Almost nobody in America ever heard of Rosa Brooks except her enemies. She was very big news for Republicans (and only Republicans) when our brand-new President Barack Obama hired her for a job that ceased to exist when she resigned as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy last week, and doesn’t that title make you dizzy!
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy! Appointed by the Drone-King Obama, Commander in Chief of an evil little prison on Guantanamo Bay and an unknown number of similar operations all over the world, like our “Detention Facility” in Parwan Province, which Rosa Brooks visited in January 2011 along with Marine Col. William Lietzau, who is currently Chief Warden of the Global War on Terror, and into whose office Rosa Brooks’ portfolio as defender of the rule of law has been unceremoniously dumped.
So now Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy Lietzau also oversees the Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy for the Department of Defense, and what could be more legal and humane than the indefinite detention of an always indefinite number of Muslim gentlemen who have never been and will never be charged with any crime?
This odious transformation transpired in almost total silence and indifference, even inside the Beltway, but only two years ago Fox News was screaming!
RADICALS RUN WILD!
RADICAL LEFTIST ROSA BROOKS NOW OPERATING INSIDE THE PENTAGON!
Bring back Joe McCarthy from the dead! Only HUAC can save us now!
But just how far far left is the “radical leftist” Rosa Brooks? Here’s a sample:
Before 9/11 “al-Qaida was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. Today, thanks to U.S. policies, Al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001. Our ham-handed detention and interrogation tactics and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq have alienated vast swathes of the Islamic world, fueling extremism and anti-Americanism.”
So it’s easy to see why Rosa Brooks makes right-wing chicken-hawks like Bill O’Reilly see red, and if her dead-on analysis of the War on Terror wasn’t already bad enough, she even fights back!
When researchers at Indiana University calculated that O’Reilly indulges in “8.88 name-calling incidents per minute” every minute he’s on the air, Dr. Brooks celebrated this “achievement” in the L.A. Times.
Well, color me crazy, but I think we need to give the guy a little credit here. Do you think it’s easy to engage in name-calling every 6.8 seconds? To match O’Reilly’s performance, I would have to insult people 35.52 times in the course of this column. That’s a pace I just can’t hope to maintain, unless I cheat.
So hats off to Bill O’Reilly, that shameless, deceitful, irresponsible, propagandizing right-wing bully!
And my hat’s off to former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Rosa Brooks, that brilliant, funny, dedicated advocate and activist for human dignity and the rule of law.