Arab Revolutions: From Tunisia To Egypt, Is This The Beginning Of A Trend?
The Huffington Post Cara Parks First Posted: 02/ 1/11 01:02 AM Updated: 02/ 1/11 11:15 AM
Protests continue to sweep Egypt, as the world waits to see if President Hosni Mubarak will be forced from office. Those protesters are not alone. The movement leading the demonstrations in Egypt credited inspiration for their actions to the protesters in Tunisia, and a later protest in Yemen credited the Egyptians. What's going on?
According to Foreign Policy, the successful ouster of autocratic president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali struck a chord with many young, angry Arab populations ready to protest. Writes Ellen Knickmeyer, "The unhappy youth in Tunisia are not alone in the Arab world. On Jan. 25, tens of thousands of young Egyptians took to the pavement in Cairo and other major Egyptian cities in the largest challenge to President Hosni Mubarak's regime in a generation. Other crowds have shaken the streets of Sanaa, Algiers, and Amman."
She also notes, "And rather than the Arab world's usual suspects -- bearded Islamists or jaded leftists -- it is young people, angry at the lack of economic opportunity available to them, who are risking their lives going up against police forces." Why is the Middle Eastern youth so angry? Much of the frustration can be traced to extremely high unemployment rates. As Knickmeyer notes, the unemployment rate for young people in North Africa and the Middle East, who make up sixty percent of the area's population, is four times higher than the average rate in the region.
So why these countries, and not poor nations in general? CNN's Fareed Zakaria argues that it's not just the joblessness that sparks unrest in these populations; it's the "frustrated expectations" of a group that feels it should be receiving more from society than it has. He notes that far from failing, the Tunisian economy had been growing at five percent a year, and the Egyptian economy "much faster than that." The dictators ruling these countries were unable to accomodate the increasing demands of the nation's youth. As Zakaria puts it, "It is this revolution of rising expectations that often undoes a dictatorship because it is usually unable to handle the growing demands of its citizens."
What are these "growing demands"? Historian Basheer Nafi of the University of London's Birkbeck College told Al Jazeera today, "My feeling is that we are witnessing a second wave of the Arab liberation movement ... In the first wave, the Arabs liberated themselves from colonial powers and foreign domination. I think now, the very heart of the Arab world, the backbone of the Arab world, is leading the move towards freedom and democracy and human rights." There has been a lot of talk about the effect of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media on the revolutions, but one of the largest effects seems to be the anger incurred when these services are denied. In Tunisia, some commentators called it a "WikiLeaks Revolution" because of the unrest stirred by the government blocking the critical leaked cables. In Egypt, anger has flared over the government's early decisions to block Twitter and Facebook, and to later take the unprecedented step of shutting off the Internet entirely. While social media certainly helped the protestors to organize and communicate, it seems one of their most powerful roles was to serve as a catalyst when they disappeared. As Salman Shaikh of the Brookings Institute points out, "Due to the phenomenal growth of secondary and university-level education, literacy rates among the region's youths have skyrocketed in the past 40 years. The percentage of people living in Arab cities has risen by 50% in the same period." Literate, cosmopolitan people want to communicate. Therefore, argues Shaikh, "Propelled by the young and the digital revolution, citizens will demand nothing less than the right to choose and change their representatives in the future."
The Tunisia riots were set off by a the self-immolation of a 26-year-old man named Mohamed Bouazizi, who killed himself after police seized vegetables he was trying to sell. Michele Penner Angrist, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that in authoritarian societies, "... people bear an internal cost -- to their sense of autonomy and personal integrity -- of pretending that the status quo is acceptable. And when the cost of pretending becomes intolerably high for a few citizens, sudden and surprising mass protests can erupt." This was the case, she says, with the horrifying suicide of Bouazizi, which other Tunisians felt was too terrible to ignore. After the momentum begins, she writes, "The actions of these few can trigger similar actions by others, who, when they see how many others feel as they do and are willing to show it publicly, join in the opposition. The larger the number of protestors becomes, the more others are willing to join them."
So will these protests continue to spread through the region? It is most likely too soon to tell; after the Tunisian president fled, it was reported that Cairo residents chanted "Mubarak next," but few thought that the massive Egyptian protests would begin so suddenly, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate outcome of the protests will be. However, Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy sees reason for hope. "There are strong reasons to expect most of these regimes to survive, which we shouldn't ignore in a moment of enthusiasm. But we also shouldn't ignore this unmistakable new energy, the revelation of the crumbling foundations of Arab authoritarian regimes, or the continuing surprises which should keep all analysts humble about what might follow," he acknowledges. However, he adds, "The Tunisian example has offered the possibility of success, and models for sustained action by a decentralized network, after a long and dispiriting period of authoritarian retrenchment. Al-Jazeera and the new media have played their role in reshaping political opportunities and narratives, but it is people who have seized those opportunities."
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AdvertisementFrom Yemen to Algeria to Jordan, the BBC reports protests both large and small. The average age in the countries hovers around 25, the jobless rate about 10 percent, and Internet use anywhere from a sixth to a quarter of the population. While it is far from certain, the potential for a "new Arab liberation" movement is entirely possible.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Kids Of Divorce And Suicide: New Study Shows Link
Kids Of Divorce And Suicide: New Study Shows Link
The Huffington Post Amy Lee Posted: 01/24/11 02:38 AM
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Children with divorced parents are at an increased risk of suicidal thoughts, with boys especially vulnerable to the effects of marital breakups.
These new findings were revealed by the recent study, "Suicidal Ideation Among Individuals Whose Parents Have Divorced," conducted by Esme Fuller-Thompson, a professor at the University of Toronto.
Using a sample of 6.647 adults, 695 of whose parents had divorced before they were 18, Fuller-Thompson found that men from divorced households were three times as likely to have seriously considered suicide, while women had an 83 percent higher chance of having done the same.
Even when Fuller-Thomson adjusted for additional factors like parental abuse and addiction, which often accompany divorce, men still had twice the likelihood of having had suicidal thoughts. These findings suggest that divorce can have seriously adverse effects on children. We asked Esme Fuller-Thompson to help illuminate her study and its implications.
What was the most surprising finding of the study?
We're certainly not the first [group] to find a link between parental divorce and suicidal ideation. We were looking at gender differentiation--whether adult sons and adult daughters have different [responses]. Both men and women are at increased risk of suicidal ideation--at some time in their life they've seriously considered suicide. When you look at it carefully, and we had a big sample, what we found was that the association between parental divorce and suicidal ideation disappeared when I took out women who had also experienced parental addictions and abuse. But for men, the relationship still existed. Men who had experienced a parental divorce that had not been exposed to those other childhood factors still were at greater risk for suicidal ideation.
Why might boys be more affected than girls?
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Probably loss of the male role model, the father figure. The majority of children of divorce are raised by their moms. There are a portion of children who have very limited contact with their dad. The loss of a male role model is very significant for young men who are developing their gender identities. When you look back at the general literature, that seemed to be the one that popped up, but we don't know for sure.
Are there some differences between men and women generally in terms of suicidal thoughts?
