This is a follow up to Andrew's great picture earlier. I laugh every time.
Also, if you that initial thrill has worn off the bin Laden situation and you want to think a little more about it, here are a couple good things to read.
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2011
He's Dead
This is a follow up to Andrew's great picture earlier. I laugh every time.
Also, if you that initial thrill has worn off the bin Laden situation and you want to think a little more about it, here are a couple good things to read.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Osama Bin Laden is dead
I think this image sums up the last couple of years quite nicely:
http://i.imgur.com/KDssc.jpg
OBL's death may be largely symbolic, but the symbolism is powerful. The thugs that are Al-Qaeda have stolen the focus for too many years from the billions of peaceful Muslims in the world. If nothing else, I'm hoping his death will undo that supreme injustice.
http://i.imgur.com/KDssc.jpg
OBL's death may be largely symbolic, but the symbolism is powerful. The thugs that are Al-Qaeda have stolen the focus for too many years from the billions of peaceful Muslims in the world. If nothing else, I'm hoping his death will undo that supreme injustice.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Speedy and Public Trial by Jury
 |
| Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, from The Economist |
This seems pretty straightforward, right? I believe the historical impetus for this addition to the Bill of Rights was the fact that kings and rulers were accusing the people of crimes and convicting them without a trial by jury, without witnesses, without due process of law, essentially without any safeguards or protections whatsoever against corruption and unchecked power. The founders wisely ensured that if government has the ability to deprive a person of property, freedom, or life (which it does) then the Constitution should require that the government has to submit to certain safeguards against the abuse of that power. I believe those on both the political right and left can feel good about that.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Trying Terrorists in Civil Court
The latest evidence proffered by conservative ideologues that Pres. Obama is anti-American and that America is being ruined is the announcement that certain detainees from Guantanamo Bay will be tried in civil courts for the 9/11 attacks. Chief among them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of 9/11.
The reasons for conservative outrage go like this, I think:
1. These men do not deserve the privilege of the American court system. To try them in our court system would be to defile that system.
2. It is dangerous to bring these terrorists to American soil because it would invite further terrorist attacks.
3. The government would have to give up its secrets in court in order to prosecute them effectively.
4. It would be a media circus and too great a strain on our court system.
As to number one, I agree. He does not deserve due process of law. Neither did Timothy McVeigh or Jeffrey Dahmer. These types of men do not deserve the rights and privileges of due process of law. But in America this is how we do it. In America we are a nation of laws, due process, objectivity, and justice. We have a Constitution to protect us from mob rule and decisionmaking based on emotion, hatred, half-truths, rumors, and the like. It is fundamentally American, and the right thing to do, to drag these terrorists through the court system and show the world that America does things the Right Way.
Number two is, I believe, a scare tactic. There have been no other terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, despite the fact that they have tried. We are more alert now than ever, and I believe that we are safer now than ever. I don't believe that we are more at risk having these few terrorists locked up in America than we did having them locked up 100 miles south of Florida in Cuba.
Number three is probably not going to happen to begin with, but reveals something about ourselves in any case. The government has a long standing exemption from regular discovery rules for national security secrets. They will not give away information that could be used to harm America, our troops, or our citizens. But really what we are worried about is the embarrassing stuff that could come out as a result of this trial. The torture, the poor conditions, the poor decisionmaking, and all the other skeletons in our closet regarding how we have prosecuted the war on terror.
Part of the reason I support this move by the Obama Administration is because it will lead to more openness about how we've been doing things and it will shed some light on some of our actions that we should not be proud of. Hopefully we'll come out of this a stronger nation with more desire to be just, open, and supportive of human rights than before. They will convict these terrorists no matter how embarrassing some of the details may be, so I hope we end up doing a little soul-searching along the way.
Number four is trivial and doesn't matter to me. It will be a media circus. It will strain the courts. Compared to how important it is to get this right, and show America to be just and strong and confident, those concerns mean little.
It has been well documented (I get my information from Glenn Greenwald: see here, here, here, and here, who in turn gets his information from the Pentagon, Gen. McChrystal, and others) that the imprisonment of Muslims suspected of terrorism without any sort of due process of law is a key recruiting tool for Islamic extremists. The mistreatment of extremists in our custody is driving more extremism. We have to put a stop to this, and it is within our power to do so. Muslim extremists, it is true, will never "like" us, but that is besides the point. We don't need friends, we just need to take the edge off that seething anger that drives manageable dislike to terrorism.
