Work Your Brain — 10/03/06

On Terror-steria

mass hysteria
n. A socially contagious frenzy of irrational behavior in a group of people as a reaction to an event.

• The Suntan Menace — The Cunning Realist writes about another incident in our friendly skies where an innocent man is assumed by other passengers to be a terrorist because of “suspicious activities” like going to the toilet when he got on the plane and having an iPod. The most damning piece of evidence was the color of his skin, which was tanned due to the vacation the Jewish father of three was returning from. Mr. Stein was physically attacked by another passenger “claiming” to be a NY police officer and put in a head lock an hour into the flight while he was minding his own business reading a book and sipping his ginger ale. He sounds terribly dangerous. He’s suing the airline for failing to protect him since the cabin crew was aware of the passenger’s obsession with him. He should sue the passenger too.
  

  As someone who travels a lot, owns gadgets, is dark-complected, and even uses the restroom, I keep waiting — with anticipation, I must admit — for some overeager vigilante/Charles Bronson-wannabe to try this crap on me.

• Please step to the white courtesy phone [for a brain] — Mac @ peskyapostrophe reports that a man missed his flight after being detained in an airport in Seattle because he was speaking a foreign language into his cell phone. Hmmmmm… That does sound suspicious. Apparently he was discussing sports, which is really suspicious. The language was Tamil, which is a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore and the person who called it in was an off-duty airline personnell. The passenger indicated that in the future, he wouldn’t be speaking Tamil into his cell phone in the airport. That’s just a shame.
• The TSA sucks - hey, better detain me — Mac @ peskyapostrophe also has a post about a Wisconsin man who wrote “Kip Hawley is an Idiot” on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat. You know, because Kip Hawley is the head of the Transportation Security Administration. “A TSA spokeswoman acknowledged a man was stopped, but likened the incident to cases in which people inappropriately joke about bombs.” *snort* Talk about going overboard.

On Torture

• Is The U.S. A Rogue State? — Matthew Yglesias (op-ed writer for The American Prospect) @ CBS News wrote a brilliant opinion piece about how in 2003 President George Bush gave a speech indicating that the U.S. was committed to “world-wide elimination of torture” and leading the fight by example. He said it was an inalienable human right to be free of torture. He also said, “The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control….Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.” Based on that statement from Bush’s own claims, Yglesias wants to know if the United States is now a rogue state since we now legally torture. Have we now become what we set out to eliminate?
  

  Other countries, of course, practice torture in violation of international law. As has now been clear for a while, we have been in their company for some years. The latest twist, however, is that we now won’t show any shame about it. Rather than simply violating the laws to which we have agreed to adhere, we’re repudiating them, simply denying that the standard by which civilized nations operate apply to us.

  The problems here will be widespread. One of the strengths of democracies on the international scene is precisely that it’s much harder for liberal states to violate agreements. Dictatorships can say one thing and do another with ease. Democracies feature free presses, free speech, the rule of law, independent judiciaries, legislative oversight, and other measures to ensure that laws and treaties are followed. This is, to the conservative mind, a weakness. In their view, cheating is a good thing, and America’s historical difficulty in cheating constitutes a problem. They’re dead wrong. Cooperation is a good thing — the best ticket to prosperity, security, and international peace. Democracies can cooperate with other countries — and especially with other democracies — more credibly and effectively, and that’s one of the reasons the world’s democratic block is so much stronger and more prosperous than the rest of the world.

  But the rule of law is now off the table as far as Bush is concerned. What’s more, insofar as national-security policy is at issue, the United States increasingly doesn’t look like much of a democracy. As the congressional Republicans march in lockstep behind the White House’s torture agenda, they don’t even know what that agenda’s composed of. The Boston Globe reported Saturday that 90 percent of members of Congress don’t know “which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.” Which is just to say that, in practice, absolutely everything would be permitted, since the only people capable of overseeing the interrogation program haven’t done it, won’t do it, and have no intention of doing it in the future.

  Consequently, the United States now presents itself as what amounts to the globe’s largest and most powerful rogue state — a nuclear-armed superpower capable of projecting military force to the furthest corners of the earth, acting utterly without legal or moral constraint whenever the president proclaims it necessary. The idea that striking such a posture on the world stage will serve our long-term interests is daft. American power has, for decades, rested crucially on the sense that the United States can be trusted and relied upon, on the belief that we use our power primarily to defend the community of liberal states and the liberal rules by which they conduct themselves rather than to undermine them.

  An America prepared to casually toss out the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian diplomacy, along with basic human decency and the rule of law as side helpings, is not a country others are going to want to cooperate with.

