Empty & Angry........

February 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MUMBAI, India
I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.
Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:
"Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ...
"[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."
No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

More on the Ports

February 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Osama, Saddam and the Ports
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.
So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.
Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. "Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]," read an aide's handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. "Hard to get a good case," the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.
But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn't.
The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what's the difference?
Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
The administration also tells us not to worry about having Arabs control port operations. "I want those who are questioning it," Mr. Bush said, "to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
He was being evasive, of course. This isn't just a Middle Eastern company; it's a company controlled by the monarchy in Dubai, which is part of the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.
But more to the point, after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs."
Finally, the ports affair plays in a subliminal way into the public's awareness — vague but widespread — that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed deliverer of democracy to the Middle East, and his family have close personal and financial ties to Middle Eastern rulers. Mr. Bush was photographed holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (now King Abdullah), not the emir of Dubai. But an administration that has spent years ridiculing people who try to make such distinctions isn't going to have an easy time explaining the difference.
Mr. Bush shouldn't really be losing his credibility as a terrorism fighter over the ports deal, which, after careful examination (which hasn't happened yet), may turn out to be O.K. Instead, Mr. Bush should have lost his credibility long ago over his diversion of U.S. resources away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda and into an unnecessary war in Iraq, his bungling of that war, and his adoption of a wrongful imprisonment and torture policy that has blackened America's reputation.
But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush's current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions — a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The Psychology of the Ports

According to the AP, Bush didn't know about the port deal till just a few days ago. Apparently the British owned company that has been in charge of many of our major ports, had put the deal together to sell these ports to the United Arab Emirates, and sent them wending through the channels of committees and "oversight" where it was decided that the sale posed no threat to national security. It never occurred to anyone in this deal to run this by the higher-ups because everyone knows that the Bush boys don't want to be bothered with details. They say officially that this is not the kind of thing that the President gets involved with, but come on!...Give me a break! One of the committees that "unanimously" approved the deal even sports Rumsfeld as a member. But, uh-oh, Rummy said that he didn't know anything about this till this past weekend. So then how could they have "unanimously" approved anything? I hear the scratching of thousands of little rat feet in the walls scrambling for position by the lifeboats.

I can now honestly say, once and for all, that I've heard everything! I just don't know what to think about these guys and how they could possibly be in charge of this country. At this point I find it almost kind of fun because its like watching a movie about dysfunctional alcoholics run amuck. I just wish that this was taking place in that fake Eddie Murphy country from whatever movie where he pretends to not be royal, or the half dozen other ones where he finds himself suddenly rich and doesnt know how to act in the upper crusty world. Bush just doesnt know how to act in the regular guy world. I often imagine Bush and his gang running around the oval office and seeing who can grab the big comfortable chair first with a little bit of three stooges antics thrown in and lots of butt slapping and high-fiving.

There is just so far that I can distract myself with the comedy of the situation though before the reality comes crashing back, and the reality of this is pretty disturbing. These guys are running our country, and at this point, even Bush supporters are calling this White House "politically tone deaf." I call them dangerous and I am really, really sick of being lied to.

Bush is slurring his words and reports from surprisingly sound sources such as the National Enquirer have him drinking again. The Secret Service leaked a report today saying that Cheney was "inebriated" when he shot Whit in the face, as is widely known and expected in South Texas hunting parties. With a staff that is afraid to disturb them even for national emergencies, who is babysitting these days? Things seem a little out of control at 1600.

Helen Thomas struggled yesterday, from her back of the White House Briefing Room seat, to clarify the situation with Pig-boy McClellen, and it seems that the best that Helen and the entire White House Press Corps could get out of him was that these companies just manage putting things on ships and taking them off. He would not say for sure if they would do the hiring or if we would have some sort of oversight of who would work on site. The message is that this information is too important to waste time talking about and so you all should run along and let us handle it.

I, like most Americans, was under the impression that the Port Authority ran the ports and that we had border and customs control as part of homeland security. I know that those infrastructures have been neglected, as has everything that's really important, and that only something like 5% of containers coming into the major ports are screened. I guess that they rely on the ports of origin to screen the outgoing cargo, then the Coast Guard when its at sea, and then they spot check it once its here. It seems like we could do a better job in-house, but I have the feeling that if its not the UAE running things, we might get Halliburton or one of it's subsidiaries. As Helen Thomas pointed out to Scotty McClellan, most Americans are not aware that even this British company was involved in this and people are now going to want to know. This throws a whole new spotlight on things.

I suppose it should be said also that its sort of tragic that all of this talk of ports is mainly about what is coming in as opposed to going out. I really dont think that we export all that much anymore. A Google search of "what America exports" came back with "America exports flawed Democracy," and a bunch of stuff about guns. It seems that most of the things that we "make" these days are made off-shore or here by foreign companies.

