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Illustration: We keep hearing that Kucinich does not have a chance, even though he ranked 4th recently in a New Hampshire poll. What we need to do is compare him with some of our past Presidents. Believe it or not, all of the above were past Presidents. I'm not even sure about the accomplishments of some of them, but I'll take a stab at a few. Harding was know for corruption and a big scandal. Fillmore was the best of the lot. He did nothing whatsoever except have indoor plumbing installed at the White House. We all know about Herbert Hoover. He is the Republican who promised a "chicken in every pot." He is also known for the Great Depression. None of them are ever quoted (I think they were all Republican, but I may be wrong" except Nixon, know for "I am not a crook."
Considering recent Presidents along with this crowd, the conventional wisdom seems correct. Kucinich will never be elected President.
Our first article gives a stellar example of this. We hear a great deal of talk about how to defend our country against terrorism and how we do not use torture. So, enclosed is an article by Robert Fisk about a Canadian citizen and what happened to him.
*ZNet | Repression*
*Rendition*
*by Robert Fisk; The Independent
06, 2007*
At university, we male students used to say that it was
impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and
concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I've at last proved this
to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses - and
with the vicious policies of George Bush - we both sat absorbed
by Rendition, Gavin Hood's powerful, appalling testimony of the
torture of a "terrorist suspect" in an unidentified Arab capital
after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.
Why did an Arab "terrorist" telephone an Egyptian chemical
engineer - holder of a green card and living in Chicago with a
pregnant American wife while he was attending an international
conference in Johannesburg? Did he have knowledge of how to make
bombs? (Unfortunately, yes - he was a chemical engineer - but
the phone calls were mistakenly made to his number.)
He steps off his plane at Dulles International Airport and is
immediately shipped off on a CIA jet to what looks suspiciously
like Morocco - where, of course, the local cops don't pussyfoot
about Queensberry rules during interrogation. A CIA operative
from the local US embassy - played by a nervous Jake Gyllenhaal
- has to witness the captive's torture while his wife pleads
with congressmen in Washington to find him.
The Arab interrogator - who starts with muttered questions to
the naked Egyptian in an underground prison - works his way up
from beatings to a "black hole", to the notorious
"waterboarding" and then to electricity charges through the
captive's body. The senior Muhabarat questioner is, in fact,
played by an Israeli and was so good that when he demanded to
know how the al-Jazeera channel got exclusive footage of a
suicide bombing before his own cops, my companion and I burst
into laughter.
Well, suffice it to say that the CIA guy turns soft, rightly
believes the Egyptian is innocent, forces his release by the
local minister of interior, while the senior interrogator loses
his daughter in the suicide bombing - there is a mind-numbing
reversal of time sequences so that the bomb explodes both at the
start and at the end of the film - while Meryl Streep as the
catty, uncaring CIA boss is exposed for her wrong-doing. Not
very realistic?
Well, think again. For in Canada lives Maher Arar, a totally
harmless software engineer - originally from Damascus - who was
picked up at JFK airport in New York and underwent an almost
identical "rendition" to the fictional Egyptian in the movie.
Suspected of being a member of al-Qa'ida - the Canadian Mounties
had a hand in passing on this nonsense to the FBI - he was put
on a CIA plane to Syria where he was held in an underground
prison and tortured. The Canadian government later awarded Arar
$10m in compensation and he received a public apology from Prime
Minister Stephen Harper.
But Bush's thugs didn't get fazed like Streep's CIA boss. They
still claim that Arar is a "terrorist suspect"; which is why,
when he testified to a special US congressional meeting on 18
October, he had to appear on a giant video screen in Washington.
He's still, you see, not allowed to enter the US. Personally,
I'd stay in Canada - in case the FBI decided to ship him back to
Syria for another round of torture. But save for the US
congressmen - "let me personally give you what our government
has not: an apology," Democratic congressman Bill Delahunt said
humbly - there hasn't been a whimper from the Bush administration.
Even worse, it refused to reveal the "secret evidence" which it
claimed it had on Arar - until the Canadian press got its claws
on these "secret" papers and discovered they were hearsay
evidence of an Arar visit to Afghanistan from an Arab prisoner
in Minneapolis, Mohamed Elzahabi, whose brother, according to
Arar, once repaired Arar's car in Montreal.
There was a lovely quote from America's Homeland Security
secretary Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney
general at the time, that the evidence again Arar was "supported
by information developed by US law enforcement agencies". Don't
you just love that word "developed"? Doesn't it smell rotten?
Doesn't it mean "fabricated"?
