By William Fisher
As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passed into history, the White House continued to dumb down what defines “victory”, Bush administration officials regurgitated their upbeat talking points, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed claiming, “The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. Now is the time for resolve, not retreat.”
We may or may not agree with the president and his people, but at least they have an opinion.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of the editorial writers for America’s most influential mainstream media.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle all were silent on the subject. The Wall Street Journal touched on the anniversary as part of an editorial praising the Bush Administration’s decision to release most of Saddam Hussein's secret documents, and said, almost en passant, “The Iraq War is a long way from being over, and anything we can know about the accuracy of our judgments before and during the fight is well worth trying to uncover and understand.”
But the vast majority of daily newspapers that published editorials marking the anniversary were long on facts and analysis, excellent in their syntax, but virtually mute on solutions beyond “stay the course” and “support our troops”.
Proffering solutions was pretty much left to the op-ed punditocracy and, on television, to the seemingly endless parade of journalists, academics, and retired military generals who have learned how to increase their incomes as talking heads.
As for newspaper editorials, a few examples:
The Chicago Tribune: “Iraqi leaders are meeting, and some progress is being reported by (the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq). The reality in Iraq now: The path to security is mainly political, not military. All must give, or all will lose.”
The New York Times: “Our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise. While we are distracted by picking up the pieces, there is no time to imagine what the world might be like if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were instead of how he wanted them to be three years ago. History will have more time to consider the question.”
The Los Angeles Times: “As it enters its fourth year, the war in Iraq defies simplistic characterizations from both ends of the political spectrum. The heroism of U.S. forces and of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily lives is inspiring. But the future of Iraq remains shrouded in gray uncertainty.”
Only two major dailies offered any ideas about the future – both totally predictable: “Stay the Course”.
The New York Daily News said, “America has been spared another terrorist attack, perhaps because the enemy is otherwise engaged. Libya has given up its nukes. Pakistan's atomic bazaar has closed. Resistance to despotic, terror-sponsoring regimes, like Syria's, has blossomed. There's been a great cost, of course. More than 2,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives, with thousands more injured. Americans - and the world - owe a huge debt to these heroes. Alas, in this Age of Terror, the choice not to fight can be disastrous; 9/11 proved that. As Iraq stabilizes and terrorists are eliminated, a recurrence of that day's horrors seems less likely. That's worth fighting for, anyway.”
And Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post opined, “Three years later, Iraq has a formalized government - after a fashion, anyway - and the very fact that it is there at all is the worst possible news for the gangsters who labored so desperately to prevent its arising. For all the heartbreak, for all the despair, this is still a fact, and it is one worth celebrating. It is not yet happily ever after. But it's what there is, or now, three years on. If the current course is wrong, what's the alternative? The answer: There is no alternative. U.S. troops must stay in Iraq until that country can defend itself from those who would turn it into a jidahi haven.”
By contrast, many of the editorials in the Middle East press tied the Iraq anniversary to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Typical was the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, which wrote that the world has not become safer since 9/11 because, "There is now no international unity in the face of terrorism -- shattered as it was by Washington's attempted hijacking of it to fight the wholly unconnected war in Iraq, by the desire of other governments to use the situation for their own political purposes, and by the cowardice of some when themselves directly targeted by terrorists."
For U.S. print media, it was as if there never were any proposals beyond “Stay the Course” and “Support Our Troops”.
Where were the editorial writers’ opinions on whether it was all worth it? On whether the U.S. could continue to finance the Bush adventure? On whether America ought to be involved in nation-building? On the variety of proposals made for new diplomatic initiatives? On the many plans that have been put forward for withdrawal?
Absent. AWOL. Silent.
And the reason, it seems to me, is not fear of being called “unpatriotic”. The reason is that most editorial writers don’t have a clue about how to go forward.
In which case, probably to their shock and awe, they have a lot in common with our president.
But not with their readers.
Monday, March 20, 2006
GIVE US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES – OR NOT
By William Fisher
There are some 10 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today, and there is no sign that the flow is going to decrease any time soon.
They pick and pack our agricultural produce, serve patrons at our hotels and restaurants and resorts, and help build our new houses. Most of them come from the southern border with Mexico. Many of them have been here for years and have children who were born in the U.S.
So serious is the problem of illegal immigration that Governors of some of the states on the U.S.-Mexican border – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California -- have actually declared “states of emergency” in an effort to get the attention of Federal officials and lawmakers. Many raise the specter of Al Qaida allies sneaking in to commit acts of terrorism.
The Department of Homeland Security, which governs border control, appears incapable of dealing with the problem. That has led to the formation of citizens’ vigilante groups patrolling the border to “help” Border Patrol agents to identify and capture lawbreakers.
Meanwhile, skilled hi-tech workers, prospective university enrollees, and even State Department-sponsored exchange students, can’t get visas to come here. And those who come seeking asylum from political persecution or domestic abuse face an increasingly impossible task of convincing immigration judges of the validity of their claims.
Given these facts, the mantra of just about everyone who speaks on this subject has become “America’s immigration system is broken and must be fixed”. But that’s about where the agreement ends. As to what do about the problem, there are almost as many “solutions” as there are immigrants.
This was to be the year of comprehensive immigration reform legislation. President Bush spent a good deal of his once-hefty “political capital” to advocate for a “guest worker” program. But so polarized are the views of state officials, legislators and advocacy groups representing all points on the political spectrum that Congress-watchers are expressing serious doubt that 2006 will see any meaningful progress toward such reform.
Tom Barry, Policy Director for the International Relations Center (IRC), predicted flatly, “There will be no comprehensive reform proposal approved by the U.S. Congress during this session or any session in the near future because the immigration restrictionists have seized control of the debate.”
What is likely, experts agree, is a battle royal between two critical GOP constituencies: the “law-and-order conservatives” and business interests that rely on immigrant labor. One camp wants to tighten borders and deport people who are here illegally; the other seeks to bring illegal workers out of the shadows and acknowledge their growing economic importance.
The issue is complicated by the competing -- and sometimes counter-intuitive – demands of a wide range of groups and coalitions. Usually conservative business interests, particularly in the fields of agriculture, construction, and hospitality, want to open American borders to avail themselves of cheaper labor.
Groups representing states on the U.S.-Mexican border propose adopting draconian measures – including construction of a “security fence” -- to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. Others are advocating legislation that would tighten U.S. border security but give some legal status to newcomers. Still others are focusing on providing “a path to citizenship” for the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
Legislation reflecting the varied panoply of solutions has already been introduced. Led by conservative Republican Representative James Sensenbrenner, Jr. of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House passed a bill in January that would create a giant fence along the Mexican border, and increase criminal penalties for immigration violations -- including some mandatory minimum sentences -- for people who encourage illegal immigration and for immigrants who return to the United States after being deported. It would also broaden the range of deportable aliens so that, for example, repeat drunk drivers can be kicked out of the country.
The House bill would also force employers to verify employees' Social Security numbers against a national database, reimburse sheriffs in the counties that border Mexico for the costs of holding illegal immigrants, and make both detention and deportation of illegal immigrants easier. The Bush administration, which earlier had proposed a “guest worker” program, supported the House the bill, which was passed 239 to 182.
Critics of the House restrictions, including many Senate Republicans, say the curbs would trample states' rights and lead to more unlicensed drivers while ignoring what they believe to be the crux of the problem: the millions of undocumented people already entrenched in the workforce.
In the Senate, two pieces of major legislation were introduced last year. One bill, sponsored by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, calls for increased border security but also creates a guest worker program. It would require illegal aliens to pay all regular fees as well as a $1,000 fine to join the program and, after six years, another $1,000 fine to obtain a green card signifying legal permanent residence. Green card holders eventually can apply for citizenship.
Another bill was introduced last year by two border-state Republicans, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and Senator John Kyl of Arizona. It proposes a “work-and-return” rationale rather than the McCain-Kennedy “work-and-stay” approach.
Currently at the center of the task of attempting to craft passable Senate legislation is Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who heads the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. His "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006," would allow new immigrants to work in the country for up to six years without applying for citizenship. It would create a temporary status for the estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens already here, provided they pay their taxes, remain employed, and pass background checks. The Specter bill does not limit the amount of time those workers may remain in that status.
Specter's proposal is likely to meet stiff opposition from champions of the much tougher immigration bill passed by the House. Some observers believe the differences in approach between House and Senate are irreconcilable.
One of the principal supporters of the House approach, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican and one of the shrillest voices in the immigration debate, said of the Specter proposal, "Words almost fail to describe the threat this bill poses to our national and economic security."
While most civil liberties and immigration experts favor any of the Senate proposals over the “enforcement only” bill passed by the House, they nonetheless express reservations about such issues as privacy, asylum, and due process protections for immigrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls attention to what it calls the lack of privacy protections in the Specter proposal. It says that under the bill’s “Employment Verification System”, all workers would be required to obtain a federal agency’s permission to work. All employers would be required to participate in a national employment eligibility verification program.
But, the ACLU says, “Legislators have not mandated that the private information flowing to and from the government be encrypted or that the databases be secured. Thus, the data provides a ripe target for identity thieves.”
“Even assuming a near-perfect accuracy rate in the program, millions of legal, eligible American workers could still have their right to work seriously delayed or denied -- while they fight bureaucratic red tape to resolve errors,” the ACLU charges.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents millions of employers, has also expressed strong objections to the employment verification provisions.
The ACLU says the government also would be given “extraordinary powers to detain non-citizens indefinitely without meaningful review.” This move, it claims, “would potentially place many non-citizens in a legal ‘black hole’ that subjects them to a life sentence after having served a criminal sentence, or, in some cases, without ever having been convicted of a crime.”
Another immigration authority, Karen Musalo, Director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law of the University of California, told us, “The central goal of any comprehensive immigration legislation should be to build and maintain an immigration and judicial system based on core American values like fairness, family, and recognition for one's work; one that recognizes that the consequences of removal for most immigrants and their families are severe. Such legislation must contain safeguards and ensure due process for vulnerable groups seeking protection in the U.S., including refugees, children and victims of trafficking.”
She criticized Senator Specter's legislation for imposing “harsh criminal penalties on undocumented workers and other immigrants for even minor or technical infractions that cause them to lose their legal status, creates a permanent sub-class of immigrant workers with no real protections and no provisions for acquiring long-term legal status, and strips immigrants of judicial review.”
The IRC’s Barry told us, “The battle within the Republican party has been instigated by largely by social conservatives, and it is likely that their positions on enforcement will be adopted by the Republican party leadership, leaving the Democrats looking in the public mind as if that they are the ones without a clear stance against illegal immigration.”
He says the Kennedy-McCain bill is the “most comprehensive” legislation being considered, but adds, “This is a nonstarter in Congress and in U.S. society because of the fierce restrictionist sentiment that now frames the political debate over immigration in the United States.”
Apparently drowned out by the shrill charges and counter-charges in the immigration debate is a simple truth articulated by George Hunsinger, McCord professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and coordinator of Church Folks for a Better America. He told us, “No human being -- whether citizen or non-citizen -- should be placed outside the protections of the law. No one who performs needed work should be denied fair wages and decent conditions. A society that exploits immigrants for their labor while declaring them illegal is caught in a tangle of contradictions.”