I don't believe that we should outsource our ports, our borders, our army, nor our healthcare, education, or jobs. It is a really bad trend, and when an administration that is methodically continuing on the Reaganomics path of deregulation and privatization is selling the very ports out from under us....Well, we have to look at the big picture of outsourcing without letting crazy racial accusations and fear of terror scare us into complacency or dependency. We could at least hope that corporations that outsource jobs are charged a special tax, but often the government is tripping over itself to give tax breaks to these companies and so all of this becomes more attractive. I dont understand the trickle down effect if the jobs for the little guy are sent overseas. Maybe we have to get used to a global economy, but where do we draw the line? That may be what Americans are coming up against now. Bush, like a child, has no boundaries and is testing ours. At some point it is up to us to tell him when he's gone too far. The funny thing is that he seems oblivious to the very thing that is being said directly to him, preferring his own reality. This is alcoholic behavior and a classic case of denial.

I was called a bigot today on a blog that I frequent. I am probably the least racist person in the world, having grown up in a very mixed Brooklyn neighborhood where little pale Irish/Russian girls were definitely the minority. I am also a pretty tolerant person, but I do call 'em as I see 'em. The part of this that can be misconstrued into racism or bigotry is much less about race or color than it is about organized religion and fanatical zealots. And its much less about that than it is about the psychology of outsourcing, fear, and dependency, the loss of our country's values, and the tipping point of the masses. To be fair, alot of the more radical liberals are going on about us being manipulated into blaming and fearing Muslims for all of the ills of the world, so I was called a bigot in very good company of intelligent thinkers who care about the state of things.

As far as the bigotry thing goes, it is absolutely wrong to paint all Muslims with the same brush, but when you're dealing with the UAE, you are first of all dealing with a governmental entity that does not keep religion and government separate. You're also dealing with a culture that does not have a great record in the areas of women's or human rights. This is all beside the fact that there were clear ties in the money trail involving 9-11 and terrorism. These guys are big time Bush cronies, and again we are asked to just "trust" him. For God's sake George!! Are you out of your mind?
The British company that is currently selling these management rights, or whatever they are, is just that, a company from Britain. The UAE company that wants to buy these rights is run by the government and thereby tied into the politics and religion of the region. Besides the idea that maybe we shouldn't support governments that have lousy human rights records, it is sort of disheartening to allow them to manage any part of our security system, and we don't know if some of them might be susceptible to fringe groups or fanaticism. It has not been spelled out what our rights would be to oversee this company and the AP reports that the White House cut a very soft deal with them, not imposing even routine restrictions.

The troubling thing about fanatical Muslims operating in the regular Muslim world is that they are able to incite all sorts of craziness and uprisings by twisting things out of proportion. Its sort of like the whole weapons of mass destruction and get them over there before they come here with the mushroom cloud thing. Perfectly regular people are suddenly war mongers if you whip things up enough. The God comic strip is a good example of how easily misled people can be, or how on edge people are in general these days. Whoever actually stirred the pot on that whole issue, and for whatever reasons, the reality of it is that the Koran does not say anywhere that one should not depict the image of God, in a comic strip or otherwise. Its not in there! That idea is actually in the Torah and was carried over to the Koran through teaching by some Mullahs who thought it applied to some point they wanted to make. The average Joe-Muslim on the street just follows the teachings of his Mosque and Mullah, and so is easily manipulated into anger. How is it, though, that their anger then turns so easily to violence? How is it that those Left Behind people envision Jesus as a muscular, angry, avenging guy who rides his horse around smiting sinners? What is just Christian evangelical imagining doesn't seem to turn to flipping cars and running through the streets even if there is a stadium full of them....YET. They seem to leave the vengeance to God for the time being, but seeing that all humans are capable of this sort of reaction, I wonder how far away from this we really are.

I'm not going to give a million examples of Piss-Christ or the cow crap Virgin Mary and go all Guilliani about this, but I haven't seen huge riots in the past couple of hundred years over these sorts of things. Rudy Guilliani had a fit about a museum show and proceeded to cut funding, which was met by peaceful protests. If one is so insecure in God that a picture or outside influence can cause this kind of uncontrolled emotion then there is something wrong with what is being taught. This is some sort of deep seated fear of human nature and how maybe if a man sees a woman without her head covered he will go crazy. But humans can control themselves and these stories of out of control men only really serve to control the women....Strange how that happens, huh? The point is the spin, I guess, and I don't know if we can so distance ourselves from the manipulation and anger as to say that this sort of behavior is not possible here in our radical factions. Its interesting that some of the Muslim teachings are not that different from what we are seeing lately in the evangelical community, and in some cases there are groups who wait for the vengeful Jesus to return and who want to shoot doctors who perform abortions.
When we get the kneejerk fear, we are really not talking about mainstream Muslims, who we live next door to and see every day. I know that the vast majority are regular folks. But, to me, people who follow a strict religion, any religion, be it conservative Judaism, Catholicism, or Muslim-ism, are hard to talk to logically. Maybe that's because they have given themselves over to something that defies logic. This is just my opinion and I respect that people have their beliefs. I just cant get my mind around alot of it. And there is an element present of serving a higher purpose than life here on earth, which becomes so extreme that it forgets that its how you conduct yourself during life here on earth that solidifies the projected hereafter.

