Breaking News

OK then call me stupid, but when national security is at stake shouldn’t the big guy get involved in the big decisions? Apparently not because as the Associated Press reveals, here printed in the New York Times: Bush Played No Role in Approval of Port Deal, White House Says, our great defender was not in the decision loop when the contract to manage six of our key ports was allowed to go to a company based in Dubai.

How strange is that? This is the same President who has made a political football out of our fears, and who has relentlessly exploited xenophobic feelings to stir up support for his hopelessly ill advised foreign policies. He has struggled to look like a supreme commander at every turn. Yet now he spreads the word that he heard about the ports contract, a major security issue, after the fact. Just who is he kidding?

Then again the alternative: that he really didn’t know, is just as bad. That would mean that his administration treated the whole ports contract as just another ho-hum deal, one not worth bothering the big guy about. That’s called strectching incredulity a little too far. Rumsfeld didn’t know? Chertoff didn’t know? If they did, then obviously they thought that handing over the protection of six of our major ports to a company based in Dubai, the source of funding and support for some of the 9/11 criminals wasn’t worth mentioning.

Which is scary, and I don’t buy it.

Nor do I buy the idea that a contract’s a contract and that we shouldn’t walk away from this one becasue it might offend our allies. Big deal. Let people get offended. Safety first. I thought that Bush would be spouting on endlessly about how he brought in a good old “red white and blue” contractor to enhance security [Halliburton comes to mind!]. Apparently I don’t understand Bush because he has leapt to defend the contract and has attacked its critics as being xenophobic.

Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black! And it makes me think that there’s more to the eye here. Like there’s investments in this Dubai company that come from … oh, let’s just say Kennebunkport.

Setting aside the conspiracy theory: Bush is getting more and more clueless, and it’s strange that he would be so far out of step with his far right supporters on this one. I suspect that this denial of knowledge is the first step toward Bush trying to save face. It’s too late for that in my mind. He really is the dunce I think he is.

I haven’t commented on Guantanamo for a while so here goes: the United Nations has just condemned the U.S. for keeping the detention camp “Gitmo” open. The U.N. press release is here: Gitmo Press Release. The New York Times has the full report here: The full U.N. report

They are absolutely right, of course. Gitmo and all it represents is an abomination. It is a constant contradiction of American freedoms and an ongoing source of aggravation in the Middle East. America cannot and will not begin to turn around Arab sentiment while Gitmo remains open. I suppose these massive costs would be vaguely worth it were there benefits accruing from maintaining the camp. There are not.

The majority of prisoners in the camp have no valuable intelligence. Nor can they be classified in any way as terrorists at the time they were taken into custody. A recent study of the inmates, conducted by journalists at the National Journal, concludes that as many as 80% of the inmates never had any al-Qaida connection and many were never even Taliban soldiers. They have no value at all to the U.S., and most probably were never “enemy comabatants”, which is what George Bush keeps referring to them as.

Most of the prisoners were not captured by American soldiers, but were “sold” to the U.S. in return for rewards by various warlords in Afghanistan. It is highly questionable that some of these peole ever had anything to do with combat against the U.S., they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Their continued incarceration is often based on the flimmsiest and frankly dumbest pretense: one prisoner admitted to having seen Bin Laden five times, and so his file reads that: “Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden”. The trouble is that he admitted to seeing Bin Laden on the TV! Surely the U.S. officials who compiled the file are not serious about this man’s association with Bin Laden. Yet his continued detention suggests that they are. This kind of thing makes a mockery of any words Bush et al might say to the contrary.

A second study, published by Seton Hall university professors who represent a couple of the prisoners concludes that 55% of the prisoners are not suspected of ever having committed any hostile acts against the U.S. This study also highlights the “captured for bounty” fate of many prisoners: fully 86% of all of them were captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance during the time the bounties were being paid.

It gets worse: some of the prisoners are being detained for having owned a Kalashnikov rifle: you only have to watch TV to realize that Kalashnikovs are a dime a dozen in the Middle East. [I imagine there are quite a few sitting around in the U.S. also.].

The U.N. report condemns the U.S. as violating numerous human rights including the ban on torture, arbitrary detention, and the right to a fair trial. This condemnation is an embarrassment to all Americans. How is it that there is not more outrage? Were Gitmo to be operated by the Soviet Union it would rapidly have become an iconic rallying point for the freedom loving American public in their contempt for the “evil empire” so vilified by Ronald Reagan. The hypocrisy is sickening.

