As Albert Camus once said, "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor." After tonight's speech, there can be little doubt that Afghanistan will be, for Obama, the Sisyphus war.
At best, war is a difficult enterprise, but by his decision to fan the fires of a conflict that is languishing, and extinguishing itself, this president will share the distinction, with Sisyphus, of endlessly trying to defy gravity.
This was a speech of contradictions--an increase of troops in order to facilitate withdrawal, a desire to stabilize, and support an unstable, and corrupt government, and a refrain that has become at once familiar, and tired, one that harps on 9/11 as justification for prolonging a struggle from which even Sisyphus would have been spared.
Who can forget image of Gates and Clinton, Defense and State, sitting side by side, collaborators in seeing to it that this newest inhabitant of the Oval Office is fed his minimum daily requirement of Kool-Aid. Only one who forgets that U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan longer than Iraq could accept the rationale behind not merely extending their stay, but increasing their numbers by 50%.
Have those who govern this country become so cynical that they think the American public will believe, even for an instant, that we're sending a fresh crop of young men and women into harm's way to inflict "freedom" on yet another part of the world?
Do the heads of State and Defense, and the commander-in-chief, expect any literate adult to believe that it's possible to eradicate bin Laden, and Al Qaeda, without involving Pakistan?
Is it any secret who trained bin Laden when he was a Freedom Fighter in Afghanistan? Is there any doubt about where U.S. funds went that were funneled into Pakistan for the ten plus year period during which General Musharraf ruled?
Why would anyone expect to find a fugitive from the CIA, one who was allowed to escape months after 9/11, to be hiding out in the same cave in Tora Bora for the past eight plus years?
The target date for withdrawal is eighteen months away. In light of the eight years already invested in the region, there can be little doubt that in July, 2011, this administration, like that of its predecessor, may find itself condemned to watching a rock fall back on itself.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Caught in the Cross Fire
The President spoke to thousands of cadets at West Point on Tuesday and, as anticipated, announced the deployment of another 30,000 troops starting after the first of the year.
Cameras scanned the crowded auditorium where the speech was delivered. One could see the fresh, if sombre faces of those who have chosen the military as their career, and will soon be called upon to join the front lines an ever-expanding battlefield thousands of miles away.
Forgetting, for a moment, whether or not the World Trade Center was attacked by Afghanistan in 2001, and forgetting whether or not it was Al Qaeda or the Taliban who attacked us; forgetting, too, whether Al Qaeda is even in Afghanistan, and overlooking the quintessential question -- how can any serious effort at counterinsurgency not at least partially include Pakistan, one's focus was inextricably drawn not to those were present to hear this latest war speech, but those who were absent.
Looking around the auditorium at West Point, what one didn't see are the faces of those service men and women who, in a moment of anguish, ended their lives while on duty in Iraq, and Afghanistan. What is not factored into military service is what the Defense Department has tried to sweep under the rug, over the past eight plus years, the fact that the suicide rate over the past decade among combat forces has reached record levels. And, while efforts at containment appear to be working, combat suicides in 2008 will be the highest yet.
When called upon to send condolence letters to families of those who have served their country honorably, and given their lives in military service, the President will not be writing a personal letter to loved ones of those who committed suicide. So far this year, there have been more than 60 confirmed suicides in the Army alone. In a culture of machismo, despair is seen as a sign of weakness. By not acknowledging the service of those who have succumbed to despair, the subliminal message is "stay tough out there," but toughness is not synonymous with insensitivity. Indeed, insensitivity, and feelings of invulnerability often lead to the kinds of abuses by interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
Being in touch with the reality of armed conflict can only lead to despair. Being called upon for protracted, and repeat tours of duty often does result, understandably, in depression.
When President Obama addressed those spanking clean uniforms at West Point, he was not addressing a group of pawns on a global chessboard. This speech was not intended to be a pep rally for a Special Ops videogame. These are not toy soldiers. They are young men and women prepared to die for their country and, more precisely, for the illusion that they're dying for their country. The commmander-in-chief owes it to them to acknowledge their efforts, great or small, even those whose disillusionment has led them to turn their weapons on themselves.
The White House has said that not sending letters to families of soldiers who have committed suicide is longstanding policy, and one that is not of their making, but it is an egregious policy that needs to be overturned. All this policy does is transfer feelings of hopelessness, worthless, and disenfranchisement from the fallen service member to loved ones back home.
And, factoring out the whys and wherefores, whether this administration is telling the truth or not about the reasons for U.S. involvement in the region, as long as there are any troops going to war at all, it is just and reasonable for the commander-in-chief to formally acknowledge, and honor, all those who have served this country, even those trapped in a cross fire not of their making.
Cameras scanned the crowded auditorium where the speech was delivered. One could see the fresh, if sombre faces of those who have chosen the military as their career, and will soon be called upon to join the front lines an ever-expanding battlefield thousands of miles away.
Forgetting, for a moment, whether or not the World Trade Center was attacked by Afghanistan in 2001, and forgetting whether or not it was Al Qaeda or the Taliban who attacked us; forgetting, too, whether Al Qaeda is even in Afghanistan, and overlooking the quintessential question -- how can any serious effort at counterinsurgency not at least partially include Pakistan, one's focus was inextricably drawn not to those were present to hear this latest war speech, but those who were absent.
Looking around the auditorium at West Point, what one didn't see are the faces of those service men and women who, in a moment of anguish, ended their lives while on duty in Iraq, and Afghanistan. What is not factored into military service is what the Defense Department has tried to sweep under the rug, over the past eight plus years, the fact that the suicide rate over the past decade among combat forces has reached record levels. And, while efforts at containment appear to be working, combat suicides in 2008 will be the highest yet.
When called upon to send condolence letters to families of those who have served their country honorably, and given their lives in military service, the President will not be writing a personal letter to loved ones of those who committed suicide. So far this year, there have been more than 60 confirmed suicides in the Army alone. In a culture of machismo, despair is seen as a sign of weakness. By not acknowledging the service of those who have succumbed to despair, the subliminal message is "stay tough out there," but toughness is not synonymous with insensitivity. Indeed, insensitivity, and feelings of invulnerability often lead to the kinds of abuses by interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
Being in touch with the reality of armed conflict can only lead to despair. Being called upon for protracted, and repeat tours of duty often does result, understandably, in depression.
When President Obama addressed those spanking clean uniforms at West Point, he was not addressing a group of pawns on a global chessboard. This speech was not intended to be a pep rally for a Special Ops videogame. These are not toy soldiers. They are young men and women prepared to die for their country and, more precisely, for the illusion that they're dying for their country. The commmander-in-chief owes it to them to acknowledge their efforts, great or small, even those whose disillusionment has led them to turn their weapons on themselves.
The White House has said that not sending letters to families of soldiers who have committed suicide is longstanding policy, and one that is not of their making, but it is an egregious policy that needs to be overturned. All this policy does is transfer feelings of hopelessness, worthless, and disenfranchisement from the fallen service member to loved ones back home.
And, factoring out the whys and wherefores, whether this administration is telling the truth or not about the reasons for U.S. involvement in the region, as long as there are any troops going to war at all, it is just and reasonable for the commander-in-chief to formally acknowledge, and honor, all those who have served this country, even those trapped in a cross fire not of their making.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
We Give Thanks
We Give Thanks
We give thanks for those who came before
We give thanks for those yet to come
for those who have served in war and
those who have served to make peace.
We give thanks to the farmers
the teachers
the iron workers
the skydivers
those in prison who have not abandoned hope
those who bring us our daily news
those who bring us into this world naked and bloody and
those who follow us out.
We give thanks to those who have led
this great nation in times of plenty and
in times of less
and to those who have yet to be called upon to lead
thanks for the future and the past
for that sparkling hybrid moment we call now
for all that has been,
and all that is yet to be.
