October 2007 archive

The Frost family v. BushCo:  a modern day David and Goliath story????

This is a story of a Republican movement totally detached from even trying to deceive us anymore. They are hateful.

I suggest reading the Baltimore Sun story first, and then read Kos’s great compilation of reactions.

[http://www.baltimore…]

[http://www.dailykos….]

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started.

1. The following from Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, is offered without comment:

   House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in a determinedly good mood when she sat down to lunch with reporters yesterday. She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs.

   But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic “base” over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

   “Look,” she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

   Unsmilingly, she continued: “If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.”

   Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn’t done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California’s 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething.

   “We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their “passion,” Pelosi called it “a waste of time” for them to target Democrats. “They are advocates,” she said. “We are leaders.”

2. If I were president decider, this is not the kind of headline I’d want to see in the Los Angeles Times — ‘Bush urges ‘no’ vote on Armenian genocide bill‘ or in The New York Times — ‘Bush Argues Against Armenian Genocide Measure‘. But then after invading countries, sanctioning and using torture, and systematically eroding away your own citizens’ civil liberties, then I suppose you might get a bit squeemish about the House passing a resolution recognizing, in yet another non-binding resolution, genocide.

   From George W. Bush’s statement today:

   On another issue before Congress, I urge members to oppose the Armenian genocide resolution now being considered by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.

   So, Mr. Bush. What is the “right response”? According to the Washington Post story on Bush’s remarks, “Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists… to defeat the initiative.” Bush has offered no alternative to the reslution other than continuing to ignore genocide.

   [EVENING UPDATE] According to Bloomberg, House panel backs Armenian measure over objections. “A congressional panel approved a resolution calling for the U.S. to designate the World War I-era killings of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, amid warnings that the measure would harm relations with Turkey. ¶ The nonbinding resolution, backed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on a 27-21 vote, calls for a reversal in the practice by successive presidential administrations of avoiding referring to the deaths as genocide in an annual April message commemorating the event. More than half of the House’s 435 members have signed on as co-sponsors.”

3. The Guardian reports that Russian president, Vladimir Putin said there is no proof Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons.

   “We do not have data that says Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. We do not have such objective data,” Mr Putin told a news conference in Moscow after talks with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

   “Therefore we proceed from a position that Iran has no such plans, but we share the concern of our partners that all programmes should be as transparent as possible.”

   So, will Putin provide an effective check to President-in-waiting Cheney? Would Russian protection extend over Iran? Welcome to the Neo Cold War. Now with even more insanity!

News item no. 4, ‘Tensions heat up between China and Taiwan’ and today’s “Guns of Greed” is below the fold.

Note: Revisiting a topic originally posted over on The Big Orange. Given our current discussions about extraordinary rendition and torture, it seemed worth dusting off (actually this is a major rewrite) and posting in the new digs.

The seminal piece to date on the origins of extraordinary rendition is this piece over in the New Yorker. It is titled: Outsourcing Torture – The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. (by Jane Mayer).

The main focus of the article is to discuss how egregiously the government of George W. Bush has crossed the line in its decisions to use extraordinary rendition as a tool to fight terrorism.

But my interest in the piece was tweaked by the discussions about the origins of the program. And with a little research, the picture proved not to be pretty.

The New York Times had a front page article on the legal peregrinations of the Bush Administrations as it seeks safe harbor for its ship of torturers. The next day, the scandal spills out into official Washington, and the stubborn evil denizens at 1600 Pennsylvania trot out for a desultory press conference. There’s the snarling, contemptuous Bush, explaining, “This government does not torture people.”

