Monday, May 17, 2004
Noteworthy Day in Massachusetts: Gay and lesbian Couples Flock to City Halls
On the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education ruling, “all deliberate speed” has been abandoned.
Against a backdrop of whoops and cheers and a party that spilled onto the streets, gay and lesbian couples here began filling out applications for marriage licenses at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, when Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow them to marry. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/national/17GAYS.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: Accepting the Reality The head of the Governing Council is killed by a bomb, Condi says the abuse issue hasn’t undermined our moral authority, and the Red Cross freshly cites violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Democracy, or Theocracy?
The United States signaled its readiness to put up with an Islamic theocracy in future sovereign Iraq, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying the US administration "will have to accept" any government created as a result of free and fair elections there.
The remark, made in an interview with NBC television, marked a policy reversal for the administration of President George W. Bush, which up to now had vowed to fight tooth and nail any attempt by Iraqi Shiite leaders to follow in the footsteps of their brethren in Iran. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/85209/1/.html
Abuse: Seymour Hersh (cont.)
Newest article from Hersh in the New Yorker. He continues to look at accountability.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror…
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
Not Just Seymour Hersh: Newsweek weighs in (John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff):
"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/
The Pentagon said that Hersh’s account was “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture”, but didn’t actually deny the truthfulness of the article. http://www.dod.mil/releases/2004/nr20040515-0793.html
Business Week (Bruce Nussbaum) sounds off:
"The fiercest anti-American backlash in history may well be under way. The policy of unilateral preemption and its inept execution has, in the end, made the U.S. less secure." http://businessweek.feedroom.com/iframeset.jsp?ord=807048
Vanderbilt’s Senior Class Day speaker, Condi:
Condi plays the race card. Not everyone liked it.
Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that terrorists today are driven by the same hatred that inspired Klansmen to bomb a church in 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala.
Some Vanderbilt students and faculty had signed a petition to protest Rice's selection for an award. The petition said the award amounted to a university endorsement of Rice's role in the war in Iraq and described her as a "person who repeatedly misrepresented the truth to tragic effect."
Constance Gee, a professor and wife of Chancellor Gordon Gee, was among 200 people who signed the petition against Rice receiving the Chancellor's Medal.
Before Rice's speech, about 40 protesters gathered in the drizzle, some holding signs such as "Vandy Does Not Support Liars." http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20040513/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/condoleezza_rice_vanderbilt_1&printer=1 doing
William Pfaff: The International Herald Tribune writer is consistently on the mark.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration displayed hostility toward international law and treaty obligations that it considered as limits on U.S. national sovereignty or as obstacles to American national interest.
In the Afghanistan war it summarily shipped prisoners outside of the country, notably to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without serious examination of their cases, and in disregard of Geneva norms concerning prisoners taken in war.
While the administration's disregard for international, military and constitutional law was widely acknowledged at the time, there was little protest in the American press, and no effective challenge from Democratic Party leaders. There is a bipartisan responsibility for what has happened.
Some Afghan and other "war against terror" prisoners were transferred to third countries. Reporters were informed - with a smile and a wink - that this was because they could be tortured there. Again there was negligible reaction in U.S. press and political circles.
In Afghanistan, and subsequently in Iraq, an obvious reason for the involvement of civilian "contract employees" in intelligence and interrogations has been that they are not subject to military discipline, and responsibility for them and what they do can be "plausibly denied" by U.S. officials.
All this is consistent with an attitude toward violence characteristic of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who have for years insisted that history is made through violence, and that in the national cause a governing elite has the right to mislead the public in order to achieve goals that the leaders alone are in a position to understand. http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=519400&owner=(TMSI)&date=20040513144504 .
Michael Moore’s Movie Debuts
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, Fehrenheit 9/11, which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/movies/17MOOR.html?adxnnl=1&8hpib=&adxnnlx=1084794959-mfiJ/PHHo4ad2dHbYUUWrg&pagewanted=print&position=
-R
On the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education ruling, “all deliberate speed” has been abandoned.