(c) Jayne Lyn Stahl
Thanksgiving day, 2009
We give thanks for those who came before
We give thanks for those yet to come
for those who have served in war and
those who have served to make peace.
We give thanks to the farmers
the teachers
the iron workers
the skydivers
those in prison who have not abandoned hope
those who bring us our daily news
those who bring us into this world naked and bloody and
those who follow us out.
We give thanks to those who have led
this great nation in times of plenty and
in times of less
and to those who have yet to be called upon to lead
thanks for the future and the past
for that sparkling hybrid moment we call now
for all that has been,
and all that is yet to be.
(c) Jayne Lyn Stahl
Thanksgiving day, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
IF...
If this country took the war on poverty half as seriously as it takes the war on terror, no child would go to bed hungry in America tonight.
Hungry and Poor in America: Let's Finish the Job Here
The local news was replete with images of First Lady Michelle Obama in the elegant, strapless designer gown she wore for this White House's first state dinner.
Don't get me wrong, I like to look at gowns by Naeem Khan as much as anyone, but as we edge closer to that holiday most often associated with abundance, and overindulgence, one can't help but be distracted by the equally stunning number of people who find themselves hungry and poor this Thanksgiving.
More than 12% of all Americans know what it means to be poor in America. While they're conspicuously absent from reality T.V. shows, from box office movies, and political party platforms, they are increasingly visible at food banks, and shelters.
Nearly 50% of children in the U.S. will be on food stamps at some point before they reach adulthood as reported in study published by the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The research extends over a three decade period, and also shows that one in three white children, and 90% of African-American youngsters through age 20 will make use of federally subsidized food programs.
A staggering 50% of all Americans between 20 and 65 (4 out of every 10 adults in America) will use food stamps in their lifetimes. 85% of African-Americans will, at some point in their lives, need to use food stamps. African-Americans and Hispanics make up the leading groups of those experiencing the most egregious food deprivation.
In 2008 alone, according to Feeding America, the number of poor Americans grew to:
40 million, or 13% of all Americans
8 million families, or 10%,
22 million, or nearly 12%, of people between 18-64
14 million, or nearly 20%, of children under 18
Last year, too, 49 million people didn't have enough to eat (32 million adults and 17 million children). A disproportionate number of those are men, women, and children of color.
The number of households with inadequate food resources has increased by 3.5% from 2007-2008 alone.
Nearly 10% of households with seniors were food insecure.
3.6 million seniors, 65 and older, nearly one in ten, live in poverty
In 2002, 35 million people went hungry, a number that has increased by 50% in the past seven years.
Last year, 4% of all U.S. households, nearly 5 million Americans, accessed emergency food from a food pantry one or more times.
In 2008, too, more than 50% of all households experiencing hunger participated in one of the major federal food assistance programs, but that's not enough. Instead of the trillions of dollars this administration has committed to buying drones, building embassies in Iraq, and sending thousands of more servicemen and women into combat, we need to fight the war on poverty here at home.
An astonishing 40% of households headed by single women have food shortages.
Too often, politicians of both parties speak of the need to save the middle class, but nobody talks about the working poor. There is little mention of those who return from the battlefield only to struggle to keep their homes, their dignity, and find a way to feed their families.
Some might argue that Congress is making a good start by working to pass legislation that will enable more Americans to get affordable health insurance, but that's only a start. There is something desperately wrong with a country that provides bailouts for its banks, and its fortune 500 carpetbaggers, but cannot provide for its children and seniors.
If even half the resources the government has allocated for the war on terror were to be spent instead on a war on poverty, no child in America would go to bed hungry tonight.
And, when the president announced this week that he intends to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, clearly the job he needs to finish is here, and not in the Middle East.
Don't get me wrong, I like to look at gowns by Naeem Khan as much as anyone, but as we edge closer to that holiday most often associated with abundance, and overindulgence, one can't help but be distracted by the equally stunning number of people who find themselves hungry and poor this Thanksgiving.
More than 12% of all Americans know what it means to be poor in America. While they're conspicuously absent from reality T.V. shows, from box office movies, and political party platforms, they are increasingly visible at food banks, and shelters.
Nearly 50% of children in the U.S. will be on food stamps at some point before they reach adulthood as reported in study published by the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The research extends over a three decade period, and also shows that one in three white children, and 90% of African-American youngsters through age 20 will make use of federally subsidized food programs.
A staggering 50% of all Americans between 20 and 65 (4 out of every 10 adults in America) will use food stamps in their lifetimes. 85% of African-Americans will, at some point in their lives, need to use food stamps. African-Americans and Hispanics make up the leading groups of those experiencing the most egregious food deprivation.
In 2008 alone, according to Feeding America, the number of poor Americans grew to:
40 million, or 13% of all Americans
8 million families, or 10%,
22 million, or nearly 12%, of people between 18-64
14 million, or nearly 20%, of children under 18
Last year, too, 49 million people didn't have enough to eat (32 million adults and 17 million children). A disproportionate number of those are men, women, and children of color.
The number of households with inadequate food resources has increased by 3.5% from 2007-2008 alone.
Nearly 10% of households with seniors were food insecure.
3.6 million seniors, 65 and older, nearly one in ten, live in poverty
In 2002, 35 million people went hungry, a number that has increased by 50% in the past seven years.
Last year, 4% of all U.S. households, nearly 5 million Americans, accessed emergency food from a food pantry one or more times.
In 2008, too, more than 50% of all households experiencing hunger participated in one of the major federal food assistance programs, but that's not enough. Instead of the trillions of dollars this administration has committed to buying drones, building embassies in Iraq, and sending thousands of more servicemen and women into combat, we need to fight the war on poverty here at home.
An astonishing 40% of households headed by single women have food shortages.
Too often, politicians of both parties speak of the need to save the middle class, but nobody talks about the working poor. There is little mention of those who return from the battlefield only to struggle to keep their homes, their dignity, and find a way to feed their families.
Some might argue that Congress is making a good start by working to pass legislation that will enable more Americans to get affordable health insurance, but that's only a start. There is something desperately wrong with a country that provides bailouts for its banks, and its fortune 500 carpetbaggers, but cannot provide for its children and seniors.
If even half the resources the government has allocated for the war on terror were to be spent instead on a war on poverty, no child in America would go to bed hungry tonight.
And, when the president announced this week that he intends to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, clearly the job he needs to finish is here, and not in the Middle East.
"A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving" by Michael Winship
Courtesy of "Bill Moyers Journal," and Public Affairs Television:
A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving
By Michael Winship
Give thanks. Because this isn't one of those Thanksgiving lists of things for which we should be grateful -- although health, family, friends, laughter, etc., would certainly all be on mine.
And Jane Goodall.
Yes, that Jane Goodall, the woman we all grew up with watching those National Geographic specials on TV as she communed with the chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe National Park in East Africa. Everyone I know seems especially to remember those scenes of chimps ingeniously utilizing straw and blades of grass to poke around in mounds hunting for termites, proof that they know how to make and use tools. I still have trouble opening a can of tuna.
Goodall was interviewed by my colleague Bill Moyers for this week's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS. She began her work in Africa in 1960 at the age of 26, spurred by the encouragement of her English mother and the great anthropologist Louis Leakey, as well as the African adventure books she read as a child. "I was in love with Tarzan," she told Moyers. "I was so jealous of that wimpy Jane. I knew I
would have been a better mate for Tarzan."
I'm especially thankful to Jane Goodall after reading the passage in Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" in which the erstwhile vice presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska writes that she doesn't "believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into
monkeys who eventually swung down from trees."
She could learn a thing or two from the chimps. Goodall sees our affinity with them as like "the bond between mother and child, which really for us and chimps and other primates is the root of all the expressions of social behavior you can sort of see mirrored in the mother/child relationship."
But chimpanzees can be violent, too, and Goodall says, "Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence is inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that I do believe we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary past. I mean, you can't look around the world and not realize that we can be, and often are, extremely brutal and aggressive."
