Recommended Reading - In The News Edition

Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:

• Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
  

  This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.

  To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.

  To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.

  Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.

• Turd for Turd — Ron Beasley’s reaction to Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s call for amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who fought/killed Americans is not as reactionary as some of the other liberal blogs I’ve read or even some of the conservative blogs I’ve read on this subject. I’ve not commented on the subject because quite frankly I couldn’t find the words for my thoughts. However, I do appreciate that Ron has updated his post with other reactions, including one from the Right’s Captain Ed, which does in fact put into words very well how I feel on the subject:
  

  This sounds appalling, but it probably reflects the reality of Iraq today, and will be the only realistic way to bring an end to the infighting. We can demand that Mailiki rescind the offer, but a refusal would only burnish his credentials as an independent leader. In fact, we should protest to give him that chance. I would like nothing more that to see the cowards hand from the nearest gallows, but insisting on that point would likely make almost everyone ineligible for the amnesty. Maliki has already narrowed down eligibility to those who have not attacked civilians, which will prove problematic enough to enforce.

  At some point, Iraq needs a national reconciliation if it is to avoid a civil war. The Shi’a and Kurds will have to find ways to connect to the Sunni minority on a rational political basis, and the best way to get to that stage is to combine a crackdown on insurgents and a ban on militias with a general amnesty for those who wish to return home and live normal lives. Their motivation has not been radical Islam in most cases but sectarian hatreds and a reaction to occupation. If we want to stabilize Iraq, we will probably need to bend on this concern, as hard as it will be, in order to hasten that reconciliation and help the Iraqis move farther away from politics at gunpoint.

  So far, Maliki has hit all the right notes in his short tenure as Prime Minister. He has acted with much more alacrity and conviction than Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who got forced into withdrawing from the run for Prime Minister. We need to continue to support Maliki and his efforts to bring his nation to healing.

• Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers — Litbrit at Shakespeare’s Sister has a post about this article by Greg Palast as reported on Democracy Now! and BBC Television Newsnight. It’s more conspiracy theory about the RNC in Florida blatantly robbing black voters of their voting privilages — only in this case it’s black soldiers sent to Iraq.
  

  Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

  The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

  One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

  [See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set-72157594155273706&size=o ]

  Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

  A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by “provisional” ballot.

  Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

• Sexually Harrassed Soldier’s Mom Speaks Out — If you have or haven’t been following the story of US Army service woman Specialist Suzanne Swift, who was arrested last Sunday night after being AWOL since last year after refusing to return to Iraq for a second tour of duty, Rose at Stories in America has reprinted the letter Swift’s mother has written asking for her daughter’s discharge and medical help based on her diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and apparent repeated sexual harrassment by her fellow soldiers. She is also requesting help and support from the pulic in the form of a letter-writting/fax/phone campaign.
  

  She spent a long year in Iraq. I feared for her safety every waking minute. She frequently called me crying, telling me very little of the horror she was witnessing - only telling me it was hard. She told me that almost all of the other soldiers were sexually harassing her and that many of her sergeants and lieutenants were really pressuring her and making her life miserable for rejecting them. Calls from her often ended with “Oh, there goes gun fire - gotta go mom, love you.”

  When she returned from Iraq, she was much more quiet and anxious than when she left. I offered to get her help, but she refused. She told me that if she opened that can of worms she would not be able to function as a human being. I asked her if she wanted to deal with the horrible sexual harassment charges against so many of her fellow soldiers. She said, no mom, it would only make my life even more of a living hell. Then she finally blew the whistle on one of her superiors for sexually harassing her, and she was treated like a pariah, while he was moved to a different unit and promoted. She put her head down and worked as a Military Police officer on Ft. Lewis. She was always shocked by the number of domestic violence calls she went out on. The fear of a mother of a peace officer was there, but at least I could call her and knew she was safe. We knew that she was going to be re-deployed to Iraq sometime after the mandatory 18 months’ stabilization time is over. So, we were looking at November of 2006 for a second re-deployment. Our hearts were heavy at the thought.

• Man’s Inhumanity To Man — This is possibly the best essay I’ve read on why what the U.S. is doing domestically and abroad is wrong on so many levels.
  

  Thing is, humanity isn’t a fad, it shouldn’t be thought of when something spectacular or horrific happens. How we treat others is part of our moral fiber.

tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity

2 comments

1. on June 20, 2006 at 10:30 am

   litbrit said:

   Hello N. Mallory,

   A quick word of thanks for the mention re: my post on the Greg Palast piece Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers.

   While I agree that there are a multitude of real “conspiracy theories” surrounding both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, I must object to the term–the word “theory”, specifically–being used in reference to the Palast piece, as well as other investigative reports this man has produced for the BBC, The Guardian, Harpers, and other respected and notoriously fact-checking-obsessed news media, none of which, by the way, include mainstream US media, for reasons that would appear obvious.

   There is nothing theoretical or imagined about what happened: over a million provisional ballots really were never counted in the 2004 election. Large numbers of African Americans, manr of them soldiers on active duty in Iraq, for Heaven’s sake really were improperly scrubbed from the list of approved voters and thus their absentee ballots were discarded. There really was an organized effort by agents of the GOP to deny the vote to large swaths of society they deemed mostly Democratic. There really were scrub lists: you provide the link to one of them yourself.

   The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican’s national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, “Caging.xls.” Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

   Thanks for allowing me to clarify.

2. on June 20, 2006 at 1:48 pm

   n. mallory said:

   Perhaps my use of the word “theory” might have been a little loose. Admittedly, I am a collector of “Conspiracy Theories”; however, I am also a believer that the GOP really fixed the vote in Florida using a variety of methods, particularly aimed at black voters. You’re preaching to the choir for me.

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