Women have higher rates of suicidal ideation, while men are more likely to complete suicide. They tend to take steps such as shooting or hanging themselves. Women will attempt, but with drugs where you can catch them if you get it in time. In the general population, whose parents haven't divorced, among males 5.5 percent had seriously considered suicide, among females 8.7 percent. But when I looked at men who've experienced parental divorce, I had 17.5 percent. For females it went to 17.5 percent too, but compared to norms, women had a higher baseline to start with.
What's the link between having divorced parents and exposure to other negative factors?
Basically, parental divorces are higher if there's an addicted parent, and childhood physical abuse is higher in blended families. The majority of children of divorce don't become suicidal, or are exposed to these stresses, though they have a higher chance of exposure.
What were some limitations of your study?
We don't have all the intense details I would like to have. Though the parents had to divorce before the kid was 18, though one would expect the timing of the divorce would affect their experience--we didn't have access to that information, or things like, how much contact the child had with the father afterward, or when exactly the suicidal thoughts occurred.
What can divorced parents take from this?
I don't want everyone to panic, every divorced mom to go into an apoplectic fit! The vast majority of divorced children have never been suicidal. It's just one factor among many. You want it to be replicated many times before you really know what's going on. It seems to indicate that health professionals should use this as one more screening tool, particularly among men, particularly if they're depressed. We need to think a little more creatively about how to build resilience in children as they're experiencing parental divorce.
The Huffington Post Amy Lee Posted: 01/24/11 02:38 AM
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Children with divorced parents are at an increased risk of suicidal thoughts, with boys especially vulnerable to the effects of marital breakups.
These new findings were revealed by the recent study, "Suicidal Ideation Among Individuals Whose Parents Have Divorced," conducted by Esme Fuller-Thompson, a professor at the University of Toronto.
Using a sample of 6.647 adults, 695 of whose parents had divorced before they were 18, Fuller-Thompson found that men from divorced households were three times as likely to have seriously considered suicide, while women had an 83 percent higher chance of having done the same.
Even when Fuller-Thomson adjusted for additional factors like parental abuse and addiction, which often accompany divorce, men still had twice the likelihood of having had suicidal thoughts. These findings suggest that divorce can have seriously adverse effects on children. We asked Esme Fuller-Thompson to help illuminate her study and its implications.
What was the most surprising finding of the study?
We're certainly not the first [group] to find a link between parental divorce and suicidal ideation. We were looking at gender differentiation--whether adult sons and adult daughters have different [responses]. Both men and women are at increased risk of suicidal ideation--at some time in their life they've seriously considered suicide. When you look at it carefully, and we had a big sample, what we found was that the association between parental divorce and suicidal ideation disappeared when I took out women who had also experienced parental addictions and abuse. But for men, the relationship still existed. Men who had experienced a parental divorce that had not been exposed to those other childhood factors still were at greater risk for suicidal ideation.
Why might boys be more affected than girls?
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Probably loss of the male role model, the father figure. The majority of children of divorce are raised by their moms. There are a portion of children who have very limited contact with their dad. The loss of a male role model is very significant for young men who are developing their gender identities. When you look back at the general literature, that seemed to be the one that popped up, but we don't know for sure.
Are there some differences between men and women generally in terms of suicidal thoughts?
Women have higher rates of suicidal ideation, while men are more likely to complete suicide. They tend to take steps such as shooting or hanging themselves. Women will attempt, but with drugs where you can catch them if you get it in time. In the general population, whose parents haven't divorced, among males 5.5 percent had seriously considered suicide, among females 8.7 percent. But when I looked at men who've experienced parental divorce, I had 17.5 percent. For females it went to 17.5 percent too, but compared to norms, women had a higher baseline to start with.
What's the link between having divorced parents and exposure to other negative factors?
Basically, parental divorces are higher if there's an addicted parent, and childhood physical abuse is higher in blended families. The majority of children of divorce don't become suicidal, or are exposed to these stresses, though they have a higher chance of exposure.
What were some limitations of your study?
We don't have all the intense details I would like to have. Though the parents had to divorce before the kid was 18, though one would expect the timing of the divorce would affect their experience--we didn't have access to that information, or things like, how much contact the child had with the father afterward, or when exactly the suicidal thoughts occurred.
What can divorced parents take from this?
I don't want everyone to panic, every divorced mom to go into an apoplectic fit! The vast majority of divorced children have never been suicidal. It's just one factor among many. You want it to be replicated many times before you really know what's going on. It seems to indicate that health professionals should use this as one more screening tool, particularly among men, particularly if they're depressed. We need to think a little more creatively about how to build resilience in children as they're experiencing parental divorce.
Friday, January 21, 2011
and that's an understatement
"I am going to back to Washington and meet with the president of China. He is a dictator. He can do a lot of things through the form of government they have," Reid told KSNV television.
"Maybe I shouldn't have said 'dictator,' but they have a different type of government than we have – and that is an understatement," said Reid, who had been asked about the prospects for cooperation in divided Washington.
"Maybe I shouldn't have said 'dictator,' but they have a different type of government than we have – and that is an understatement," said Reid, who had been asked about the prospects for cooperation in divided Washington.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
'HEROISM IS FOUND NOT ONLY ON THE FIELDS OF BATTLE'
'HEROISM IS FOUND NOT ONLY ON THE FIELDS OF BATTLE' Barack Obama
Jack Kennedy would be proud. "War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." — John F. Kennedy ..
Jack Kennedy would be proud. "War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." — John F. Kennedy ..
The mold hates light. The inborn serfs hate courage and decency.
The "technological enemy" of WikiLeaks is not the US - but China, according to Assange.
"China is the worst offender," when it comes to censorship, says the controversial whistleblower. "China has aggressive and sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We've been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site."
Maria
12 January 2011 at 15:10
The mold hates light. The inborn serfs hate courage and decency.
"China is the worst offender," when it comes to censorship, says the controversial whistleblower. "China has aggressive and sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We've been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site."
Maria
12 January 2011 at 15:10
The mold hates light. The inborn serfs hate courage and decency.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
the dangers of being armed
But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!' "
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.
more dead birds
Birds Fall From Sky In California, Thousands Of Dead Fish Found In Chicago
The Huffington Post Travis Walter Donovan First Posted: 01/11/11 11:03 AM Updated: 01/11/11 12:31 PM
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Over 100 birds were found dead along a California highway this past weekend, and thousands of dead fish were reported along Chicago's lakefront prior to that. A smaller incident of around 30 dead birds was also reported in Missouri.
According to the AP, the dead birds found along Highway 101 in California "were intact and had not been shot." Thousands of gizzard shad, a member of the herring family, were found dead in Chicago's harbors, many floating in ice, The Sun-Time reports. Even more abnormal, according to wildlife experts, was the sight of Canada geese and mallards munching on the dead fish, something not ordinarily a part of their diet.
California and Illinois join countless other states that have seen mass animal deaths in the past weeks. Thousands of dead birds and fish were reported in Arkansas within 100 miles of each other, and then days later hundreds more dead birds turned up 300 miles away in Louisiana. Reports of similar incidents continued, with dead birds turning up Kentucky and millions of dead fish appearing in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay.
The incidents haven't been isolated to the U.S., as hundreds of dead birds were discovered in Italy, and dozens of birds fell from the sky in Sweden. Massive fish kills were reported in Brazil and New Zealand, while England experienced an estimated 40,000 dead crabs washing onto its beaches.