But, she adds, "Equally, we have inherited tendencies of love, compassion, and altruism, because they're there in the chimp. So, we've brought those with us. So, it's like each one of us has this dark side. And a more noble side. And I guess it's up to each one of us to push one down and develop the other."
Jane Goodall has never seen a conflict between religion and evolution. "I don't think that faith, whatever you're being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained," she said. "And I don't want to explain this whole life business. Truth, science. There's so much mystery. There's so much awe.
"I mean, what is it that makes the chimpanzees do these spectacular displays, rain dances -- I call them waterfall dances. At the foot of this waterfall, [they] sit in the spray and watch the water that's always coming and always going and always there. It's wonder. It's awe. And if they had the same kind of language that we have, I suspect that [they would turn it] into-- some kind of animistic religion."
In 1986, after two and a half decades of quiet research in the African forest, Goodall's career took a dramatic turn at a conference of scientists studying chimpanzees. During a session on conservation, she said that it was "shocking" to learn that across Africa, because of deforestation, the explosion of human population and commercial hunting of animals for food, the chimpanzee population had "plummeted from somewhere between one and two million at the turn of the last century to, at that time, about 400,000. So I came out - I couldn't go back to
that old, beautiful, wonderful life."
She now spends more than 300 days out of the year traveling, speaking out, rallying people to see ourselves as caretakers of the natural world, and inspiring us with word that all is not yet lost. Her Jane Goodall Institute works ceaselessly for the worldwide protection of habitat, and her program "Roots and Shoots" now has chapters in 114 countries, working to make young people more environmentally aware. "I could kill myself trying to save chimps and forests," she said to Bill Moyers. "But if we're not raising new generations to be better stewards than we've been, then we might as well give up."
The worldwide chimp population is down to fewer than 300,000 now, spread across isolated fragments of forest, Goodall says, in 21 African nations. Moyers asked, what do we lose if the last chimp goes? "We lose one window into learning about our long course of evolution," she replied.
"I've spent so long looking into these minds that are fascinating, because they're so like us. And yet they're in another world. And I think the magic is, I will never know what they're thinking... And so, it's like elephants and gorillas, and all the different animals that we are pushing toward extinction...
"There's a saying, 'We haven't inherited this planet from our parents,
we've borrowed it from our children.' When you borrow, you plan to pay
back. We've been stealing and stealing and stealing. And it's about time
we got together and started paying back."
That's as good a Thanksgiving wish as I can imagine.
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local
airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. Additional
research provided by producer Candace White and associate producer Diane
Chang.
A Jane Goodall Thanksgiving
By Michael Winship
Give thanks. Because this isn't one of those Thanksgiving lists of things for which we should be grateful -- although health, family, friends, laughter, etc., would certainly all be on mine.
And Jane Goodall.
Yes, that Jane Goodall, the woman we all grew up with watching those National Geographic specials on TV as she communed with the chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe National Park in East Africa. Everyone I know seems especially to remember those scenes of chimps ingeniously utilizing straw and blades of grass to poke around in mounds hunting for termites, proof that they know how to make and use tools. I still have trouble opening a can of tuna.
Goodall was interviewed by my colleague Bill Moyers for this week's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS. She began her work in Africa in 1960 at the age of 26, spurred by the encouragement of her English mother and the great anthropologist Louis Leakey, as well as the African adventure books she read as a child. "I was in love with Tarzan," she told Moyers. "I was so jealous of that wimpy Jane. I knew I
would have been a better mate for Tarzan."
I'm especially thankful to Jane Goodall after reading the passage in Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" in which the erstwhile vice presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska writes that she doesn't "believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into
monkeys who eventually swung down from trees."
She could learn a thing or two from the chimps. Goodall sees our affinity with them as like "the bond between mother and child, which really for us and chimps and other primates is the root of all the expressions of social behavior you can sort of see mirrored in the mother/child relationship."
But chimpanzees can be violent, too, and Goodall says, "Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence is inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that I do believe we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary past. I mean, you can't look around the world and not realize that we can be, and often are, extremely brutal and aggressive."
But, she adds, "Equally, we have inherited tendencies of love, compassion, and altruism, because they're there in the chimp. So, we've brought those with us. So, it's like each one of us has this dark side. And a more noble side. And I guess it's up to each one of us to push one down and develop the other."
Jane Goodall has never seen a conflict between religion and evolution. "I don't think that faith, whatever you're being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained," she said. "And I don't want to explain this whole life business. Truth, science. There's so much mystery. There's so much awe.
"I mean, what is it that makes the chimpanzees do these spectacular displays, rain dances -- I call them waterfall dances. At the foot of this waterfall, [they] sit in the spray and watch the water that's always coming and always going and always there. It's wonder. It's awe. And if they had the same kind of language that we have, I suspect that [they would turn it] into-- some kind of animistic religion."
In 1986, after two and a half decades of quiet research in the African forest, Goodall's career took a dramatic turn at a conference of scientists studying chimpanzees. During a session on conservation, she said that it was "shocking" to learn that across Africa, because of deforestation, the explosion of human population and commercial hunting of animals for food, the chimpanzee population had "plummeted from somewhere between one and two million at the turn of the last century to, at that time, about 400,000. So I came out - I couldn't go back to
that old, beautiful, wonderful life."
She now spends more than 300 days out of the year traveling, speaking out, rallying people to see ourselves as caretakers of the natural world, and inspiring us with word that all is not yet lost. Her Jane Goodall Institute works ceaselessly for the worldwide protection of habitat, and her program "Roots and Shoots" now has chapters in 114 countries, working to make young people more environmentally aware. "I could kill myself trying to save chimps and forests," she said to Bill Moyers. "But if we're not raising new generations to be better stewards than we've been, then we might as well give up."
The worldwide chimp population is down to fewer than 300,000 now, spread across isolated fragments of forest, Goodall says, in 21 African nations. Moyers asked, what do we lose if the last chimp goes? "We lose one window into learning about our long course of evolution," she replied.
"I've spent so long looking into these minds that are fascinating, because they're so like us. And yet they're in another world. And I think the magic is, I will never know what they're thinking... And so, it's like elephants and gorillas, and all the different animals that we are pushing toward extinction...
"There's a saying, 'We haven't inherited this planet from our parents,
we've borrowed it from our children.' When you borrow, you plan to pay
back. We've been stealing and stealing and stealing. And it's about time
we got together and started paying back."
That's as good a Thanksgiving wish as I can imagine.
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local
airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. Additional
research provided by producer Candace White and associate producer Diane
Chang.
Friday, November 20, 2009
"New York Is Tough Enough For Terrorist Trials," Michael Winship
Courtesy of Bill Moyers Journal, and Public Affairs Television:
New York's Tough Enough for Terrorist Trials
By Michael Winship
If you want to royally tick off New Yorkers, try telling us what to do.
That's probably why the police stopped trying to enforce the jaywalking laws here years ago (as opposed to Washington, DC, where I once got one too many tickets and was sent to pedestrian school).
And that's why in the weeks after 9/11, my favorite sign was the one that appeared in the windows of Italian-American neighborhoods near where I live downtown. In bright red, white and blue, it read: "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You got a problem with that?"
So imagine how pleased many of us were when told by conservatives - most of them from out-of-town -- that we should be very afraid that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of his Al Qaeda henchmen will be put on trial here in New York City, just blocks from the scene of their horrific crime, the World Trade Center.
My own unscientific survey indicates that most of us who live not far from Ground Zero and who were here on 9/11 see it as an appropriate and just venue and aren't afraid that the trial will result in terrorist retribution. And if for some reason it should, we will stand up in righteous, rational indignation, the way we New Yorkers do on an almost daily basis, whether the source of vexation is slight or extreme.
I immediately thought of the moment in Casablanca, when the supercilious Nazi, Major Strasser, asks Humphrey Bogart if he's one of those who can't imagine Germans occupying New York. Bogart replies, "There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade."
