutal dictators, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Former Republican Lawmaker Charged With Promoting Terrorism

OK, it's very tempting: a Midwest man (Mark Deli Siljander of Michigan) who formerly served in Congress (as a Republican) and as a delegate to the United Nations has been charged with 42 - count 'em - charges of funding and promoting terrorism. The righteous Republican tag makes me want to exploit this story for all it's worth.

But here's why I won't.

First, there's that strange notion of "innocent until proven guilty" that was hard hit even BEFORE the Bushies rode into office on a surplus of rigged electronic voting and almost completely eliminated now. But even that is not the only reason here I won't take the bait.

Siljander has been charged for his efforts with the Islamic American Relief Agency which the feds claim funnels money to groups that have actually threated America and its war of empire in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. However, we've seen a BUNCH of such charges that, even when the feds DO manage to win in court, seem to be built on unsubstantiated so-called evidence. Outside the U.S., many courts throughout the very civilized world have, often using info "developed" by the Bushies, have failed to render guilty verdicts because of the speciousness of the charges and the evidence the cases are built upon.

As the Christian Science Monitor so WISELY opined soon after September 11th, 2001 when they decided to stop using the term "terrorist" to identify everyone the Bushies do not like, "one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." This government is waging war on money going to every Muslim cause that isn't directed at keeping the Bushies and American corporations in charge of the oil in Iraq and the huge oil pipeline planned to cross Afghanistan OR to promote the war Bush WANTS to have in Iran.

At the exact same time, this government turns a blind eye to fund raising for others who also might be construed as religious fascists; for example, it's fine if you donate huge sums of money to some of the seriously rightwing "let's get rid of these Muslims and anyone else of not-our-kind-of-Semite" groups in Israel. (Palestinians and others are also Semites, btw, which makes any criticism of the most rightwing of the Israeli government's actions as "anti-Semitic" just because some of us want a fairness way beyond odd.) And Israel is just one example of the terrorists our government IS willing to support while condemning a select group of others.

Knowing how many charges have been brought by the highly politicized judicial system under Bush for reasons that have nothing to do with actual justice, I'm sorry but I don't think anything they do stands up to the smell test.

IF Siljander's group and Siljander himself actually are terrorists, then I have no problem with them being charged and prosecuted. But persecution just for being Muslim - to this Christian, me - just stinks. STOP ALL TERRORIST FUNDING and then apply the rules, or stop bringing charges only against CERTAIN parties. We still support, for example, many programs that help keep any Saudi but the Saud royal family in extreme poverty in ways most of the rest of the world sees as terrorism against the Saudi people but God forbid an Islamic charity does anything to feed and educate those poor.

2007: People We Lost Who Gave So Much

[Right after I wrote this, I learned that the mother of one of my best friends died New Year's Eve morning. Mrs. Judd, being human, was hardly perfect. But when my own mother died just as I started college - my father predeceased her, dying just as I started kindergarten - Mrs. Judd was quite kind to me. A few times, I was lucky enough to hear her say that despite all I had been put through - "she's handling as well as anyone could as bad a tragic situation as life deals" - she was impressed that I still kept up with school despite having to take care of my little brother and take multiple jobs to do so. For many years, she allowed me to be an odd little part of her family. Knowing she was ill, she had been in my thoughts a lot lately and especially yesterday. I was about to contact her son, my friend, to ask how best I could contact her to tell her how much I appreciated her kindness at such a tough time when I learned she had died. I was too late - but if the appreciation in my heart counts for anything, then she knows. I dearly appreciated her as a scared teenager and I still do today. Thank you, Mrs. Judd, and may God bless you and show you the same kindness.]

There are many more of these folks than I will list here, but I'd rather publish an abbreviated list (and get it out) than to start some exhaustive, all-inclusive one I won't even have finished by this time next year.

My heart and soul demand I start this list with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a writer whose work I did not begin to respect and appreciate until I was well into my adulthood (my loss) and whose death I continue to grieve almost a full year later. If you have not yet read his last work, "Man Without A Country", shame shame shame on you... and get yourself to a bookstore and get a copy post haste. A library borrow is also acceptable, though you want this one on your bookshelves (and pity on you if you don't HAVE even one bookshelf).


I also deeply miss Molly Ivins, probably one of the very best things to ever hail from Texas. Her humor, her sharp mind and even sharper pen and tongue, are unmatched.