  Hat tip: Sean Aqui.

• How long till they come and take your favorite blogger away? — Punkass Mac @ PunkAssBlog.com expresses concern that the inclusion of the term “leftist terrorist” in the NIE report may eventually lead to serious problems for leftist bloggers once the new torture/detainee legislation passes. Pain-in-the-ass lefty bloggers can be labeled as having “leftist terrorist agendas” and disappear into some CIA black prison or Gitmo.

On Iraq

• Batiste — Gregory @ The Belgravia Dispatch wrote an excellent piece, quoting former Major General John Batiste’s testimony before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee which presented a rather scathing review of Rumsfeld’s competence as a wartime leader. Gregory’s analysis is dead on, suggesting that the Bush-Chenney Administration is all talk but no real muscle to back it up, meaning they haven’t or can’t put the resources in to match their own rhetoric.
  

  That is to say, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika are only pretending to have the sang-froid and will and staying power and Churchillian courage to prevail in Iraq. But they are being dishonest with us. They are empty suits, presiding over a failing strategy, none of them with the energy or intellectual courage to own up and demand either that the nation sacrifice and devote adequate resources to the effort, or failing that pursue a convincing alternative strategy. Of course, it’s not all their fault, as they are bowing to some realities, one suspects. If Bush gave a speech calling for re-institution of the draft, or implemention of a war tax, or even less dramatic moves but nevertheless ones that demanded more sacrifice (sending another 50,000 troops in, with casualty rates inevitably increasing, especially if we adopted less conservative force postures in keeping with best counter-insurgency practice) one presumes the nation would turn on the war all the faster (though if such moves changed the tenor of the war for the better perhaps support would not drop as much as one might suspect, although one would need real leaders at the helm explicating the need persuasively, which we don’t). Worth noting too, Rove would allow none of it, with midterms looming in November.

  Regardless, what we have now is not quite ’stay the course’, or the comically desperate sounding ‘adapting to win’, or some such soundbite. What we are doing, really, is half-assing along as best we can without truly summoning all the national reservoirs of power (military, economic, diplomatic, humanitarian) to really have a real go at prevailing, assuming one believes there is still a shot at eking out a victory, an issue where intelligent people (as the previous thread indicated) can disagree. At some point, we either step up, talk to the Iranians and Syrians so as to get more intelligent about pursuing a regional strategy, make clear and signal to Iraqis we’re there to truly prevail by sending in more forces, and otherwise get more serious (more robust force posture to truly “clear”, not via endless rounds of whack-a-mole, but with a convincing footprint and level of sustained effort through entire areas of concern simultaneously, more funds for reconstruction and infrastructure to effectively “build”, increasing American embeds operating with both Iraqi Army and even Police units so as to help develop more of an indigenuous “hold” function, and so on)–or we need to think much more about pursuing an intelligent withdrawal strategy–if perhaps we don’t think the additional effort is worth it (perhaps presiding over a confederation, but holding out the prospects of a unitary state in the future, a la Dayton, is worthy of more thought). Either way, the rough status quo, with a couple soldiers dying a day, dishonors their sacrifice, because it is a sacrifice made in vain. And our leaders are not honest enough to come clean with us about this, or if they think they are being honest with us, it is only because they are living in a deluded fantasy land where fundamentalist-style verities reign, rather than the grim realities presented by the empirical evidence around them.

  Hat tip: John Cole.

Have an opinion on these topics to share or found a post you want to add? Add your opinion or the post link to the comments section. My inquiring mind wants to know!

Tags: John Batiste, Senate Democratic Policy Committee, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Iraq, War, stay the course, adapting to win, propaganda, American soldiers, Middle East, Seth Stein, American Airlines, mass hysteria, terrorism, rogue state, The American Prospect, CBS News, torture, War Crimes Act, Geneva Convention, Congress, Seattle, Tamil, TSA, Kip Hawley, leftist terrorist agenda, NIE report, Guantanamo Bay

Work Your Brain — 09/04/06

Women’s Rights

• Class warfare at Starbucks — lambert @ CorrenteWire writes about how class warfare starts over breast milk. Companies are far more likely to be accomodating to executive mothers who need breaks during the day to pump breast milk, but the women who work in the stores and “on the line” have to “barricade themselves in small restrooms intended for customers, counting the minutes left in their breaks.” There’s a lot of pressure to breast-feed in this day and age, but it’s easy to get discouraged and give up under less than ideal conditions.
• A Mystery From the Time When Abortion Was Illegal and Dangerous — olvlzl @ ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES remembers a horrible, deadly practice from the pre-Roe era — infanticide.
  