But this is an election year for the U.S. Congress. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that simple truth to sink in.
There are some 10 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today, and there is no sign that the flow is going to decrease any time soon.
They pick and pack our agricultural produce, serve patrons at our hotels and restaurants and resorts, and help build our new houses. Most of them come from the southern border with Mexico. Many of them have been here for years and have children who were born in the U.S.
So serious is the problem of illegal immigration that Governors of some of the states on the U.S.-Mexican border – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California -- have actually declared “states of emergency” in an effort to get the attention of Federal officials and lawmakers. Many raise the specter of Al Qaida allies sneaking in to commit acts of terrorism.
The Department of Homeland Security, which governs border control, appears incapable of dealing with the problem. That has led to the formation of citizens’ vigilante groups patrolling the border to “help” Border Patrol agents to identify and capture lawbreakers.
Meanwhile, skilled hi-tech workers, prospective university enrollees, and even State Department-sponsored exchange students, can’t get visas to come here. And those who come seeking asylum from political persecution or domestic abuse face an increasingly impossible task of convincing immigration judges of the validity of their claims.
Given these facts, the mantra of just about everyone who speaks on this subject has become “America’s immigration system is broken and must be fixed”. But that’s about where the agreement ends. As to what do about the problem, there are almost as many “solutions” as there are immigrants.
This was to be the year of comprehensive immigration reform legislation. President Bush spent a good deal of his once-hefty “political capital” to advocate for a “guest worker” program. But so polarized are the views of state officials, legislators and advocacy groups representing all points on the political spectrum that Congress-watchers are expressing serious doubt that 2006 will see any meaningful progress toward such reform.
Tom Barry, Policy Director for the International Relations Center (IRC), predicted flatly, “There will be no comprehensive reform proposal approved by the U.S. Congress during this session or any session in the near future because the immigration restrictionists have seized control of the debate.”
What is likely, experts agree, is a battle royal between two critical GOP constituencies: the “law-and-order conservatives” and business interests that rely on immigrant labor. One camp wants to tighten borders and deport people who are here illegally; the other seeks to bring illegal workers out of the shadows and acknowledge their growing economic importance.
The issue is complicated by the competing -- and sometimes counter-intuitive – demands of a wide range of groups and coalitions. Usually conservative business interests, particularly in the fields of agriculture, construction, and hospitality, want to open American borders to avail themselves of cheaper labor.
Groups representing states on the U.S.-Mexican border propose adopting draconian measures – including construction of a “security fence” -- to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. Others are advocating legislation that would tighten U.S. border security but give some legal status to newcomers. Still others are focusing on providing “a path to citizenship” for the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
Legislation reflecting the varied panoply of solutions has already been introduced. Led by conservative Republican Representative James Sensenbrenner, Jr. of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House passed a bill in January that would create a giant fence along the Mexican border, and increase criminal penalties for immigration violations -- including some mandatory minimum sentences -- for people who encourage illegal immigration and for immigrants who return to the United States after being deported. It would also broaden the range of deportable aliens so that, for example, repeat drunk drivers can be kicked out of the country.
The House bill would also force employers to verify employees' Social Security numbers against a national database, reimburse sheriffs in the counties that border Mexico for the costs of holding illegal immigrants, and make both detention and deportation of illegal immigrants easier. The Bush administration, which earlier had proposed a “guest worker” program, supported the House the bill, which was passed 239 to 182.
Critics of the House restrictions, including many Senate Republicans, say the curbs would trample states' rights and lead to more unlicensed drivers while ignoring what they believe to be the crux of the problem: the millions of undocumented people already entrenched in the workforce.
In the Senate, two pieces of major legislation were introduced last year. One bill, sponsored by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, calls for increased border security but also creates a guest worker program. It would require illegal aliens to pay all regular fees as well as a $1,000 fine to join the program and, after six years, another $1,000 fine to obtain a green card signifying legal permanent residence. Green card holders eventually can apply for citizenship.
Another bill was introduced last year by two border-state Republicans, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and Senator John Kyl of Arizona. It proposes a “work-and-return” rationale rather than the McCain-Kennedy “work-and-stay” approach.
Currently at the center of the task of attempting to craft passable Senate legislation is Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who heads the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. His "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006," would allow new immigrants to work in the country for up to six years without applying for citizenship. It would create a temporary status for the estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens already here, provided they pay their taxes, remain employed, and pass background checks. The Specter bill does not limit the amount of time those workers may remain in that status.
Specter's proposal is likely to meet stiff opposition from champions of the much tougher immigration bill passed by the House. Some observers believe the differences in approach between House and Senate are irreconcilable.
One of the principal supporters of the House approach, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican and one of the shrillest voices in the immigration debate, said of the Specter proposal, "Words almost fail to describe the threat this bill poses to our national and economic security."
While most civil liberties and immigration experts favor any of the Senate proposals over the “enforcement only” bill passed by the House, they nonetheless express reservations about such issues as privacy, asylum, and due process protections for immigrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls attention to what it calls the lack of privacy protections in the Specter proposal. It says that under the bill’s “Employment Verification System”, all workers would be required to obtain a federal agency’s permission to work. All employers would be required to participate in a national employment eligibility verification program.
But, the ACLU says, “Legislators have not mandated that the private information flowing to and from the government be encrypted or that the databases be secured. Thus, the data provides a ripe target for identity thieves.”
“Even assuming a near-perfect accuracy rate in the program, millions of legal, eligible American workers could still have their right to work seriously delayed or denied -- while they fight bureaucratic red tape to resolve errors,” the ACLU charges.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents millions of employers, has also expressed strong objections to the employment verification provisions.
The ACLU says the government also would be given “extraordinary powers to detain non-citizens indefinitely without meaningful review.” This move, it claims, “would potentially place many non-citizens in a legal ‘black hole’ that subjects them to a life sentence after having served a criminal sentence, or, in some cases, without ever having been convicted of a crime.”
Another immigration authority, Karen Musalo, Director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law of the University of California, told us, “The central goal of any comprehensive immigration legislation should be to build and maintain an immigration and judicial system based on core American values like fairness, family, and recognition for one's work; one that recognizes that the consequences of removal for most immigrants and their families are severe. Such legislation must contain safeguards and ensure due process for vulnerable groups seeking protection in the U.S., including refugees, children and victims of trafficking.”
She criticized Senator Specter's legislation for imposing “harsh criminal penalties on undocumented workers and other immigrants for even minor or technical infractions that cause them to lose their legal status, creates a permanent sub-class of immigrant workers with no real protections and no provisions for acquiring long-term legal status, and strips immigrants of judicial review.”
The IRC’s Barry told us, “The battle within the Republican party has been instigated by largely by social conservatives, and it is likely that their positions on enforcement will be adopted by the Republican party leadership, leaving the Democrats looking in the public mind as if that they are the ones without a clear stance against illegal immigration.”
He says the Kennedy-McCain bill is the “most comprehensive” legislation being considered, but adds, “This is a nonstarter in Congress and in U.S. society because of the fierce restrictionist sentiment that now frames the political debate over immigration in the United States.”
Apparently drowned out by the shrill charges and counter-charges in the immigration debate is a simple truth articulated by George Hunsinger, McCord professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and coordinator of Church Folks for a Better America. He told us, “No human being -- whether citizen or non-citizen -- should be placed outside the protections of the law. No one who performs needed work should be denied fair wages and decent conditions. A society that exploits immigrants for their labor while declaring them illegal is caught in a tangle of contradictions.”
But this is an election year for the U.S. Congress. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that simple truth to sink in.
EDITORIAL WRITERS: THE SILENCE OF THE SHEEP
By William Fisher
As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passed into history, the White House continued to dumb down what defines “victory”, Bush administration officials regurgitated their upbeat talking points, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed claiming, “The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. Now is the time for resolve, not retreat.”
We may or may not agree with the president and his people, but at least they have an opinion.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of the editorial writers for America’s most influential mainstream media.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle all were silent on the subject. The Wall Street Journal touched on the anniversary as part of an editorial praising the Bush Administration’s decision to release most of Saddam Hussein's secret documents, and said, almost en passant, “The Iraq War is a long way from being over, and anything we can know about the accuracy of our judgments before and during the fight is well worth trying to uncover and understand.”
But the vast majority of daily newspapers that published editorials marking the anniversary were long on facts and analysis, excellent in their syntax, but virtually mute on solutions beyond “stay the course” and “support our troops”.
Proffering solutions was pretty much left to the op-ed punditocracy and, on television, to the seemingly endless parade of journalists, academics, and retired military generals who have learned how to increase their incomes as talking heads.
As for newspaper editorials, a few examples:
The Chicago Tribune: “Iraqi leaders are meeting, and some progress is being reported by (the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq). The reality in Iraq now: The path to security is mainly political, not military. All must give, or all will lose.”
The New York Times: “Our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise. While we are distracted by picking up the pieces, there is no time to imagine what the world might be like if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were instead of how he wanted them to be three years ago. History will have more time to consider the question.”
The Los Angeles Times: “As it enters its fourth year, the war in Iraq defies simplistic characterizations from both ends of the political spectrum. The heroism of U.S. forces and of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily lives is inspiring. But the future of Iraq remains shrouded in gray uncertainty.”
Only two major dailies offered any ideas about the future – both totally predictable: “Stay the Course”.
The New York Daily News said, “America has been spared another terrorist attack, perhaps because the enemy is otherwise engaged. Libya has given up its nukes. Pakistan's atomic bazaar has closed. Resistance to despotic, terror-sponsoring regimes, like Syria's, has blossomed. There's been a great cost, of course. More than 2,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives, with thousands more injured. Americans - and the world - owe a huge debt to these heroes. Alas, in this Age of Terror, the choice not to fight can be disastrous; 9/11 proved that. As Iraq stabilizes and terrorists are eliminated, a recurrence of that day's horrors seems less likely. That's worth fighting for, anyway.”
And Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post opined, “Three years later, Iraq has a formalized government - after a fashion, anyway - and the very fact that it is there at all is the worst possible news for the gangsters who labored so desperately to prevent its arising. For all the heartbreak, for all the despair, this is still a fact, and it is one worth celebrating. It is not yet happily ever after. But it's what there is, or now, three years on. If the current course is wrong, what's the alternative? The answer: There is no alternative. U.S. troops must stay in Iraq until that country can defend itself from those who would turn it into a jidahi haven.”
By contrast, many of the editorials in the Middle East press tied the Iraq anniversary to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Typical was the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, which wrote that the world has not become safer since 9/11 because, "There is now no international unity in the face of terrorism -- shattered as it was by Washington's attempted hijacking of it to fight the wholly unconnected war in Iraq, by the desire of other governments to use the situation for their own political purposes, and by the cowardice of some when themselves directly targeted by terrorists."
For U.S. print media, it was as if there never were any proposals beyond “Stay the Course” and “Support Our Troops”.
Where were the editorial writers’ opinions on whether it was all worth it? On whether the U.S. could continue to finance the Bush adventure? On whether America ought to be involved in nation-building? On the variety of proposals made for new diplomatic initiatives? On the many plans that have been put forward for withdrawal?
Absent. AWOL. Silent.
And the reason, it seems to me, is not fear of being called “unpatriotic”. The reason is that most editorial writers don’t have a clue about how to go forward.