And what, one wonders, were Bush's toughs doing sending Arar off
to Syria, a country that they themselves claim to be a
"terrorist" state which supports "terrorist" organisations like
Hizbollah. President Bush, it seems, wants to threaten Damascus,
but is happy to rely on his brutal Syrian chums if they'll be
obliging enough to plug in the electricity and attach the wires
in an underground prison on Washington's behalf.
But then again, what can you expect of a president whose nominee
for Alberto Gonzales's old job of attorney general, Michael
Mukasey, tells senators that he doesn't "know what is involved"
in the near-drowning "waterboarding" torture used by US forces
during interrogations. "If waterboarding is torture, torture is
not constitutional," the luckless Mukasey bleated.
Yes, and I suppose if electric shocks to the body constitute
torture - if, mind you - that would be unconstitutional. Right?
The New York Times readers at least spotted the immorality of
Mukasey's remarks. A former US assistant attorney asked "how the
United States could hope to regain its position as a respected
world leader on the great issues of human rights if its chief
law enforcement officer cannot even bring himself to acknowledge
the undeniable verity that waterboarding constitutes
torture...". As another reader pointed out, "Like pornography,
torture doesn't require a definition."
Yet all is not lost for the torture lovers in America. Here's
what Republican senator Arlen Spector - a firm friend of Israel
- had to say about Mukasey's shameful remarks: "We're glad to
see somebody who is strong, with a strong record, take over this
department."
So is truth stranger than fiction? Or is Hollywood waking up -
after Syriana and Munich - to the gross injustices of the Middle
East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the
region? Go and see Rendition - it will make you angry - and
remember Arar. And you can take a beautiful woman along to share
your fury.
Yes, good ol' protection.
Do you feel safer now? Well, then, we should remember that it is our troops that need to be supported. The following is an outline of some of the housing benefits these brave young men and women received as a result of their service. You can not say that Bush fails to meet the standards of some of our past Presidents pictured above:
*ZNet | Race*
*Back From the War... and Into Homelessness*
*by Bill Fletcher; The Black commentator,
November 16, 2007*
The report this past week confirmed what veterans' advocates
have been saying for some time: one quarter of the homeless are
veterans! While this came as a shock to many people, anyone of
age at the time of the Vietnam War would not have been surprised
at all. In the 1960s and 1970s we saw returning veterans
discarded by the government that had placed them in harm's way.
Many returned strung out on heroin and were completely unable to
adjust to life at home. As homelessness became a national
phenomenon in the 1980s, we often saw the face of the Vietnam
War veteran staring back at us on the streets of the USA.
Yet few of us stop and realize that the mistreatment of veterans
is not just peculiar to Iraq or Vietnam. After each major
military conflict, with the possible exception of World War II,
soldiers who were drafted or enlisted in the context of a
patriotic fervor, returned home to a society that rarely knew
what to do with them and, sometimes depending on the nature of
the conflict, found them to be an embarrassment. The years
following World War I are an example of this. Veterans,
including a great uncle of mine, returned from the war scarred
for life physically and/or psychologically, yet the government
was unwilling to step forward and assist them in achieving any
degree of normalcy.
This recurring situation is what infuriated me in the lead up to
the illegal and immoral US invasion of Iraq. At the same time
that the Bush administration was fanning the flames of war
hysteria with misinformation, half-truths, fear and calls to
patriotism, it was simultaneously cutting back on funds for the
Department of Veterans Affairs. At a moment when soldiers
needed assurance of US government support, should they return
injured or otherwise facing adjustment issues (including needing
assistance in finding housing, jobs and psychological/emotional
counseling), the Bush administration was quietly cutting back;
some would say, cutting the soon- to-be veterans adrift.
I have found myself wondering each time the US - and especially
the Bush administration - beats the drums of war, why and how we
so easily forget this history, and particularly the
disposability of the citizen soldiers after they have served the
objectives of whomever happened to have been in power.
Given the racist reality of the USA, it should come as no
surprise that the crisis of the veteran becomes the catastrophe
for Black and Latino veterans. I saw this after Vietnam and I
am seeing it again with Iraq. But even in Black America, there
are few voices speaking up for the veteran. Perhaps we simply
think that the issues they face are just another variant of
those which we all suffer. While there is a truth to this, such
a view is nevertheless unacceptable. Particularly in an
environment of dramatic Black opposition to the US aggression
against Iraq, we have to make sure that we do not transfer our
hostility to the war to hostility toward the veteran.
This totality necessitates a Black veterans' movement that
reaches out to other Black veterans, provides a leading voice
against the war and all future plans of aggression and also
becomes a means to help our community focus our collective
opposition to the war. It necessitates as well as advances the
demand that the government take care of those it was willing to
sacrifice for a lie.
Let's hear the voice of the Black veteran!
[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr.
is a labor and international writer and activist, a Senior
Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate
past president of TransAfrica Forum.]
