[smygo] Garrrison Keillor Calls for Bush Impeachment
C Hamilton
(2) Facing the offal truth about Bush's propaganda machinery
(3) a view from a secular Arab on Muslim fundamentalism...
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The failed Bush war on Iraq
by William F. Buckley Jr.
February 24, 2006
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley.asp
Support our troops
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The debate on impeachment
http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/2900/caseagainst2xg.gif
We had a secular government in Iraq before Bush came...
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==========================
George W. Bush
The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than
ever - and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to
remove him.
By Garrison Keillor
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/keillor/
Mar. 01, 2006 | These are troubling times for all of us who love this
country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at
your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A
blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of
arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him
home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over,
and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read
the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying
attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on
his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The
man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever,
plus being blind.
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer
about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora,
and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From
within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld
and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders
from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva
Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of
prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing
that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation
under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to
unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be
allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention
in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict
severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it
a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it.
How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to
9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the
war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to
tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt - it's you.
But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's
fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their
palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with
this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position.
They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who
will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It
goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even
the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is
coming out now.
According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country
is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are
wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital,
and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying
around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most
categories of defending against terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country
to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever
before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork
barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation
of a nuclear bomb within our borders - pick any big city - is a real
possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats
have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as
Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting
the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We
might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco
dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort
of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed
now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to
account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's
defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday
nights on public radio stations across the country.)
=================================
Facing the offal truth about Bush's propaganda machinery
by Sydney H. Schanberg
December 20th, 2005
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0551,schanberg,71155,6.html
Most of the time these days, when I scour the "media" looking for a sign
of hope about mankind, I inevitably trip over a discouraging spew of
waste matter passing as news of importance. Historically, the name we
give this offal is propaganda. Its spewers are often
reporter-impersonators. The Defense Department, CIA, and White House
have been hiring these performers in large numbers lately to spread the
gospel of a puppeteer named Rove.
Some of the impersonation journalism actually comes from failed
reporters who are still not admitting they embarrass the profession.
Just the other day, I came across a story that said Judith
My-WMD-Sources-Were-Wrong-It-Was-All-Their-Fault Miller was now on a
cruise-ship gig in South America. The brief report said the former New
York Times employee is lecturing unsuspecting tourists on why protecting
the identity of rumor-mongering sources must be journalism's first
commandment.
But most of the spew is government waste, like the latest string of road
show speeches from President Bush, who confessed that all the "secret"
intelligence that led him to invade Iraq was wrong, but then he said,
Never mind, folks, the war was still the right thing to do, and anyway
most of the critics of my war are "defeatists." That kind of sophistry
was called horse manure back in the mill town where I grew up.
Though this hazardous propaganda does litter the press landscape and
confuse many Americans, honest newspaper people and other disciplined
reporters continue to produce a steady flow of principled journalism.
Still, one is forced to wonder whether a populace bone-tired of bad news
is even interested in separating the honest journalism from the fake;
after all, the voters have twice elected the crowd who are producing the
faux information-and whose radical policies have produced much of the
bad news.
In any event, as a change of pace, I thought I'd take a reporter's walk
through a few of the artifacts I came across this past week in the
theater of the absurd that is the news business at the moment.
Robert Novak was back in the news. He's the Republican conduit who broke
the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame in a 2003 column, apparently as
part of a White House effort to discredit her war-critic husband, Joe
Wilson. This led to the still-running Plamegate investigation. Novak has
never publicly revealed the source who passed him Plame's identity. He
has also not been indicted. So far, that honor has fallen solely on I.
Lewis Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and is
now awaiting trial. (Also, the above-mentioned Judith Miller, then a New
York Times reporter and now rusticated with a severance package, was
found in contempt of court, a civil offense, and spent 85 days in jail
for refusing to reveal her source, who turned out to be Libby.)
About Novak, it seems he was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, last week,
giving a luncheon speech during which he suggested that people stop
asking him to name his White House source and ask President Bush
instead. Novak said: "I'm confident the president knows who the source
is. I'd be amazed if he doesn't. So I say, don't bug me. Don't bug Bob
Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the
source is." (Coincidentally, a few days later, Novak announced that he
was leaving his position as a political commentator on CNN for a similar
role at Fox News, a more Republican-friendly setting.)
The White House said it was dumbfounded by Novak's claim that the
president must know the source. "I don't know what he's basing it on,"
said spokesman Scott McClellan, who would say nothing more. (But if the
president really doesn't know the source's identity, then his marionette
strings are truly showing.)
The overarching story that encompasses all this misinformation is the
government's propaganda machine. Multimillion-dollar contracts have been
awarded to public relations companies in Washington to place stories in
the Afghan and Iraqi press. The Rendon Group and the Lincoln Group are
two of the companies working for the Pentagon. Both say they are
forbidden by their contracts to talk about the details of their work.