In which case, probably to their shock and awe, they have a lot in common with our president.
But not with their readers.
As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passed into history, the White House continued to dumb down what defines “victory”, Bush administration officials regurgitated their upbeat talking points, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed claiming, “The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. Now is the time for resolve, not retreat.”
We may or may not agree with the president and his people, but at least they have an opinion.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of the editorial writers for America’s most influential mainstream media.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle all were silent on the subject. The Wall Street Journal touched on the anniversary as part of an editorial praising the Bush Administration’s decision to release most of Saddam Hussein's secret documents, and said, almost en passant, “The Iraq War is a long way from being over, and anything we can know about the accuracy of our judgments before and during the fight is well worth trying to uncover and understand.”
But the vast majority of daily newspapers that published editorials marking the anniversary were long on facts and analysis, excellent in their syntax, but virtually mute on solutions beyond “stay the course” and “support our troops”.
Proffering solutions was pretty much left to the op-ed punditocracy and, on television, to the seemingly endless parade of journalists, academics, and retired military generals who have learned how to increase their incomes as talking heads.
As for newspaper editorials, a few examples:
The Chicago Tribune: “Iraqi leaders are meeting, and some progress is being reported by (the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq). The reality in Iraq now: The path to security is mainly political, not military. All must give, or all will lose.”
The New York Times: “Our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise. While we are distracted by picking up the pieces, there is no time to imagine what the world might be like if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were instead of how he wanted them to be three years ago. History will have more time to consider the question.”
The Los Angeles Times: “As it enters its fourth year, the war in Iraq defies simplistic characterizations from both ends of the political spectrum. The heroism of U.S. forces and of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily lives is inspiring. But the future of Iraq remains shrouded in gray uncertainty.”
Only two major dailies offered any ideas about the future – both totally predictable: “Stay the Course”.
The New York Daily News said, “America has been spared another terrorist attack, perhaps because the enemy is otherwise engaged. Libya has given up its nukes. Pakistan's atomic bazaar has closed. Resistance to despotic, terror-sponsoring regimes, like Syria's, has blossomed. There's been a great cost, of course. More than 2,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives, with thousands more injured. Americans - and the world - owe a huge debt to these heroes. Alas, in this Age of Terror, the choice not to fight can be disastrous; 9/11 proved that. As Iraq stabilizes and terrorists are eliminated, a recurrence of that day's horrors seems less likely. That's worth fighting for, anyway.”
And Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post opined, “Three years later, Iraq has a formalized government - after a fashion, anyway - and the very fact that it is there at all is the worst possible news for the gangsters who labored so desperately to prevent its arising. For all the heartbreak, for all the despair, this is still a fact, and it is one worth celebrating. It is not yet happily ever after. But it's what there is, or now, three years on. If the current course is wrong, what's the alternative? The answer: There is no alternative. U.S. troops must stay in Iraq until that country can defend itself from those who would turn it into a jidahi haven.”
By contrast, many of the editorials in the Middle East press tied the Iraq anniversary to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Typical was the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, which wrote that the world has not become safer since 9/11 because, "There is now no international unity in the face of terrorism -- shattered as it was by Washington's attempted hijacking of it to fight the wholly unconnected war in Iraq, by the desire of other governments to use the situation for their own political purposes, and by the cowardice of some when themselves directly targeted by terrorists."
For U.S. print media, it was as if there never were any proposals beyond “Stay the Course” and “Support Our Troops”.
Where were the editorial writers’ opinions on whether it was all worth it? On whether the U.S. could continue to finance the Bush adventure? On whether America ought to be involved in nation-building? On the variety of proposals made for new diplomatic initiatives? On the many plans that have been put forward for withdrawal?
Absent. AWOL. Silent.
And the reason, it seems to me, is not fear of being called “unpatriotic”. The reason is that most editorial writers don’t have a clue about how to go forward.
In which case, probably to their shock and awe, they have a lot in common with our president.
But not with their readers.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
THE AGE OF ANXIETY REDUX
By William Fisher
Airplanes crashing into buildings. Daily body counts from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hospitals filled with hideously mutilated young service men and women. Prisoners being tortured and abused. People being beheaded. Religious leaders urging us to “take out” heads of state. Katrina survivors stranded on rooftops while FEMA fiddles. Tsunami victims stranded nowhere -- just gone.
These are only a few of the kinds of grisly images bombarding the American people every day.
To which we can add the 24/7 menu of relentless television alarums: 90-mile-an-hour car chases, online child pornographers getting busted, corporate executives and congressmen being frog-walked to the slammer in handcuffs, judges receiving death threats, murdered children found in shallow graves, millions dead and displaced in Darfur, children dying from HIV-AIDS and many totally curable diseases, ports being turned over to ‘Muslim terrorists’, phone calls and emails being intercepted, and on and on and on.
And, as a not-so-delicate counterpoint to this scary dirge, the secretary of Health and Human Service tells us to buy extra cans of tunafish and powdered milk to put under our beds to ward off an avian flu pandemic, and the president exhorts us yet again to “stay the course”, go about our business as usual, but be sure to pay attention to the brainless haute couture color codes intended to tell us how scared we should be on any given day.
There is an old axiom in the news business: “If it bleeds, it leads.” So the blood and gore is nothing new. What’s new is its sheer volume and pervasiveness. And if anyone still believes it’s not having a profound and profoundly negative effect on the lives of ordinary Americans, we ought to ask them what they’ve been smoking.
This is not pop-psych 101. This is real. We are living though an age of high anxiety (for which the government’s favorite cliché is “the post-9/11 environment”) that is likely to have a very long-lasting effect on the American psyche.
One of the public’s responses to that post 9/11 environment is popping pills. Since that dreadful day, there has been a rapid and dramatic increase in sales of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, and sleep aid drugs, according to one Atlanta-based health information service provider, NDC Health, which tracks retail pharmaceutical sales.
New prescriptions for sleep aid rose 27.5%. Anti-anxiety drug prescriptions are up 25% and anti-depressants up 17%. New prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants are up 13%, while sleep aid prescriptions are up 8%. Nationwide, anti-anxiety prescriptions are up 8.6%, anti-depressants up 2.6%, and sleep aids up 7.5%.
Therapists are reporting agitation, sleeplessness, survivor guilt and depression -- and not just among those directly affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A New York psychiatrist says her practice increased by 25% since September 11 and that half of those patients had no direct connection to the attacks. "These people feel they have no control over their lives," she said. Another shrink reports that his practice increased by 50% since the attacks and that he didn't expect it to fall off anytime soon.
But many other medical authorities report that the sorry state of the nation’s mental health is deteriorating for reasons that reach far beyond 9/11. And far beyond World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In large and small, urban and rural communities in places like Kansas and Arkansas and Maine, citizens find themselves trying to live “old normal” lives but are unable to find respite from the low-level but persistent environment of fear, anxiety, and conflict that has come to be known as the ‘new normal’.
We all recall Karl Rove’s cynical observation that 9/11 would be a boffo campaign issue in the 2004 election. And it was. Now, equally cynical politicians from both sides of the aisle are using and will continue to use the “new normal” to divide us. Nation against nation. Left against right. Interest group against interest group. Church against State. Religion against religion. Immigrants against citizens.
When President Bush was elected (sic) in 2000, he promised to unite us through “compassionate conservatism”. Since when he has worked tirelessly to unite only his base. The result has been what John Edwards calls the “Two Americas”.
Many Americans are trying to cope by popping more pills.
But some of us continue to harbor some faint hope that by 2006 or 2008, the loyal opposition will come together with some manifesto that goes beyond “anyone but Bush”.
If they fail, we will all continue to live in fear. And pop more pills.
Airplanes crashing into buildings. Daily body counts from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hospitals filled with hideously mutilated young service men and women. Prisoners being tortured and abused. People being beheaded. Religious leaders urging us to “take out” heads of state. Katrina survivors stranded on rooftops while FEMA fiddles. Tsunami victims stranded nowhere -- just gone.
These are only a few of the kinds of grisly images bombarding the American people every day.
To which we can add the 24/7 menu of relentless television alarums: 90-mile-an-hour car chases, online child pornographers getting busted, corporate executives and congressmen being frog-walked to the slammer in handcuffs, judges receiving death threats, murdered children found in shallow graves, millions dead and displaced in Darfur, children dying from HIV-AIDS and many totally curable diseases, ports being turned over to ‘Muslim terrorists’, phone calls and emails being intercepted, and on and on and on.
And, as a not-so-delicate counterpoint to this scary dirge, the secretary of Health and Human Service tells us to buy extra cans of tunafish and powdered milk to put under our beds to ward off an avian flu pandemic, and the president exhorts us yet again to “stay the course”, go about our business as usual, but be sure to pay attention to the brainless haute couture color codes intended to tell us how scared we should be on any given day.
There is an old axiom in the news business: “If it bleeds, it leads.” So the blood and gore is nothing new. What’s new is its sheer volume and pervasiveness. And if anyone still believes it’s not having a profound and profoundly negative effect on the lives of ordinary Americans, we ought to ask them what they’ve been smoking.
This is not pop-psych 101. This is real. We are living though an age of high anxiety (for which the government’s favorite cliché is “the post-9/11 environment”) that is likely to have a very long-lasting effect on the American psyche.
One of the public’s responses to that post 9/11 environment is popping pills. Since that dreadful day, there has been a rapid and dramatic increase in sales of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, and sleep aid drugs, according to one Atlanta-based health information service provider, NDC Health, which tracks retail pharmaceutical sales.
New prescriptions for sleep aid rose 27.5%. Anti-anxiety drug prescriptions are up 25% and anti-depressants up 17%. New prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants are up 13%, while sleep aid prescriptions are up 8%. Nationwide, anti-anxiety prescriptions are up 8.6%, anti-depressants up 2.6%, and sleep aids up 7.5%.
Therapists are reporting agitation, sleeplessness, survivor guilt and depression -- and not just among those directly affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A New York psychiatrist says her practice increased by 25% since September 11 and that half of those patients had no direct connection to the attacks. "These people feel they have no control over their lives," she said. Another shrink reports that his practice increased by 50% since the attacks and that he didn't expect it to fall off anytime soon.
But many other medical authorities report that the sorry state of the nation’s mental health is deteriorating for reasons that reach far beyond 9/11. And far beyond World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In large and small, urban and rural communities in places like Kansas and Arkansas and Maine, citizens find themselves trying to live “old normal” lives but are unable to find respite from the low-level but persistent environment of fear, anxiety, and conflict that has come to be known as the ‘new normal’.
We all recall Karl Rove’s cynical observation that 9/11 would be a boffo campaign issue in the 2004 election. And it was. Now, equally cynical politicians from both sides of the aisle are using and will continue to use the “new normal” to divide us. Nation against nation. Left against right. Interest group against interest group. Church against State. Religion against religion. Immigrants against citizens.
When President Bush was elected (sic) in 2000, he promised to unite us through “compassionate conservatism”. Since when he has worked tirelessly to unite only his base. The result has been what John Edwards calls the “Two Americas”.
Many Americans are trying to cope by popping more pills.
But some of us continue to harbor some faint hope that by 2006 or 2008, the loyal opposition will come together with some manifesto that goes beyond “anyone but Bush”.
