January 30, 2010 archive

So far, flight control refuses to land any planes, instead routing every new arrival into a holding pattern.   Too much congestion?    Bad weather?  Runways unavailable?  Who knows.  

The planes have arrived, fraught with heavy cargoes and passengers, circling above.  New arrivals are added to the top of the stack, and aircraft at the bottom should be taken out and allowed to make an approach first, letting each aircraft above move down one level.  There are limits to both fuel and vertical airspace.  Laden aircraft can’t just zoom off into some weightless outer orbital, or magically appear on the ground without some orderly intervening process.  What goes up, must come down, and all that.  That’s what gravity is all about.

Tonight is the first Full Moon of 2010. It is a warm clear night here in Haiti. Moon rise was impressive.

olive branch

n

1. a branch of an olive tree used to symbolize peace

2. any offering of peace or conciliation

http://www.thefreedictionary.c…

dis dain

tr.v. dis·dained, dis·dain·ing, dis·dains

1. To regard or treat with haughty contempt; despise. See Synonyms at despise.

2. To consider or reject as beneath oneself.

n.

1. A feeling or show of contempt and aloofness; scorn.

http://www.thefreedictionary.c…

Given the same opportunity, the famed GOP guru, Frank Luntz, would recommend the same tactics again, in order to derail progress …

In “Illiteracy: The Downfall of American Society”, Education Portal reports that 50 percent of adults in America cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.  20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.  42 million American adults can’t read at all.  The number of American adults classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.

Many of those people are Teabaggers . . .

Yeah.  That’ll help.  

Finding America on a map is also a problem.  According to National Geographic News, 11 percent of young Americans can’t locate the United States on a map. The location of the Pacific Ocean is a mystery to 29 percent, 58 percent don’t know where Japan is, 65 percent don’t know where France is, 69 percent don’t know where the United Kingdom is.

Knowledge of current issues and historical events is just as abysmal. Saul Friedman notes that 34 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, nearly one-third of Republicans don’t believe Obama was born in the United States, more than two-thirds don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade, 24 percent could not name the country we fought in the Revolutionary War.

Many of these people vote, with predictably appalling results.  According to Freedom Daily . . .

Political scientist Michael Carpini analyzed thousands of voter surveys and found that there was “virtually no relationship” between the political issues that low-knowledge voters said “matter most to them and the positions of the candidates they voted for on those issues.  It was as if their vote was random.  

Low knowledge voters comprise 36 percent of the electorate and provide the deciding margins in almost all contested congressional and presidential elections.  Here in the 21st century, with multiple crises facing us, with the worst crisis of all–global warming–steadily intensifying, we have little if any chance of dealing with any of these crises through the political system, because our elections are not decided by the well-informed voters who make rational decisions in the voting booth, they’re decided by the voters who have no fucking idea what’s going on.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about our current situation in the government. And the wars. And our current and seemingly never ending involvement with torture.

With the somewhat recent revelation that some suicides in 2006 were questionable at best, I’m reminded of the things happening in 2006 and why more investigations into the Bush administration are necessary.

Report Casts Doubt On Guantanamo Suicides

by The Associated Press [via NPR]

January 18, 2010

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees whose deaths were ruled a suicide in 2006 apparently were transported from their cells hours before their deaths to a secret site on the island, according to an article in Harper’s magazine.

The published account released Monday raises serious questions about whether the three detainees actually died by hanging themselves in their cells and suggests the U.S. government is covering up details of what precisely happened in the hours before the deaths.

I first read about the suicides through that NPR article. It says the suicides likely happened at a facility near the main Gitmo facility, referred to as “Camp No.” The justification for setting up these facilities and for using this kind of interrogation technique is apparently 9/11:

After the terror attacks on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA set up a number of so-called “black” sites around the world, where harsh interrogations of terrorism-era suspects took place.

The Harper’s article suggested such a site at Guantanamo Bay may have belonged to the CIA or to the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

I remember 9/11. I remember how it was used as the justification for everything. I remember how people were tortured after 9/11 because they wouldn’t link 9/11 to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. I remember how the administration saw an opportunity with 9/11 and they went for it. When it didn’t work they tortured. They lied. They made up other claims that Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Last time there was a whistleblower revealing evidence to hamper the Bush administration’s plans, I remember how they outed his CIA agent wife.

I remember how their link from 9/11 to Saddam Hussein, al-Libi gave bad information to authorities because he was tortured. And this information was revealed in a DIA report that Dick Cheney read. And he committed suicide. I wrote about it, in fact.

I’ll quote from myself, again. May 15, 2009:

Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate claims of Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa:

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) — not by his wife — largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

Cheney had asked for more information on an intelligence report earlier on the same day questioning the link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In response to his request, the CIA sent Wilson to Africa, and an aide to Cheney testified that he had no idea his request would result in that trip.

So, he wanted information but didn’t think they’d send someone to get information?

The DIA in question had some very interesting and useful information. You’re definitely going to want to read this:

WASHINGTON — A government document raises doubts about claims that Al Qaeda members received training for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, as Senate Democrats yesterday defended their push for a report on how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence.

   […]

   The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said.

   The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The DIA report said that the links between al Qaeda and Iraq were probably not to be trusted and that al-Libi’s information was bad. This was made all the more strange when, in the midst of the Plame scandal, Karl Rove sent an email to the reporter Matthew Cooper, saying not to “get too far out” on Joe Wilson, the whistleblower, because the administration had information to discredit his findings and it was going to start declassifying things soon.

If they had this information, I don’t understand. This whole incident happened because Cheney asked the CIA for more information on the Iraq-AQ link and the Niger yellowcake. The CIA asked Joe Wilson to go to Niger because of his expertise on the subject, and Cheney says that the CIA misinterpreted his request and that he never wanted a trip to Niger. If there were information already to cast doubt on Wilson’s new information then why ask for any new information? It already existed!

Valerie Plame’s work consisted of monitoring WMDs going into and out of Iraq and Iran.  

I’ve been watching the Prop 8 trial…except not really, since SCOTUS disallowed us folks who couldn’t be in the courtroom to watch what may be the most important court case ever for GLBT people.  So I watched the transcripts instead, as they were posted by the people at the Courage Campaign Institute and FiredogLake.  

One of the assertions made time and again by the defense was that Proposition 8 was not based in animus.

What?  No strong dislike of GLBT people?  No enmity?  Are we seriously expected to believe that there was no hostile attitude?

I’d like to think that one could discount those assertions as being false on there face.  But this was a court of law.  I am no lawyer, but as a writer and a mathematician, I know words and logic.

Having followed the trial closely, I have to ask the following.

When you deliberately choose not to learn about people who you wish to discriminate against, what is that if not animus?