  The woman who owned the trunk was in her 60s in 1983. The papers say she was called a “pillar of the community” when she lived in the area. People who remembered her said that at the time the babies had been killed she often appeared to be pregnant but she never had children. The authorities found her but she wouldn’t say anything about the trunk. I don’ t know of any legal pressure put on her to talk. The fact that there were five corpses of infants wrapped in newspapers from different years certainly suggests serial infanticide, not a misdemeanor in anyone’s book.

More

Tags: Starbucks, Women's Rights, breastfeeding, class warfare, abortion, baby snuffer, infancticide, Islamofascism, propaganda, War on Terror, WWII, Osama bin Laden, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, Domino Theory, Hitler, whistleblowers, Russell Tice, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, 101st Fighting Keyboarders, Fox News, David Warren, Debbie Schussel, Kathleen Parker, Mark Steyn, Glenn Greenwald, hypocrisy

Al-Qaeda’s #2 Guy In Iraq Arrested…Again

In case you’ve missed it yesterday…

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi forces have arrested the second most senior operative in al-Qaida Iraq, and the group now suffers from a “serious leadership crisis,” the national security adviser said Sunday. [“No. 2 al-Qaida leader in Iraq” (Yahoo!News)]

If you were like me when you heard the news, you were probably trying to figure out how many #2 al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq there are that are because it seems like they’re making this announcement every month or so. It turns out someone has been keeping track and yesterday’s arrest makes 39.

Yesterday the Iraqi Prime Minister on the news telling the world that this man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeed, is behind all of violence in Iraq. He blamed al-Saeed for plotting to start a Civil War between religious Sects by attacking the Sects and making it look like it was done by opposing Sects. It sounded like convenient propaganda to me.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Iraq, propaganda

Is It Time To Panic Yet?

This is a great post by The (liberal) Girl Next Door:

Someone recently told me that it’s not quite time to panic, that things in this country may be bad, but we haven’t yet reached the point of no return. So I’d just like to toss out the question. When is it time to panic? When does mere concern turn urgent, and will we all recognize the signs in time?

[…]

Or is it time to panic when, as Patricia Goldsmith suggests, there is no opposition left? It has long been the case that our two party system is nothing more than political theater. We have two political parties feeding from the same corporate troughs and serving the same corporate interests. If we continue to buy into the lies of either side and continue to separate from one another reducing public discourse to screaming at one another from opposite sides of the wedges driven between us, we give the only power we have left away to leaders who will only abuse it. If we willfully divide ourselves, we will be easily conquered.

I don’t want to panic before it is warranted, but I sometimes wonder if we will recognize the last straw. Don’t we remember that in Germany, the Nazis took control of government, not in a violent coup, but by passing laws that gave them increasing power and control over the people and the news they received? We keep hearing that it’s not time to panic just yet, but if history has a lesson for us right now, it’s that panicking too late won’t do a damn bit of good. Do we really, as a country, want to sit idly by watching evil become a way of life? Most of us judge the German people not as victims, but rather as willing accomplices. Will we judge ourselves the same?

I have been wary of using the Nazi comparison, but since Sandra Day O’Connor, the voice of reason on our high court for decades, feels comfortable warning of a dictatorship, I guess I feel justified. We are being fed propaganda, our government is becoming increasingly secretive, dissenting voices are routinely being silenced, and this administration appears to be accountable to no one. If it isn’t quite yet time to panic, I fear the time is fast approaching.

Read the whole well-thought-out post! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling panicky for a while, but then I come by it naturally. I thought it was just me being paranoid. Apparently, I’m not alone. That’s somewhat comforting. I think.

Tags: politics, George W. Bush, Impeach, Freedoms, liberals, Sandra Day O'Connor, voice of reason, dictatorship, Nazi Germany, propaganda

The White House War On The Facts

Wasn’t there a book about a world where the government controls everything including the information and the history, where history is officially changed in the archives to agree with what the government wants people to believe, and where people are told what to believe and remember?

People — o.k. Left-wingers — have been making a lot of references to 1984, comparing many of the things the current administration has done to the Orwellian world. Let’s face it, there’ve been a number of revelations of press releases and press ops that appear to have been completely staged or have been suggested to have been, including the Jessica Lynch rescue, the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush’s recent teleconference with soldiers in Iraq, and his photo ops with rescue and restoration crews in New Orleans and Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. Then there have been the efforts by the White House and the administration to hide the American dead, whether it be coffins returning from the Middle East or bodies found unattended in New Orleans.