Against a backdrop of whoops and cheers and a party that spilled onto the streets, gay and lesbian couples here began filling out applications for marriage licenses at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, when Massachusetts became the first state in the country to allow them to marry. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/national/17GAYS.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: Accepting the Reality The head of the Governing Council is killed by a bomb, Condi says the abuse issue hasn’t undermined our moral authority, and the Red Cross freshly cites violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Democracy, or Theocracy?
The United States signaled its readiness to put up with an Islamic theocracy in future sovereign Iraq, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying the US administration "will have to accept" any government created as a result of free and fair elections there.
The remark, made in an interview with NBC television, marked a policy reversal for the administration of President George W. Bush, which up to now had vowed to fight tooth and nail any attempt by Iraqi Shiite leaders to follow in the footsteps of their brethren in Iran. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/85209/1/.html
Abuse: Seymour Hersh (cont.)
Newest article from Hersh in the New Yorker. He continues to look at accountability.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror…
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
Not Just Seymour Hersh: Newsweek weighs in (John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff):
"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/
The Pentagon said that Hersh’s account was “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture”, but didn’t actually deny the truthfulness of the article. http://www.dod.mil/releases/2004/nr20040515-0793.html
Business Week (Bruce Nussbaum) sounds off:
"The fiercest anti-American backlash in history may well be under way. The policy of unilateral preemption and its inept execution has, in the end, made the U.S. less secure." http://businessweek.feedroom.com/iframeset.jsp?ord=807048
Vanderbilt’s Senior Class Day speaker, Condi:
Condi plays the race card. Not everyone liked it.
Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that terrorists today are driven by the same hatred that inspired Klansmen to bomb a church in 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala.
Some Vanderbilt students and faculty had signed a petition to protest Rice's selection for an award. The petition said the award amounted to a university endorsement of Rice's role in the war in Iraq and described her as a "person who repeatedly misrepresented the truth to tragic effect."
Constance Gee, a professor and wife of Chancellor Gordon Gee, was among 200 people who signed the petition against Rice receiving the Chancellor's Medal.
Before Rice's speech, about 40 protesters gathered in the drizzle, some holding signs such as "Vandy Does Not Support Liars." http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20040513/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/condoleezza_rice_vanderbilt_1&printer=1 doing
William Pfaff: The International Herald Tribune writer is consistently on the mark.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration displayed hostility toward international law and treaty obligations that it considered as limits on U.S. national sovereignty or as obstacles to American national interest.
In the Afghanistan war it summarily shipped prisoners outside of the country, notably to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without serious examination of their cases, and in disregard of Geneva norms concerning prisoners taken in war.
While the administration's disregard for international, military and constitutional law was widely acknowledged at the time, there was little protest in the American press, and no effective challenge from Democratic Party leaders. There is a bipartisan responsibility for what has happened.
Some Afghan and other "war against terror" prisoners were transferred to third countries. Reporters were informed - with a smile and a wink - that this was because they could be tortured there. Again there was negligible reaction in U.S. press and political circles.
In Afghanistan, and subsequently in Iraq, an obvious reason for the involvement of civilian "contract employees" in intelligence and interrogations has been that they are not subject to military discipline, and responsibility for them and what they do can be "plausibly denied" by U.S. officials.
All this is consistent with an attitude toward violence characteristic of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who have for years insisted that history is made through violence, and that in the national cause a governing elite has the right to mislead the public in order to achieve goals that the leaders alone are in a position to understand. http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=519400&owner=(TMSI)&date=20040513144504 .
Michael Moore’s Movie Debuts
The Michael Moore documentary the Walt Disney Company deemed too partisan to distribute offers few new revelations about the connections between President Bush and prominent Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden.
But this film, Fehrenheit 9/11, which is scheduled to make its debut today at the Cannes International Film Festival, contains stark images of civilian casualties and disillusioned soldiers from the Iraq war zone that have rarely, if ever, been shown on American television. And the muckracking craft evident in this nearly two-hour attack on President Bush's tenure in the White House is likely to have a galvanizing effect among both conservatives and liberals should the film be widely distributed this summer. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/movies/17MOOR.html?adxnnl=1&8hpib=&adxnnlx=1084794959-mfiJ/PHHo4ad2dHbYUUWrg&pagewanted=print&position=
-R