The response of Arizona Republican Congressman John Shadegg was especially offensive. After noting that Mayor Mike Bloomberg had said that New Yorkers are tough and could handle the trial and its attendant commotion, Rep. Shadegg declared on the floor of the House, "Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the judge's wife? Or the jailer's little brother or little sister?"
Rep. Shadegg wound up apologizing, although he insisted the point survived his insensitivity - "I think it is important to note that this decision involves potential risk to innocent people," he said. But even Rupert Murdoch's right wing New York Post took offense, describing Shadegg's remarks as "the outrageously shameless use of Bloomberg's children as debating points."
Two local politicians who should know better did speak out in opposition to a federal trial here in Manhattan, but to a large degree their motives can be perceived as mercenary. Both men are or may be running for statewide office, and polling outside the city indicates that when it comes to a civilian trial, a sizable majority has bought into the fearmongering.
Former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who became such a hero in New York as he walked the rubble-strewn streets on 9/11, and who has been bandied about the media as a potential candidate for governor or the US Senate, fell into conservative lockstep and told CBS News, "There is no reason to try them in a civilian court. Others are going to be tried in the military tribunal. And the reality is we've never done this before. And this is something that was pushed very, very hard by the left wing for President Obama to do."
Which is odd, because back in 2006, when a civilian jury sentenced 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to life without parole, Giuliani told Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" that while he would have preferred the death penalty, the verdict "does show that we have a legal system, that we follow it, that we respect it. And it is exactly what is missing in the parts of the world or a lot of the parts of the world that are breeding terrorism... it does say something pretty remarkable about us, doesn't it?"
What's more, when blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahmanm, the architect of the first Trade Center bombing in 1993, was convicted in New York federal court, Giuliani said, "It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law... I think he's going to be a symbol of American justice."
More baffling was New York's Democratic Governor David Paterson, who told The New York Times, "This is not a decision I would have made... We still have been unable to rebuild that site, and having those terrorists tried so close to the attack is going to be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers." But the governor's popularity is so low and election chances next year so slim he is desperate for the slightest grit of traction. A Siena College poll this week had 69% saying they would vote for someone else. At this point, he probably would allow himself to be pulled between two farm tractors if he thought it might help him carry upstate.
Paterson's position also seemed to puzzle US Attorney General Eric Holder - a New Yorker, by the way - who last week announced the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow conspirator here in the city. When told of Paterson's comments, he said to the New York Daily News, "It's a little inconsistent with what he told me last week."
Attorney General Holder, in this instance at least, has been the consistent one, unwavering over the rightness of his decision while admitting that it was a "tough call, and reasonable people can disagree with my conclusion."
On Wednesday he handled four hours of often harshly critical questioning from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and then met with families of 9/11 victims. He countered the opposition's main objections. "We know that we can prosecute terrorists in our federal courts safely and securely because we have been doing it for years," Holder said, and the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) "establishes strict rules for the use of classified information at trial."
As for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - often identified simply as KSM -- and his track record of rabid histrionics, Holder said that the terrorist "will have no more of a platform to spew his hateful ideology in federal court than he would have in military commissions... "Judges in federal court have firm control over the conduct of defendants and other participants in their courtrooms, and when the 9/11 conspirators are brought to trial, I have every confidence that the presiding judge will ensure appropriate decorum. And if KSM makes the same statements he made in his military commission proceedings, I have every confidence the nation and the world will see him for the coward he is. I'm not scared of what KSM will have to say at trial -- and no one else needs to be either."
Which seems right to me and my friends who stood on our neighborhood streets and watched those towers burn and fall. You got a problem with that?
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
New York's Tough Enough for Terrorist Trials
By Michael Winship
If you want to royally tick off New Yorkers, try telling us what to do.
That's probably why the police stopped trying to enforce the jaywalking laws here years ago (as opposed to Washington, DC, where I once got one too many tickets and was sent to pedestrian school).
And that's why in the weeks after 9/11, my favorite sign was the one that appeared in the windows of Italian-American neighborhoods near where I live downtown. In bright red, white and blue, it read: "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You got a problem with that?"
So imagine how pleased many of us were when told by conservatives - most of them from out-of-town -- that we should be very afraid that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of his Al Qaeda henchmen will be put on trial here in New York City, just blocks from the scene of their horrific crime, the World Trade Center.
My own unscientific survey indicates that most of us who live not far from Ground Zero and who were here on 9/11 see it as an appropriate and just venue and aren't afraid that the trial will result in terrorist retribution. And if for some reason it should, we will stand up in righteous, rational indignation, the way we New Yorkers do on an almost daily basis, whether the source of vexation is slight or extreme.
I immediately thought of the moment in Casablanca, when the supercilious Nazi, Major Strasser, asks Humphrey Bogart if he's one of those who can't imagine Germans occupying New York. Bogart replies, "There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade."
The response of Arizona Republican Congressman John Shadegg was especially offensive. After noting that Mayor Mike Bloomberg had said that New Yorkers are tough and could handle the trial and its attendant commotion, Rep. Shadegg declared on the floor of the House, "Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped? Or the judge's wife? Or the jailer's little brother or little sister?"
Rep. Shadegg wound up apologizing, although he insisted the point survived his insensitivity - "I think it is important to note that this decision involves potential risk to innocent people," he said. But even Rupert Murdoch's right wing New York Post took offense, describing Shadegg's remarks as "the outrageously shameless use of Bloomberg's children as debating points."
Two local politicians who should know better did speak out in opposition to a federal trial here in Manhattan, but to a large degree their motives can be perceived as mercenary. Both men are or may be running for statewide office, and polling outside the city indicates that when it comes to a civilian trial, a sizable majority has bought into the fearmongering.
Former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who became such a hero in New York as he walked the rubble-strewn streets on 9/11, and who has been bandied about the media as a potential candidate for governor or the US Senate, fell into conservative lockstep and told CBS News, "There is no reason to try them in a civilian court. Others are going to be tried in the military tribunal. And the reality is we've never done this before. And this is something that was pushed very, very hard by the left wing for President Obama to do."
Which is odd, because back in 2006, when a civilian jury sentenced 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to life without parole, Giuliani told Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" that while he would have preferred the death penalty, the verdict "does show that we have a legal system, that we follow it, that we respect it. And it is exactly what is missing in the parts of the world or a lot of the parts of the world that are breeding terrorism... it does say something pretty remarkable about us, doesn't it?"
What's more, when blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahmanm, the architect of the first Trade Center bombing in 1993, was convicted in New York federal court, Giuliani said, "It does demonstrate that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law... I think he's going to be a symbol of American justice."
More baffling was New York's Democratic Governor David Paterson, who told The New York Times, "This is not a decision I would have made... We still have been unable to rebuild that site, and having those terrorists tried so close to the attack is going to be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers." But the governor's popularity is so low and election chances next year so slim he is desperate for the slightest grit of traction. A Siena College poll this week had 69% saying they would vote for someone else. At this point, he probably would allow himself to be pulled between two farm tractors if he thought it might help him carry upstate.
Paterson's position also seemed to puzzle US Attorney General Eric Holder - a New Yorker, by the way - who last week announced the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow conspirator here in the city. When told of Paterson's comments, he said to the New York Daily News, "It's a little inconsistent with what he told me last week."
Attorney General Holder, in this instance at least, has been the consistent one, unwavering over the rightness of his decision while admitting that it was a "tough call, and reasonable people can disagree with my conclusion."
On Wednesday he handled four hours of often harshly critical questioning from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and then met with families of 9/11 victims. He countered the opposition's main objections. "We know that we can prosecute terrorists in our federal courts safely and securely because we have been doing it for years," Holder said, and the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) "establishes strict rules for the use of classified information at trial."
