The arrival of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the United States hasn't been without its fair share of fervor usually reserved for deviant behavior of A-list celebrities caught on camera. Indeed, Ahmadinejad's (who shall be known as A-jad henceforth) visit to the United States has set off a conflagration of controversy across the nation as to the appropriateness of several parts of his trip.
There were two stops A-jad wanted to make while in the United States. The first was an invitation to speak at Columbia University. The second was a trip to Ground Zero to "pay respect" to those lives lost in the 9/11 terror attacks. The first he was granted. The second he was not.
Without delving into the many different avenues of debate the A-jad visit could take, I particularly would like to focus one just one: What harm would it have done?
The hair-brained speech A-jad gave at Columbia University was pretty much what anybody would expect from a guy that defends holocaust deniers and questions al Qaeda's role in 9/11. A bunch of rambling nonsense that had the audience laughing by the end of his speech. Without any help from political pundits or Administration officials, A-jad turned himself into the "little man on campus" as the Drudge Report aptly named him.
So what was everybody afraid of? The objection to A-jad's speech at Columbia University was rather unfounded. Granted, A-jad isn't exactly on par with the intellectuals that have come before him at Columbia, but that doesn't necessarily mean his history and reputation should exempt him from being allowed to speak. This, of course, is not to say A-jad has an unalienable right to speak at Columbia, only that he shouldn't be prevented from doing so. I agree with the President of Columbia when he said that they would invite Hitler to speak were he alive. What do you have to lose, aside from maybe your "reputation?"
The government shouldn't be in the business of protecting people from what they feel might be offensive, idiotic or straight up crazy talk. I think the audience at Columbia did a pretty fine job at deciding for themselves how they would receive A-jad's speech.
Additionally, Columbia University's invitation to A-jad wasn't an attempt to be rebellious or a political pot-shot at the Bush administration like the motivations of many ivory-tower academics when doing something that cause stirs like this. I believe Columbia was inviting A-jad to speak because of the opportunity to learn more about him and why he believes what he does, hence the condition that A-jad was allowed to speak so long as he took audience questions.
Did the audience let A-jad get away without answering some tough questions? Of course not. They berated him for his human rights abuses and suppression of liberty. In fact, the very man that invited A-jad to the university called him a "petty, cruel dictator" to his face.
But, imagine if A-jad hadn't been allowed to speak. Would we have known that the guy has no redeeming qualities, and even given the chance to explain his past comments or perhaps give insight into his ideology, still espoused the same anti-jew, anti-gay, anti-American nonsense he's famous for? No, of course not.
A-jad's trip to Columbia was a learning experience that wasn't nearly as much of a controversy as everyone made it out to be. We reaffirmed that the guy is a loon, and he does plenty well by himself to discredit every word that he utters. Banning him from speaking would have been an insult to the same freedom that he suppresses in his own country, and as it turns out, we "killed him with kindness" by giving him a dose of the First Amendment.
It would have been a mistake to bar A-jad from speaking at Columbia because it would have been lowering us to his level. The United States should send a thank you card to A-jad when he gets back to Iran, thanking him for doing what the United States has been trying to do for so long: discredit him.
The Washington Post had a story out today that talked about the military's attempt to "reeducate" Iraqi detainees with some as young as 11 years old.
Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."
Some of this new education is religious. The military has brought in Muslim scholars who teach "moderate" Islam, and pick a part the arguments of al Qaeda.
The religious courses are led by Muslim clerics who "teach out of a moderate doctrine," Stone said, according to the transcript of a conference call he held from Baghdad with a group of defense bloggers. Such schooling "tears apart" the arguments of al-Qaeda, such as "Let's kill innocents," and helps to "bring some of the edge off" the detainees, he said.
Some of the programs aren't as controversial, such as vocational training and basic education courses. However, the idea that the military is engaging in "psychological warfare" at the individual level is scary nonetheless. The whole concept of reeducation seems right out of the pages of A Clockwork Orange. I can just see an Iraqi teen strapped down into a chair, with his eyes peeled open with pictures of the aftermaths of suicide bombings and 9/11 blasted on a screen in front of him for hours.