Reading around the blogosphere today I'm hearing all sorts of theories about this thing. One is that Bush is taking a fall for the Republicans by doing something so boldly stupid so as to discredit himself on both sides. That way they can distance themselves from him easily and have some sort of chance in the upcoming elections. I don't buy that. It seems to me like Bush is really behind this thing. Bush is really in that bubble they keep talking about.

I'm starting to think that the whole thing is just a load of aggressive bullshit. I don't buy that Bush didn't know about this deal when he is so close with the UAE. Someone had to run it by him or Cheney at some point because it is an area that is so sensitive and it is full of conflict for both of them. If they had wanted to sell the port management, I'm sure they could have found a buyer that is not so controversial. Look at how many times this has been done quietly. We have talked extensively about our borders and our ports not being secure without this coming up. It has come up now because this is a bold move on the part of our administration. Its an in your face, we're gonna do what we want, we run this joint, message. I don't think that they counted on the Republicans balking at this so violently though. They are so used to just getting their way no matter what.

This is a message with a loaded undercurrent of psychological manipulation that almost puts you in a state of disbelief at how fast the crap is flying out of the Capital. Maybe eventually you become numb and grow to love your captors? What started as a gift to the comedians has become another example of these guys rubbing it in everybody's faces that they are above the law and can and will reshape this country into anything they damn please. The constitution? Forget it. The law? Not for them; its a little old anyway and needs revamping. They really believe this. They then throw in a little fear to make sure that you know that you still need them. It is sleazy salesmanship and it plays into everybody's weaknesses and fears in the worst way.

Meantime what these guys really want is to secure a place for themselves at the conference table of the most powerful movers and shakers in the world.
If there really is a secret consortium of big business (oil companies?) behind the scenes pulling the strings of the whole world and manipulating globally as if in some soldier game with really high stakes, then that's where Bush, Cheney, and Rummy want to be. The problem with that is that you have to be talented and smart to get there. Riding in on your ability to scare and manipulate the uneducated masses of America doesn't cut it. The success of these guys seems to run towards the luck of birth, schooling, friends, and good stock picks. It is cronyism with no bounds. Talent and intelligence is not required. But where these guys want to be, I think you need to have a little something upstairs.

In the meantime, we are left angry and confused. Not so much at having the UAE run our ports, but at the flagrant flip-flop of justifications between why we should hate them, fear them, and go to war and why we should trust them, and they are really our friend in fighting terrorism. Well, the evidence doesn't say that, not that evidence ever slowed these guys down. You don't have to walk down the street and hate every Muslim you pass, to not want these particular guys running the ports. No one should manage or run our ports but us. Our government needs to get back to managing itself.
The outsourcing has to stop and we have to roll back the privatization that is already in place.
The Bush Administration may have finally painted itself into a corner. Whatever machinations have been going on behind the scenes have to stop now and they have to reassess everything. Meantime, more of their own guys are jumping the sinking ship.

The sad thing is that we have conducted ourselves so badly in the past 5 years that I cant say that we are all that different from who we have been told to be afraid of. This is just a big wakeup call...Again...To ask Americans to look at what is going on and to vote in the next election as if your life depended on it.

Read the story below about the private citizen who was picked up and tortured for a year for no reason. Realize that this has been happening all over, that only a small percentage of Gitmo detainees should actually be there but they have no rights or recourse because they hang in the limbo of a non-war. Look at how Bush and Co. wanted a month's worth of Google web surfing records. Think and remember where you've been on Google in the past month? Would they come for you? Who knows? For the first time in my life I'm realizing that they could come for me and not really have to have a reason. My surfing to research these things may be enough "evidence," but I also decided a long time ago that I wasn't going to be silenced.
This is not about the Ports. Its about seeing where we draw the line. Its a taking of the temperature of the people of America. Don't get caught up in one thing or another and don't let anyone shame or manipulate you. Take it all in and know what is going on, because this information is going to really effect all of our lives.

Who Are We?

