Entries from December 2003 ↓

The ongoing and open-ended war on terrorism, which looks remarkably like a full scale attack on the constitution and American civil liberties, was handed a setback when two federal appeals courts–one in New York, the other in San Francisco–ruled that the U.S. military cannot hold prisoners indefinitely without giving them access to lawyers or the court system.

These rulings are a direct response to an order signed by President Bush in November 2001 that allowed captives to be detained as “enemy combatants” if they were deemed members of al-Qaida, engaged in or aided terrorism, or harbored terrorists. The designation can also be applied if it is “the interest of the United States” to hold an individual during hostilities.

Now I’m no lawyer, but that’s extraordinarily wide latitude to give the government without requiring proof of any real terrorist activity. The definition of “terrorist” in this instance is left to the discretion of the Bush Administration as is “the interest of the United States.” By this executive order, anyone they want can be branded a terrorist and put away indefinitely. (I wonder if they’d still let me blog from a prison camp?)

Two cases will be direct beneficiaries of these rulings, the 660 “enemy combatants” rounded up around the world after 9/11 who are being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and American Jose Padilla, who was seized in Chicago in an alleged plot to detonate a so-called “dirty bomb” who was similarly declared an “enemy combatant.”

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ordered Padilla released from military custody within 30 days. A civilian, he was arrested in May 2002 and has been held at a naval brig in Charleston, S.C. The court ruled he could be turned over to a civilian court for trial. In a 2-1 decision, the court ruled that Padilla’s detention was not authorized by Congress and that the Bush administration could not designate him as an enemy combatant without such approval.

Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Rosemary S. Pooler said, “As this court sits only a short distance from where the World Trade Center stood, we are as keenly aware as anyone of the threat al-Qaida poses to our country and of the responsibilities the president and law enforcement officials bear for protecting the nation. But presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum, and this case involves not whether those responsibilities should be aggressively pursued, but whether the president is obligated, in the circumstances presented here, to share them with Congress.”

The San Francisco court ruling, also by a 2-1 majority, rebuked the Bush position on the Guantanamo detainees, who have been held without charges, some for nearly two years.

Because they were picked up overseas on suspicion of terrorism and are being held on foreign land, the Bush administration maintains they may be held without charges or trial. (Apparently taking a page from their bank fraud friends, they see these as offshore accounts, free from governmental oversight.)

Writing for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Stephen Reinhardt ruled, “We cannot simply accept the government’s position that the executive branch possesses the unchecked authority to imprison indefinitely any persons, foreign citizens included, on territory under the sole jurisdiction and control of the United States, without permitting such prisoners recourse of any kind to any judicial forum, or even access to counsel, regardless of the length or manner of their confinement.”

The government plans to appeal both decisions, and they will probably go to the Supreme Court. But herein lies yet another reason why we must remove Bush. Another four years gives them more opportunities to appoint federal judges, making rulings such as these to check their unbridled power less likely to occur.

This is an administration that doesn’t just border on demagoguery. They have long since crossed the line.
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Two items from The Daily Mis-Lead

• White House covers tracks by removing information

• White House admits pre-9/11 warnings; Bush still denies it

If I ever hear another Right Wing pundit claim that the media is liberal I’m gonna hurl.

The majority of major news outlets in these here United States not only have a clear and unambiguous conservative bias, but they have given George Bush unprecedented freedom from the type of criticism to which they routinely subjected Bill Clinton.

When millions in the US and overseas, including yours truly, took to the streets earlier this year to protest the buildup towards war in Iraq, the media underreported turnout or chose to bury such stories. When the invasion began, instead of critical reporting, we got flag-waving and state-mandated patriotism. The tough questions have gone unasked from the very beginning, the hundreds of American military casualties has gotten little play, and with the capture of Saddam Hussein, there continues to be news reporting suggesting this is a great moment in history and we should all rejoice. Just the way the White House wants it. No questions asked.

As both a former journalist and state government press officer, I am well aware of how politicians and reporters need and manipulate one another. But as I was trained, the media is supposed to maintain both a safe distance from and a healthy skepticism of the people they cover, to insure balanced and objective reporting. Those rules have gone right out the window. The press has become the press office for this administration.

Since last year I have been seeking alternatives to American mainstream media, choosing various online sources like AlterNet, and The Daily Mis-Lead , foreign press including the Toronto Globe and Mail and on television, News World International. Getting views from outside the beltway, outside the mainstream and outside the US, I feel I am getting a better picture of what’s really going on inside this country. Sad, isn’t it.

The Village Voice ran an article and cartoon this week countering the election impact speculation that has taken off since the Saddam capture.