Secondly, the whole "House of Wisdom" carries the same ominous feeling that there is something inherently wrong with the problem. Whether or not it is a play on Islam's "House of War" and "House of Peace" still doesn't change the fact that it seems it could have been based off of 1984's Ministry of Love, where "thought-criminals" were taken to be mentally broken to the point where the finally are brainwashed enough to accept the Party's ideals. Preaching "moderate" Islam is nowhere near as ignominious as brainwashing people with socialism and authoritarianism, but the ethics are still nearly as debatable.
Proponents of this program will of course say that the battle of the mind is nearly as important as the actual military battles on the ground in Iraq. Truth be told, there is a lot of merit to this argument. In fact, the battle of the mind is exponentially greater than any military engagement, and is one of the things that must be undertaken before the seeds of democracy will ever take root. Bush forgot this crucial point before deciding to mess with the Middle East in the first place. However, essentially "brainwashing" captive detainees seems so morally wrong, that what "good" could come from it is overshadowed entirely.
The same situation (to a lesser degree) was the case in A Clockwork Orange. For those that haven't read Anthony Burgess' book or seen the Kubrik film adaptation, the main character, Alex, is arrested by the police for murder and eventually placed in an experimental behavior modification program to extinguish his delinquent behavior. The program is a success, and Alex is "cured" of his bad behavior for the time being, but the obvious ethical questions of the procedure and general morality of the program is dubious.
Does the government have a moral imperative to influence a captive's mental state, against his will, if it serves the interests of the State?
It would be one thing to let "Western" values assimilate into Islamic culture through trade and other non-violent, voluntary relations. But this is far different from what the American military seems to be doing, even if the outcome is for "the greater good."
Alan Greenspan's first book after stepping down as the Federal Reserve chairman after 18 years has a number of biting criticisms of the Bush administration's spending policy, which has been anything but fiscal:
"In the revised world of growing deficits, the goals were no longer entirely appropriate," Greenspan noted. Bush, he said, stuck with his campaign promises anyway. "Most troubling to me was the readiness of both Congress and the administration to abandon fiscal discipline."
Greenspan harshly bemoans Bush's stupid dedication to Party promises when faced with harsh facts that reality and his promises couldn't both exist and still maintain responsible spending. But, this has been the case for more than two decades. Bush just took it to the next level.
Of course, the tax cuts were a great idea and the right moves to pull the economy out of a deficit. Additionally, the tax cuts should have stayed in place. Only they should have been met with reductions in expenditures, such as vetoing the huge healthcare bill that is predicted by the head of the GAO to bankrupt the country in mere decades. Instead, Bush pushed forward with expensive spending that exploded the Federal deficit while ignoring its implications.
I'm not entirely sure how Republicans will spin this harsh criticism from one of their own, but it is doubtful they'll take Greenspan with much seriousness. After all, when is the last time a Republican has listened to objective criticism?
For those that missed it last night, the President delivered a rare speech on the situation in Iraq following this week's updates from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. The speech comes at a very pivotal time for Iraq, as that Bush announced he would begin a 'limited withdrawal' of troops in Iraq although it would only put troop levels back to those before the troop surge.
For all intents and purposes, the President's speech was predictable and represented no real deviation from his plan despite his reassurance that this was a "change" in the course of Iraq. Bush reiterated previous statements before, saying the war in Iraq was essential to American security and even bringing in 9/11.
But after the cameras cut off and the pundits started their analysis, the general consensus was that nothing has changed. President Bush is still calling for more time for improvements and even the plan to begin withdrawing troops fits in with what was expected all along. We are now no closer to ending the occupation of Iraq than we were in March of 2003. In fact, we might be even further away.
One of the key elements of Bush's speech was his use of the term "enduring relationship" with Iraq, indicating an indefinite presence of U.S. soldiers in the country. Before the speech, some news agencies were quoting sources familiar with the President's speech who predicted the President would compare the Iraq war with Korea. This was perhaps to compare that we may have a similar presence in Iraq as we do in Korea now, more than 50 years down the road.