Norman Mailer, the prized writer, also well more than earned a spot at the top of this list for all he contributed to the arts, to American culture, and to my own education and development as a writer. With all three of these people so far listed, we have a blessing: we still have their work to admire for many, many, many generations to come.


There is also David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer whose documentation of the Vietnam War, among other pivotal American and world events, was invaluable.

But I'm hardly done. I also mourn the loss of:

Tom Snyder, the once top TV talk show host who was far more human than the "egos with hair" we have now

Grace Paley, the poet and anti-war activist

Madeleine L'Engle, one of the first and most prolific published women sci-fi writers

Ira Levin, best known as the author of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives" but I believe his best work was "This Perfect Day", a terrifying and thought-provocating sci-fi future society book; he like Vonnegut and Mailer have played a role in shaping my writing

Steve Gilliard who started The News Blog

Beverly "Bubbles" Sills, the great opera singer who, though I hated opera, I thoroughly enjoyed her and her beloved mother

Art Buchwald, the humorist

Calvert "Larry Bud Melman" DeForest of David Letterman fame

And last but not least, Benazir Bhutto; while her legacy may be considered controversial, she proved that a woman can play an enormous role in traditional Muslim societies and MUST be allowed to do so - few would have been as brave as she in trying again and again to help change her country

Benazir Bhutto's Assassination

Since Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf plunged his country of Pakistan into one of its maddest states ever in his efforts to control the results of voting a few months ago that threatened to unseat him, it became not a question of IF his major opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, twice elected and twice unseated as a Muslim country's first major woman leader, would be assassinated, but when.

I find much about the reaction to her death to be completely disingenuous. The first was the Bush Administration's reaction, acting like they were saddened when I doubt they were; my biggest questions with her death, in fact, center around just how much involvement Musharraf - who was to face Ms. Bhutto in elections in less than two weeks - and the Bushies may have had with her assassination earlier today.

While we've heard that the Bushies really wanted her there in a power sharing arrangement with Musharraf, there is far more evidence that neither Musharraf nor Bush actually did want her there, since the progressiveness she represented is hardly what the Bush Administration wants in trying to control that part of the world.

But I am just as suspicious concerning the rush by the Bushies and their ilk - including "I see 9/11 everywhere" Rudy Giuliani - to identify al Qaeda as responsible for Bhutto's death. Sure, Bhutto did not pose herself a good candidate for al Qaeda; she also wasn't who Musharraf and Bush want either.

In truth, there are any number of groups and individuals who could have put the hit on this woman. Sadly, the more the Bushies point to al Qaeda and boast "they know" Osama bin Laden is behind it, the more questions I feel arise as to their own culpability here. After all, the Bushies - and this is clear right from their administration HERE at home - are no champions of democracy; they like the "absolute monarchy" kind of arrangement. While Bush is hardly the first "monarch" to decide who lives and dies, a hell of a lot of destabilization and attempted coups around the world since 2000 (including the short ouster of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez) point right back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bad Gets Worse

From Reuters (and filed in the Empires Crumble department):

Police fired tear gas and clubbed thousands of lawyers protesting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's decision to impose emergency rule, as Western allies threatened to review aid to the troubled Muslim nation. More than 1,500 people have been arrested in 48 hours, and authorities put a stranglehold on independent media.

Al Qaeda Rising, Bush Spinning

Today may be Friday the 13th but, sadly, under the Bush 43rd Administration, every day feels like the world’s least fortunate day (that is, unless you’re a fatcat defense contractor, an energy company stockholder, or one of the hundreds of incompetent appointees of this president constantly rewarded for their grave failures). So I suppose it fits that we have been treated this week to the news not only that our Homeland Security czar decides terror levels based on his “gut” but that Al Qaeda has, after probably more than a trillion dollars (the Bushies hide so much) and countless lives have been expended “fighting” Osama bin Laden’s exclusive club, largely reconstituted itself to its “pre September 11th” strength.

Yet it’s not just al Qaeda here we need to worry about. Bush has made the world a far more scary and hate-filled place through his policies and pronouncements. There were, for instance, a number of Muslim-dominant countries that had “favorable” feelings toward the United States before Bush but almost none now.

While he’s spent more money than any other president EVER “reshaping” everything terror-wise, creating endlessly redundant agencies (for example, we have 4-5 people now who seem to be in charge of our wars, including our Commander in Cheat, Bush himself), removing civil liberties left and right as if the U.S. Constitution did not exist, restructuring spy agencies to make them “function better” only to have them work less well than ever before, what do we have?