Various wildlife officials attest that the events are unrelated, and are not uncommon. Multiple explanations have been suggested as likely causes for various incidents. Experts believe the dead birds in Italy suffered from indigestion after overeating, while fireworks have been blamed for bird deaths in Arkansas, Louisiana and Sweden. Unusually cold weather has been speculated as the culprit in many of the fish and crab deaths, with some suggesting the same for the bird incidents.
As for the latest reports of birds falling from the sky in California and dead fish washing ashore in Chicago, officials are currently uncertain as to what could be responsible.
The Huffington Post Travis Walter Donovan First Posted: 01/11/11 11:03 AM Updated: 01/11/11 12:31 PM
Email Comments 196
Over 100 birds were found dead along a California highway this past weekend, and thousands of dead fish were reported along Chicago's lakefront prior to that. A smaller incident of around 30 dead birds was also reported in Missouri.
According to the AP, the dead birds found along Highway 101 in California "were intact and had not been shot." Thousands of gizzard shad, a member of the herring family, were found dead in Chicago's harbors, many floating in ice, The Sun-Time reports. Even more abnormal, according to wildlife experts, was the sight of Canada geese and mallards munching on the dead fish, something not ordinarily a part of their diet.
California and Illinois join countless other states that have seen mass animal deaths in the past weeks. Thousands of dead birds and fish were reported in Arkansas within 100 miles of each other, and then days later hundreds more dead birds turned up 300 miles away in Louisiana. Reports of similar incidents continued, with dead birds turning up Kentucky and millions of dead fish appearing in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay.
The incidents haven't been isolated to the U.S., as hundreds of dead birds were discovered in Italy, and dozens of birds fell from the sky in Sweden. Massive fish kills were reported in Brazil and New Zealand, while England experienced an estimated 40,000 dead crabs washing onto its beaches.
Various wildlife officials attest that the events are unrelated, and are not uncommon. Multiple explanations have been suggested as likely causes for various incidents. Experts believe the dead birds in Italy suffered from indigestion after overeating, while fireworks have been blamed for bird deaths in Arkansas, Louisiana and Sweden. Unusually cold weather has been speculated as the culprit in many of the fish and crab deaths, with some suggesting the same for the bird incidents.
As for the latest reports of birds falling from the sky in California and dead fish washing ashore in Chicago, officials are currently uncertain as to what could be responsible.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
And I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol."
Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: Arizona 'Mecca For Prejudice & Bigotry'
Posted: 01- 8-11 11:18 PM
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After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and number of others were wounded or killed in a shooting in Tucson, Ariz. on Saturday, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said that the state has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Addressing the tragedy at a news conference, the sheriff said that law enforcement had reason to believe that Giffords was specifically targeted in the attack. He added that evidence suggests one suspect -- 22-year-old Jared Loughner, who is already in custody -- likely did not act alone.
"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," said the sheriff. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
When asked by a reporter if Giffords being shot could have been motivated by "prejudice and bigotry," Dupnik responded, "All I can tell you is that there's reason to believe is that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol."
While speaking, the sheriff said that himself it included, "it's not unusual for all public officials to get threats." However, he said the sentiment doesn't come without consequences.
"And that's the sad thing of what's going on in America," he explained. "Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."
Posted: 01- 8-11 11:18 PM
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Read More: Arizona Sheriff Giffords Shooting, Arizona Sheriff On Shooting, Arizona Sheriff Shooting, Clarence Dupnik, Clarence Dupnik Arizona, Clarence Dupnik Arizona Bigotry, Clarence Dupnik Arizona Prejudice, Gabby Giffords, Gabby Giffords Shooting, Gabby Giffords Shot, Gabrielle Giffords, Gabrielle Giffords Shooting, Gabrielle Giffords Shot, Gabrielle Giffords Shot At, Giffords, House Of Representatives, Politics News
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After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and number of others were wounded or killed in a shooting in Tucson, Ariz. on Saturday, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said that the state has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Addressing the tragedy at a news conference, the sheriff said that law enforcement had reason to believe that Giffords was specifically targeted in the attack. He added that evidence suggests one suspect -- 22-year-old Jared Loughner, who is already in custody -- likely did not act alone.
"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," said the sheriff. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
When asked by a reporter if Giffords being shot could have been motivated by "prejudice and bigotry," Dupnik responded, "All I can tell you is that there's reason to believe is that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol."
While speaking, the sheriff said that himself it included, "it's not unusual for all public officials to get threats." However, he said the sentiment doesn't come without consequences.
"And that's the sad thing of what's going on in America," he explained. "Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."
Friday, January 7, 2011
oops lets not forget who these guys are
GOP Congressmen Face Criticism From Watchdog Groups For Skipping Oath For Fundraiser
ALAN FRAM | 01/ 7/11 05:12 PM |
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WASHINGTON — Democrats and congressional watchdog groups accused Republicans on Friday of illegally holding a campaign fundraiser in the Capitol complex during this week's swearing-in ceremonies for lawmakers.
One group said it would ask House ethics officials to investigate, but there were no immediate indications that they would take formal action.
A spokesman for the GOP congressman who sponsored the event denied that he had used it to raise campaign money, and said funds collected were for the costs of buses that ferried people to the reception. While at the reception, the two Republican lawmakers – Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Pete Sessions of Texas – missed their swearing-in ceremony on the House floor. They subsequently cast six votes each that House Republicans later had to nullify.
The salvos between the parties underscored the raw political feelings accompanying the start of the new Congress, in which Republicans took control of the House after four years in the minority and strengthened their hand in a Senate still run by Democrats.
Fitzpatrick held an event on Wednesday in the Capitol Visitor Center that his campaign called "Mike Fitzpatrick's Swearing In Celebration," according to copies of the announcement provided to The Associated Press by the Sunlight Foundation, which favors open government. Also attending the event was Sessions, who heads the House GOP's campaign arm.
The invitations said buses would provide round-trip transportation from Pennsylvania and cited a price of $30 per person. An accompanying form repeatedly describes the money as a "contribution," and attendees are asked to write their checks to Fitzpatrick's campaign committee.
"The $30 was for the cost of the bus, that's it," Fitzpatrick spokesman Darren Smith said in an email. "The reception in the CVC was free and open to anyone who showed up, including over 100 constituents who drove down on their own."
Fitzpatrick is technically a freshman, though he previously served one term in Congress from 2005 to 2007. He represents several Philadelphia suburbs, including prosperous Bucks County.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that holding a fundraiser in the Capitol Visitor Center violates the law banning campaign fundraising on federal property. Sloan said her group would ask the Office of Congressional Ethics to look into the reception.
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"You're not allowed to solicit contributions. I don't care why," she said.
The law allows members to hold swearing-in receptions in House offices, paid for by campaign contributions, but not fundraisers.
The ethics office can conduct preliminary reviews of potential ethics problems and make non-binding recommendations to the House ethics committee about whether it should pursue a formal investigation. Jim Steinman, spokesman for the office, said its bipartisan board considers information it receives but could not predict what action they might take.
Aides to the bipartisan House ethics committee, which oversees lawmakers' behavior, did not return two telephone messages seeking comment.
Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which monitors campaign finance practices in Washington, said Fitzpatrick seemed to have broken campaign finance laws. She said the ethics office should examine the congressman's reception to spell out for lawmakers what types of events they can hold on congressional property.
"I don't look at this and say, 'My God, how venal,'" she said. "I say, 'Here's a guy who misses his own swearing-in and then goes and reads the Constitution.' How ironic. It does show how much the money system has become wrapped up in being a member of Congress."
Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for the House Democratic campaign committee, said serious questions are raised "when a Republican member of Congress and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional committee in charge of helping him get elected were at an event in the U.S. Capitol where camp funds were solicited to attend."
Fitzpatrick was among dozens of members of Congress who helped read the Constitution aloud on the House floor on Thursday, which GOP leaders engineered in a bow to the conservative tea party voters who helped them win a House majority in November.
The House voted 257-159 on Friday to nullify the votes cast by Sessions and Fitzpatrick. Retracting their votes didn't affect any outcomes. The two were sworn in Thursday.
ALAN FRAM | 01/ 7/11 05:12 PM |
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WASHINGTON — Democrats and congressional watchdog groups accused Republicans on Friday of illegally holding a campaign fundraiser in the Capitol complex during this week's swearing-in ceremonies for lawmakers.
One group said it would ask House ethics officials to investigate, but there were no immediate indications that they would take formal action.
A spokesman for the GOP congressman who sponsored the event denied that he had used it to raise campaign money, and said funds collected were for the costs of buses that ferried people to the reception. While at the reception, the two Republican lawmakers – Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Pete Sessions of Texas – missed their swearing-in ceremony on the House floor. They subsequently cast six votes each that House Republicans later had to nullify.
The salvos between the parties underscored the raw political feelings accompanying the start of the new Congress, in which Republicans took control of the House after four years in the minority and strengthened their hand in a Senate still run by Democrats.
Fitzpatrick held an event on Wednesday in the Capitol Visitor Center that his campaign called "Mike Fitzpatrick's Swearing In Celebration," according to copies of the announcement provided to The Associated Press by the Sunlight Foundation, which favors open government. Also attending the event was Sessions, who heads the House GOP's campaign arm.
The invitations said buses would provide round-trip transportation from Pennsylvania and cited a price of $30 per person. An accompanying form repeatedly describes the money as a "contribution," and attendees are asked to write their checks to Fitzpatrick's campaign committee.
"The $30 was for the cost of the bus, that's it," Fitzpatrick spokesman Darren Smith said in an email. "The reception in the CVC was free and open to anyone who showed up, including over 100 constituents who drove down on their own."
Fitzpatrick is technically a freshman, though he previously served one term in Congress from 2005 to 2007. He represents several Philadelphia suburbs, including prosperous Bucks County.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that holding a fundraiser in the Capitol Visitor Center violates the law banning campaign fundraising on federal property. Sloan said her group would ask the Office of Congressional Ethics to look into the reception.
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"You're not allowed to solicit contributions. I don't care why," she said.
The law allows members to hold swearing-in receptions in House offices, paid for by campaign contributions, but not fundraisers.
The ethics office can conduct preliminary reviews of potential ethics problems and make non-binding recommendations to the House ethics committee about whether it should pursue a formal investigation. Jim Steinman, spokesman for the office, said its bipartisan board considers information it receives but could not predict what action they might take.
Aides to the bipartisan House ethics committee, which oversees lawmakers' behavior, did not return two telephone messages seeking comment.
Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which monitors campaign finance practices in Washington, said Fitzpatrick seemed to have broken campaign finance laws. She said the ethics office should examine the congressman's reception to spell out for lawmakers what types of events they can hold on congressional property.
"I don't look at this and say, 'My God, how venal,'" she said. "I say, 'Here's a guy who misses his own swearing-in and then goes and reads the Constitution.' How ironic. It does show how much the money system has become wrapped up in being a member of Congress."
Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for the House Democratic campaign committee, said serious questions are raised "when a Republican member of Congress and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional committee in charge of helping him get elected were at an event in the U.S. Capitol where camp funds were solicited to attend."
Fitzpatrick was among dozens of members of Congress who helped read the Constitution aloud on the House floor on Thursday, which GOP leaders engineered in a bow to the conservative tea party voters who helped them win a House majority in November.
The House voted 257-159 on Friday to nullify the votes cast by Sessions and Fitzpatrick. Retracting their votes didn't affect any outcomes. The two were sworn in Thursday.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
a message from the pope to china
"May the birth of the savior strengthen the spirit of faith, patience and courage of the faithful of the church in mainland China, that they may not lose heart through the limitations imposed on their freedom of religion and conscience," Benedict said, praying aloud.
Monday, December 20, 2010
National Crime Statistics: Violent Crime Falls Again, FBA Data
National Crime Statistics: Violent Crime Falls Again, FBA Data Shows
ALICIA A. CALDWELL | 12/20/10 11:13 AM |
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WASHINGTON — Reports of violent and property crimes continued to decline in the first half of 2010, according to preliminary crime report released by the FBI Monday.
The FBI's semiannual uniform crime report shows that reports of violent crime dropped 6.2 percent from January to June and property crime reports were down 2.8 percent.
The dip in reported crimes follows a three-year trend of decreasing crime rates despite a sagging economy.
According to the FBI, murders dropped 7.1 percent in the first six months of 2010 while robberies decreased by 10.7 percent. Reports of vehicle thefts also dropped by 9.7 percent.
FBI crime reports have shown a steady decrease in crimes rates since 2008. In the annual report for 2009, released in September, reports of violent crimes dropped 5.3 percent and reported property crimes fell 4.6 percent.
Experts have been hard-pressed to explain the decreasing crime when a weak economy has put a continuing strain on local police budgets. Typically, crime rates increase as the economy falters.
ALICIA A. CALDWELL | 12/20/10 11:13 AM |
WHAT'S YOUR REACTION?
Amazing
Inspiring
Funny
Scary
Hot
Crazy
Important
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Read More: Crime, FBI Crime Data, FBI Crime Statistics, FBI Crime Stats, National Crime Data, National Crime Statistics, Violent Crime, Violent Crime Data, Violent Crime Statistics, Home News
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WASHINGTON — Reports of violent and property crimes continued to decline in the first half of 2010, according to preliminary crime report released by the FBI Monday.
The FBI's semiannual uniform crime report shows that reports of violent crime dropped 6.2 percent from January to June and property crime reports were down 2.8 percent.
The dip in reported crimes follows a three-year trend of decreasing crime rates despite a sagging economy.
According to the FBI, murders dropped 7.1 percent in the first six months of 2010 while robberies decreased by 10.7 percent. Reports of vehicle thefts also dropped by 9.7 percent.
FBI crime reports have shown a steady decrease in crimes rates since 2008. In the annual report for 2009, released in September, reports of violent crimes dropped 5.3 percent and reported property crimes fell 4.6 percent.
Experts have been hard-pressed to explain the decreasing crime when a weak economy has put a continuing strain on local police budgets. Typically, crime rates increase as the economy falters.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
China and the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2010
China and the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky
Nobel Peace Prize: echoes of 1936 when Hitler barred von Ossietzky
The absence of Liu Xiaobo from this year's Nobel prize ceremony has raised the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist who was not allowed to collect his Nobel prize in 1936.