Bush believed his call for troop withdrawal would quell the ire from Democrats, Libertarians and even some Republicans who believe the Iraq war is failing and we need to begin bringing troops home.
The Libertarian and Democratic response may be a barometer of the public's reaction to his speech. After all, the American public is much smarter than Bush believes. However, if a Democratic controlled Congress fails to muster the spine to force more action from the Bush administration, waning public support may not be enough to pressure the Bush administration from doing anything more, especially given he is so close to passing the war off onto his successor.
As for right now, things will remain relatively the same until March, when the President will call for another report from Petreaus and Crocker, and we'll repeat this dog and pony show all over again.
Hours before the President will be giving a prime-time television address to the American public on Iraq, one of the large benchmarks the U.S. government established for the Iraqi parliament seems to be on the verge of collapsing.
A carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields, agreed to in February after months of arduous talks among Iraqi political groups, appears to have collapsed. The apparent breakdown comes just as Congress and the White House are struggling to find evidence that there is progress toward reconciliation and a functioning government here.
Much of the recent turmoil comes from a deal Kurds have struck up with a U.A.E. company for oil production in their province. While Kurdish officials say this deal is within the bounds of the Iraqi constitution, others feel this is a push for sovereignty and are now backing out of the deal.
The Kurds say their regional law is consistent with the Iraqi Constitution, which grants substantial powers to the provinces to govern their own affairs. But Mr. Shahristani believes that a sort of Kurdish declaration of independence can be read into the move. “This to us indicates very serious lack of cooperation that makes many people wonder if they are really going to be working within the framework of the federal law,” Mr. Shahristani said in a recent interview, before the Hunt deal was announced.
However, some feel that the Sunnis left the table because such a compromise would have given credibility to the al-Maliki government--who Sunni militia groups have worked hard to undermine.
But the prime minister’s office believes there is a simpler reason the Sunnis abandoned or at least held off on the deal: signing it would have given Mr. Maliki a political success that they did not want him to have. “I think there is a political reason behind that delay in order not to see the Iraqi government achieve the real agreement,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Mr. Maliki. Mr. Rikabi was at Wednesday’s meeting.
With this as just another setback to an Iraqi government who has been struggling to establish itself as a viable vehicle to a post-Saddam democracy, the last remnants of hope seem to be dissolving. How Bush will address this last minute catastrophe in tonight's speech is yet to be seen; however, such a monumental setback cannot go without mention.
For my generation the Sept. 11 terror attacks were the J.F.K. assassination of the baby boomer generation. I always heard people say they remembered exactly what they were doing when news came in from Dallas that the President had been assassinated, and they remembered it as if it were yesterday. The same can be said for all of us who hadn't grown up with a national tragedy. Not to gloss over the tragedy of the OKC bombing, or the Challenger exploding, but nothing I had experienced in my lifetime had the significance of what happened on Sept. 11.
I always like hearing about other people's stories of what they were doing on that day when the United States came to a silent hush. It's not that I enjoy them, or take pleasure out of it. It's just that hearing other people's experiences make 9/11 more real and keeps the tragedy of that day close to my heart. Much like how stories of the past are kept alive through the word of mouth, 9/11 will always be fresh in the American consciousness as long as people never forget the emotions of that day. And in the times when America seems ripped apart in political strife, it is good to remember how we all came together on that morning.
I don't remember much about that morning. I don't remember the temperature outside. I don't remember whether or not it was cloudy. But, it must have been close to 9:00 a.m. when someone knocked on the door of the English class I was in and said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, and the building was on fire. We immediately turned on the TV to watch what was happening. The first image we saw was a wide shot of the Twin Towers, with the north tower smoking.
My first thought was: 'How could this happen? Did a pilot just get blinded by the sun and not see the building?' My class and I discussed in hushed tones what might be the cause of the plane hitting the building. I believe the news floated around the ideas of terrorism, but few of us in the room, being so young, really remembered the first WTC attack in the 90s, or really knew whom Osama bin Laden was.