But those things are just an effort to formulate opinion, to positively shape the image of the President and his administration and their causes and efforts, but where do they draw the line from trying to shape the image they present to the press to trying to change the facts to fit their agenda?

No, ironically, I’m not even talking about the whole conspiracy to misled Americans into a war with Iraq with falsified information, I’m talking about something much simpler.

Wonkette has an interesting tale about how the White House attempted to alter history. Think Progress summarizes:

Everyone agrees NBC’s David Gregory said this:

Q Whether there’s a question of legality, we know for a fact that there was involvement. We know that Karl Rove, based on what he and his lawyer have said, did have a conversation about somebody who Patrick Fitzgerald said was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. We know that Scooter Libby also had conversations.

Congressional Quarterly and FNS both transcribed Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s answer as “That’s accurate.” The White House transcript lists McClellan’s answer as “I don’t think that’s accurate.”

We’ve isolated the clip so you can judge for yourself:

Watch in QuickTime streaming.

If you listened to the clip, it’s clear McClellan says “that’s accurate.” Nevertheless, the White House is trying to get CQ and FNS to change their transcripts. They’ve refused. [” That’s Not Accurate: White House Alters Transcript of Press Briefing (Think Progress)”]

Wonkette also quotes CQ, if you’d like to hear their version of the story.

O.K. So now I’m going to talk the conspiracy to use fabricated intelligence to mislead Americans into a war without win. If the White House is willing to try to alter the facts about a press conference that’s on publically available video feed after the fact, how big a leap is it to think that they might have tried to alter the facts about the intelligence on Iraq beforehand?

Just a little “point to ponder” as a friend of mind says.

Tags: 1984, paranoia, lie, propaganda, Scott McClellan

Proud to be an American?

If you get the chance, check out Scott-O-Rama’s Proud To Be An American? post from yesterday. I must say I feel his anger and disappointment in the current state of a country we were raised to believe was the best country in the world. It’s hard to be proud when you feel you should appologize to the world just for being an American.

In the United States, we are taught from a very early age that the U.S.A. is the greatest country in the world. We learn about other cultures that don’t have the freedoms that we have in America. We are led to believe that the U.S.A. only fights to protect the oppressed and spread freedom and democracy around the world. And we are told that when we grow up, we can be anything we want to be… and astronaut, a CEO, the president… all because we live in America.

As I’ve grown older, I have come to realize what a load of crap propaganda it all is.

A little less than a month ago, we celebrated the 4th of July- Independence Day in the U.S.A. As I have done so many times in the past, I hung the flag out in front of the house to show my patriotism. This year though, I did not feel any pride. Instead, I felt anger. Yes, I’m mad at my country, and here are a few reasons why:

Read the rest here…

Tags: blogs, propaganda, patriotism

I Wish It Were Over Already!

I kind of wish the whole election thing was over already so we could go on with our lives. However, my experience with the last election tells me that it won’t be over on Nov. 3rd, but will drag on and on and on.

I saw a statistic in Newsweek last week, I think, about how in the 1992 election at this time 66% of people were still undecided, but polsters working for Bush (probably from India) say that this year only 17% are undecided. I wonder if they’re counting all the Amish people Republicans have been registering to vote lately — apparently the Amish traditionally vote Republican and the Republicans have been out in the fields signing them up to vote this year.

Still, I’m tired of all the debating going on between people who appear to be brainwashed on either side — though mostly it does seem to be the right-wing conservative Republicans that are acting like parrots, but I could be biased. I don’t really know anymore if I’m capable of not being biased.

I’ve heard complaints that some people are upset that Bush might not win because people are voting for Kerry because they don’t like Bush. To me that’s completely reasonable and logical. Why would they vote for Bush if they don’t like him?

I’ve heard outright lies and rumors, some of which have been perpetuated by the Republican Party and by popular right-wing talk show hosts (even the ones who claim to be fair and balanced). I’ve heard silliness even from the Democrats. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who to believe. There are Vets for John Kerry and Vets against John Kerry. I tend to believe the ones who served under and with him more than those who didn’t even know him then — and those apparently are the ones for him. In fact, one of the really big mouthed ones against him has even recanted his claims, though I understand it’ll still be in the Kerry-bashing commercial.