ARTICLE
Chinese censors clamp down on Nobel internet buzz
ARTICLE
Chinese clampdown ahead of Nobel ceremony
Carl von Ossietzky in a concentration camp in Esterwegen
By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai 6:30AM GMT 10 Dec 2010
Mr Liu, 54, is currently serving an eleven-year sentence on the charge of "inciting subversion" after he co-authored a petition for political reform in China.
Mr Ossietzky, a German journalist and pacifist who spoke out against Hitler's rise to power, was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after publishing an article about Germany's efforts to rebuild its air force, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.
He was tortured in Spandau prison in 1933, after the Reichstag fire, and was interned in the KZ Esterwegen concentration camp near Oldenburg when he was awarded the prize in 1936.
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Ai Weiwei blocked from leaving China10 Dec 2010
The Nazi regime put enormous pressure on the Nobel committee not to award him the Peace prize, to the extent that the 1935 Peace prize, which he had been nominated for, was not awarded at all.
It took the Nobel committee a year to work up the courage, and two members withdrew, before it finally announced the 1935 prize to Mr Ossietzky on the same day as awarding the 1936 prize to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, who brokered a truce between Paraguay and Bolivia. Mr Ossietzky's prize was described by newspapers at the time as "a slap in the face of fascism".
King Haakon VII of Norway stayed away from the ceremony, while the award was generally condemned by conservatives. Aftenposten, the Norwegian newspaper, argued that Mr Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power".
One of the German activists supporting Mr Ossietzky in Norway was Herbert Frahm, a 21-year-old exile who took the name Willy Brandt and would eventually become chancellor of West Germany and win the Peace prize himself.
Germany reacted with fury, and an unnamed official called the award "preposterous". The Nazi government told Mr Ossietzky, by then suffering from severe tuberculosis in a hospital bed, that he had to decline the prize, a demand that he refused. A year-and-a-half later he died, at the age of 48.
Meanwhile, Hitler established his own alternative Peace prize and declared that no Germans were to ever accept the Nobel prize again. The University of Oldenburg is now named after Mr Ossietzky.
China and the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky
Nobel Peace Prize: echoes of 1936 when Hitler barred von Ossietzky
The absence of Liu Xiaobo from this year's Nobel prize ceremony has raised the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist who was not allowed to collect his Nobel prize in 1936.
ARTICLE
Chinese censors clamp down on Nobel internet buzz
ARTICLE
Chinese clampdown ahead of Nobel ceremony
Carl von Ossietzky in a concentration camp in Esterwegen
By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai 6:30AM GMT 10 Dec 2010
Mr Liu, 54, is currently serving an eleven-year sentence on the charge of "inciting subversion" after he co-authored a petition for political reform in China.
Mr Ossietzky, a German journalist and pacifist who spoke out against Hitler's rise to power, was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after publishing an article about Germany's efforts to rebuild its air force, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.
He was tortured in Spandau prison in 1933, after the Reichstag fire, and was interned in the KZ Esterwegen concentration camp near Oldenburg when he was awarded the prize in 1936.
RELATED ARTICLES
Nobel peace prize row: 18 countries turn down ceremony invitations10 Dec 2010
Outgoing US Speaker Nancy Pelosi to attend Nobel Peace ceremony10 Dec 2010
Russia joins China in boycotting Nobel peace prize10 Dec 2010
Nobel Peace prize boycott is blow to US prestige10 Dec 2010
WikiLeaks: China's Politburo a cabal of business empires10 Dec 2010
Ai Weiwei blocked from leaving China10 Dec 2010
The Nazi regime put enormous pressure on the Nobel committee not to award him the Peace prize, to the extent that the 1935 Peace prize, which he had been nominated for, was not awarded at all.
It took the Nobel committee a year to work up the courage, and two members withdrew, before it finally announced the 1935 prize to Mr Ossietzky on the same day as awarding the 1936 prize to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, who brokered a truce between Paraguay and Bolivia. Mr Ossietzky's prize was described by newspapers at the time as "a slap in the face of fascism".
King Haakon VII of Norway stayed away from the ceremony, while the award was generally condemned by conservatives. Aftenposten, the Norwegian newspaper, argued that Mr Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power".
One of the German activists supporting Mr Ossietzky in Norway was Herbert Frahm, a 21-year-old exile who took the name Willy Brandt and would eventually become chancellor of West Germany and win the Peace prize himself.
Germany reacted with fury, and an unnamed official called the award "preposterous". The Nazi government told Mr Ossietzky, by then suffering from severe tuberculosis in a hospital bed, that he had to decline the prize, a demand that he refused. A year-and-a-half later he died, at the age of 48.
Meanwhile, Hitler established his own alternative Peace prize and declared that no Germans were to ever accept the Nobel prize again. The University of Oldenburg is now named after Mr Ossietzky.
Michael Moore and Assange
Michael Moore
Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author
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December 14th, 2010 6:23 AM
Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange
By Michael Moore
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."
**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."
**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff ... there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned -- and now it's Big Brother who's being watched ... by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept ... as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?
But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in takeoffs or landings, did nothing. Had he read about the bin Laden threat in the paper, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time's 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)
Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read "secret" memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the "facts" he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched -- or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?
Openness, transparency -- these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 -- after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin -- there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, secrets killed them.
For those of you who think it's wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he's being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please -- never, ever believe the "official story." And regardless of Assange's guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money -- and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.
Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.
And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.
I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. I am willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money I have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.
P.S. You can read the statement I filed today in the London court here.
P.P.S. If you're reading this in London, please go support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at a demonstration
Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author
520 Comments
Share
December 14th, 2010 6:23 AM
Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange
By Michael Moore
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:
**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."
**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."
**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."
**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff ... there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."
**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned -- and now it's Big Brother who's being watched ... by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept ... as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?
But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in takeoffs or landings, did nothing. Had he read about the bin Laden threat in the paper, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time's 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)
Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read "secret" memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the "facts" he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched -- or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?
Openness, transparency -- these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 -- after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin -- there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, secrets killed them.
For those of you who think it's wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he's being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please -- never, ever believe the "official story." And regardless of Assange's guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money -- and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.
Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.
And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.
I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. I am willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money I have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.
P.S. You can read the statement I filed today in the London court here.
P.P.S. If you're reading this in London, please go support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at a demonstration
Judy Miller gets it wrong "again"
Doug LimanDirector, 'Fair Game'
Posted: December 15, 2010 09:43 AM
Last Thursday, Judith Miller penned a column for the Wall Street Journal in which she accused the new film Fair Game of pushing "untruths" in its telling of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Miller described the film, which focuses on the relationship of Plame and husband Joe Wilson, as "brilliantly acted," but a "gross distortion of a complicated political saga." She challenges seven of what she calls the film's "untruths"; among them, claims that Plame played a "key role" in the CIA's counterproliferation division, charged with gathering evidence on Iraq's WMD programs, and that Plame was involved in missions to provide safe havens to Iraqi scientists. Miller also takes issue with a subplot in the film in which Plame, played by Naomi Watts, recruits an Iraqi-American woman to visit her scientist brother in Iraq, where is working on the country's WMD program.
CJR.org approached Fair Game director Doug Liman (Swingers, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Bourne Identity) for comment. He wrote back with this response to Miller's piece, which was originally published at CJR.org.