We have NO greater homeland security than we had before. We are hated far more throughout the world than we have ever been before. We have done the almost impossible: made the Middle East far more dangerous and far less stable than it was before we went into Iraq.
But we also have a president who turned around and refuted his “intelligence experts” and his own gut-rumbling secretary of Homeland Security to claim al Qaeda isn’t restored AT THE SAME TIME Bush congratulated himself for keeping us so damned safe. This, the same man who, for his own political gain, quite obviously engineered the outing of a CIA operative directly involved in the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as political payback because the woman’s husband exposed one of Bush’s flood of lies related to Iraq in the buildup toward war.

And we’re supposed to thank him. Right. Let’s hope he holds his breath until he receives our gratitude.

Say Hello to...

Blame Islam (Bush, Cheney, & the neocons certainly always do).

Afghanistan: Taliban Deploy Thousands of Suicide Bombers?

Really?

"What 'Israel's Right To Exist' Means to Palestinians

Although I read the Christian Science Monitor online several times a week, thebhc, posting here in comments, points out an excellent summary of what we "miss" in the way Palestinians and their Arab/Muslim sympathizers interpret "Israel's Right to Exist" vs. "Recognizing Israel's Existence."

It's quite smart analysis; I highly recommend it.

We really must look behind the rhetoric used by lawmakers and others regarding the Middle East problem, where Israel is always the good guy and anyone we looks like a Muslim the bad guy. In truth, both Jews and Muslims in the Middle East have the right to exist and the U.S. and Great Britain, among others, have made the situation since we established (carved out) the state of Israel much worse, almost guaranteeing the hatred and bloodshed we've seen for years.

Until America can stop taking sides, we help guarantee there will be no Middle East peace.

"Civil Rights Under Siege In Israel"

This letter from Mark Hage of Montpelier in the Time Argus, I believe, states some excellent points:

Thank you for your editorial ("Israel's Dilemma," Feb. 23) on the controversy in Israel over a manifesto that calls for the country, officially a "Jewish state," to become a bi-national state with full equality for all citizens.

Since the mid-90s, Palestinian citizens have intensified their political and legal efforts to achieve the same rights as Jews. There are more than one million Palestinian citizens in Israel, and they live under apartheid-like conditions. Hundreds of rural communities have been established since Israel was created in 1948, but are closed to Arab citizens. For 60 years, vast tracts of private Arab landholdings have been confiscated by government authorities to benefit Jews exclusively.

Most Palestinian children, prior to the university level, attend segregated, inferior and under-funded schools. Arab towns, the poorest in the country, are short-changed annually when it comes to municipal budgets and funding infrastructure projects.

Palestinians are no strangers to police brutality, and Israeli cops, like Jewish soldiers, are prone to being trigger-happy when their weapons are aimed at Arabs. In October, 2000, police shot dead 12 unarmed Palestinians and a man from Gaza during protests against Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories. No Jewish officers were indicted for this atrocity.

Job discrimination against Palestinian workers is widespread, and substantial sectors of the Israeli economy are off-limits to them. The civil service is the country' largest employer, but in 2004, just 5 percent of its 55,000 workers were Palestinian. Islamic and Christian holy sites get a pittance of their funding from public coffers, and according to English journalist Jonathan Cook, "almost all of the Muslim and Christian holy places that existed in Israel before 1948 have been destroyed, fenced off, locked up or converted for the use of Jewish communities."

Israel is confronting a civil rights movement within its 1967 borders, and a national liberation struggle in the West Bank and Gaza. Both challenge the fundamental tenets and structures of Zionism, which elevate Jewish blood, privilege and religion over democracy, equality and the rule of law.

Mark Hage

Montpelier

The Bush Doctrine for Dummies

As with all things Bush, you pretty much have to deliver up details in a very simple visual format since our president appears to be illiterate (among with his many, many other... uh... er... strengths).

Thus, Jesus' General - who remains an 11 on the 1-10 manliness scale - has summed up Dubya's own Middle East doctrine in perfect pictorial format (although I think both "Iraq" and "Iran" may be rather big words for the president to grasp).

The General labels this:

Our Glorious Eternal War
to Resubjugate Brown People

It's Official: Israel All But Demands U.S. Pay For Its War on Lebanon

[Ed. update: Senators just went to Israel in an effort pushed by the Bushies, with the express purpose - stated by Jon Kyl for the Bushies - of indoctrinating them into feeling "an obligation" to Israel. I'm for helping... but obligation considering what we already fund? And I almost guarantee you the subject of Iran came up.]