I guess that the big question has to be: Who do we want to be as Americans? Are we the struggling immigrants who came to a new country to find freedom and opportunity in a country made up of immigrants, or are we the same as the monarchs, dictators, and cruel societies that we fled from? Now that we're settled or whatever, are we just as bad as those that we condemn as undemocratic?

Is this big experiment of America, where people have rights, a bust? Are our ideals so weak that a bunch of criminals can infiltrate our system and hijack what was once something that supposedly belonged to the people? Maybe it is just that the people don't care. Lack of education, laziness, not paying attention to what is going on...Or lack of real empathy, leads to the breakdown of everything that the guys who created this nation fought and died for. Their evolution was a long one because they couldn't even seem to get it straight about the slavery thing, and I don't think we ever got the Native American thing straight. But at least they tried, and they rejected the idea of Monarchy and Dictatorship. Now it seems like half of us might welcome something like that back if they could be left alone with their KFC and big screen TV.
So here we are back in the same place, really, and half of our fellow Americans seem to think that its OK to just hand over the keys to anyone who seems sure of themselves.
We've got to figure this out quick or it will be our grandkids figuring it out for us. I really want to live long enough to see what happens with this bunch of crooks and thieves. I'd love to see their bad legacy in history books and to see some of them serving jail time! Too bad that there is just no justice for so many who have been wronged by this administration.

This Piece by Bob Herbert in today's NY Times really begs the question of how different we are from someone like Saddam. If the treatment of this guy is to be believed, and I believe it, then we are every bit as bad. I don't think that this is an isolated case either.
Imagine that you are in he airport one day....Never been in trouble...Parent to two kids...Computer technician....(here is his case timeline)

February 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Torturers Win
By BOB HERBERT
Justice? Surely you jest.

Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We're in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. According to court papers, "The cell was damp and cold, contained very little light and was infested with rats, which would enter the cell through a small aperture in the ceiling. Cats would urinate on Arar through the aperture, and sanitary facilities were nonexistent."

Mr. Arar's captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.

This is a quintessential example of the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. government kidnaps individuals — presumably terror suspects — and sends them off to regimes that are skilled in the fine art of torture. In terms of vile behavior, rendition stands shoulder to shoulder with contract killing.

If the United States is going to torture people, we might as well do it ourselves. Outsourcing torture does not make it any more acceptable.

Mr. Arar's case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria's torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He's never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that "accidents will happen" in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn't matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday. Judge Trager wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."

But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.

He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted."

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

As an example of the kind of foreign policy problems that might arise if Mr. Arar were given his day in court, Judge Trager wrote:

"One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

Oh yes, by all means, we need the federal courts to fully protect the right of public officials to lie to their constituents.

"It's a shocking decision," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It's really saying that an individual who is sent overseas for the purpose of being tortured has no claim in a U.S. court."

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what's not O.K.?



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Bruce Bird...Welcome to the Family!! Thanks for your beautiful songs all day long....

I just listened to the Imus clip with Mary Matalin again and I also saw her this morning on Russert. It was, as usual, scary, and made more so by whoever her stylist is and the poor choice of lipstick and shiny flower pin that gives her a certain Day of the Dead Catrina sort of look. I cant, for the life of me, figure out why we should consider that, as Imus says over and over, Cheney is a real nice guy with a good vibe, or that Cheney has been through so much this week that we should take pity on him. Every time I see him I think of all of the soldiers and innocent Iraqi citizens who have died in this war, not to mention in every other covert, democracy spreading, strongman supporting, weapons supplying, law breaking thing that he's been involved with.
Cheney has shown nothing but contempt for the regular people of America and the press. He certainly doesn't think that we have the same rights as those in his class of power and prestige. And the right to know what's going on with our elected officials seems laughable when he sneers that he just doesn't understand why anyone would want to know. Certainly if we are to believe the Washington Post as linked to by HuffPo then we are paying for these hunting trips with our tax dollars, which I suppose could be OK if that's what he does to unwind, though I'm trying to think of any other job where the taxpayers legally pay for your upper-crusty relaxation pastimes. Doesnt the VP get to use Camp David too?
I guess that the sticking point for me is his dripping contempt, and even if I could imagine him kneeling next to a lifeless body crying "Whit, Whit, speak to me, Whit!," it just somehow doesn't fit with Cheney repairing to the ranch for a stiff cocktail rather than following the ambulance to the hospital or at least starting the spin machine. There are so many things that are so not right with this story.
So, I'm not buying any of it. I can only figure from everything thats happened and what he's said, that he was probably drunk. He will never escape that stigma in this society or in the world. Once its out there, as Chris Matthews said last week to Ron Reagan when young Ron suggested that perhaps there was bad blood between Whit and Cheney, its out there.
So, enjoy your medicine Mr Cheney. If it was good enough for Clinton's blow job then its good enough for you.