Judith Miller demonstrated in her recent WSJ story about my film, Fair Game, the same cavalier attitude towards the facts that led to her departure from the New York Times in disgrace. And we should never forget that Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to Miller in June 2003 -- more than two weeks before Richard Armitage outed Plame to Novak. Somehow Miller neglected to mention that in her op-ed piece. But she also forgot about that before -- in her early grand jury testimony -- until she was forced to come clean about it in a subsequent grand jury appearance and under oath at Libby's trial. Miller's belated testimony helped convict her "source" Libby, but not until she did everything she could, as a forceful proponent of the war in Iraq, to avoid telling the truth to the American public.
And so here we go again.
Judith Miller writes that her supposed anonymous sources told her that Valerie Plame did not play a "key role" in the CIA's effort to penetrate Iraq's presumed WMD program. In truth, Valerie Plame was head of operations for the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI). My sources: former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald.
Valerie's specific actions as head of operations for the JTFI were and still are classified. Valerie Plame, a loyal intelligence officer from a military family, has always honored and continues to honor the secrecy agreement she signed when she joined the Agency more than twenty-five years ago. As filmmakers, we did the best job we could to piece together her activities in covert CIA operations specializing in nuclear counter-proliferation. This is not easy, especially since Valerie was a NOC, a form of deep cover operative with no official ties to the U.S. government. To be drawn into debating what this deep cover operative may or may not have done is to miss the big picture--this was no "glorified secretary" who was outed by the White House. Far from it.
Special Counsel Fitzgerald submitted a memorandum to the district court in the Libby trial spelling out in detail Valerie's undercover role overseas, covert status, and senior positions at the CIA leading counter-proliferation teams and searching for WMD in Iraq. It is disgraceful that Miller and others like her continue to demean Valerie and the dedicated women and men who serve our country as operations officers and risk their lives to keep armchair warriors like Miller safe from harm.
Regarding the Iraqi scientists that are the focus of a sub-plot in Fair Game, Judith Miller seems to blur the line between opinions and indisputable fact. This much we know to be fact: the CIA made a criminal referral because of Plame's outing. I doubt that the CIA and its director George Tenet--someone who bent over backwards to protect the Bush Administration--would have allowed that to occur if the consequences to national security weren't serious and the damage to intelligence operations severe.
Obviously WMDs remain a sore subject for Miller, who wrote many erroneous stories that badly misled the American public about their existence in Iraq in 2003. Fair Game doesn't much focus on the WMDs, except to recount an episode showing the dangers of politicized intelligence, which is now common wisdom on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, Fair Game doesn't even state an opinion about the war itself, however disastrous its consequences are in hindsight. Rather, Fair Game is about the president of the United States lying to the American people, and what happened to the people who challenged him. The wagons were circled around the president of the United States on the trust issue.
And while Judith Miller seems to downplay whether there was a conspiracy in the White House to out Valerie Plame, the published explanation for her hasty and forced exit from the New York Times refers to the unfortunate role she played as "one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign." As a key witness, Miller didn't attend every day of the Scooter Libby trial the way my screenwriters did. Remember that this was not some witch-hunt: the special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald is universally respected and was a Republican U.S. Attorney appointed by President Bush. And the jury was unanimous in its conviction of Scooter Libby on all five counts with which he was charged.
As for Miller's rehash of old arguments about Armitage, here again she's got it wrong. Armitage was not an innocent Boy Scout, as wrongly portrayed by Miller and the Washington Post editors in their recent editorial. Armitage twice attempted to out Plame as a CIA officer, first to Bob Woodward (just about the most famous reporter in Washington), then, when unsuccessful with that, to Bob Novak, the syndicated self-proclaimed "Prince of Darkness." Armitage famously confessed his "foolishness," but that isn't an explanation. Once may be careless, but twice is not careless, it's either intentionally foolish, on purpose, or worse.
The truth is that Armitage is no peacenik and probably never was, no matter what Miller wishes were true to cover her tracks. Anyone looking at a timeline of who did what and when can see that Armitage tried to be an "army of one" by blurting out about Plame to two different high profile inside-the-Beltway reporters. But the trail of how Armitage came to know about Joe Wilson and his wife--a covert CIA NOC--appears to lead straight back to Libby.
Libby met with Armitage in June 2003, shortly after confirming that Joe Wilson was the unnamed ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to find out about the now infamous "yellowcake" uranium claim. A few days later, Armitage first told Bob Woodward about Wilson and his wife, but Woodward kept silent. So Armitage's first effort to out Plame failed. But weeks before Armitage got his second chance to out Plame, Libby had already outed Plame to Miller at the end of June 2003. Then Libby outed Plame to Miller again in early July 2003, right before Armitage blabbed to Novak about Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson.
In case Armitage's second attempt failed, Libby knew that Miller was standing by. With Miller as a backup and Karl Rove standing by to confirm Armitage, Novak outed Plame as a CIA operative wife of Joe Wilson. Miller says nothing about her role in this affair in her op-ed piece. The Republican controlled Justice Department in fact found that Libby and Rove personally outed Valerie Plame to multiple members of the news media, including Robert Novak, Judith Miller, Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, and Bob Woodward. Plame was going to be outed even if Armitage didn't succeed with Novak.
So although neither Miller nor Armitage are in the film Fair Game, both of them were involved in the whole sorry episode up to their eyeballs. Actually, I would have loved to have included Richard Armitage, Cheney, and others in Fair Game, had Scooter Libby not obstructed the investigation, for which a unanimous jury convicted him on five serious counts with jail sentences.
So was there a conspiracy in the White House to punish Joe Wilson for speaking out? The film leaves that up to the viewer to decide. Pat Fitzgerald did say "there's a cloud over the Vice-President, a cloud over the White House." People can go see Fair Game this holiday and decide for themselves who was naughty and who was nice.
Posted: December 15, 2010 09:43 AM
Last Thursday, Judith Miller penned a column for the Wall Street Journal in which she accused the new film Fair Game of pushing "untruths" in its telling of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Miller described the film, which focuses on the relationship of Plame and husband Joe Wilson, as "brilliantly acted," but a "gross distortion of a complicated political saga." She challenges seven of what she calls the film's "untruths"; among them, claims that Plame played a "key role" in the CIA's counterproliferation division, charged with gathering evidence on Iraq's WMD programs, and that Plame was involved in missions to provide safe havens to Iraqi scientists. Miller also takes issue with a subplot in the film in which Plame, played by Naomi Watts, recruits an Iraqi-American woman to visit her scientist brother in Iraq, where is working on the country's WMD program.
CJR.org approached Fair Game director Doug Liman (Swingers, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Bourne Identity) for comment. He wrote back with this response to Miller's piece, which was originally published at CJR.org.
Judith Miller demonstrated in her recent WSJ story about my film, Fair Game, the same cavalier attitude towards the facts that led to her departure from the New York Times in disgrace. And we should never forget that Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to Miller in June 2003 -- more than two weeks before Richard Armitage outed Plame to Novak. Somehow Miller neglected to mention that in her op-ed piece. But she also forgot about that before -- in her early grand jury testimony -- until she was forced to come clean about it in a subsequent grand jury appearance and under oath at Libby's trial. Miller's belated testimony helped convict her "source" Libby, but not until she did everything she could, as a forceful proponent of the war in Iraq, to avoid telling the truth to the American public.