Away, in countless rooms in millions of houses, the populace reads the stories and sighs and does nothing. Politicians screech, and pundits blather, and the war their generation shouldered with both protest and calm continued its carnage. Slowly, the news media formed a tight narrative around the new scandal: Bush’s Justice Department had found a way to legally, and yet secretly (and only in 2007 America can this occur without oxymoron), legitimate forms of torture too bestial to contemplate — beatings, simulated drownings, freezing men half to death… you know, Bush had growled, interrogation techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”

But no one knew, no one could know, that in the bowels of CIA headquarters at Langley, a group of men and women were safeguarding a group of techniques that were already exposed, and already forgotten, that were carefully cozened, that men were trained in, that were meant to outlast the worst New York Times editorial or Congressional investigation. And if they were referred to, if anyone should have to whisper them, they could use the awful acronym that had referenced them for over fifty years now: DDD.

Bush pushes for telecom immunity
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
21 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.

A proposed bill unveiled by Democrats on Tuesday does not include such a provision. Bush, appearing on the South Lawn as that measure was taken up in two House committees, said the measure is unacceptable for that and other reasons.

…

A top Democratic leader opened the door on Tuesday to allowing an immunity provision. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Bush administration must first detail what the companies did. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws.

Bush detailed criteria that the bill must meet before he would sign it, including the immunity provision and the broad requirement that it “ensure that protections intended for the American people are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us.”

You read that right. When. Why am I so certain? I have of course no inside knowledge. None. Yet I’ve been certain that he would get in ever since I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, a year and a half ago. And my certainty has only grown since then. Am I delusional? Hardly. I just use a different primary premise for my opinion. Disclaimer: I am not an American. I can’t vote in your election, though I’ve followed your politics almost obsessively ever since watching the 2000 election debacle live on television (Canadians have a front-row seat when it comes to watching you). No, my friends. The timing of Gore’s entry is not so much to do with Hillary, ballot deadlines or any Hamlet-like hesitations on Gore’s part as it is about a meeting of world leaders on climate in Bali in December and all the meetings that will follow in the coming years and that will ultimately decide the fate of humanity on this planet.

Through October 15, I plan to devote my Pony Party slots to support International Blog Action Day and its focus on our environment. Below the fold is a look at some secret places on this place we call Earth… v.v.v. cool.

I have been trying to stay current with what is going on in Burma.  That isn’t easy, of course, because of the difficulty of getting stories out of the country.  If caught trying to cover what’s going on, journalists can expect the same harsh treatment from the junta as any Burmese citizen.  But still, stories emerge.

One of these stories is posted in ABITSU, All Burma I.T. Students Union.  It is about a 15 year old novice monk who is in hiding from the junta.

By timesofinda.indiatimes.com : YANGON: Just two weeks ago, Yin Phoe Htoo’s life was governed by the austere but peaceful routines of the Yangon monastery where he has spent the past five years as a novice monk.Every morning, the 15-year-old would wake up at 4:00 am, eat breakfast at dawn, and then walk through the community in his saffron robes to accept alms from residents.

But since Myanmar’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests that saw Buddhist monks lead 100,000 people onto the streets, Yin Phoe Htoo now lives in hiding at one of the homes where he used to seek alms of food or small coins.

He has shed his flowing robes for a T-shirt and the traditional lungi that most men in Myanmar wear.

“I want to become a novice again. I feel uncomfortable living with the family here,” he said, giving a false name to protect himself from military reprisal.

For now he has little choice but to hide. At least three monks were killed and hundreds more were beaten or arrested as security forces used baton charges, teargas and live weapons fire to break up the monks’ peaceful protests.

jamesboyce over at Daily Kos has written a diary today with a disturbing story out of Burma, from the Sunday Times Online, entitled “Secret cremations hide Burma killings:”

THE Burmese army has burnt an undetermined number of bodies at a crematorium sealed off by armed guards northeast of Rangoon over the past seven days, ensuring that the exact death toll in the recent pro-democracy protests will never be known.

The secret cremations have been reported by local people who have seen olive green trucks covered with tarpaulins rumbling through the area at night and watched smoke rising continuously from the furnace chimneys.

jamesboyce has also set up a blog entitled burma newsladder, trying to aggregate all stories on what is going on there.

But let’s go back to Yin Phoe Htoo, the 15 year old novice monk.  One person, one story.