The Pentagon insists that all the stories they produce contain accurate
information. No one can be surprised about propaganda efforts, since
they've always been used in wars and occupations to counter adversarial
or false information in the local press. But if the stories are factual,
as the Pentagon says, why the secrecy?
The Bush administration-including Bush himself, Dick Cheney, and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld-regularly accuse the press of failing to give
a complete picture of what's taking place in Iraq. That's laughable-the
laughter of the theater of the absurd. If they want us to enlarge the
portrait of Iraq, then please open some doors and let us see the whole
picture. And not just in Iraq, but on domestic policy as well. The Bush
White House team has turned this presidency into the most sealed-off,
secretive regime in American history.
I and many other career journalists have written often about the White
House's war on the independent press. When a presidency sets up a huge
public relations machine to create and promulgate a rosy, Potemkin
village substitute for the actual gritty and sometimes lethal reality on
the ground, then the press, to retain its credibility, is forced to push
back hard and strip away the fantasy tableaux of Karl Rove and company.
The Bush circus train now is easy to describe-its crew members are still
running an election campaign, with all the bells and whistles: the
carefully selected audiences, the president's incessant stump speeches,
the stage props, and the billboard-like slogans. This is more like a
sales campaign for a new line of gas-guzzling SUVs than a competent
government leadership team wrestling with matters of war and peace and
the travails of ordinary people.
To this White House, apparently, everything is merely an issue of image,
of getting a soothing message up on some giant screen. Example: His
handlers, remember, took President Bush to devastated New Orleans,
placed him in a historic square and framed him in messianic blue lights
with his collar unbuttoned like a regular person. Then, in a nationwide
television speech crafted to mask the shame of how his government had
bungled the rescue and relief effort after the gargantuan Hurricane
Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, he promised the survivors that he
would spare no expense to restore their dwellings and their towns and
cities.
"We will do what it takes," he said. "We will stay as long as it takes .
. . "
That was the night of September 15. Three months have passed, but major
decisions about rebuilding are still stalled by vacillation and red
tape. According to a Brookings Institution study published on December
7, more than $21 billion has been "allocated" to New Orleans alone, and
$19 billion of that has been spent. Half has gone to "administration"
and "general operations." Meanwhile, only one-yes, one-of New Orleans's
116 public schools is open. Two-thirds of the
276,000 applications for low-interest home-rebuilding loans-earmarked
for low-income families-have yet to be reviewed. Worse, of those
reviewed, more than 80 percent have been rejected, on the grounds that
applicants' incomes or credit ratings were too low.
Protests from the hurricane victims have multiplied. What does the White
House do? It announces that it will "allocate" another $1.5 billion to
rebuild the breached levees. That should mute the protests from the
legions of Gulf Coasters now living as refugees in trailer parks and
motels. All aboard the Public Relations Express!
===========================
A fearless (secular) Arab American
March 4, 2006
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060303-090939-8482r.htm
To judge by her appearances on al Jazeera, Los Angeles psychologist Wafa
Sultan is the very definition of fearlessness. Face-to-face with radical
Islamists before millions of potentially hostile viewers around the Arab
world, Ms. Sultan -- a secular Arab American fluent in Arabic -- does
not flinch when called a heretic and a blasphemer. For all we know, she
is endangering her life.
Her latest appearance took place Feb. 21, when Ms. Sultan engaged the
Egyptian cleric Ibrahim Al-Khouli in a live debate about the "clash of
civilizations" on the talk show "The Other Direction" on al Jazeera TV.
The transcript and subtitled video are available in English
(www.memri.org). "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a
clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations," she said. "It is a
clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a
mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that
belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and
backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity
and rationality ... What we see today is not a clash of civilizations."
Turning to her Egyptian interlocutor Mr. Al-Khouli, she asks, "What
gives you the right to call [Christians] 'those who incur Allah's
wrath,' or 'those who have gone astray,' and then come here and say that
your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of
others?" Mr. Al-Khouli had previously compared Christians to apes and
pigs. "I am not a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew. I am a secular human
being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right
to believe in it."
"Are you a heretic?" Mr. Al-Khouli asks.
"You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not
believe in the supernatural," she responds.
"If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have
blasphemed against Islam, the prophet and the Koran."
"These are personal matters that do not concern you," she says.
"Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at
me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs
are not your concern ... Let people have their beliefs."
She then issues an even greater provocation. "We have not seen a single
Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single
Jew destroy a church ... Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by
burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This
path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what
they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect
them." This isn't the first time Ms. Sultan has engaged radical
Islamists: In July MEMRI translated her al Jazeera face-off with the
Algerian Islamist Ahmad Bin Muhammad on the subject of Palestinian
suicide bombers. Ms. Sultan "absolutely puts herself at risk" by
appearing on this program, a MEMRI staffer told The Washington Times.
Which seems about right: Her remarks are as or more provocative as
Salman Rushdie's.
Copyright ) 2006 News World Communications, Inc.
=======================
thanks to B. Zannelli
C Hamilton
a moderator of
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