As for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - often identified simply as KSM -- and his track record of rabid histrionics, Holder said that the terrorist "will have no more of a platform to spew his hateful ideology in federal court than he would have in military commissions... "Judges in federal court have firm control over the conduct of defendants and other participants in their courtrooms, and when the 9/11 conspirators are brought to trial, I have every confidence that the presiding judge will ensure appropriate decorum. And if KSM makes the same statements he made in his military commission proceedings, I have every confidence the nation and the world will see him for the coward he is. I'm not scared of what KSM will have to say at trial -- and no one else needs to be either."
Which seems right to me and my friends who stood on our neighborhood streets and watched those towers burn and fall. You got a problem with that?
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
An "Elegant President" in Cracker Country
Don't know if you happened to catch Frank Schaeffer on Rachel Maddow, but it was a riveting show. Given his own background as the son of a right-wing evangelist who recently converted, it would be wise to listen to Schaeffer pushing the panic button.
I confess, too, that I can't help thinking about what Sean Penn said when he learned that Barack Obama was elected. We have "an elegant president;" that was as good as it gets, as well as an interview Dick Cavett did, thirty years ago, with another elegant man---Jimi Hendrix.
On the show, Cavett spoke about "red necks," "white trash," and how difficult it was to be a gifted black musician in a devoutly racist country. Having had the good fortune to have met Jimi, I suspect that, apart from being an Obama supporter, he'd empathize with him, too.
Not as much has changed over the past few decades as we might like to think. Now there are those who say this president is taking us the wrong way down a one way street, that his vision is one that leads to bigger government, and less free enterprise.
And, there are others who think that Obama isn't heading in the direction of peace, disarmament, and transparency. They are disillusioned about this president's openness to hawkish generals when they thought that endgame was to get out of Iraq.
The best way not to get disillusioned is not to entertain illusions in the first place. Any president with a concrete plan for either disarmament, or imminent troop withdrawal would never have been elected.
George W. Bush is blamed for nearly thousands of American and Iraqi deaths in an eight year war, but it was George H.W. Bush who brought troops into Iraq in the first place. That Papa Bush rightly decided to shrug his shoulders, fold up his tent, declare victory in the Gulf, and go home doesn't mean that he wasn't responsible for the error that became a huge mistake.
Likewise, Lyndon B. Johnson is the president most often associated with the Vietnam War when it was his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, who arranged for the first troops to be deployed there. Johnson took an initial commitment of 15,000 troops and raised nearly ten times. In his last speech to the American people, Kennedy acknowledged that he was "rethinking" his commitment of troops to Vietnam, and had plans for phased withdrawal, a plan, not coincidentally, sabotaged by his assassination.
That "war is a racket" we know, and have known for as long as Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler wrote back in 1932. Still, Americans feign surprise, and disillusionment, when a president is elected who continues the status quo. Where war is concerned, the status quo is our best cash crop.
Others, like myself, see a presidency that is barely one quarter of the way along and remain optimistic that Mr. Obama, like Mr. Kennedy before him, will rethink his military objectives, and will share JFK's vision of "complete and total disarmament."
Some may say we've drunk the Kool-Aid, and that may be fair. But, there is no denying the precariousness of the more than 100 new paramilitary groups which, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, have sprung up since Obama took office. The threats from these fringe groups, these leftover Birchers are real. Demands on the secret service, the president's bodyguards, have increased by 400%.
While no one is suggesting blind obedience, Frank Schaeffer is right that we need to support this president, and pray for his safety. Those, on the left, who have been going after him with a viscera matching their radical right counterparts would be well advised to lighten up, and recognize that discourse has been racheted up such that it now poses a clear and present danger. The Tea Party of today is just as scary as the John Birch Society in Jimi Hendrix's day.
This is a presidency under siege, and those who confuse verbal dysentery with dissent do a disservice to the framer's notion of free speech.
To maintain a healthy political climate, disagreement must be accompanied by deference, and deference isn't coming from the right, or the left frankly.
One may disagree with a president's policies, yet still support the president. One may abjure the influence of special interests, the banksters, and Wall Street, and still press for extended unemployment benefits, a higher living wage, and greater access to affordable housing. One doesn't have to throw out the baby with the bath water.
While Afghanistan is clearly a quagmire, and a McChrystal surge would be a huge mistake, to articulate foreign policy differences with anything less than respect is a disservice to the civil rights efforts of Malcolm X, and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
Someday, what we now witness will be seen as nothing less than civil war, but it's about more than race, or party affiliation, it's a war between rich and poor. With our support of this president comes the implicit understanding that he was elected to represent the poor, and hungry. Anything short of that is unacceptable.
The only mandate that can work is one that mandates equal opportunity, and equal justice under the law. So far, I have heard no mention of that kind of mandate. If nothing else, this is one president who can be prevailed upon to listen.
Something is radically wrong when the rhetoric of the left can no longer be distinguished from that of the right. Anti-war posturing must not disintegrate into anti-Obama posturing.
And, more importantly, there is a racial component to the anti-Obama rhetoric that is especially troubling, one that must not be discounted, but addressed, or there will be a moral tsunami that will reverberate for generations.
The election of Barack Obama was not about seeing the world in black or white, but gray. The dream hasn't died. The dreamers have just woken up.
I confess, too, that I can't help thinking about what Sean Penn said when he learned that Barack Obama was elected. We have "an elegant president;" that was as good as it gets, as well as an interview Dick Cavett did, thirty years ago, with another elegant man---Jimi Hendrix.
On the show, Cavett spoke about "red necks," "white trash," and how difficult it was to be a gifted black musician in a devoutly racist country. Having had the good fortune to have met Jimi, I suspect that, apart from being an Obama supporter, he'd empathize with him, too.
Not as much has changed over the past few decades as we might like to think. Now there are those who say this president is taking us the wrong way down a one way street, that his vision is one that leads to bigger government, and less free enterprise.
And, there are others who think that Obama isn't heading in the direction of peace, disarmament, and transparency. They are disillusioned about this president's openness to hawkish generals when they thought that endgame was to get out of Iraq.
The best way not to get disillusioned is not to entertain illusions in the first place. Any president with a concrete plan for either disarmament, or imminent troop withdrawal would never have been elected.
George W. Bush is blamed for nearly thousands of American and Iraqi deaths in an eight year war, but it was George H.W. Bush who brought troops into Iraq in the first place. That Papa Bush rightly decided to shrug his shoulders, fold up his tent, declare victory in the Gulf, and go home doesn't mean that he wasn't responsible for the error that became a huge mistake.
Likewise, Lyndon B. Johnson is the president most often associated with the Vietnam War when it was his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, who arranged for the first troops to be deployed there. Johnson took an initial commitment of 15,000 troops and raised nearly ten times. In his last speech to the American people, Kennedy acknowledged that he was "rethinking" his commitment of troops to Vietnam, and had plans for phased withdrawal, a plan, not coincidentally, sabotaged by his assassination.
That "war is a racket" we know, and have known for as long as Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler wrote back in 1932. Still, Americans feign surprise, and disillusionment, when a president is elected who continues the status quo. Where war is concerned, the status quo is our best cash crop.
Others, like myself, see a presidency that is barely one quarter of the way along and remain optimistic that Mr. Obama, like Mr. Kennedy before him, will rethink his military objectives, and will share JFK's vision of "complete and total disarmament."
Some may say we've drunk the Kool-Aid, and that may be fair. But, there is no denying the precariousness of the more than 100 new paramilitary groups which, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, have sprung up since Obama took office. The threats from these fringe groups, these leftover Birchers are real. Demands on the secret service, the president's bodyguards, have increased by 400%.
While no one is suggesting blind obedience, Frank Schaeffer is right that we need to support this president, and pray for his safety. Those, on the left, who have been going after him with a viscera matching their radical right counterparts would be well advised to lighten up, and recognize that discourse has been racheted up such that it now poses a clear and present danger. The Tea Party of today is just as scary as the John Birch Society in Jimi Hendrix's day.