Although I predicted this would happen, it took until this week for Israel to expressly demand that American taxpayers reimburse them in large part for the war they waged in Lebanon last summer. Before I tell you why this is outrageous - and I don't blame Israel entirely for this outrage; the Bushies' filthy fingerprints are all over Lebanon - let's get a little perspective on how generously we already fund one of the world's smallest nations.

You may not realize this, but we give more financial aid to Israel every year (starting at around $4-6 Billion - yes, that's with a B, folks) than we do most other countries put together. A minimum of $2.5 Billion of this directly funds Israel's military, one of the largest and most sophisticated in the world for a nation that is one of the smallest. Some analysts say the amount that goes to fund Israel from the U.S. actually probably is closer to $10-15 billion per year because we do a lot of "under the table" stuff for them. And this is separate from private funding that goes on not just from Jewish communities in America, but from defense contractors and a host of others.

As I've stated a multitude of times, I do believe it is very appropriate for us to help Israel. First, we allowed the Nazi atrocities to go on for years before we acknowledged any of what was going on. Second, the U.S. helped carve what is today Israel from what was, to both Jews and Westerners, a very inhospital region (I'm still not sure we did the right thing there, in terms of location, but.. what's done is done). Third, obviously, Israel is a strategic partner for the U.S. in the Middle East; granted, however, it's an oft-times unholy alliance but that is also a long story. But fourth, and in my thinking, most important: everyone should have a place to call home. Four million Jews are in Israel and we should help them survive there. [The far-right Christians would tender a fifth reason they consider almighty: that the Bible tells them that Israel has to be in place in its current configuration for the "end of times" to happen the way they want. This, to me, is both madness and something far worse than crazy. But that's also a battle for another day.]

Here's where I - and many others - have problems with the level of funding and "strategic partnership" that flows from our country to Israel. At the most basic level, it's way out of proportion to Israel's size. Divide 4-15 Billion dollars into 4 Million people and... let's just say that Americans don't get that much from their own government for their health and welfare.

Well beyond that, the degree of assistance causes us untold "blowback" - to use Chalmers Johnson's apt phrase. Because Israel has a rabid appetite for military stuff, everytime Israel launches an attack on a Palestinian refugee camp, on its neighbors, et al, those being attacked can see the U.S. logo on the big guns like the helicopter gunships swooping in. We give far less in aid to much larger Muslim-majority nations with a much, much, much lower quality of life circumstance.

But let's get to the Lebanon issue. I join a great many Israelis in believing that the war Israel waged on Lebanon last year was WRONG in every way, shape, and form. Many of those who originally supported the war and "bought" the propaganda that it was waged to weaken Hezbollah (Hizbollah with some spellings) have long since turned because they saw - much as we see with the ever-strengthening al Qaeda and Taliban after all the U.S. action - that what was done only empowered Hezbollah and made people who did not see Israel as their enemy into Hezbollah supporters. Why? Because Hezbollah was the closest thing to an army/aid organization the Lebanese saw.

Israeli sources last year were telling us that they were waging a war "in proxy" FOR the United States, attacking Lebanon to send a powerful message to Syria and Iran that Israel AND the U.S. would come after them next. While the Bushies smirked and insisted that wasn't true, the very fact that Bush WANTS to write a check to pay the Israeli government FOR the Lebanon war is just one more piece in an already sizeable pile of evidence that the war by proxy story is 99.9% accurate.

I encourage you to run, not walk, to your phone, call your elected reps, and tell them NO, you do NOT support paying Israel for the destruction of Lebanon (which, contrary to the pablum espoused by the far right, is a generally peaceful land that is far more Christian than Muslim). I also encourage you to do your own research and, if you agree that FAR too much money is flowing into Israel for its militaristic endeavors, to demand your legislators take a long and hard look at cutting the funding to Israel. I'm not saying cut it all because I don't think that would be right. But I don't want to fund the Israeli war machine anymore than I want to fund outs.

Think about it: between $4-15 billion for 4 million people, each and every year. Something is dangerously out of whack here.

More Of The Bushies' Fondness For Others' Right to Speak

On the heels of the story of GIs being told to zip it, the magnificent MissM brings us this:

Facility Holding Terrorism Inmates Limits Communication - washingtonpost.com

The Justice Department has quietly opened a new prison unit in Indiana that houses a hodgepodge of second-tier terrorism inmates, most of them Arab Muslims, whose ability to communicate with the outside world has been tightly restricted.

::sigh:: and grrrrrrrr.....