If they fail, we will all continue to live in fear. And pop more pills.
Monday, March 13, 2006
QUOTH THE CRAVEN EVERMORE*
By William Fisher
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For those who enjoy the political theater of the absurd, the Dubai Ports World soap opera was the only show in town last week.
And it was a hoot! The actors came straight out of Central Casting.
Here was George W. Bush admitting he knew nothing about the deal, but vowing resolutely to defend it to the death in the interest of national security. The United Arab Emirates were among our most steadfast allies in the “Global War on Terrorism”.
Quickly appeared the Majority Leader of Senate Republicans and presidential hopeful, Dr. Bill Frist, doing another drive-by Terry Schiavo diagnosis and quickly rushing to distance himself from his poll-challenged president, only to flip-flop the next day in favor of a 45-day ‘national security investigation’.
Enter Senator Hillary Clinton and her senior partner, Senator Chuck Schumer, racing to get to the right of George W. Bush to prove that the Dems are really hawkish on national security. Pushing to ban any foreign “government-owned” company from “buying” any American seaport, ever. Especially a country that sent us two of the 9/11 hijackers and used their banks to launder money to help terrorists.
Then there were those courageous Republicans across the Capitol in the House of Representatives, all up for reelection in November, all terrified by being led by an unpopular second-term president, virtually all voting in lockstep to kill the ports deal – and, at the same time, putting as much daylight as possible between their stumbling selves and their stumbling Dubya and, as a bonus, inflicting a bit of ego-flexing payback to the commander-in-chief who ignored them for six years.
It’s an old adage in Washington that the most dangerous place to be is between a politician and his microphone. And our always-patriotic lawmakers lost no time in using their mikes to whip up a toxic cocktail of misinformation to get their constituents drunk with jingoistic paranoia.
A project in which they were immeasurably helped by “The media”, which ran story after clueless story about this government-run Arab company “buying” our ports.
Small wonder then that, outside the Beltway, the people of America stopped watching The Simpsons long enough to rise up to speak with a single shrill voice: “No foreigners (read Arabs) running our ports!”
Not to worry that most of “the people” had never heard of the United Arab Emirates, couldn’t find Dubai on a map, and had not the slightest clue that most of America’s seaport terminals are already managed by foreign companies – including the largest, Long Beach, California, run by a company owned by our great friend and staunch ally, the Government of China.
It’s consoling to know that the people had so much in common with the Congress. And with the media.
Doubtless with a little friendly arm-twisting from Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condi Rice, and the venerable Senator John Warner of the Armed Services Committee, Dubai Ports World threw in their keffiyehs. They announced they would sell their U.S. port assets to “a U.S. entity” (providing they could avoid taking a financial bath in the process).
We still don’t know precisely what this means, but that’s OK; that’s the least we don’t know.
Among the unanswered questions:
If, as has been widely reported, there is only one U.S.-owned port management company, and it’s too small to take on the Dubai Ports World job, who’s going to run these port terminals?
If the Coast Guard and our Customs folks are ultimately responsible for port security, does it really matter who runs the terminals?
What, if anything, is wrong with the Treasury-led inter-agency review process that approved the UAE deal without telling the President, anyone in the Cabinet, or anyone in the Congress -- and what’s going to be done to fix it?
How is our public diplomacy maven, the culturally-challenged Karen Hughes, going to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of all those who think we’re doing a little unsubtle ethnic profiling of all things Arab?
And, most importantly, what exactly has our wildly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security been doing to strengthen our seaport security? And at what cost?
These are serious questions. But don’t expect serious answers. It’s an election year.
Call Central Casting.
* With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe for playing with his words (Quoth the Raven Nevermore) in his poem, “The Raven”.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For those who enjoy the political theater of the absurd, the Dubai Ports World soap opera was the only show in town last week.
And it was a hoot! The actors came straight out of Central Casting.
Here was George W. Bush admitting he knew nothing about the deal, but vowing resolutely to defend it to the death in the interest of national security. The United Arab Emirates were among our most steadfast allies in the “Global War on Terrorism”.
Quickly appeared the Majority Leader of Senate Republicans and presidential hopeful, Dr. Bill Frist, doing another drive-by Terry Schiavo diagnosis and quickly rushing to distance himself from his poll-challenged president, only to flip-flop the next day in favor of a 45-day ‘national security investigation’.
Enter Senator Hillary Clinton and her senior partner, Senator Chuck Schumer, racing to get to the right of George W. Bush to prove that the Dems are really hawkish on national security. Pushing to ban any foreign “government-owned” company from “buying” any American seaport, ever. Especially a country that sent us two of the 9/11 hijackers and used their banks to launder money to help terrorists.
Then there were those courageous Republicans across the Capitol in the House of Representatives, all up for reelection in November, all terrified by being led by an unpopular second-term president, virtually all voting in lockstep to kill the ports deal – and, at the same time, putting as much daylight as possible between their stumbling selves and their stumbling Dubya and, as a bonus, inflicting a bit of ego-flexing payback to the commander-in-chief who ignored them for six years.
It’s an old adage in Washington that the most dangerous place to be is between a politician and his microphone. And our always-patriotic lawmakers lost no time in using their mikes to whip up a toxic cocktail of misinformation to get their constituents drunk with jingoistic paranoia.
A project in which they were immeasurably helped by “The media”, which ran story after clueless story about this government-run Arab company “buying” our ports.
Small wonder then that, outside the Beltway, the people of America stopped watching The Simpsons long enough to rise up to speak with a single shrill voice: “No foreigners (read Arabs) running our ports!”
Not to worry that most of “the people” had never heard of the United Arab Emirates, couldn’t find Dubai on a map, and had not the slightest clue that most of America’s seaport terminals are already managed by foreign companies – including the largest, Long Beach, California, run by a company owned by our great friend and staunch ally, the Government of China.
It’s consoling to know that the people had so much in common with the Congress. And with the media.
Doubtless with a little friendly arm-twisting from Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condi Rice, and the venerable Senator John Warner of the Armed Services Committee, Dubai Ports World threw in their keffiyehs. They announced they would sell their U.S. port assets to “a U.S. entity” (providing they could avoid taking a financial bath in the process).
We still don’t know precisely what this means, but that’s OK; that’s the least we don’t know.
Among the unanswered questions:
If, as has been widely reported, there is only one U.S.-owned port management company, and it’s too small to take on the Dubai Ports World job, who’s going to run these port terminals?
If the Coast Guard and our Customs folks are ultimately responsible for port security, does it really matter who runs the terminals?
What, if anything, is wrong with the Treasury-led inter-agency review process that approved the UAE deal without telling the President, anyone in the Cabinet, or anyone in the Congress -- and what’s going to be done to fix it?
How is our public diplomacy maven, the culturally-challenged Karen Hughes, going to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of all those who think we’re doing a little unsubtle ethnic profiling of all things Arab?
And, most importantly, what exactly has our wildly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security been doing to strengthen our seaport security? And at what cost?
These are serious questions. But don’t expect serious answers. It’s an election year.
Call Central Casting.
* With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe for playing with his words (Quoth the Raven Nevermore) in his poem, “The Raven”.
Friday, March 10, 2006
The Court-Martial of Willie Brand
The following is a transcript of a segment that appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday, March 5.
You wouldn't figure Willie Brand for a killer. He's a quiet young soldier from Cincinnati who volunteered to be a guard at a U.S. military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. But when 60 Minutes met him, Brand was facing a court-martial in the deaths of two prisoners. The prisoners were found hanging from chains in their isolation cells. They had been beaten; one of them was "pulpified," according to the medical examiner.
Brand told correspondent Scott Pelley what he did wasn't torture, it was his training, authorized and supervised by his superiors. So how is it he was charged with assault, maiming and manslaughter?
"I didn't understand how they could do this after they had trained you to do this stuff and they turn around and say you've been bad you shouldn't have done this stuff now they're going to charge you with assault, maiming and 'unvoluntary' manslaughter, how can this be when they trained you to do it and they condoned it while you were doing it," says Brand.
"[The] Army says you are a violent man," Pelley said.
"They do say that, but I'm not a violent person," Brand replied.
But there was violence in the prison. A man named Habibullah and a cab driver called Dilawar died only days after they had been brought in on suspicion of being Taliban fighters.
"They brought death upon themselves as far as I'm concerned," says Capt. Christopher Beiring, who was Brand's commanding officer as head of the prison guards. Beiring was charged with dereliction of duty, but the charge was later dropped.
Asked whether compared to other detainees Habibullah was more or less aggressive, Beiring says, "Yes, absolutely more. He was probably the worst we had."
What kind of prisoner was Dilawar?
"I wouldn't categorize him as the worst but he, but he definitely, several of my soldiers would say that he would test them, fight with them kick, trip, try to bite, spit. That's typically what a fighter does," Beiring recalls.
Dilawar was picked up outside a U.S. base that had been hit by a rocket. Habibullah was brought in by the CIA, rumored to be a high-ranking Taliban. Both of them were locked in isolation cells with hoods over their heads and their arms shackled to the ceiling.
Their shackled hands, according to Brand, were at about eye level. The point of chaining them to the ceiling, Brand says, was to keep the detainees awake by not letting them lie down and sleep.
Interrogators wanted the prisoners softened up.
Asked what the longest period of time Brand saw a detainee chained like that, Brand says, "Probably about two days."
"Two days? Without a break?" Pelley asked.
"Without a break," Brand replied.
Capt. Beiring says he doesn't know of prisoners chained that long. But in general, he had no problem with the procedure.
"They weren't in pain. They weren't, as far as I'm concerned they weren't being abused. It seemed OK to me. If I was a prisoner, I would think that would probably be acceptable," says Beiring.
Brand says something else was thought to be acceptable in the prison: a brutal way of controlling prisoners - a knee to the common peroneal nerve in the leg, a strike with so much force behind it that the prisoner would lose muscle control and collapse in pain.
Brand says he vaguely remembers giving knee strikes to Habibullah.
How did the detainee react to that?
"The same way everybody else did. I mean he would scream out 'Allah, Allah, Allah'; sometimes his legs would buckle and sometimes it wouldn't," Brand explained.
It wasn't only Willie Brand. A confidential report by the Army's criminal investigation division accuses dozens of soldiers of abuse, including "slamming [a prisoner] into walls [and a] table," "forcing water into his mouth until he could not breathe," giving "kicks to the groin" and once, according to the report, a soldier "threatened to rape a male detainee." Soldiers even earned nicknames including "King of Torture" and "Knee of Death."
Habibullah and Dilawar were found dead in their cells, hanging from their chains. The military medical examiner says Dilawar's legs were pulpified. Both autopsy reports were marked "homicide." But the Army spokesman in Afghanistan told the media that both men had died of natural causes. With two deaths in a week, the Army decided to investigate. But the facts only began to become public months later in an article in The New York Times.
"I could smell that I was looking at what I thought was a cover-up," says retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.
Back in Washington, Wilkerson smelled trouble, and so did his boss. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. In 2004, during the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal in Iraq, Powell asked Wilkerson to investigate how Americans had come to torture.
"I was developing the picture as to how this all got started in the first place, and that alarmed me as much as the abuse itself because it looked like authorization for this abuse went to the very top of the United States government," says Wilkerson.