This is a presidency under siege, and those who confuse verbal dysentery with dissent do a disservice to the framer's notion of free speech.
To maintain a healthy political climate, disagreement must be accompanied by deference, and deference isn't coming from the right, or the left frankly.
One may disagree with a president's policies, yet still support the president. One may abjure the influence of special interests, the banksters, and Wall Street, and still press for extended unemployment benefits, a higher living wage, and greater access to affordable housing. One doesn't have to throw out the baby with the bath water.
While Afghanistan is clearly a quagmire, and a McChrystal surge would be a huge mistake, to articulate foreign policy differences with anything less than respect is a disservice to the civil rights efforts of Malcolm X, and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
Someday, what we now witness will be seen as nothing less than civil war, but it's about more than race, or party affiliation, it's a war between rich and poor. With our support of this president comes the implicit understanding that he was elected to represent the poor, and hungry. Anything short of that is unacceptable.
The only mandate that can work is one that mandates equal opportunity, and equal justice under the law. So far, I have heard no mention of that kind of mandate. If nothing else, this is one president who can be prevailed upon to listen.
Something is radically wrong when the rhetoric of the left can no longer be distinguished from that of the right. Anti-war posturing must not disintegrate into anti-Obama posturing.
And, more importantly, there is a racial component to the anti-Obama rhetoric that is especially troubling, one that must not be discounted, but addressed, or there will be a moral tsunami that will reverberate for generations.
The election of Barack Obama was not about seeing the world in black or white, but gray. The dream hasn't died. The dreamers have just woken up.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
A frightening Incident
On my way home from work today, I stopped in to the local 7-11 to pick up a few things. It was late in the day and, as usual, there was only one cashier at the register.
In line in front of me was a young lady who I observed rushing into the store before I got there. She looked to be in her early 20's, a brunette.
Anyway, she bought a half dozen items or so, and stood at the counter with her purse open, her wallet, her keys, a cup of coffee slowly proceeding to put things away. She was oblivious to the fact that someone was behind her waiting patiently for what must have been about three minutes.
I proceeded to pull a few bills out of my wallet, and hand them to the cashier who gratefully accepted them. My change, if any, would have been a few pennies, so I was prepared to leave the store. The young "lady," in a manner of speaking, then confronts me: "You're in a hurry, are you?" she says. "Yes," I said, "I'd like to pay for these items, and get on with my day."
She exits the store. I exit, too, whereupon I notice that she gets in her car, and proceeds to block the entrance to the 7-11. She had a young man next to her who appeared to find the whole encounter amusing. "You better be careful, lady, or somebody might hurt you," she says and looks at me menacingly.
I get in my car quickly, and lock the door. My car window is down a bit, and she yells out, "You heard me, lady, somebody might hurt you." Her boyfriend started laughing. Obviously, I had no intention of getting out of my car to walk over to her car, and confront her. I recognized her accent which sounded a lot like my students in Los Angeles.
There is no way I would have gotten out of my car to approach her. The first thought that entered my mind when I saw her car parked there was---get in the car, lock the door, and don't respond. She might be packing.
No one had ever followed me from a store, and threatened me like that before.
A woman in her early 40's walked over to her car to find out what was going on, and the girl just started gesturing, and next thing I knew she drove up.
Funny thing is right down the street there was a sheriff parked in a car marked "Sheriff's Department." On my way to the store, I noticed him sitting there with his head neatly bowed into his lap evidently text messaging. On my way back, he was still sitting there, only now he appeared to be doing paperwork.
Given the incidence, albeit rare, of women being held up at gunpoint only blocks away from where this encounter occurred, I found it rather odd that there wouldn't be more surveillance. It's not as if there was no police car, and it's not as if there isn't any crime.
As I drove him, it occurred to me that I'm old enough to be this young woman's mother, and then some. It also occurred to me that if I had called local law enforcement, I would have been told "a threat is not a crime," and nothing would have been done.
What scared me most of all was how little it mattered to this person that the person she was threatening could have been her mother, her teacher, or her next door neighbor. The brutality, and enjoyment of brutality---brutality for brutality's sake sent shivers down my spine.
The only thing that distinguishes human beings from animals is conscience. This creature clearly doesn't have one. What can be more frightening than living in fear of one's children.
In line in front of me was a young lady who I observed rushing into the store before I got there. She looked to be in her early 20's, a brunette.
Anyway, she bought a half dozen items or so, and stood at the counter with her purse open, her wallet, her keys, a cup of coffee slowly proceeding to put things away. She was oblivious to the fact that someone was behind her waiting patiently for what must have been about three minutes.
I proceeded to pull a few bills out of my wallet, and hand them to the cashier who gratefully accepted them. My change, if any, would have been a few pennies, so I was prepared to leave the store. The young "lady," in a manner of speaking, then confronts me: "You're in a hurry, are you?" she says. "Yes," I said, "I'd like to pay for these items, and get on with my day."
She exits the store. I exit, too, whereupon I notice that she gets in her car, and proceeds to block the entrance to the 7-11. She had a young man next to her who appeared to find the whole encounter amusing. "You better be careful, lady, or somebody might hurt you," she says and looks at me menacingly.
I get in my car quickly, and lock the door. My car window is down a bit, and she yells out, "You heard me, lady, somebody might hurt you." Her boyfriend started laughing. Obviously, I had no intention of getting out of my car to walk over to her car, and confront her. I recognized her accent which sounded a lot like my students in Los Angeles.
There is no way I would have gotten out of my car to approach her. The first thought that entered my mind when I saw her car parked there was---get in the car, lock the door, and don't respond. She might be packing.
No one had ever followed me from a store, and threatened me like that before.
A woman in her early 40's walked over to her car to find out what was going on, and the girl just started gesturing, and next thing I knew she drove up.
Funny thing is right down the street there was a sheriff parked in a car marked "Sheriff's Department." On my way to the store, I noticed him sitting there with his head neatly bowed into his lap evidently text messaging. On my way back, he was still sitting there, only now he appeared to be doing paperwork.
Given the incidence, albeit rare, of women being held up at gunpoint only blocks away from where this encounter occurred, I found it rather odd that there wouldn't be more surveillance. It's not as if there was no police car, and it's not as if there isn't any crime.
As I drove him, it occurred to me that I'm old enough to be this young woman's mother, and then some. It also occurred to me that if I had called local law enforcement, I would have been told "a threat is not a crime," and nothing would have been done.
What scared me most of all was how little it mattered to this person that the person she was threatening could have been her mother, her teacher, or her next door neighbor. The brutality, and enjoyment of brutality---brutality for brutality's sake sent shivers down my spine.
The only thing that distinguishes human beings from animals is conscience. This creature clearly doesn't have one. What can be more frightening than living in fear of one's children.
From Michael Winship
In a Chilly London November, War and Remembrance
By Michael Winship
In Great Britain, Remembrance Sunday falls on the second Sunday of November, the one closest to November 11th, the anniversary of the end of the First World War in 1918. Once, the world called November 11th Armistice Day. Now, here in the States at least, it is Veterans Day.
As coincidence and travel itineraries would have it, twice over the last four years I've been in London on Remembrance Sunday. This time, my girlfriend Pat and I were on our way home from Greece, stopping off for a couple of days to see old friends.
As we unpacked at the hotel, a recap of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies was playing on TV - Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife laying a wreath at the Cenotaph (the UK equivalent of our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), a stirring parade of veterans along Whitehall, the military bands playing "Rule, Britannia," "God Save the Queen" and "O Valiant Hearts."
Remembrance Sunday fell just a couple of days after the horrendous shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 soldiers dead and 30 wounded, many of whom were preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. From Greece, we had been watching the news reports on CNN with special interest. I'd been at Fort Hood several times - the huge military base is where my parents met during World War II; my father a medical supply mofficer, my mother a secretary from a nearby town. It was Camp Hood then.
