Category: Politics

The state of Justice in Cheney’s America: a navy lawyer is being prosecuted because…

… he mailed a New York law firm a list identifying detainees who were being held at Guantánamo.
The government had a legal obligation to disclose the names…
The Pentagon mounted a number of increasingly absurd arguments in defending this suit, principally saying that it was entitled to withhold the names of the detainees because it would “invade their privacy” for this information to be disclosed. The federal court hearing the matter was not amused by these evasions, and ordered the disclosure of the data. Accordingly, under federal court order, the data was turned over to the AP and published.
So the names of the detainees were required to be disclosed. Their non-disclosure was a criminal act. A federal court compelled their disclosure. And now a Guantánamo JAG is being prosecuted for disclosing the names.

There’s an appalling case documented in The Guardian:

A Muslim woman forcibly separated from her Hindu husband by Malaysia’s Islamic authorities after 21 years of happy marriage wept inconsolably yesterday after a judge endorsed her decision to hand custody of six of her seven children to her former spouse.
In an unprecedented move for Malaysia – where Islamic religious laws are strictly enforced – the children, aged four to 14, will be raised as Hindus despite being born to a Muslim mother. Last month Selangor state’s Islamic authorities took Raimah Bibi Noordin, 39, and her children away for “rehabilitation” and religious counselling after belatedly declaring that her marriage was illegal.

In a recent comment, Conskeptical pointed out “you can’t effectively, or informedly, change something you’re not part of”. And he’s right, of course. But there are several things we can do:
As Conskeptical also said, “When in Rome, behave as the Romans do.” When people arrive in the US or Western Europe, we have to emphasize that we’re not going to compromise our legal and cultural principles to accommodate what they may have been used to. There will be no sharia law in Bradford or Oslo, and spousal abuse will not be condoned. We should make sure that this is never repeated:

[T]he woman, as a Muslim, should have “expected” it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the “right to use corporal punishment”. Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you.

This was in Germany, not in Malaysia or Saudi Arabia.
We also need to be vigilant about the way in which religious bigotry can creep into our Western political and legal fabric. Andrew Sullivan has a good summary of the way in which the right is fighting to prevent homosexuals being added to the groups that are covered by hate crime legislation. Anyone who believes that this isn’t about pandering to religious fundamentalism need to get out more. Just like the C of E bishops in England, the message is same: we want our bigotry to be exempt from legal sanction. That slippery slope leads to forcing women to the back of the bus, busting up families based on their choice of mythology, and worse. Just say no….

According to a piece entitled America’s war on tourists:

…overseas travel to the US has slumped 17 per cent since 2001, even as world travel to other countries reaches historic growth levels. The decline has cost US$94 billion… in visitor spending, US$16 billion in tax receipts, and some 194,000 American jobs.
…
Interestingly, the poll suggested US foreign policy was not “a significant factor” in global dissatisfaction with the US, but that US entry policies were.

The slump in tourism to the US comes in the middle of a worldwide boom in overseas travel. The USA is singled out by travellers because of the way they are treated:

Before September 11, US airport staff often seemed to err on the laid-back rather than on the vigilant side. Now some overzealous officials appear to regard all tourists as potential terrorists. Entering America can feel like running the gauntlet.
“We are citizens of a country regarded as one of the closest allies the US has,” frequent British visitor Ian Jeffrey told the Orlando Sentinel last November. “Yet on arrival we are treated like suspects in a criminal investigation and made to feel very unwelcome.”

Personally I think that the EC countries should duplicate the US policies exactly – fingerprints, retina scans, arbitrary visa delays, abusive officials – but only for US visitors. And they should put up posters around their airports explaining the reason for their actions, and suggesting that if US visitors don’t like it, they ought to call their congress-critters.
(Of course they won’t do this, because – unlike the US, apparently – they have no wish to cripple their tourist industry.)