Trying these extremists in civil court, including KSM, is the right thing to do both for ourselves internally as a nation and our security worldwide.
The reasons for conservative outrage go like this, I think:
1. These men do not deserve the privilege of the American court system. To try them in our court system would be to defile that system.
2. It is dangerous to bring these terrorists to American soil because it would invite further terrorist attacks.
3. The government would have to give up its secrets in court in order to prosecute them effectively.
4. It would be a media circus and too great a strain on our court system.
As to number one, I agree. He does not deserve due process of law. Neither did Timothy McVeigh or Jeffrey Dahmer. These types of men do not deserve the rights and privileges of due process of law. But in America this is how we do it. In America we are a nation of laws, due process, objectivity, and justice. We have a Constitution to protect us from mob rule and decisionmaking based on emotion, hatred, half-truths, rumors, and the like. It is fundamentally American, and the right thing to do, to drag these terrorists through the court system and show the world that America does things the Right Way.
Number two is, I believe, a scare tactic. There have been no other terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, despite the fact that they have tried. We are more alert now than ever, and I believe that we are safer now than ever. I don't believe that we are more at risk having these few terrorists locked up in America than we did having them locked up 100 miles south of Florida in Cuba.
Number three is probably not going to happen to begin with, but reveals something about ourselves in any case. The government has a long standing exemption from regular discovery rules for national security secrets. They will not give away information that could be used to harm America, our troops, or our citizens. But really what we are worried about is the embarrassing stuff that could come out as a result of this trial. The torture, the poor conditions, the poor decisionmaking, and all the other skeletons in our closet regarding how we have prosecuted the war on terror.
Part of the reason I support this move by the Obama Administration is because it will lead to more openness about how we've been doing things and it will shed some light on some of our actions that we should not be proud of. Hopefully we'll come out of this a stronger nation with more desire to be just, open, and supportive of human rights than before. They will convict these terrorists no matter how embarrassing some of the details may be, so I hope we end up doing a little soul-searching along the way.
Number four is trivial and doesn't matter to me. It will be a media circus. It will strain the courts. Compared to how important it is to get this right, and show America to be just and strong and confident, those concerns mean little.
It has been well documented (I get my information from Glenn Greenwald: see here, here, here, and here, who in turn gets his information from the Pentagon, Gen. McChrystal, and others) that the imprisonment of Muslims suspected of terrorism without any sort of due process of law is a key recruiting tool for Islamic extremists. The mistreatment of extremists in our custody is driving more extremism. We have to put a stop to this, and it is within our power to do so. Muslim extremists, it is true, will never "like" us, but that is besides the point. We don't need friends, we just need to take the edge off that seething anger that drives manageable dislike to terrorism.
Trying these extremists in civil court, including KSM, is the right thing to do both for ourselves internally as a nation and our security worldwide.
Friday, September 11, 2009
9/11/09
On September 11, 2001 I was a junior at the University of Utah. I had been married just a few months. My wife was already at work on campus and, as I recall, called me as I was getting ready for class and told me to turn on the TV because something was going on. I turned on CNN and sat there aghast and confused. They kept saying that America is under attack. I guess we really had no idea what was going on at the time, but that phrase never sat well with me.
I remember watching live as the first tower collapsed. I was so disoriented. I had no frame of reference to understand what was going on. Pearl Harbor was way to long ago and Desert Storm was just a cool TV show for me when I was 12 years old. Seeing such a massive structure collapse and seemingly being at war on US soil was outside of every paradigm I had ever known. We grew up thinking that America was impenetrable to our enemies, that we were apart from and above the rest of the world.
I went on campus and joined the group that quietly watched the news coverage on the TV's that had been set up in the library. My work told me not to bother going in that day. It is not often that we know something will change the way we look at the world and the course of history itself, usually we can look back and identify moments in hindsight but not as they are happening, but of course this was different. Everything would be different, even when we didn't know who was doing this to us.
I'm not sure it's helpful to rehash 9/11 stories every year. Some of the legacy of 9/11 is ugly. Some people, from everywhere on the political spectrum, used it to advance political ideology and goals. We wouldn't have gone into Iraq, we wouldn't be a country that tortured, but we also would have still thought that America was impenetrable and isolated. We have been forced to become a leader on the world stage in more ways than just economic or cultural. We haven't always been the world's moral compass since then, but I still believe that America is the greatest nation on Earth.
So I guess, partly, for me, 9/11 is just as much about looking back at our failures and successes since then and committing to being better, as a nation, than it is to just rehash those awful feelings we felt as the towers fell.