So, US troops have captured Saddam Hussein. Let’s recap:

- Neither United Nations weapons inspectors nor American military officials ever found any of the “weapons of mass destruction” George Bush claimed Iraq possessed and used as justification for the invasion.

- In fact, the entire argument that such weapons ever existed was exposed as baseless and the result of falsefied documents. Both Bush and Tony Blair admitted this.

- Iraq never had either intentions nor capability of attacking the US.

- The Bush administration months ago also begrudgingly had to acknowledge that there was never any connection between Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda or 9/11, another phoney reason used to justify the invasion.

- Osama Bin Laden is still at large and terrorism around the world seems to be escalating not decreasing as a result of this silly trumped up war.

- The number of American soldiers killed since the war was supposedly “won” far out numbers those who died during the official conflict and is increasing every day.

- George Bush has never attended any of their funerals.

- The level of animosity towards the United States is growing around the world with each day troops remain stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan in an open-ended war against unspecified terrorist targets.

- While $87 billion dollars and more have been flushed down this toilet, domestic programs affecting education, health care, senior citizens, youth, cities, farms, the environment and others, are being cut back drasticly.

- The ONLY people benefiting from this unnecessary war are the same cadre of defense contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel, who supported Bush during his election campaign. And Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, has been accused of overcharging the government for its services.

SO WHY THE FUCK SHOULD ANYBODY CARE THAT SADDAM HAS BEEN CAPTURED????

This administration, illegally put in office by the Supreme Court, has lied from day one. This war played upon the anti-Arab fears and ignorance of an uninformed American population that doesn’t have a clue who the players are in the Middle East, how they got in power to begin with, and which ones are allies and which are enemies.

Terrorism around the world will only diminish when we remove George Bush and his pack of right wing extremists from the White House.

From The Daily Mis-Lead

President Bush yesterday deployed his budget director to write an op-ed claiming “We can cut the deficit in half”1. It was a direct attempt to regain his status as a supposed “fiscal conservative.” The problem is that it is just one in a long line of empty reassurances and dishonest statements on the deficit issue.

In 2001, when he was pitching his tax cut, the President reassured the country that, “we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits, even if the economy softens.”2 After his tax cuts passed and a deficit ensued, he promised, “Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term.”3 When that proved not to be the case, he said “I remember campaigning in Chicago and one of the reporters said, ‘Would you ever deficit spend?’ I said, ‘Only - only - in times of war, in times of economic insecurity as a result of a recession or in times of national emergency.’ Never did I dream we’d have a trifecta.”4 Even this statement proved to be a flat out lie: two days later on Meet the Press, Tim Russert said “We have checked everywhere and we’ve even called the White House as to when the president said [the trifecta caveat] when he was campaigning in Chicago, and it didn’t happen.”

Bush then tried to shift the blame for the deficit, saying, “This nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war.”5 While that sounded good, he was contradicting his own budget director, who admitted just a few months before that “Even if we had never been attacked, and incurred no costs of war or recovery from September 11th…we still would have gone into deficit.”6

Because the President has decided to focus on dishonest rhetoric - instead of action - the deficit now sits at $374 billion - the highest in history.7

Sources:

1. Wall Street Journal, 12/10/03
2. Remarks by the President, 03/27/2001.
3. State of the Union Address, 01/29/2002.
4. President Discusses Homeland Security Department, 06/07/2002.
5. President Discusses Plan for Economic Growth in Ohio, 04/23/2003.
6. Mitch Daniels, congressional testimony, 2/5/03
7. “Federal deficit hits record $374.2 billion”, USA Today, 10/20/2003.

On December 4, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an article that didn’t break any new ground on the subject of Black gay men supposedly “living on the down low.” Mainstream media has recently gone on a crusade on this topic, with articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.

The gist of the story is always the same: These awful Black men are passing for straight, dating women, then sneaking around having sex with men and infecting those women with HIV.

No where in any of these articles is there discussion of the role of individual responsibility for practicing safe sex–it does take two to tango, after all–nor the fact that most of the Black gay men who “pass” for straight aren’t involved with women at all. There’s little discussion of the role that homophobia plays in making some people feel they have to hide who they are. Nor the fact that for the past 20 years Black gay men have been the hardest hit by AIDS yet the mainstream media missed that story. A reactionary and accusatory stance about the DL phenomenon seems to be the preferred angle.

In response to the Sun-Times article, Gay City News, a New York City weekly, offered a rebuttal, citing factual errors. Links to the two stories are below, so you can read them both for yourself.

Life on the down low
by Cheryl Jackson
Chicago Sun-Times

Hawking Tales of the Down Low
Chicago Sun Times continues trend of butchering epidemiology statistics
by Duncan Osborne
Gay City News