A Very Bad Day for the New York Times (ILCA)

[struggle4progress]

By Doug Ireland, ILCA Associate Member

<snip> It's nice to see the Times finally catching up to the story that the Bush administration has been routinely sending people accused of terrorism to despotic allies of Washington, countries in which physical torture is commonplace and will be visited on those suspected terrorists (although the word "torture" only made it into the subhead in the Times story, not the main headline.) A significant number of other major news outlets -- from the WashPost to the Guardian, not to mention the major European dailies and the BBC -- have been reporting this story for months. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about it a year ago. So did my friend Tom Engelhardt, in a particularly tough and prescient piece. However, better late than never, I suppose, where the arteriosclerotic Times is concerned.

But the Times and its reporters, Doug Jehl and David Johnston, missed a hugely significant aspect of this story that strikes at the very heart of our democracy--a story which luckily can be found on the front page of the Sunday Baltimore Sun. Says the Sun, "The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state-secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign....

"The government is invoking the privilege in an attempt to wipe out the heart of a lawsuit that seeks to examine rendition, the secretive and controversial practice of sending terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they might be tortured....

"Use of the secrets privilege could also eliminate a suit by a former FBI contract linguist who charges that the bureau bungled translations of terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.... <snip>

http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2056&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[BrklynLiberal]

1. I cancelled my subscription months ago. They should hand in whatever

credentials they have left.

[ClintonTyree]

2. The coup is complete................

we can no longer question anything the White House does. They have disregarded the law at every turn and were not challenged, or when they were, they simply ignored said challenge and did whatever they damned well pleased anyway. We have a run away government, and there is no one or nothing that can stop it now.
It wouldn't matter if the NYT ran an entire special issue concerning the crimes of this administration. It's too late. This country is fucked. Totally fucked.
Time to head to Canada.

[rodeodance]

3. yes, you are right--I am feeling very helpless at the moment. The WH

jaugernaut rails on and on--.

Can it be stopped? They get a day or two bad press if we are lucky then amnesia sets in. Yes, some brave souls, (Kennedy, Boxer, others) go on record and get bashed in the process--but in the end it seems there is no consequence whatsoever for the WH!!

[struggle4progress]

7. One antidote to that helpless feeling is action.

Sure, it's bad -- and getting worse. And sure, it's going to take hard work over an extended period to recover. The sooner we get organized at the grass roots, the sooner we can kick some butt, so to speak.

[applegrove]

4. Oh - when someone says: "this is a terrorist" in Canada - they've been

sent to the USA and then on to Syria. We are not perfect! We don't have the Patriot Act but have changed some laws. The big difference is that we do it and we don't drink the kool-aid so when someone innocent is 'wash-boarded' they come home and sue. Likely the situation you will be in (one suit after another) if the crisis in the USA is ever allowed to end.

[ClintonTyree]

5. IF the crisis in the USA is ever allowed to end.....................

and it never will be. They've got the reins now and aren't about to give them up. Ever. Whatever it takes, armed thugs in the streets, wholesale murder, a complete police state, they'll do it. They have no qualms about killing their own people to retain power. It's over.

[applegrove]

6. No they will hand power over to the Democrats and then the

recession & the lawsuits will hit.

As well as the bankruptcy of the government. Man I would make that gated community just a little more "gated". When the fundies figure out they have been totally scammed - they may get there guns and go wild.

[struggle4progress]

8. Learn about resistance movements! There's inspiring history ...

... out there. What do you know about Denmark's anti-Nazi activists, for example? How much American labor history do you know? What about the long and astonishingly successful history of the anti-apartheid movement? -- those activists were risking torture or murder, and their families were relocated by troops armed with machine guns.

Interested in analysis? Ever read any Eduardo Galeano or Paolo Freire or Armand Mattelart?

Art has important political uses; remember Woody Guthrie?

How about Frederick Douglass, who played a major role in forcing the North to reinterpret the Civil War as a struggle over slavery, not a dispute over whether the South could withdraw from the Union?

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass, 1849

[applegrove]

9. I hope we will not have to face a WH as evil as Hitler's (he is on track)

So I think we should study the labour & Christian & women's movements of the turn of the century. We are dealing with people who liked the 19th Century for its lack of regulations. I say we read up on the good eggs like Frederick Douglas & all the other thinkers who did not go Marxist from 100 years before WWII to WWII.

Those are the people who defeated the Robber Barons.