Remembrance Sunday also fell less than a week after an Afghan policeman named Gulbadin, armed with a machine gun, shot five British soldiers dead at a police compound in Helmand province. The men had just returned from patrol and had put their rifles aside, preparing for a rest. The policeman opened fire from a rooftop.
The wantonness of the killings only further deteriorated the already plummeting British support for the country's involvement in the Afghan war, and anger worsened in the next few days after Prime Minister Brown accidentally botched a handwritten letter of condolence to the mother of Jamie Janes, a British soldier killed last month by an IED. He, too, was in Helmand province.
It seems Brown misspelled Janes' name in the letter. The mother, urged on, some say, by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, The Sun (which recently switched its political allegiance from Brown's Labor Party to the Conservatives), bitterly attacked the prime minister for insensitivity.
In a subsequent phone call with Brown, which she recorded - perhaps with the assistance of The Sun - she chastised him for failing to adequately equip and protect British troops in Afghanistan. After several days of media-manufactured controversy, she accepted his apology.
Brown blamed the incident on his notoriously poor penmanship and inability to see - he is blind in one eye.
Metaphor, remembrance and coincidence were in abundance during our brief London stay. As it happened, the next night, we went to see a play called The War Horse. Written by Nick Stafford, and based on a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, the drama uses remarkable, life-size puppets of horses, beautifully crafted and each masterfully manipulated by teams of performers so skilled you sometimes forget that
what you're seeing isn't real.
The War Horse is the story of Joey, a horse that's half-thoroughbred and should be raised for riding in foxhunts by the landed gentry. But through fate and the cruel reality of rural life in southwest England's Devonshire, Joey is brought up as a farm horse, trained and loved by a teenager named Albert. When World War I begins, Albert's father sells the horse to the British cavalry. Albert runs away and joins the army to find him.
In the beginning, almost everyone is convinced that the war will be brief - "God help the Kaiser, because... we're gonna run him right out of Belgium, right back into Germany." But as a veteran British major tells a junior officer, "Every generation has to discover things for themselves, don't they? There's some things that can be understood through telling, but other things have to be experienced before they can be fully apprehended. War is one such thing."
Joey is ridden into senseless, deadly charges against German machine guns. Eventually, he and another horse end up on the other side of the enemy lines, and are forced to drag German hospital wagons and artillery as both armies fall into the trench warfare of mud and misery that will go on for more than four bloody years, killing between 15 and 16 million.
Our current reality, our deadly dilemma in Afghanistan as Barack Obama reportedly agonizes over the next steps there, were never far from mind, even as we lost ourselves in the story and stagecraft of the play. At one point, a young British recruit is given his grandfather's knife to carry, a souvenir of the Second Afghan War, he's told. At another, a German sergeant named Rudi talks with a group of fellow soldiers: "They're saying that because we attacked, we're paying for it. They're saying that we must get rid of the Kaiser and make a democracy. It would
be impossible for a democracy to start a war, continue a war against the will of its people. What do you think?"
In the penultimate scene, an injured Joey has been pulled from the barbed wire of no-man's-land by a British soldier and is about to be out of his misery by a doctor's bullet when Albert, temporarily made sightless by gas, hears him and they are reunited.
A happy ending of sorts, but what I was reminded of was another powerful metaphor, a painting by American artist John Singer Sargent that I saw a few years ago in London's Imperial War Museum.
During World War I, Sargent, master of the exquisite, artful society portrait, was commissioned by the British government to go the front and create a work that would celebrate the cooperative spirit of British and American soldiers pulling together in "The War to End All Wars."
Finding little to none of that alleged battlefield camaraderie, instead, he painted a massive canvas - 20 feet wide and more than seven feet high - depicting a group of soldiers felled by a mustard gas attack. In hues of yellow and brown, they stumble in a setting sun toward the hospital tents, eyes bandaged, each man in the line struggling to find his way, guided by a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him.
The blind leading the blind.
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.
Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at
www.pbs.org/moyers.
By Michael Winship
In Great Britain, Remembrance Sunday falls on the second Sunday of November, the one closest to November 11th, the anniversary of the end of the First World War in 1918. Once, the world called November 11th Armistice Day. Now, here in the States at least, it is Veterans Day.
As coincidence and travel itineraries would have it, twice over the last four years I've been in London on Remembrance Sunday. This time, my girlfriend Pat and I were on our way home from Greece, stopping off for a couple of days to see old friends.
As we unpacked at the hotel, a recap of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies was playing on TV - Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife laying a wreath at the Cenotaph (the UK equivalent of our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), a stirring parade of veterans along Whitehall, the military bands playing "Rule, Britannia," "God Save the Queen" and "O Valiant Hearts."
Remembrance Sunday fell just a couple of days after the horrendous shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, that left 13 soldiers dead and 30 wounded, many of whom were preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. From Greece, we had been watching the news reports on CNN with special interest. I'd been at Fort Hood several times - the huge military base is where my parents met during World War II; my father a medical supply mofficer, my mother a secretary from a nearby town. It was Camp Hood then.
Remembrance Sunday also fell less than a week after an Afghan policeman named Gulbadin, armed with a machine gun, shot five British soldiers dead at a police compound in Helmand province. The men had just returned from patrol and had put their rifles aside, preparing for a rest. The policeman opened fire from a rooftop.
The wantonness of the killings only further deteriorated the already plummeting British support for the country's involvement in the Afghan war, and anger worsened in the next few days after Prime Minister Brown accidentally botched a handwritten letter of condolence to the mother of Jamie Janes, a British soldier killed last month by an IED. He, too, was in Helmand province.
It seems Brown misspelled Janes' name in the letter. The mother, urged on, some say, by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, The Sun (which recently switched its political allegiance from Brown's Labor Party to the Conservatives), bitterly attacked the prime minister for insensitivity.
In a subsequent phone call with Brown, which she recorded - perhaps with the assistance of The Sun - she chastised him for failing to adequately equip and protect British troops in Afghanistan. After several days of media-manufactured controversy, she accepted his apology.
Brown blamed the incident on his notoriously poor penmanship and inability to see - he is blind in one eye.
Metaphor, remembrance and coincidence were in abundance during our brief London stay. As it happened, the next night, we went to see a play called The War Horse. Written by Nick Stafford, and based on a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, the drama uses remarkable, life-size puppets of horses, beautifully crafted and each masterfully manipulated by teams of performers so skilled you sometimes forget that
what you're seeing isn't real.
The War Horse is the story of Joey, a horse that's half-thoroughbred and should be raised for riding in foxhunts by the landed gentry. But through fate and the cruel reality of rural life in southwest England's Devonshire, Joey is brought up as a farm horse, trained and loved by a teenager named Albert. When World War I begins, Albert's father sells the horse to the British cavalry. Albert runs away and joins the army to find him.
In the beginning, almost everyone is convinced that the war will be brief - "God help the Kaiser, because... we're gonna run him right out of Belgium, right back into Germany." But as a veteran British major tells a junior officer, "Every generation has to discover things for themselves, don't they? There's some things that can be understood through telling, but other things have to be experienced before they can be fully apprehended. War is one such thing."
Joey is ridden into senseless, deadly charges against German machine guns. Eventually, he and another horse end up on the other side of the enemy lines, and are forced to drag German hospital wagons and artillery as both armies fall into the trench warfare of mud and misery that will go on for more than four bloody years, killing between 15 and 16 million.
Our current reality, our deadly dilemma in Afghanistan as Barack Obama reportedly agonizes over the next steps there, were never far from mind, even as we lost ourselves in the story and stagecraft of the play. At one point, a young British recruit is given his grandfather's knife to carry, a souvenir of the Second Afghan War, he's told. At another, a German sergeant named Rudi talks with a group of fellow soldiers: "They're saying that because we attacked, we're paying for it. They're saying that we must get rid of the Kaiser and make a democracy. It would
be impossible for a democracy to start a war, continue a war against the will of its people. What do you think?"