I remember watching live as the first tower collapsed. I was so disoriented. I had no frame of reference to understand what was going on. Pearl Harbor was way to long ago and Desert Storm was just a cool TV show for me when I was 12 years old. Seeing such a massive structure collapse and seemingly being at war on US soil was outside of every paradigm I had ever known. We grew up thinking that America was impenetrable to our enemies, that we were apart from and above the rest of the world.
I went on campus and joined the group that quietly watched the news coverage on the TV's that had been set up in the library. My work told me not to bother going in that day. It is not often that we know something will change the way we look at the world and the course of history itself, usually we can look back and identify moments in hindsight but not as they are happening, but of course this was different. Everything would be different, even when we didn't know who was doing this to us.
I'm not sure it's helpful to rehash 9/11 stories every year. Some of the legacy of 9/11 is ugly. Some people, from everywhere on the political spectrum, used it to advance political ideology and goals. We wouldn't have gone into Iraq, we wouldn't be a country that tortured, but we also would have still thought that America was impenetrable and isolated. We have been forced to become a leader on the world stage in more ways than just economic or cultural. We haven't always been the world's moral compass since then, but I still believe that America is the greatest nation on Earth.
So I guess, partly, for me, 9/11 is just as much about looking back at our failures and successes since then and committing to being better, as a nation, than it is to just rehash those awful feelings we felt as the towers fell.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
How can you be a Mormon and Republican?
One of the reasons I wanted to write a blog that no one would ever read was to answer the most annoying question on earth: How can you be a Mormon and a Democrat? We surely will attempt to answer that question as we go along, but today I want to throw it back out there: How can you be a Mormon and a Republican?
I'd like to take a look back at the last eight years of near complete Republican control of all levels of government, meaning the executive branch, legislative branch, and judiciary. We've had eight years of George "W" Bush, six years of Republican control of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court that became more conservative over the last eight years with three Bush appointments of hard right judges including the replacement of swing voter O'Connor. So lets turn it up a few notches from "Reconciliatory" to "Hyper-Partisan" and take a look at some of the things that have happened while the Republicans have been on the watch.
Torture
Seriously? Torture? Here is a nice timeline of the Bush administration's dalliance into the torture scene. From Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, here are some of the delicately name "enhanced interrogation" techniques specifically authorized and utilized by the Bush administration: stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, exposure to cold, waterboarding, forcing men to wear women's underwear, performing "dog tricks" on a leash, 18 to 20 hours of interrogation a day for months at a time, slapping, use of vicious dogs for intimidation, dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, and sleep "adjustment."
Not only is torture immoral and should in no way be condoned under any circumstances, it is plainly against United States law and violates the Geneva Convention. Even more, studies are showing that torture does not yield reliable information. It is simply appalling that our government allowed this to go on.
Wiretapping
Big Brother is watching. The Bush administration secretly created a domestic spying program to monitor communications by its own citizens, without the need for a warrant. A warrant is a simply way for the government to go to a judge and present some evidence that, in this case, it has a reason to collect information from someone believed to be a threat. Such a hearing can be completely confidential and allows for a system of checks and balances that our Founding Fathers envisioned. This may be the most appalling, to me, abuses of power the Bush administration perpetrated. So next time you hear a strange clicking sound in your phone, hang up fast.
Iraq War
The biggie. I won't go into all the detail, it is pretty well known by now, but here is a rough overview. We were told that, contrary to all credible information, that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. We were told that Iraq had WMD's, which turned out to be false. So those were the big reasons we were sold on to go to war, we're talking war here, and those were bunk. So when the bottom fell out of those excuses, we were told to just be happy we were liberating Iraqi. We were told the soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. They were welcomed with IEDs. And, as a nice little bow on top, the adminstration had no feasible plan for the occupation, which is now nearing the six year mark.
The cost for overthrowing a regime that, while admittedly horrible, had never attacked us and was no threat to attack us in the future? Try 4,201 US military casualties, over 30,000 wounded, $602,819,000,000 and rising, and a number we don't hear that often because it is liable to make us sick, nearly 100,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths. How Christian.
I could go on, and I likely will later, but let me finish up with one thing the Republicans did not do for all of their control and power over the last eight years. There are many single-issue voters in this country, and I suspect even more so among religious people. And I suspect that the largest single-issue voter issue is abortion. So for everybody that votes one party on that single issue because that is the only issue they care about, or for people that might otherwise be more independent or even liberal but for this issue: You may have wasted your vote.