Still, even with all this documentation Bush continues to deny that anything is wrong. Instead he berates the U.N. and anyone else who criticizes the camp. He allows the camp to go on acting as a perverse symbol of American attitudes towards Islam, as a source of anger to fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East, and as a stark contradiction of previously cherished American values.

The prisoners in Gitmo may be enemies of the U.S. If so they should be subjected to the kind of punishment the vaunted American legal system is capable of. They should not be non-people, an American version of “the disappeared” of totalitarian regimes in South America: outside the law, unrepresented, helpless, and facing interminable detention.

Guantanamo is wicked. The U.N. is correct. America should not operate a gulag system. It is time to shut the place down and apologize for its exsistence.

I know all of you have been following the furor over those cartoons published a few weeks ago in an obscure Danish newspaper. The nonsense that has ensued is plainly foolish. In practically every country with a majority Moslem population there have been demonstrations and small scale riots. In a few instances sundry Scandinavian embassies or consulates have been burned. The reaction in Europe has been mixed: a few newspapers have re-published the cartoons as a defiantact of freedom of speech, while in other places, notably the U.K. reaction has been muted. This is the twelfth day of demonstrations and there seems to be no end, although I expect that Moslem enthusiasm for continual protests will eventually die down.

What to make of it all?

First: I find it deeply hypoctrical of any Moslem, particularly those who claim to be devout, to pick on this issue and not on the torrent of blasphemy that is suicide bombing, beheading, and other forms of mayhem wrought in the name of Islam by terrorist thugs over these past few years. I am sure that the main instigators of the demonstrations are closely tied to the hardliners who run affairs in Iran and Syria, and are manipulating, once again, for purely cynical purposes the “Moslem man or woman on the street”. Those purposes are revealed by the spewing of anti-American and anti-Jewish verbiage that has accomapnied the demonstrations. Last I saw Denmark wasn’t part of either America or Israel, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. I also detect a cynical hand in the very fact that the cartoons found their way into the public arena in several of the Middle Eastern countries who are notorious for censorship. Odd how some things elude the censors!

Second: I cringe when I hear some commentators here in the West say that we should be more respectful of the feelings of deeply religious people. Why? What is so special about religious icons and myths that they should be excluded from criticism? The idea that there are exclusions from either satirical or serious critique is what has enabled the persistence of many of the regressive aspects that all major religions possess. The role of women in society and the repressive nature of patriarchy are promulgated by all the major religions, and is clearly contradictory to emerging social norms in our more secular Western style democracies. If we cannot critique repression how do we expose it’s odious consequences? It is all too easy for religious people to pretend that because they profess “faith” that somehow that “faith” is above criticism. No it isn’t: for the very reason that “faith” is antithetical to democratic, rational, and tolerant discussion. All religions deserve to be lampooned for their mysticism and their pernicious hold [via brain washing] over the minds of the masses that the patriarchs seek to control.

Third: The schism between the Western and Islamic worlds is brought into even sharper relief by the cartoon furor. I believe that the schism is being made worse by American foreign policy, particularly, but not exclusively, by the policies of the Bush administration. America has been relentlessly one-sided in its Middle Eastern policies for decades. It organized the sanctioning then the destruction of Saddam Hussain’s regime ostensibly because he invaded Kuwait, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and then harbored terrorists. He deserved what he received. But what about the twenty-five year occupation of the West bank and the Gaza strip by Israel, a country that actually does possess weapons of mass destruction? Every time the U.N. has raised the prospect of sanctions or punishment against Israel the U.S. has vetoed it. America has stood out as a supporter of Israeli policy no matter what that policy is. For instance, it has supported Israel’s extra-territorial summary execution of so-called terrorists, affording the victims no chance of a trial and therefore no recourse to a Western style legal process. Yet it says that Israel is a Western style democracy deserving of support. That is hypocritical. To local observers I doubt very much that the Israeli occupation looks or feels very benign or democratic. Now this is not to say I support the atrocious actions of the terrorists. Far from it. My point is simply that there can be no doubt whatever as to the source of the anti-American hatred that seems to run so deeply in Islamic cultures, and it is easy to see why it is so quickly and easily exploited. Until the U.S. forces Israel to pull back within it’s 1967 borders and give Palestinians full and proper independence it will deserve to appear irretrievably biased in Islamic eyes.

Meanwhile every little act, like the publishing of satirical cartoons, will continue to highlight just how much the world is divided, and how much work there is to be done if we are to avoid a catastrophic escalation of the ability of terrorists to exploit that divide.