In the penultimate scene, an injured Joey has been pulled from the barbed wire of no-man's-land by a British soldier and is about to be out of his misery by a doctor's bullet when Albert, temporarily made sightless by gas, hears him and they are reunited.
A happy ending of sorts, but what I was reminded of was another powerful metaphor, a painting by American artist John Singer Sargent that I saw a few years ago in London's Imperial War Museum.
During World War I, Sargent, master of the exquisite, artful society portrait, was commissioned by the British government to go the front and create a work that would celebrate the cooperative spirit of British and American soldiers pulling together in "The War to End All Wars."
Finding little to none of that alleged battlefield camaraderie, instead, he painted a massive canvas - 20 feet wide and more than seven feet high - depicting a group of soldiers felled by a mustard gas attack. In hues of yellow and brown, they stumble in a setting sun toward the hospital tents, eyes bandaged, each man in the line struggling to find his way, guided by a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him.
The blind leading the blind.
Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program
Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.
Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at
www.pbs.org/moyers.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Double Crossed: War Vets Deported
Astonishingly, more than 30,000 foreign born detainees currently face deportation at some 350 facilities nationwide. Nearly half are legal residents who committed crimes that range from homicide to misdemeanor drug possession, and were turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement after serving their prison terms.
Reportedly, about 10% of those foreign born detainees, or 3,000, have served in the U.S. military. A large percentage have legal resident status. Some suffer from PTSD, but all who get in trouble with the law will be rounded up by ICE detained, and then deported.
More troubling is the incidence of those who come here as small children with their parents who are encouraged by recruiters to join the Army, lured by the illusion that their military service will serve as their application for citizenship. Imagine their horror when they find a deportation letter in their mailbox upon their return.
Given the need for warm bodies in combat zones, the military "falsely promises automatic U.S. citizenship," according to Associated Content , in return for service which consists of deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. All too often, however, the service member is double crossed and, upon his return to the states, is scooped up, and carted back to the country of his birth.
Others, like Iraq vet Marine Corporal Phillipe Louis Jean, have also been threatened with deportation after they complete their tour of duty. The Marine was court-martialed for an infraction, adultery, not regarded as serious enough to disqualify him for military service, but one egregious enough to prevent him from ever obtaining American citizenship. What is more egregious here the obscene, and wanton exploitation of men in uniform, or their alleged infractions?
There are many who argue that it makes sense to deport anyone who commits a crime, regardless of their immigration status, but doing so renders the argument that prison is intended for rehabilitation obsolete.
Some even think that if someone is here illegally, they should be deported for jay walking. Too often, immigrants are used as human shields, and scapegoats for pre-existing larger social, and economic issues. Too often, nuance is lost as are important legal, and constitutional distinctions between undocumented immigrants and legal residents. Increasingly, those who serve our country, and are prepared to pay the ultimate price to defend us face harassment by ICE, detention, and deportation, not just veterans of Iraq either.
Many who have served this country honorably are now being held in immigration facilities thoughout the U.S. They are legal residents of a country that wants to cart them off in a crate with a "return to sender" label. Consider the irony, for a moment, in light of the organized crime families of the 1920's and 1930's. How many vets of World Wars I and II faced being deported back to Sicily because they were convicted of drug smuggling?
Keep in mind, too, that most of the 3,000 or so service members currently being held were convicted of drug possession, and will have served as much time in immigration detention centers as they did in prison.
A bill introduced by the House in July may soon be a paradigm for how to remedy this gross inequity. HR 2988 provides for the relief of Fernando Javier Cervantes and, if passed, would preclude his deportation. Mr. Cervantes emigrated legally from Mexico to the U.S., more than thirty years ago, at the age of seven, with his mother. He enlisted in the Army toward the end of the Vietnam War, and was honorably discharged.
Now, more than three decades later, Cervantes is a detainee at El Centro Processing Center where he is being held after serving three years for possession of methamphetamine. Most likely, he will spend an equal amount of time in detention as in prison and, barring intervention should the House bill pass, he will be deported back to Mexico, a country he has not seen since 1970.
Justice is clearly a precious commodity, one that is in short supply, and less demand, when American servicemen who participated in the heinous slaughter of two dozen men, women, and children civilians in Haditha, Iraq, back in November, 2005, have escaped prosecution while noncitizen servicemen, many of whom have legal immigration status, are being deported for misdemeanor drug possession.
Clearly, this isn't about illegal drugs, but a backlash against illegal immigration with the inescapable irony that military recruiters don't seem to care about the citizenship application status of their recruits when they need to fill their front lines.
Reportedly, about 10% of those foreign born detainees, or 3,000, have served in the U.S. military. A large percentage have legal resident status. Some suffer from PTSD, but all who get in trouble with the law will be rounded up by ICE detained, and then deported.
More troubling is the incidence of those who come here as small children with their parents who are encouraged by recruiters to join the Army, lured by the illusion that their military service will serve as their application for citizenship. Imagine their horror when they find a deportation letter in their mailbox upon their return.
Given the need for warm bodies in combat zones, the military "falsely promises automatic U.S. citizenship," according to Associated Content , in return for service which consists of deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. All too often, however, the service member is double crossed and, upon his return to the states, is scooped up, and carted back to the country of his birth.
Others, like Iraq vet Marine Corporal Phillipe Louis Jean, have also been threatened with deportation after they complete their tour of duty. The Marine was court-martialed for an infraction, adultery, not regarded as serious enough to disqualify him for military service, but one egregious enough to prevent him from ever obtaining American citizenship. What is more egregious here the obscene, and wanton exploitation of men in uniform, or their alleged infractions?
There are many who argue that it makes sense to deport anyone who commits a crime, regardless of their immigration status, but doing so renders the argument that prison is intended for rehabilitation obsolete.
Some even think that if someone is here illegally, they should be deported for jay walking. Too often, immigrants are used as human shields, and scapegoats for pre-existing larger social, and economic issues. Too often, nuance is lost as are important legal, and constitutional distinctions between undocumented immigrants and legal residents. Increasingly, those who serve our country, and are prepared to pay the ultimate price to defend us face harassment by ICE, detention, and deportation, not just veterans of Iraq either.
Many who have served this country honorably are now being held in immigration facilities thoughout the U.S. They are legal residents of a country that wants to cart them off in a crate with a "return to sender" label. Consider the irony, for a moment, in light of the organized crime families of the 1920's and 1930's. How many vets of World Wars I and II faced being deported back to Sicily because they were convicted of drug smuggling?
Keep in mind, too, that most of the 3,000 or so service members currently being held were convicted of drug possession, and will have served as much time in immigration detention centers as they did in prison.
A bill introduced by the House in July may soon be a paradigm for how to remedy this gross inequity. HR 2988 provides for the relief of Fernando Javier Cervantes and, if passed, would preclude his deportation. Mr. Cervantes emigrated legally from Mexico to the U.S., more than thirty years ago, at the age of seven, with his mother. He enlisted in the Army toward the end of the Vietnam War, and was honorably discharged.
Now, more than three decades later, Cervantes is a detainee at El Centro Processing Center where he is being held after serving three years for possession of methamphetamine. Most likely, he will spend an equal amount of time in detention as in prison and, barring intervention should the House bill pass, he will be deported back to Mexico, a country he has not seen since 1970.
Justice is clearly a precious commodity, one that is in short supply, and less demand, when American servicemen who participated in the heinous slaughter of two dozen men, women, and children civilians in Haditha, Iraq, back in November, 2005, have escaped prosecution while noncitizen servicemen, many of whom have legal immigration status, are being deported for misdemeanor drug possession.
Clearly, this isn't about illegal drugs, but a backlash against illegal immigration with the inescapable irony that military recruiters don't seem to care about the citizenship application status of their recruits when they need to fill their front lines.
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