In 2002, the "top of the government" was divided over whether the Geneva Convention applied to prisoners in Afghanistan. The resulting presidential directive tried to have it both ways ordering that the "…armed forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely" but Geneva would apply only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity...."
It's Wilkerson's opinion that the Army chose to ignore Geneva when it issued new rules for interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"That essentially says to the troops at the bottom of the rung that you have a new game," Wilkerson says. "You can use the methods that aren't in accordance with Geneva. You can use methods that are other than when you've been taught, trained and told you could use. That, that is an invitation, a license to go beyond that, especially when you're also putting on them tremendous pressure to produce intelligence."
Capt. Beiring acknowledges that there was some confusion. "Because a lot of people didn't really know, what are their status? Who are these people? Did they sign the Geneva Convention? Who are they and what do we do with them? So there was some confusion," he says.
"Can you tell me whether anyone up the chain of command above you was aware that the prisoners were being shackled with their hands up about shoulder high?" Pelley asked.
"Absolutely," Beiring said.
"Who knew?" Pelley asked.
"Several of my leaders knew because we had them like that, you know, there was probably one or two like that any given day. And we didn't change the procedure if someone came through whether they were a colonel or a general, we left them the same. They seen (sic) what was going on there," Beiring answered.
Pelley asked Brand if other leaders knew what was going on.
Gen. Daniel McNeill, the top officer in Afghanistan, said "we are not chaining people to the ceilings."
Brand disagreed. "Well, he's lying obviously. I mean because we were doing it on a daily basis," he says.
"Gen. Theodore Nicholas, he was the top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said that he did not recall prisoners being shackled with their arms overhead. Is that reasonable?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
"Lt. Col. Ronald Stallings told investigators, quote, 'he had no idea,' end quote, that prisoners were being chained overhead for 24 hours and more. What you seem to be saying is that it was common knowledge," Pelley said.
"Yes," Brand said.
"It wasn't being kept a secret from the chain of command?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
We don't know whether Gen. McNeill toured the prison, Brand doesn't specifically remember him there. But Gen. Nicholas and Lt. Col. Stallings were there. 60 Minutes wanted to speak with all three, but they declined.
There were inspection tours at the prison, run by the Red Cross. But the Red Cross didn't see everything. For example, it didn't see the instructions written on a dry erase board that told the guards how long prisoners were to be chained.
"We didn't want them to know - we didn't think they had an operational reason to know," says Capt. Beiring. "It also had other things on there like if a detainee was fighting or being punished for doing stuff wrong or if he didn't eat his food or he wasn't drinking, but yes, we erased that board so the ICRC we didn't think they had the need to know."
There was a lot the Red Cross didn't know. Medical experts say that Dilawar's injuries were so severe that, if he had lived, both his legs would have required amputation. Even worse, one soldier testified that most of the interrogators thought Dilawar had been arrested only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had come to believe he was just a cab driver.
"And so we killed an innocent man, and that's something else that got me as I went though this, got me very concerned as to not just what we are doing to perhaps al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like terrorists or even insurgents when we come to Iraq, but what were doing to innocents," says Wilkerson.
Wilkerson says the Secretary of State, who devoted much of his life to the Army, was enraged. As the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was breaking, Wilkerson says his boss snapped up the phone and called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"And he essentially said, 'Don, don't you know what you're doing to our credibility around the world don't you know what you're doing to our image?' And for Secretary Powell to raise his voice that way was quite extraordinary. I've only heard him do it maybe five times in 16 years," says Wilkerson.
"What do you mean he raised his voice?" Pelley asked.
"I'm sure Secretary Rumsfeld was probably holding the phone away from his ear," Wilkerson replied.
In August, Willie Brand faced court-martial. Prosecutors said he and other guards had struck the prisoners dozens and dozens of times.
"People watching this interview are thinking, 'Look, this guy came into this facility, he was there five days and he was dead. He died in five days' time,' How did that happen?" Pelley asked.
"I don't really know how that happened," Brand replied.
"You hit him, you hit him numerous times. Did you think it was you?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
"The Army would have us believe that you were operating outside the rules," Pelley said.
"This is what we were trained to do, and this is what we did. And not only that I was not the only one, there were many other people hitting them - and this was going on on a daily basis and nothing was said about it," Brand said.
But Capt. Beiring says those were not his orders. He says those knee strikes were to be used only for self-defense.
"You've read the Army investigation, and in it some of the witnesses say one of the soldiers was nicknamed the 'King of Torture' another one had quote the 'Knee of Death.' You were there; were you not seeing this?" Pelley asked Beiring.
"No, I was not," Beiring replied. "Some nicknames, as a commander you are fairly removed from the junior soldiers, so nicknames could have occurred that I did not know about."
"It's not the nicknames, it's how they got the nicknames that matters," Pelley said.
"I can't say for sure, I can only say I never witnessed any of my soldiers do anything that was out of line," Beiring said.
Still, a letter of reprimand has been written that blisters Beiring. It says his "command failures enabled an environment of abuse." But the charges that could have brought court-martial against him were dropped. An investigating officer said that Beiring "may not have done his duty perfectly, but he did it well." Beiring is appealing the reprimand.
Asked if he, in retrospect, has any sympathy for Habibullah and Dilawar, Beiring says, "Sure, I have some sympathy. I wish they were born Americans."
At his court-martial, Willie Brand was convicted of assault and maiming. He faced 16 years. But the jury of soldiers had it both ways. They convicted him and let him go with a reduction in rank, nothing more. So far, 15 soldiers have been charged in the Bagram abuse. The sentences range from letters of reprimand to five months in jail. No one above the rank of captain has been charged.
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, after serving 31 years in the Army, has drawn his own conclusions about how interrogation procedures were changed in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.
How did it go wrong?
"It went wrong because we had a secretary of defense who had never served on the ground a day in his life, who was arrogant and thought that he could release those twin pressures on the backs of his armed forces, the twin pressures being a wink and a nod, you can do a lot of things that you know don't correspond to Geneva, don't correspond to your code of conduct, don't correspond to the Army field manual, and at the same time I want intelligence, I want intelligence, I want it now," says Wilkerson.
While Secretary Rumsfeld never served in combat, he was a Navy aviator and retired from the reserves as a captain. 60 Minutes wanted to talk with Secretary Rumsfeld, but the Pentagon declined our requests. Since the deaths at Bagram, chaining from the ceiling has been banned. The number of prisoners there has increased fivefold, to roughly 500. The prisoners don't get lawyers, and they can't appeal their detentions. But, the military tells 60 Minutes, it reviews each prisoner's file for release at least once a year.
You wouldn't figure Willie Brand for a killer. He's a quiet young soldier from Cincinnati who volunteered to be a guard at a U.S. military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. But when 60 Minutes met him, Brand was facing a court-martial in the deaths of two prisoners. The prisoners were found hanging from chains in their isolation cells. They had been beaten; one of them was "pulpified," according to the medical examiner.
Brand told correspondent Scott Pelley what he did wasn't torture, it was his training, authorized and supervised by his superiors. So how is it he was charged with assault, maiming and manslaughter?
"I didn't understand how they could do this after they had trained you to do this stuff and they turn around and say you've been bad you shouldn't have done this stuff now they're going to charge you with assault, maiming and 'unvoluntary' manslaughter, how can this be when they trained you to do it and they condoned it while you were doing it," says Brand.
"[The] Army says you are a violent man," Pelley said.
"They do say that, but I'm not a violent person," Brand replied.
But there was violence in the prison. A man named Habibullah and a cab driver called Dilawar died only days after they had been brought in on suspicion of being Taliban fighters.
"They brought death upon themselves as far as I'm concerned," says Capt. Christopher Beiring, who was Brand's commanding officer as head of the prison guards. Beiring was charged with dereliction of duty, but the charge was later dropped.
Asked whether compared to other detainees Habibullah was more or less aggressive, Beiring says, "Yes, absolutely more. He was probably the worst we had."
What kind of prisoner was Dilawar?
"I wouldn't categorize him as the worst but he, but he definitely, several of my soldiers would say that he would test them, fight with them kick, trip, try to bite, spit. That's typically what a fighter does," Beiring recalls.
Dilawar was picked up outside a U.S. base that had been hit by a rocket. Habibullah was brought in by the CIA, rumored to be a high-ranking Taliban. Both of them were locked in isolation cells with hoods over their heads and their arms shackled to the ceiling.
Their shackled hands, according to Brand, were at about eye level. The point of chaining them to the ceiling, Brand says, was to keep the detainees awake by not letting them lie down and sleep.
Interrogators wanted the prisoners softened up.
Asked what the longest period of time Brand saw a detainee chained like that, Brand says, "Probably about two days."
"Two days? Without a break?" Pelley asked.
"Without a break," Brand replied.
Capt. Beiring says he doesn't know of prisoners chained that long. But in general, he had no problem with the procedure.
"They weren't in pain. They weren't, as far as I'm concerned they weren't being abused. It seemed OK to me. If I was a prisoner, I would think that would probably be acceptable," says Beiring.
Brand says something else was thought to be acceptable in the prison: a brutal way of controlling prisoners - a knee to the common peroneal nerve in the leg, a strike with so much force behind it that the prisoner would lose muscle control and collapse in pain.
Brand says he vaguely remembers giving knee strikes to Habibullah.
How did the detainee react to that?
"The same way everybody else did. I mean he would scream out 'Allah, Allah, Allah'; sometimes his legs would buckle and sometimes it wouldn't," Brand explained.
It wasn't only Willie Brand. A confidential report by the Army's criminal investigation division accuses dozens of soldiers of abuse, including "slamming [a prisoner] into walls [and a] table," "forcing water into his mouth until he could not breathe," giving "kicks to the groin" and once, according to the report, a soldier "threatened to rape a male detainee." Soldiers even earned nicknames including "King of Torture" and "Knee of Death."
Habibullah and Dilawar were found dead in their cells, hanging from their chains. The military medical examiner says Dilawar's legs were pulpified. Both autopsy reports were marked "homicide." But the Army spokesman in Afghanistan told the media that both men had died of natural causes. With two deaths in a week, the Army decided to investigate. But the facts only began to become public months later in an article in The New York Times.
"I could smell that I was looking at what I thought was a cover-up," says retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.
Back in Washington, Wilkerson smelled trouble, and so did his boss. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. In 2004, during the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal in Iraq, Powell asked Wilkerson to investigate how Americans had come to torture.
"I was developing the picture as to how this all got started in the first place, and that alarmed me as much as the abuse itself because it looked like authorization for this abuse went to the very top of the United States government," says Wilkerson.
In 2002, the "top of the government" was divided over whether the Geneva Convention applied to prisoners in Afghanistan. The resulting presidential directive tried to have it both ways ordering that the "…armed forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely" but Geneva would apply only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity...."
It's Wilkerson's opinion that the Army chose to ignore Geneva when it issued new rules for interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"That essentially says to the troops at the bottom of the rung that you have a new game," Wilkerson says. "You can use the methods that aren't in accordance with Geneva. You can use methods that are other than when you've been taught, trained and told you could use. That, that is an invitation, a license to go beyond that, especially when you're also putting on them tremendous pressure to produce intelligence."