The Paul Wolfowitz affair is provoking the usual partisan food-fight, complete with bellowing Hitchens, and it’s dragging on much longer than I expected. I’ve read the arguments from both sides, and frankly they all carried much less weight than did one little detail in Blumenthal’s piece in Salon.com last week:

But in 2006 Wolfowitz made a series of calls to his friends that landed her a job at a new think tank called Foundation for the Future that is funded by the State Department. She was the sole employee, at least in the beginning. The World Bank continued to pay her salary, which was raised by $60,000 to $193,590 annually, more than the $183,500 paid to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all of it tax-free. Moreover, Wolfowitz got the State Department to agree that the ratings of her performance would automatically be “outstanding.” Wolfowitz insisted on these terms himself and then misled the World Bank board about what he had done.

Automatically “outstanding”. What a deeply cynical, self-important, “fuck-you” touch. This is what distinguishes a “painful forced choice” from an act of brazen, selfish nepotism.
Firing’s too good for him. Wolfowitz should be made to walk the plank by the Crimson Permanent Assurance.
UPDATE: Hallelujah! Someone has actually found a funny angle to this whole sordid affair. And it’s a beaut!

There’s a sobering piece by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent entitled And they call it peace: Inside Iraq, four years on:

The difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous to know what is happening in most of the country outside central Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace; untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the attempt. My best bet was to go to Sulaymaniyah[…] then drive south, sticking to a road running through Kurdish towns and villages to Khanaqin, a relatively safe Kurdish enclave in north-east Diyala province, one of the more violent places in Iraq.
We start for the south through heavy rain, and turn sharp east at Kalar, a grubby Kurdish town, to Jalawlah, a mixed Kurdish and Arab town where there has been fighting. […] We go to the heavily guarded office of the deputy head of the PUK, Mamosta Saleh, who says the situation in Diyala is getting worse. The insurgents have control of Baquba, the provincial capital….
Baquba is only 30 miles from Baghdad. It is as if the government in London had lost control of Reading.

Or as if the government in Washington DC had lost control of Annapolis or Baltimore..

Here’s a moving response by Andrew Sullivan to the odious Coulter, and the bigots who support her. Money quote:

What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men “boys”? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that’s what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said – and conservatives applauded – that I and so many others are not men.

The first two paragraphs of this story in the Washington Post make it very clear why no Republican (or Joe Liebermann) has any moral right to castigate others about “supporting the troops”.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Hat tip to Jesus’ General, who puts the point even more graphically. And Maha cites it in her devastating fisking of the odious Jeff Jacoby’s slimy op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. Jacoby is one reason I don’t miss the Boston press too much.]

File under “You can’t make this stuff up”: Salon.com has this gem from today’s White House press briefing:

Reporter: Slides from a prewar briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
Tony Snow: I’m not sure anything went wrong.

I’m all for people celebrating their varieties of cultural heritage, acknowledging their history, and so forth. But for me such things end at the school gates. I’m vehemently opposed to sectarian or religious schools of all stripes. (I’m not particularly enthusiastic about any kind of private schooling, but in practice there are always going to be children whose individual needs and aptitudes cannot be accomodated within the public system. But this should depend on the needs of the child, not the prejudices of the parents.) Once you allow bishops, priests, rabbis, and creationist car-dealers to dictate the curriculum, you’re going to wind up with situations like this:

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as “apes” and Christians as “pigs” and has refused to withdraw them. Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton. In an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight, Dr Alyusuf was asked by Jeremy Paxman whether she recognised the books. She said: “Yes, I do recognise these books, of course. We have these books in our school. These books have good chapters that can be used by the teachers. It depends on the objectives the teacher wants to achieve.”

And what might those objectives be? Well:

[Mr. Cook] also alleges that when he questioned whether the curriculum complied with British laws, he was told: “This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia”.

To Christians and Jews who would argue that such books don’t belong in the classroom: I agree. And the same goes for your own religious texts, which also contain viciously intolerant language.

It looks as if the White House has found a worthy successor to Donald Rumsfeld. Spencer Ackermann reports here on the confirmation hearings for Admiral Bill Fallon, the new commander of US forces in the Middle East. After dodging most of the questions, Fallon produced this gem:

Perhaps most egregiously, when hawkish Republican Senator Lindsay Graham fished for an endorsement of his view that the US can win in Iraq, Fallon commented, “I don’t know what ‘winning’ is,” before pausing, realizing that he might have just made some unfortunate headlines, and backpedaling.