And so here we go again.
Judith Miller writes that her supposed anonymous sources told her that Valerie Plame did not play a "key role" in the CIA's effort to penetrate Iraq's presumed WMD program. In truth, Valerie Plame was head of operations for the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI). My sources: former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald.
Valerie's specific actions as head of operations for the JTFI were and still are classified. Valerie Plame, a loyal intelligence officer from a military family, has always honored and continues to honor the secrecy agreement she signed when she joined the Agency more than twenty-five years ago. As filmmakers, we did the best job we could to piece together her activities in covert CIA operations specializing in nuclear counter-proliferation. This is not easy, especially since Valerie was a NOC, a form of deep cover operative with no official ties to the U.S. government. To be drawn into debating what this deep cover operative may or may not have done is to miss the big picture--this was no "glorified secretary" who was outed by the White House. Far from it.
Special Counsel Fitzgerald submitted a memorandum to the district court in the Libby trial spelling out in detail Valerie's undercover role overseas, covert status, and senior positions at the CIA leading counter-proliferation teams and searching for WMD in Iraq. It is disgraceful that Miller and others like her continue to demean Valerie and the dedicated women and men who serve our country as operations officers and risk their lives to keep armchair warriors like Miller safe from harm.
Regarding the Iraqi scientists that are the focus of a sub-plot in Fair Game, Judith Miller seems to blur the line between opinions and indisputable fact. This much we know to be fact: the CIA made a criminal referral because of Plame's outing. I doubt that the CIA and its director George Tenet--someone who bent over backwards to protect the Bush Administration--would have allowed that to occur if the consequences to national security weren't serious and the damage to intelligence operations severe.
Obviously WMDs remain a sore subject for Miller, who wrote many erroneous stories that badly misled the American public about their existence in Iraq in 2003. Fair Game doesn't much focus on the WMDs, except to recount an episode showing the dangers of politicized intelligence, which is now common wisdom on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, Fair Game doesn't even state an opinion about the war itself, however disastrous its consequences are in hindsight. Rather, Fair Game is about the president of the United States lying to the American people, and what happened to the people who challenged him. The wagons were circled around the president of the United States on the trust issue.
And while Judith Miller seems to downplay whether there was a conspiracy in the White House to out Valerie Plame, the published explanation for her hasty and forced exit from the New York Times refers to the unfortunate role she played as "one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign." As a key witness, Miller didn't attend every day of the Scooter Libby trial the way my screenwriters did. Remember that this was not some witch-hunt: the special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald is universally respected and was a Republican U.S. Attorney appointed by President Bush. And the jury was unanimous in its conviction of Scooter Libby on all five counts with which he was charged.
As for Miller's rehash of old arguments about Armitage, here again she's got it wrong. Armitage was not an innocent Boy Scout, as wrongly portrayed by Miller and the Washington Post editors in their recent editorial. Armitage twice attempted to out Plame as a CIA officer, first to Bob Woodward (just about the most famous reporter in Washington), then, when unsuccessful with that, to Bob Novak, the syndicated self-proclaimed "Prince of Darkness." Armitage famously confessed his "foolishness," but that isn't an explanation. Once may be careless, but twice is not careless, it's either intentionally foolish, on purpose, or worse.
The truth is that Armitage is no peacenik and probably never was, no matter what Miller wishes were true to cover her tracks. Anyone looking at a timeline of who did what and when can see that Armitage tried to be an "army of one" by blurting out about Plame to two different high profile inside-the-Beltway reporters. But the trail of how Armitage came to know about Joe Wilson and his wife--a covert CIA NOC--appears to lead straight back to Libby.
Libby met with Armitage in June 2003, shortly after confirming that Joe Wilson was the unnamed ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to find out about the now infamous "yellowcake" uranium claim. A few days later, Armitage first told Bob Woodward about Wilson and his wife, but Woodward kept silent. So Armitage's first effort to out Plame failed. But weeks before Armitage got his second chance to out Plame, Libby had already outed Plame to Miller at the end of June 2003. Then Libby outed Plame to Miller again in early July 2003, right before Armitage blabbed to Novak about Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson.
In case Armitage's second attempt failed, Libby knew that Miller was standing by. With Miller as a backup and Karl Rove standing by to confirm Armitage, Novak outed Plame as a CIA operative wife of Joe Wilson. Miller says nothing about her role in this affair in her op-ed piece. The Republican controlled Justice Department in fact found that Libby and Rove personally outed Valerie Plame to multiple members of the news media, including Robert Novak, Judith Miller, Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, and Bob Woodward. Plame was going to be outed even if Armitage didn't succeed with Novak.
So although neither Miller nor Armitage are in the film Fair Game, both of them were involved in the whole sorry episode up to their eyeballs. Actually, I would have loved to have included Richard Armitage, Cheney, and others in Fair Game, had Scooter Libby not obstructed the investigation, for which a unanimous jury convicted him on five serious counts with jail sentences.
So was there a conspiracy in the White House to punish Joe Wilson for speaking out? The film leaves that up to the viewer to decide. Pat Fitzgerald did say "there's a cloud over the Vice-President, a cloud over the White House." People can go see Fair Game this holiday and decide for themselves who was naughty and who was nice.
Friday, December 10, 2010
china is being compared to the nazis
The last time an empty chair was used to represent an absent winner was when German peace activist Carl von Ossietzky won the 1935 award, according to Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute. Ossietzky was under "protective custody" in Nazi Germany and could not come to accept the award in person, nor was he represented by anyone.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
"we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now"
Nobel Peace Prize: Confucius prize? Never heard of it, says the winner
China's attempts to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize with a rival version ended in near-farce in Beijing yesterday when the winner of the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize failed to show up to collect his prize.
Zeng Yuhan holds the trophy for the winner of the Confucius peace prize Photo: AFP
By Peter Foster, Beijing 9:54PM GMT 09 Dec 2010
But unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who is unable to attend today's ceremony because he's in a Chinese prison, the first Confucius laureate said he wouldn't attend because he'd never heard of the prize in the first place.
The office of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan, who according to the citation won the Confucius award for his work in improving relations across the troubled Taiwan Strait, said it knew nothing of the hastily assembled £10,000 prize and had no plans to collect it.
The peace prize with Chinese characteristics had been billed as Beijing's riposte to this year's Nobel which has infuriated Beijing.
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Laureate or no, the Confucius jury, a collection of Chinese academics gathered in a packed Beijing conference facility, pressed ahead with their ceremony, handing over a glass trophy and a bundle of banknotes wrapped in a bow, to a six-year-old girl.
"For Peace!", shouted one of the jury members, while the girl, a "symbol of peace" who stood looking rather frightened as the lenses of the world's television news media were trained upon her.
The prize had been consciously styled as offering a democratic alternative to the secretive, closed-door decision making of the Nobel Committee, putting an end to what the official brochure described as Oslo's "black-box operations".
The nominees, including the former US president Jimmy Carter, software magnate turned philanthropist Bill Gates and Yuan Longping, a brilliant Chinese scientist known as the "father of hybrid rice" were supposed to have been selected by a "democratic" online primary.