It wasn't until 9:03 a.m. when the second plane appeared on the TV screen on a direct course towards the towers. I thought: 'What is he doing?! Does he not see the buildings?!' Then there was fire on the screen, gasps from my peers, and finally dead silence across the room. We talked a little about what was going on, though I don't remember much of what was said. My mind was in a different place: a place where events like this took a heavy load of concentration to rationalize and accept. A place I'd never get to return to again.
At 9:30 a.m., Bush went on television to confirm the suspicions we all had in our minds. America was under attack.
We ended up turning off the TV and went back to work, or at least what we could do with our minds heavy from what we had just seen. Soon after, we abandoned work and turned back on the TV. Reports started floating in at 9:45 a.m. or so that the National Mall was on fire. Nobody really knew the cause at the time, or whether or not it was related to the attack in NYC. Later it would turn out that it was not the National Mall, but the Pentagon that had been struck by a plane.
At 10:00 a.m., after shock had fully set in, we shuffled down to the commons area for break, where my friends and I all discussed what we had heard and what we thought. I didn't have much to say. My head was spinning, and I didn't feel much like talking. I didn't feel like much of anything. I just felt numb. Numb and heavy. Later I would find out that as I walked down the stairwell for break, the south tower of the World Trade Center was collapsing. Other people walking down other stairwells in another building wouldn't make it to the bottom floor.
At 10:15 a.m., I walked through the door of my next class. As I was walking to the room, I had heard another student jokingly say: "The south tower of the WTC collapses, in other news, Dunkin' Doughnuts stock goes down...." I immediately wanted to choke him, and ask him how he could act in such a way despite what was going on. But quickly that sentiment waned as a new one took over: 'What did he mean the building collapsed?'
When I walked into class, the television was already on, and a few students were clustered by it. I looked at the screen, and only saw one tower standing. I thought: 'Where is the other one?! Can I just not see it from the angle? It has to be there.' It wasn't. A few seconds later, the anchor restated the South Tower had fallen, then cut to a picture of it crumbling away.
We continued to watch for a while, and we all saw a live feed of the second tower falling. You can't really explain a sight like that, even watching it from the comfort of a living room by way of the television. But what did it matter? Words were sort of in short supply that morning.
We turned off the TV only a little later, and got back to work. I didn't see a TV for the rest of the day. When I got home, I turned on the news and watched for a few hours, then went to bed.
On Sept. 12, I would wake up in a new world.
Later I would reflect on how naive I was, because from then on out I would never look at the world in the same way as I once did. You see, that day, my generation lost our innocence, and was stripped of the naivete we enjoyed as children who had grown up without a national tragedy of this magnitude. It changed how we looked at the world. We saw that every action has a consequence, and that not even an ocean could protect us from the evil of men.
Even writing this now takes me back to the way I felt when I watched America stand still, and I think this is a good thing. We must never forget the sacrifices of those who walked into danger to save the lives of others. And we must never forget the lives of those innocent Americans who perished. Their lives are a testament to the liberty we enjoy, and how badly our enemies would like to see it destroyed.
The emotions of that day remind us that we are not alone in this world, and that liberty comes at a cost. Given this, we must never sacrifice this liberty for any person, or any ideal. We live in a society where freedom and security coexist, and are not mutually exclusive principles. The day we sacrifice one for the other is the day all of the 2,974 lives taken on Sept. 11 will be without consequence.
If Sept. 11, 2001 taught us anything, let it be that liberty is at the foundation of this country, and that while terror attacks may knock down buildings and break our hearts, it will never destroy the bedrock principles of the United States.
I'd like to leave you with this cartoon I ran across today. I'm not sure why it hit me like it did, maybe because the emotions it evokes are the ones that I felt as I watched the second tower collapse, or maybe it just shows how the world can change in a matter of minutes. But I like it:
A U.S. District Court Judge in New York struck down parts of the Patriot Act at the end of the last week, calling the provisions unconstitutional.