Capt. Beiring acknowledges that there was some confusion. "Because a lot of people didn't really know, what are their status? Who are these people? Did they sign the Geneva Convention? Who are they and what do we do with them? So there was some confusion," he says.
"Can you tell me whether anyone up the chain of command above you was aware that the prisoners were being shackled with their hands up about shoulder high?" Pelley asked.
"Absolutely," Beiring said.
"Who knew?" Pelley asked.
"Several of my leaders knew because we had them like that, you know, there was probably one or two like that any given day. And we didn't change the procedure if someone came through whether they were a colonel or a general, we left them the same. They seen (sic) what was going on there," Beiring answered.
Pelley asked Brand if other leaders knew what was going on.
Gen. Daniel McNeill, the top officer in Afghanistan, said "we are not chaining people to the ceilings."
Brand disagreed. "Well, he's lying obviously. I mean because we were doing it on a daily basis," he says.
"Gen. Theodore Nicholas, he was the top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said that he did not recall prisoners being shackled with their arms overhead. Is that reasonable?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
"Lt. Col. Ronald Stallings told investigators, quote, 'he had no idea,' end quote, that prisoners were being chained overhead for 24 hours and more. What you seem to be saying is that it was common knowledge," Pelley said.
"Yes," Brand said.
"It wasn't being kept a secret from the chain of command?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
We don't know whether Gen. McNeill toured the prison, Brand doesn't specifically remember him there. But Gen. Nicholas and Lt. Col. Stallings were there. 60 Minutes wanted to speak with all three, but they declined.
There were inspection tours at the prison, run by the Red Cross. But the Red Cross didn't see everything. For example, it didn't see the instructions written on a dry erase board that told the guards how long prisoners were to be chained.
"We didn't want them to know - we didn't think they had an operational reason to know," says Capt. Beiring. "It also had other things on there like if a detainee was fighting or being punished for doing stuff wrong or if he didn't eat his food or he wasn't drinking, but yes, we erased that board so the ICRC we didn't think they had the need to know."
There was a lot the Red Cross didn't know. Medical experts say that Dilawar's injuries were so severe that, if he had lived, both his legs would have required amputation. Even worse, one soldier testified that most of the interrogators thought Dilawar had been arrested only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had come to believe he was just a cab driver.
"And so we killed an innocent man, and that's something else that got me as I went though this, got me very concerned as to not just what we are doing to perhaps al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like terrorists or even insurgents when we come to Iraq, but what were doing to innocents," says Wilkerson.
Wilkerson says the Secretary of State, who devoted much of his life to the Army, was enraged. As the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was breaking, Wilkerson says his boss snapped up the phone and called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"And he essentially said, 'Don, don't you know what you're doing to our credibility around the world don't you know what you're doing to our image?' And for Secretary Powell to raise his voice that way was quite extraordinary. I've only heard him do it maybe five times in 16 years," says Wilkerson.
"What do you mean he raised his voice?" Pelley asked.
"I'm sure Secretary Rumsfeld was probably holding the phone away from his ear," Wilkerson replied.
In August, Willie Brand faced court-martial. Prosecutors said he and other guards had struck the prisoners dozens and dozens of times.
"People watching this interview are thinking, 'Look, this guy came into this facility, he was there five days and he was dead. He died in five days' time,' How did that happen?" Pelley asked.
"I don't really know how that happened," Brand replied.
"You hit him, you hit him numerous times. Did you think it was you?" Pelley asked.
"No," Brand replied.
"The Army would have us believe that you were operating outside the rules," Pelley said.
"This is what we were trained to do, and this is what we did. And not only that I was not the only one, there were many other people hitting them - and this was going on on a daily basis and nothing was said about it," Brand said.
But Capt. Beiring says those were not his orders. He says those knee strikes were to be used only for self-defense.
"You've read the Army investigation, and in it some of the witnesses say one of the soldiers was nicknamed the 'King of Torture' another one had quote the 'Knee of Death.' You were there; were you not seeing this?" Pelley asked Beiring.
"No, I was not," Beiring replied. "Some nicknames, as a commander you are fairly removed from the junior soldiers, so nicknames could have occurred that I did not know about."
"It's not the nicknames, it's how they got the nicknames that matters," Pelley said.
"I can't say for sure, I can only say I never witnessed any of my soldiers do anything that was out of line," Beiring said.
Still, a letter of reprimand has been written that blisters Beiring. It says his "command failures enabled an environment of abuse." But the charges that could have brought court-martial against him were dropped. An investigating officer said that Beiring "may not have done his duty perfectly, but he did it well." Beiring is appealing the reprimand.
Asked if he, in retrospect, has any sympathy for Habibullah and Dilawar, Beiring says, "Sure, I have some sympathy. I wish they were born Americans."
At his court-martial, Willie Brand was convicted of assault and maiming. He faced 16 years. But the jury of soldiers had it both ways. They convicted him and let him go with a reduction in rank, nothing more. So far, 15 soldiers have been charged in the Bagram abuse. The sentences range from letters of reprimand to five months in jail. No one above the rank of captain has been charged.
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, after serving 31 years in the Army, has drawn his own conclusions about how interrogation procedures were changed in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.
How did it go wrong?
"It went wrong because we had a secretary of defense who had never served on the ground a day in his life, who was arrogant and thought that he could release those twin pressures on the backs of his armed forces, the twin pressures being a wink and a nod, you can do a lot of things that you know don't correspond to Geneva, don't correspond to your code of conduct, don't correspond to the Army field manual, and at the same time I want intelligence, I want intelligence, I want it now," says Wilkerson.
While Secretary Rumsfeld never served in combat, he was a Navy aviator and retired from the reserves as a captain. 60 Minutes wanted to talk with Secretary Rumsfeld, but the Pentagon declined our requests. Since the deaths at Bagram, chaining from the ceiling has been banned. The number of prisoners there has increased fivefold, to roughly 500. The prisoners don't get lawyers, and they can't appeal their detentions. But, the military tells 60 Minutes, it reviews each prisoner's file for release at least once a year.
Satan is Resting Easy: The Power of Christ "Propels" Them
By JASON MILLER
Remember, Big Brother is watching, listening and reading. In light of the illegal surveillance they are conducting at the behest of their incompetent, rogue, and murderous Commander-in-Chief, I am dedicating this essay to the NSA.
To George Bush, Dick Cheney, Daniel Pipes, and their soulless war-mongering compadres, I proudly admit that I support the Palestinians (and their democratically elected Hamas leaders) in their struggle against their brutal Israeli oppressors. In fact, consider me a member of the so-called Fifth Column identified by Pipes. I abhor virtually all of the foreign and domestic policies the Machiavellian disciples of Strauss have implemented through wielding their ill-gotten power and influence. However, the United States is as much my country as it is theirs. I fully intend to remain here and work persistently against them by continuing to tenaciously pursue human rights and social justice for humanity, not simply for a select few in the United States and Israel.
Quoting the eloquent and infamous words of the incredibly articulate Mr. Cheney, I say, "Fuck you!" to their malignant cabal. While this nefarious faction and its loyalists may consider me a traitor, I refuse to pledge allegiance to a pack of criminals who have hijacked the government of the people of the United States. If it is treason to dissent against corrupt thieves and murderers who have shredded our sacred Constitution, I stand guilty as charged.
There are lies and there are damned lies…
One of the boldest and most insidious lies propagated by the leadership of the Zionists, the Dominionists, the Religious Right, and by their whores in Washington is that the Middle East is populated primarily by Islamic extremists with an insatiable thirst for the blood of "innocent American Christians" and who are hell bent on eliminating "those poor chronic victims" illegally occupying the land of the Palestinians and committing genocide against them.
Somehow, in a twist of logic only Lewis Carroll could fully comprehend, many people in the United States have been indoctrinated to believe that our nation, which possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the history of mankind, is the only nation to have used those weapons on a massive scale (just ask the Japanese), and bears direct and indirect responsibility for the murder of tens of millions of innocent civilians over the last century, is a benevolent super-power illuminating a beacon of hope for humanity. I readily recognize that other nations and governments have committed their share of atrocities, but I do not see them waving the Red, White and Blue, piously trumpeting platitudes about spreading freedom and democracy, and simultaneously waging pre-emptive strikes against nations which they merely “perceive to be a potential threat”. Holier than thou, dost thou think? The golden chalice of the United States runneth over with putrid sanctimony.
The terror of gazing at one’s own reflection…
For over a year now, I have written numerous essays which have been widely published on the Internet. My primary goal has been to inspire Americans to apply the same humanitarian standards to our nation that we use to stringently and hypocritically measure other nations. I have also attempted to convince more Americans to engage in introspection and self-examination. When I began plumbing those depths about 13 years ago, I did not like what I saw. I have steadily acted to reshape my values, outlook, and decisions to align with ideals such as human rights, social justice, peace, equality, thrift, dignity, honesty, respect, and responsibility. While I have not achieved the high moral plain of a Gandhi by any means, I have become more a part of the solution than the problem.
Based on the hateful, denigrating, and sometimes threatening emails I receive from about a third of the readers responding to my essays, I conclude that my message threatens the sense of security many Americans derive from supporting the status quo. I have also determined that I am swimming upstream against an addictive torrent of vitriolic propaganda spewed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Jonah Goldberg, and a host of others. Sorry to disappoint those of you who have told me to leave the country, kill myself, or renounce being a “traitor and a "self-hating American" (yes, they often parrot the rhetoric of the likes of Daniel Pipes), but I have no intention of moving, killing myself, or abandoning my deeply rooted antipathy for the enemies of humanity (and the Earth) who have stolen the United States from We the People.
Jesus as a commodity… and a weapon
One of the American elite’s (amongst whom I include their complicit disseminators of propaganda in the mainstream media) most repulsive means of grabbing and maintaining power has been its shameless use of spiritual manipulation, a heinous form of psychological abuse. Preying on fear, insecurity, and ignorance, they have perverted true Christianity to the extent that a third of those voting for George Bush, a man as morally repugnant as Dorian Gray, were a part of the radical Religious Right.
With the help of mendacious, avaricious, and highly sophisticated hucksters like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Ted Haggard, the American plutocracy has packaged and commercialized spirituality like an Extra Value Meal at McDonald’s. You want fast food salvation done the American way? Look for the Golden Crosses, zip into the drive-through, drop some donation money, and accept Christ as your savior! Forget spiritual pain or sacrifice. Jesus died to grant you a path to easy street. So be on your merry way with your Big Mac of two all beef patties and guaranteed eternity in heaven. Chase it down with an enchanting Golgotha collector’s cup filled with smug certainty that you are now morally superior to the rest of humanity. Savor a side of Schadenfreude fries delightfully spiced with visions of the abject torment the “heathens” will face when Jesus the Avenger returns to Earth to smite the sinners.
Acknowledging that not all those comprising the Religious Right are created equal, and that there is a great deal of diversity amongst their beliefs and practices, there is enough commonality to conclude that the malefactors at the helm of the US have leveraged the hateful, narrow-minded beliefs of enough of these fanatics to garner sufficient support to commit egregious acts of torture, passive mass murder (New Orleans ring a bell?), massive slaughter under the guise of military intervention, and theft of public funds.