Bush is crowing about Kerry saying that despite what he knows now he would have still voted to give Bush authorization to go to war. Bush seems to think that this proves Kerry is flip-flopping. However, Kerry did give authorization to Bush and he never denied it. What Kerry has stood by is that he would have done things differently than Bush, would have made sure of the intelligence being used (which has been proven faulty) and would have ensured that we didn’t go it alone but had the support of the world, or at least the allies we usually depend on. The Republicans keep touting about how Kerry voted against the $87 billion needed to continue the war in Iraq, but what they don’t tell you is that Kerry did support it as long as it had an amendment to increas taxes on the wealthy so that the money would be coming from somewhere. It bothers me that Bush seems to be spending a lot of money we don’t have. It makes sense to me that the money has to come from somewhere. If I were charging up that much debt, the creditors would be constantly calling my house.

People are also talking about Kerry’s money and they can’t seem to separate his finances from Teresa’s, but Teresa did make him sign a pre-nup which keeps him from all that wealth and last December he had to mortgage his Boston home to pay for the campaign. Teresa can only give him $2000 for his campaign because of campaign-finance laws. (He has repayed the debt, which is good, because I was actually worried for him.)

I’m tired of people complaining that Kerry will raise taxes. I don’t want to pay higher taxes either, but I do understand that our country is in debt; we are closing schools and cutting back on fire and police services nationwide, but we are financing a war and supposedly rebuilding two war-torn Middle Eastern countries, including providing new schools and fire houses. Where are we going to get that money? Kerry says he is only going to roll back Bush’s tax break on the very wealthy (those that make $200,000 per year). I don’t know anyone personally in that tax bracket, but since I’m living on less than $70K a year, I can imagine that they will survive.

Mostly I’m tired of the rhetoric and propoganda. I’m tired of the games and the debates. My mind is made up. Most people’s minds are made up. There’s little that can be said or done now that will change anyone’s minds. For the most part, either people love Bush, people love Kerry, or they hate Bush enough to vote for Kerry. I suppose there are other options, but on election day, those are the three that are going to matter.

I think the closer it gets to election day, the more outbreaks of bar room-like brawls will occur. And honestly, I’m very afraid for this country. I think no matter who wins, somewhere, some unhappy people are going to make a violent scene. I remember the L.A. riot. I’m afraid that could happen again.

Tags: 2004 election, politics, John Kerry, George W. Bush, mud-slinging, propaganda

One Patriot’s Point-Of-View

I cannot seem to accept the idea that more people seem to unquestioningly, blindly believe every single utterance of the Bush Administration despite any contrary facts than believe unquestioningly that there is a God.

It frustrates me to no end that you cannot argue or debate the issues with these people because they can only regurgitate the rhetoric and propoganda and will eventually turn to name calling and accusing those who don’t whole-heartedly agree as unpatriotic traitors and resort to their anthem “Remember 9/11!”

I, of course, vividly remember 9/11, sometimes still in waking nightmares. I believe that those involved should be punished. What they did was an autrocity, an act of war on our own soil. Even as a pacifist with serious doubts in the rightness of capital punishment, I believed and still believe that invading Afghanistan and hunting down the evil masterminds was the right thing to do. I wish with all my heart that we would have finished the job and in my heart of hearts, I suspect that turning our attention on Iraq was a way to distract the American public from the fact that Bin Laden has never come to justice. I am aghast that there are still so many people who cling to the belief that Iraq was involved in 9/11. Not only is there no proof of such a connection but the very likelihood has been disproven. I can only guess that they cling to this belief so tightly because accepting that they were misled and duped is a far worse fate to them than the fate of 100’s of American soldiers sent off to an unnecessary war and the fate of 100’s if not 1000’s of Iraqi’s, innocent and not, and the survivors who must now deal with the aftermath.

I am also patriotic. I love my country. I display my flag on my front door. I vehmenently resent the accusation that if I don’t hang on and embrace every utterance of the current administration, I am somehow less a person and less an American than someone who marches blindly to patriotic propoganda. Certainly this country was founded by rule breakers and those who thought outside of the box, those that wanted these freedoms they set up for us, those that gave serious thought to the good of the country. I am an American and I am entitled to my opinions, my belief in the facts, my disbelief in the compentency of an administration that has misled the American public repeatedly and appears to believe that it is above the very laws and freedoms it claims to be defending. I am an American and that does not mean I am a fanatic. It does not mean that I must accept the world as it is nor does it mean that I should roll over and pretend I love the way the current administration is doing it’s job. I am entitled to know the facts; I am entitled to express my rage, my horror, my discontent; I am entitled to these things without fear of abuse and imprisonment.

My alias is N. Mallory and I approved this message.

Tags: politics, George W. Bush, propaganda, patriotism, 9/11, lie, Iraq, Afghanistan