The secrecy provisions are "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values," Marrero wrote. His strongly worded 103-page opinion amounted to a rebuke of both the administration and Congress, which had revised the act in 2005 to take into account an earlier ruling by the judge on the same topic.
The government is expected to appeal the decision, but in the meantime, Judge Victor Marrero's acrimonious rebuke of the FBI's "national security letter" program could curtail the use of NSLs, which demand that companies turn over records and data on individuals and then prohibits these companies from talking about it publicly. It is suspected that tens of thousands of these NSLs have been issued over the years.
"The risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion to restrict such speech is that government agents, based on their own self-certification, may limit speech that does not pose a significant threat to national security or other compelling government interest," Marrero said.
In its attempt to fight against a obesity "epidemic" on the horizon, the South L.A. government has sought legislation to limit the number of fast food restaurants in certain zones. This new trend of "legislating health" is just another example of the increasing interference of government in the private sector and private lives.
The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference.
The next step might just be getting a special pass from a physician saying you are physically fit enough to go down the snack aisle at your local grocery.
A recent poll conducted by BBC, ABC News and NHK has found that 70 percent of Iraqis believe the "troop surge" has failed in regions impacted by the surge. In fact, only a slight majority of Iraqis still feel that American troops should remain in the region, and this number is dropping fast.
Between 67% and 70% of the Iraqis polled believe the surge has hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development, according to the August 2007 findings.
Only 29% think things will get better in the next year, compared to 64% two years ago.
The number of people wanting coalition forces to leave immediately rose since February's poll but more than half - 53% - still said they should stay until security improved.
This new poll comes at a bad time for the Bush administration, which is expected to call for more time and patience with a floundering occupation of Iraq. With more and more Iraqis turning against U.S. intervention in the country, and the outcome of Bush's heralded "surge" looking more grim, Americans may begin to increase pressure on the government to begin withdrawing troops from the country.
For those anxiously watching the evolution of the D.C. gun ban, today was a highly anticipated day. Sept. 5 marked the deadline the District of Columbia had to file an appeal to the Supreme Court asking it to overturn the D.C. Court of Appeals decision regarding its ban on handguns. The law also required owners of shotguns and rifles to have them unloaded and disassembled, or with a trigger lock.
The District's gun ban was one of the toughest in the nation. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said the law was necessary to prevent further gun crime, saying that legalizing handguns would bring in more guns to the city and directly increase gun crime.
This is big news for many pro-gun rights organizations, which have been chomping at the bit for any jurisprudence of the Second Amendment. The last SCOTUS case involving the Second Amendment came in 1939 with United States v. Miller. While discussing the Second Amendment, the case only involved a very narrow interpretation of the law and failed to answer the individual versus collective argument.
We can expect to hear from the Supreme Court by Nov., and it is expected they will take up the case. By summer, we should have a decision that will affect all 50 states. Of course, there are multiple ways this case could be interpreted while still defining the Second Amendment as an individual right (as historical precedent has shown it to be). One such interpretation could be that states and cities do not have a right to limit access to specific types of firearms for individuals, but do have a right to regulate how those firearms are stored--as D.C. did in addition to outright banning handguns.
Regardless of how the case eventually comes out, this is the best chance the Second Amendment has to be interpreted in the proper way, and for that decision to set precedent once and for all. The conservative nature of the court (the only good thing Bush has yet to do as President) seems to bias it towards the individual right.
You can read the Washington Post article on the ban here.
Clarification Edit: By "conservative," I mean the willingness to interpret the Constitution in a manner respective of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, or what one might call strict interpretation. On a side note, any political divergence from the TRUE meaning of the Constitution is perilous, regardless of it being "left" or "right." In essence, judicial activism is a horrid thing. Sorry for the confusion. The word "conservative" doesn't mean what it once did.
Dr. Jerome Corsi, conservative author and political analyst, appeared on C-SPAN to discuss an article he had written in May of this year about a Presidential Directive giving the President extraordinary emergency powers. The directive can be found here.
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