Men like Dobson shepherd their flocks to vote for bellicose champions of the wealthy because these “moral stalwarts” have pledged their undying support to a "culture of life". Despite their "devotion" to making abortion illegal, ending the use of human embryos (even those which would otherwise be discarded) for stem cell research, and denying equal rights to 5-10% of our population (gays and lesbians), the power brokers have perpetually been incapable of making good on their promises. While championing these “family values”, they have mesmerized their Religious Right followers into supporting the false dichotomy of Christianity vs. Islam, an imperialistic and murderous agenda in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, and domestic policies which significantly erode the economic well-being of their radical Christian base (and the rest of us amongst the working class). Thomas Frank explored this mind-blowing phenomenon in great detail in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas.
Realize that I am not disparaging the Christian religion in general. Personally, I am a spiritual person with a belief in a Higher Power, but I am not Christian. However, I recognize that there are many rational, compassionate, and decent human beings who practice Christianity. If one reads many of my essays, one will discover that I often find myself defending Islam and its followers in my writing. I do this because they have been the victims of Western imperialism for years. I make no claim that either the Muslims or Christians are better. I am simply deeply concerned about the Western genocide and acts of imperialism committed against Islamic peoples since oil became a valued commodity. In spite of the despicable misdeeds committed in our names, we wonder why so many in the Middle East harbor such hostility against the United States and its residents. We act befuddled, violated, and validated in our belief that we are morally superior when obscenely oppressed and exploited people resort to “terrorism” in a desperate attempt to defend themselves from the mightiest military and economy in the history of the world.
I abhor the violence committed by both sides, but we are not the “good guys”. The prevaricators leading our nation and writing our history have portrayed Americans as wearing the white hats for far too long. Transgressions and atrocities have been committed by many nations and people throughout history, including the United States and its leaders. Consider the most recent example in Iraq. Our occupying force has killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. This is state terrorism at its worst and it needs to end. With our resources, the United States could become a humanitarian force. Sadly, the Neocons have chosen guns over butter (using our tax dollars and a mountain of borrowed money) to a shameless degree, enraging many of us who still have a social conscience.
Do as we say, not as we do….
Just as some Islamic fundamentalists wield religion as a weapon, the morally bankrupt aristocracy of the United States utilizes religion as a tool of war. Employing the power of spiritual manipulation to muster the support of their minions of extremist Christians, the authors of the Project for the New American Century mobilized enough popular support to invade a nation which had not harmed the United States, to eradicate the poor in New Orleans through passive mass murder and a Diaspora, to sell our children's future by committing to $8 trillion worth of debt to power their war machine, to cut taxes on the rich, and to increase war spending while cutting spending on programs which benefit humanity.
I hate to burst the bubble of those still deluded enough to accept the false premise (advanced by the Bush Regime) that we are a Christian nation embroiled in a modern day crusade against the followers of an Islamic religion which teaches them to hate democracy and brutally violate human rights. Here is a dose of reality. Over the last century, this "good Christian nation" and our friends in Israel have slaughtered, murdered, and tortured millions of Islamic people, both directly and indirectly (through proxy dictators). In contrast, Islamic murders of Americans, Christians and Jews are a relative drop in the bucket. Rather than "spreading freedom and democracy", Bush has the United States spreading imperialism, torture, and murder of innocent civilians. Saddam Hussein’s removal from power was a mere sideshow. If the United States was so concerned with its moral obligation to remove a ruthless dictator from power, there were many others they could have targeted. It was oil, power, and increased security for our terrorist proxy occupying Palestine that motivated the United States to invade Iraq.
Speaking of concern for human rights and humanitarian intervention, when is the United States going to stop funding Israel and launch an invasion against them to stop the Palestinian genocide? When groups like Hamas have the audacity to resist oppression and murder, Americans and Israelis label them as "terrorists". Now that Hamas is the democratically elected ruling party of the PA, the United States has elected to cut its aid to the Palestinians, a people who are already wallowing in the misery of Israeli-inflicted poverty and racial extermination. (As a side note, the Israelis are able to inflict genocide on the Palestinians because of the obscene amounts of financial and military aid they receive from the United States). To add insult to injury, Israel has determined that they can once again disregard international law by withholding the Palestinian tax revenues they collect (the Palestinians’ chief source of income). As is typical, the United States and its proxy are free to violate treaties, international laws, UN mandates, and humanitarian standards with impunity while applying the same laws to the rest of the world to the nth degree.
How about calling us a pluralistic nation with freedom of religion?
The notion that the United States is a Christian nation is false on numerous levels. Certainly we are heavily influenced Christianity, but to say we are a Christian nation flies in the face of the raison de’ etre of America.
Consider the following:
1. According to the 1990 US Census, 91.6% of Americans were Christians. By 2000, the percentage had decreased to 85%. We 42 million “heathens” represent a pretty significant portion of the population.
2. Many of the Western Europeans who settled the original thirteen colonies fled their nations of origin to evade religious persecution and state-imposed religions.
3. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two of our most prominent Founding Fathers, were Deists. Washington and Jefferson were not particularly religious but tended more toward Deism than Christianity.
4. Thomas Paine, whose writings were a powerful catalyst for the American Revolution, vehemently attacked Christianity in one of his polemical works and refused to embrace Christianity, even on his death-bed.
5. God is not mentioned in our Constitution. The Declaration of Independence simply mentions "Nature's God" and a "Creator", neither of which specifically imply a Christian god.
6. Per the Treaty of Tripoli, endorsed by President John Adams and ratified unanimously by the US Senate in 1797: "As the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion..."
7. If Christians lay claim to the United States as their nation, that means they bear the sole responsibility for the evils of slavery, the virtual annihilation of the Native Americans, and the many acts of state terror perpetrated by the US military and CIA over the years.
8. In 1864, the equivalent of today's Religious Right cowed Congress into passing legislation mandating that the US begin stamping "In God We Trust" on several of our coins. Besides caving to the powerful influence of Christian fundamentalists, our federal government also recognized the psychological boost the power of Christian symbolism would give them after the blow to their authority rendered by the Civil War.
9. McCarthy-inspired anti-Communist hysteria motivated Eisenhower to sign Public Law 140 in 1956. Going forward, all US coins and paper money bore the propagandistic slogan "In God We Trust" to reassure Americans that we were better than the godless Communists. The same year, the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. It took 180 years for this Christian nation to fully embrace its identity. Or perhaps it simply took our plutocratic rulers that long to recognize the power of spiritual coercion….
As an aside, the original motto on the United States was E Pluribus Unum (Latin for “Out of many, one”), which obviously encourages more unity and cohesion than an exclusionary national motto dedicated to a god worshipped by one segment of the population.
Sleeping like babies….
Aside from the power of radical Christianity to subjugate the masses, this disturbing perversion of healthy spirituality does come with an added “benefit”. It enables its devotees to support politicians who rob from the poor to give to the rich, who wage murderous and imperialist wars to enrich the military industrial complex, and who allow their corporate collaborators to blatantly abuse employees, consumers, and the environment. Thanks to the salve provided to their consciences by "knowing" they live in a Christian, morally superior nation (not to mention the security provided by their "guaranteed blissful after-life"), the mélange of groups and people comprising the extreme Religious Right can swear their allegiance to a group of monstrous human beings without feeling a twinge of guilt.
As many of my antagonists have pointed out, I am not without limitations (and I do not claim to be). Remaining in the United States to wage a non-violent struggle for human rights and social justice virtually assures that I will be a party to enabling the US war machine and corporatocracy in some way. Besides the fact that I pay federal taxes (fairly unavoidable for a working class family person), buy some products from grossly corrupt corporations (albeit as few as possible), and have my share of personal spiritual struggles, my other glaring sin is the hostility I harbor toward the enemies of humanity sitting atop the throne of power in our nation. However, even Jesus himself directed outrage at the money-changers and legalistic religious leaders of his day. If someone of his moral capacity directed anger at the corrupt establishment, who am I to presume I could overcome my rancor against the malevolent forces comprising the United States ruling elite? If their numerous crimes against humanity were not fanning the flames of my anger, I would no longer be breathing. My challenges are to prevent my ire from evolving into festering hatred or desire for revenge and to strive to maintain constructive anger (which motivates me to seek justice and positive change). That is a challenge to which I can rise, despite my human short-comings.
Please excuse my use of profanity above, but it felt so good to echo Cheney's choice sentiments back to him and his unwholesome cohorts. Meanwhile, send Satan a postcard on his vacation. Our imperialistic rulers do not need him to perpetrate their acts of profound moral depravity. They glide on the momentum generated by fanatical followers who believe they have the market cornered on morality and that Jesus will soon return to Earth as the ultimate WMD.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, doing research, or writing, he works as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/ .
Remember, Big Brother is watching, listening and reading. In light of the illegal surveillance they are conducting at the behest of their incompetent, rogue, and murderous Commander-in-Chief, I am dedicating this essay to the NSA.
To George Bush, Dick Cheney, Daniel Pipes, and their soulless war-mongering compadres, I proudly admit that I support the Palestinians (and their democratically elected Hamas leaders) in their struggle against their brutal Israeli oppressors. In fact, consider me a member of the so-called Fifth Column identified by Pipes. I abhor virtually all of the foreign and domestic policies the Machiavellian disciples of Strauss have implemented through wielding their ill-gotten power and influence. However, the United States is as much my country as it is theirs. I fully intend to remain here and work persistently against them by continuing to tenaciously pursue human rights and social justice for humanity, not simply for a select few in the United States and Israel.
Quoting the eloquent and infamous words of the incredibly articulate Mr. Cheney, I say, "Fuck you!" to their malignant cabal. While this nefarious faction and its loyalists may consider me a traitor, I refuse to pledge allegiance to a pack of criminals who have hijacked the government of the people of the United States. If it is treason to dissent against corrupt thieves and murderers who have shredded our sacred Constitution, I stand guilty as charged.
There are lies and there are damned lies…
One of the boldest and most insidious lies propagated by the leadership of the Zionists, the Dominionists, the Religious Right, and by their whores in Washington is that the Middle East is populated primarily by Islamic extremists with an insatiable thirst for the blood of "innocent American Christians" and who are hell bent on eliminating "those poor chronic victims" illegally occupying the land of the Palestinians and committing genocide against them.
Somehow, in a twist of logic only Lewis Carroll could fully comprehend, many people in the United States have been indoctrinated to believe that our nation, which possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the history of mankind, is the only nation to have used those weapons on a massive scale (just ask the Japanese), and bears direct and indirect responsibility for the murder of tens of millions of innocent civilians over the last century, is a benevolent super-power illuminating a beacon of hope for humanity. I readily recognize that other nations and governments have committed their share of atrocities, but I do not see them waving the Red, White and Blue, piously trumpeting platitudes about spreading freedom and democracy, and simultaneously waging pre-emptive strikes against nations which they merely “perceive to be a potential threat”. Holier than thou, dost thou think? The golden chalice of the United States runneth over with putrid sanctimony.