Abortion
I will state here that I support the Church's stance on abortion found here, that abortion may only occur in very limited instances: rape, incest, health of the mother, if the baby cannot survive beyond birth.
However, there has not been a bit of movement or even attempted movement on this issue for the past eight years of Republican control. The appalling secret is that abortion is a political issue used during the election cycle to get votes and then left dormant by politicians until the next election. Politics is simply not the way to make a real difference on this issue, and voting Republican because of this issue will get us nowhere.
I realize these are fightin' words. And I certainly don't mean to suggest that you can't be a Mormon and a Republican, that was a little rhetoric to get the ball rolling. There is no "good Mormon" political party, both have serious flaws and both have serious virtues. But I don't want to have to answer the question of how I can be a Mormon liberal because the premise of that question is that you cannot and you must be a Republican, which is false and wrong and I reject it.
I'd like to take a look back at the last eight years of near complete Republican control of all levels of government, meaning the executive branch, legislative branch, and judiciary. We've had eight years of George "W" Bush, six years of Republican control of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court that became more conservative over the last eight years with three Bush appointments of hard right judges including the replacement of swing voter O'Connor. So lets turn it up a few notches from "Reconciliatory" to "Hyper-Partisan" and take a look at some of the things that have happened while the Republicans have been on the watch.
Torture
Seriously? Torture? Here is a nice timeline of the Bush administration's dalliance into the torture scene. From Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, here are some of the delicately name "enhanced interrogation" techniques specifically authorized and utilized by the Bush administration: stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, exposure to cold, waterboarding, forcing men to wear women's underwear, performing "dog tricks" on a leash, 18 to 20 hours of interrogation a day for months at a time, slapping, use of vicious dogs for intimidation, dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, and sleep "adjustment."
Not only is torture immoral and should in no way be condoned under any circumstances, it is plainly against United States law and violates the Geneva Convention. Even more, studies are showing that torture does not yield reliable information. It is simply appalling that our government allowed this to go on.
Wiretapping
Big Brother is watching. The Bush administration secretly created a domestic spying program to monitor communications by its own citizens, without the need for a warrant. A warrant is a simply way for the government to go to a judge and present some evidence that, in this case, it has a reason to collect information from someone believed to be a threat. Such a hearing can be completely confidential and allows for a system of checks and balances that our Founding Fathers envisioned. This may be the most appalling, to me, abuses of power the Bush administration perpetrated. So next time you hear a strange clicking sound in your phone, hang up fast.
Iraq War
The biggie. I won't go into all the detail, it is pretty well known by now, but here is a rough overview. We were told that, contrary to all credible information, that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. We were told that Iraq had WMD's, which turned out to be false. So those were the big reasons we were sold on to go to war, we're talking war here, and those were bunk. So when the bottom fell out of those excuses, we were told to just be happy we were liberating Iraqi. We were told the soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. They were welcomed with IEDs. And, as a nice little bow on top, the adminstration had no feasible plan for the occupation, which is now nearing the six year mark.
The cost for overthrowing a regime that, while admittedly horrible, had never attacked us and was no threat to attack us in the future? Try 4,201 US military casualties, over 30,000 wounded, $602,819,000,000 and rising, and a number we don't hear that often because it is liable to make us sick, nearly 100,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths. How Christian.
I could go on, and I likely will later, but let me finish up with one thing the Republicans did not do for all of their control and power over the last eight years. There are many single-issue voters in this country, and I suspect even more so among religious people. And I suspect that the largest single-issue voter issue is abortion. So for everybody that votes one party on that single issue because that is the only issue they care about, or for people that might otherwise be more independent or even liberal but for this issue: You may have wasted your vote.
Abortion
I will state here that I support the Church's stance on abortion found here, that abortion may only occur in very limited instances: rape, incest, health of the mother, if the baby cannot survive beyond birth.
However, there has not been a bit of movement or even attempted movement on this issue for the past eight years of Republican control. The appalling secret is that abortion is a political issue used during the election cycle to get votes and then left dormant by politicians until the next election. Politics is simply not the way to make a real difference on this issue, and voting Republican because of this issue will get us nowhere.
I realize these are fightin' words. And I certainly don't mean to suggest that you can't be a Mormon and a Republican, that was a little rhetoric to get the ball rolling. There is no "good Mormon" political party, both have serious flaws and both have serious virtues. But I don't want to have to answer the question of how I can be a Mormon liberal because the premise of that question is that you cannot and you must be a Republican, which is false and wrong and I reject it.
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