The terror of gazing at one’s own reflection…
For over a year now, I have written numerous essays which have been widely published on the Internet. My primary goal has been to inspire Americans to apply the same humanitarian standards to our nation that we use to stringently and hypocritically measure other nations. I have also attempted to convince more Americans to engage in introspection and self-examination. When I began plumbing those depths about 13 years ago, I did not like what I saw. I have steadily acted to reshape my values, outlook, and decisions to align with ideals such as human rights, social justice, peace, equality, thrift, dignity, honesty, respect, and responsibility. While I have not achieved the high moral plain of a Gandhi by any means, I have become more a part of the solution than the problem.
Based on the hateful, denigrating, and sometimes threatening emails I receive from about a third of the readers responding to my essays, I conclude that my message threatens the sense of security many Americans derive from supporting the status quo. I have also determined that I am swimming upstream against an addictive torrent of vitriolic propaganda spewed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Jonah Goldberg, and a host of others. Sorry to disappoint those of you who have told me to leave the country, kill myself, or renounce being a “traitor and a "self-hating American" (yes, they often parrot the rhetoric of the likes of Daniel Pipes), but I have no intention of moving, killing myself, or abandoning my deeply rooted antipathy for the enemies of humanity (and the Earth) who have stolen the United States from We the People.
Jesus as a commodity… and a weapon
One of the American elite’s (amongst whom I include their complicit disseminators of propaganda in the mainstream media) most repulsive means of grabbing and maintaining power has been its shameless use of spiritual manipulation, a heinous form of psychological abuse. Preying on fear, insecurity, and ignorance, they have perverted true Christianity to the extent that a third of those voting for George Bush, a man as morally repugnant as Dorian Gray, were a part of the radical Religious Right.
With the help of mendacious, avaricious, and highly sophisticated hucksters like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Ted Haggard, the American plutocracy has packaged and commercialized spirituality like an Extra Value Meal at McDonald’s. You want fast food salvation done the American way? Look for the Golden Crosses, zip into the drive-through, drop some donation money, and accept Christ as your savior! Forget spiritual pain or sacrifice. Jesus died to grant you a path to easy street. So be on your merry way with your Big Mac of two all beef patties and guaranteed eternity in heaven. Chase it down with an enchanting Golgotha collector’s cup filled with smug certainty that you are now morally superior to the rest of humanity. Savor a side of Schadenfreude fries delightfully spiced with visions of the abject torment the “heathens” will face when Jesus the Avenger returns to Earth to smite the sinners.
Acknowledging that not all those comprising the Religious Right are created equal, and that there is a great deal of diversity amongst their beliefs and practices, there is enough commonality to conclude that the malefactors at the helm of the US have leveraged the hateful, narrow-minded beliefs of enough of these fanatics to garner sufficient support to commit egregious acts of torture, passive mass murder (New Orleans ring a bell?), massive slaughter under the guise of military intervention, and theft of public funds.
Men like Dobson shepherd their flocks to vote for bellicose champions of the wealthy because these “moral stalwarts” have pledged their undying support to a "culture of life". Despite their "devotion" to making abortion illegal, ending the use of human embryos (even those which would otherwise be discarded) for stem cell research, and denying equal rights to 5-10% of our population (gays and lesbians), the power brokers have perpetually been incapable of making good on their promises. While championing these “family values”, they have mesmerized their Religious Right followers into supporting the false dichotomy of Christianity vs. Islam, an imperialistic and murderous agenda in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, and domestic policies which significantly erode the economic well-being of their radical Christian base (and the rest of us amongst the working class). Thomas Frank explored this mind-blowing phenomenon in great detail in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas.
Realize that I am not disparaging the Christian religion in general. Personally, I am a spiritual person with a belief in a Higher Power, but I am not Christian. However, I recognize that there are many rational, compassionate, and decent human beings who practice Christianity. If one reads many of my essays, one will discover that I often find myself defending Islam and its followers in my writing. I do this because they have been the victims of Western imperialism for years. I make no claim that either the Muslims or Christians are better. I am simply deeply concerned about the Western genocide and acts of imperialism committed against Islamic peoples since oil became a valued commodity. In spite of the despicable misdeeds committed in our names, we wonder why so many in the Middle East harbor such hostility against the United States and its residents. We act befuddled, violated, and validated in our belief that we are morally superior when obscenely oppressed and exploited people resort to “terrorism” in a desperate attempt to defend themselves from the mightiest military and economy in the history of the world.
I abhor the violence committed by both sides, but we are not the “good guys”. The prevaricators leading our nation and writing our history have portrayed Americans as wearing the white hats for far too long. Transgressions and atrocities have been committed by many nations and people throughout history, including the United States and its leaders. Consider the most recent example in Iraq. Our occupying force has killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. This is state terrorism at its worst and it needs to end. With our resources, the United States could become a humanitarian force. Sadly, the Neocons have chosen guns over butter (using our tax dollars and a mountain of borrowed money) to a shameless degree, enraging many of us who still have a social conscience.
Do as we say, not as we do….
Just as some Islamic fundamentalists wield religion as a weapon, the morally bankrupt aristocracy of the United States utilizes religion as a tool of war. Employing the power of spiritual manipulation to muster the support of their minions of extremist Christians, the authors of the Project for the New American Century mobilized enough popular support to invade a nation which had not harmed the United States, to eradicate the poor in New Orleans through passive mass murder and a Diaspora, to sell our children's future by committing to $8 trillion worth of debt to power their war machine, to cut taxes on the rich, and to increase war spending while cutting spending on programs which benefit humanity.
I hate to burst the bubble of those still deluded enough to accept the false premise (advanced by the Bush Regime) that we are a Christian nation embroiled in a modern day crusade against the followers of an Islamic religion which teaches them to hate democracy and brutally violate human rights. Here is a dose of reality. Over the last century, this "good Christian nation" and our friends in Israel have slaughtered, murdered, and tortured millions of Islamic people, both directly and indirectly (through proxy dictators). In contrast, Islamic murders of Americans, Christians and Jews are a relative drop in the bucket. Rather than "spreading freedom and democracy", Bush has the United States spreading imperialism, torture, and murder of innocent civilians. Saddam Hussein’s removal from power was a mere sideshow. If the United States was so concerned with its moral obligation to remove a ruthless dictator from power, there were many others they could have targeted. It was oil, power, and increased security for our terrorist proxy occupying Palestine that motivated the United States to invade Iraq.
Speaking of concern for human rights and humanitarian intervention, when is the United States going to stop funding Israel and launch an invasion against them to stop the Palestinian genocide? When groups like Hamas have the audacity to resist oppression and murder, Americans and Israelis label them as "terrorists". Now that Hamas is the democratically elected ruling party of the PA, the United States has elected to cut its aid to the Palestinians, a people who are already wallowing in the misery of Israeli-inflicted poverty and racial extermination. (As a side note, the Israelis are able to inflict genocide on the Palestinians because of the obscene amounts of financial and military aid they receive from the United States). To add insult to injury, Israel has determined that they can once again disregard international law by withholding the Palestinian tax revenues they collect (the Palestinians’ chief source of income). As is typical, the United States and its proxy are free to violate treaties, international laws, UN mandates, and humanitarian standards with impunity while applying the same laws to the rest of the world to the nth degree.
How about calling us a pluralistic nation with freedom of religion?
The notion that the United States is a Christian nation is false on numerous levels. Certainly we are heavily influenced Christianity, but to say we are a Christian nation flies in the face of the raison de’ etre of America.
Consider the following:
1. According to the 1990 US Census, 91.6% of Americans were Christians. By 2000, the percentage had decreased to 85%. We 42 million “heathens” represent a pretty significant portion of the population.
2. Many of the Western Europeans who settled the original thirteen colonies fled their nations of origin to evade religious persecution and state-imposed religions.
3. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two of our most prominent Founding Fathers, were Deists. Washington and Jefferson were not particularly religious but tended more toward Deism than Christianity.
4. Thomas Paine, whose writings were a powerful catalyst for the American Revolution, vehemently attacked Christianity in one of his polemical works and refused to embrace Christianity, even on his death-bed.
5. God is not mentioned in our Constitution. The Declaration of Independence simply mentions "Nature's God" and a "Creator", neither of which specifically imply a Christian god.
6. Per the Treaty of Tripoli, endorsed by President John Adams and ratified unanimously by the US Senate in 1797: "As the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion..."
7. If Christians lay claim to the United States as their nation, that means they bear the sole responsibility for the evils of slavery, the virtual annihilation of the Native Americans, and the many acts of state terror perpetrated by the US military and CIA over the years.
8. In 1864, the equivalent of today's Religious Right cowed Congress into passing legislation mandating that the US begin stamping "In God We Trust" on several of our coins. Besides caving to the powerful influence of Christian fundamentalists, our federal government also recognized the psychological boost the power of Christian symbolism would give them after the blow to their authority rendered by the Civil War.
9. McCarthy-inspired anti-Communist hysteria motivated Eisenhower to sign Public Law 140 in 1956. Going forward, all US coins and paper money bore the propagandistic slogan "In God We Trust" to reassure Americans that we were better than the godless Communists. The same year, the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. It took 180 years for this Christian nation to fully embrace its identity. Or perhaps it simply took our plutocratic rulers that long to recognize the power of spiritual coercion….
As an aside, the original motto on the United States was E Pluribus Unum (Latin for “Out of many, one”), which obviously encourages more unity and cohesion than an exclusionary national motto dedicated to a god worshipped by one segment of the population.
Sleeping like babies….
Aside from the power of radical Christianity to subjugate the masses, this disturbing perversion of healthy spirituality does come with an added “benefit”. It enables its devotees to support politicians who rob from the poor to give to the rich, who wage murderous and imperialist wars to enrich the military industrial complex, and who allow their corporate collaborators to blatantly abuse employees, consumers, and the environment. Thanks to the salve provided to their consciences by "knowing" they live in a Christian, morally superior nation (not to mention the security provided by their "guaranteed blissful after-life"), the mélange of groups and people comprising the extreme Religious Right can swear their allegiance to a group of monstrous human beings without feeling a twinge of guilt.
As many of my antagonists have pointed out, I am not without limitations (and I do not claim to be). Remaining in the United States to wage a non-violent struggle for human rights and social justice virtually assures that I will be a party to enabling the US war machine and corporatocracy in some way. Besides the fact that I pay federal taxes (fairly unavoidable for a working class family person), buy some products from grossly corrupt corporations (albeit as few as possible), and have my share of personal spiritual struggles, my other glaring sin is the hostility I harbor toward the enemies of humanity sitting atop the throne of power in our nation. However, even Jesus himself directed outrage at the money-changers and legalistic religious leaders of his day. If someone of his moral capacity directed anger at the corrupt establishment, who am I to presume I could overcome my rancor against the malevolent forces comprising the United States ruling elite? If their numerous crimes against humanity were not fanning the flames of my anger, I would no longer be breathing. My challenges are to prevent my ire from evolving into festering hatred or desire for revenge and to strive to maintain constructive anger (which motivates me to seek justice and positive change). That is a challenge to which I can rise, despite my human short-comings.
Please excuse my use of profanity above, but it felt so good to echo Cheney's choice sentiments back to him and his unwholesome cohorts. Meanwhile, send Satan a postcard on his vacation. Our imperialistic rulers do not need him to perpetrate their acts of profound moral depravity. They glide on the momentum generated by fanatical followers who believe they have the market cornered on morality and that Jesus will soon return to Earth as the ultimate WMD.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, doing research, or writing, he works as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/ .
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