But as so often in China when it comes to democracy, the theory was not matched in practice, as the jury confessed it hadn't had time to actually conduct the poll this year but promised it next year's prize would be democratic.
Opening up to the floor, the jury chairman Professor Tan Changliu of the Institute of Ideology in Beijing, was met with a barrage of questions, almost all of which, to his obvious exasperation, concerned Liu Xiaobo, the very man that his Confucius Peace Prize had been designed to eclipse.
"Our Confucius Peace Prize has no connection with the three characters you mentioned", said the Professor, refusing to even speak the name of "Liu Xiao Bo" out loud, adding instead that the prize was timely given the recent skirmishes on the Korean peninsula.
Asked if he was "supporting a supporter of Liu Xiaobo" by nominating President Carter, who has publicly backed the Nobel peace laureate, the Professor finally cracked and said the name that is only rarely spoken by public officials in China.
"If you really want me to talk about Liu Xiaobo," he said, "then let's just say, we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now." After more than an hour the ceremony was brought to tempestuous close with a hot-tempered, anti-American rant attacking the decision of George W Bush to invade Iraq and the Nobel Committee's widely questioned decision to give the 2009 award to his successor, Barack Obama.
"Don't bully a weak country, as one day it will grow up," warned Zhou Guidian, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University, "At the moment everyone wants to make trouble for a rising China. China once was strong but it was defeated because it was contemptuous of others. Now a similar fate might befall you Westerners."
China's attempts to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize with a rival version ended in near-farce in Beijing yesterday when the winner of the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize failed to show up to collect his prize.
Zeng Yuhan holds the trophy for the winner of the Confucius peace prize Photo: AFP
By Peter Foster, Beijing 9:54PM GMT 09 Dec 2010
But unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who is unable to attend today's ceremony because he's in a Chinese prison, the first Confucius laureate said he wouldn't attend because he'd never heard of the prize in the first place.
The office of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan, who according to the citation won the Confucius award for his work in improving relations across the troubled Taiwan Strait, said it knew nothing of the hastily assembled £10,000 prize and had no plans to collect it.
The peace prize with Chinese characteristics had been billed as Beijing's riposte to this year's Nobel which has infuriated Beijing.
RELATED ARTICLES
Nobel Peace Prize winners 09 Dec 2010
Nobel peace prize row: 18 countries turn down ceremony invitations09 Dec 2010
Nobel Peace prize boycott is blow to US prestige09 Dec 2010
Ai Weiwei blocked from leaving China09 Dec 2010
China imposes blanket ban on Nobel ceremony09 Dec 2010
Russia joins China in boycotting Nobel peace prize09 Dec 2010
Laureate or no, the Confucius jury, a collection of Chinese academics gathered in a packed Beijing conference facility, pressed ahead with their ceremony, handing over a glass trophy and a bundle of banknotes wrapped in a bow, to a six-year-old girl.
"For Peace!", shouted one of the jury members, while the girl, a "symbol of peace" who stood looking rather frightened as the lenses of the world's television news media were trained upon her.
The prize had been consciously styled as offering a democratic alternative to the secretive, closed-door decision making of the Nobel Committee, putting an end to what the official brochure described as Oslo's "black-box operations".
The nominees, including the former US president Jimmy Carter, software magnate turned philanthropist Bill Gates and Yuan Longping, a brilliant Chinese scientist known as the "father of hybrid rice" were supposed to have been selected by a "democratic" online primary.
But as so often in China when it comes to democracy, the theory was not matched in practice, as the jury confessed it hadn't had time to actually conduct the poll this year but promised it next year's prize would be democratic.
Opening up to the floor, the jury chairman Professor Tan Changliu of the Institute of Ideology in Beijing, was met with a barrage of questions, almost all of which, to his obvious exasperation, concerned Liu Xiaobo, the very man that his Confucius Peace Prize had been designed to eclipse.
"Our Confucius Peace Prize has no connection with the three characters you mentioned", said the Professor, refusing to even speak the name of "Liu Xiao Bo" out loud, adding instead that the prize was timely given the recent skirmishes on the Korean peninsula.
Asked if he was "supporting a supporter of Liu Xiaobo" by nominating President Carter, who has publicly backed the Nobel peace laureate, the Professor finally cracked and said the name that is only rarely spoken by public officials in China.
"If you really want me to talk about Liu Xiaobo," he said, "then let's just say, we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now." After more than an hour the ceremony was brought to tempestuous close with a hot-tempered, anti-American rant attacking the decision of George W Bush to invade Iraq and the Nobel Committee's widely questioned decision to give the 2009 award to his successor, Barack Obama.
"Don't bully a weak country, as one day it will grow up," warned Zhou Guidian, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University, "At the moment everyone wants to make trouble for a rising China. China once was strong but it was defeated because it was contemptuous of others. Now a similar fate might befall you Westerners."
"we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now"
Nobel Peace Prize: Confucius prize? Never heard of it, says the winner
China's attempts to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize with a rival version ended in near-farce in Beijing yesterday when the winner of the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize failed to show up to collect his prize.
Zeng Yuhan holds the trophy for the winner of the Confucius peace prize Photo: AFP
By Peter Foster, Beijing 9:54PM GMT 09 Dec 2010
But unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who is unable to attend today's ceremony because he's in a Chinese prison, the first Confucius laureate said he wouldn't attend because he'd never heard of the prize in the first place.
The office of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan, who according to the citation won the Confucius award for his work in improving relations across the troubled Taiwan Strait, said it knew nothing of the hastily assembled £10,000 prize and had no plans to collect it.
The peace prize with Chinese characteristics had been billed as Beijing's riposte to this year's Nobel which has infuriated Beijing.
RELATED ARTICLES
Nobel Peace Prize winners 09 Dec 2010
Nobel peace prize row: 18 countries turn down ceremony invitations09 Dec 2010
Nobel Peace prize boycott is blow to US prestige09 Dec 2010
Ai Weiwei blocked from leaving China09 Dec 2010
China imposes blanket ban on Nobel ceremony09 Dec 2010
Russia joins China in boycotting Nobel peace prize09 Dec 2010
Laureate or no, the Confucius jury, a collection of Chinese academics gathered in a packed Beijing conference facility, pressed ahead with their ceremony, handing over a glass trophy and a bundle of banknotes wrapped in a bow, to a six-year-old girl.
"For Peace!", shouted one of the jury members, while the girl, a "symbol of peace" who stood looking rather frightened as the lenses of the world's television news media were trained upon her.
The prize had been consciously styled as offering a democratic alternative to the secretive, closed-door decision making of the Nobel Committee, putting an end to what the official brochure described as Oslo's "black-box operations".
The nominees, including the former US president Jimmy Carter, software magnate turned philanthropist Bill Gates and Yuan Longping, a brilliant Chinese scientist known as the "father of hybrid rice" were supposed to have been selected by a "democratic" online primary.
But as so often in China when it comes to democracy, the theory was not matched in practice, as the jury confessed it hadn't had time to actually conduct the poll this year but promised it next year's prize would be democratic.
Opening up to the floor, the jury chairman Professor Tan Changliu of the Institute of Ideology in Beijing, was met with a barrage of questions, almost all of which, to his obvious exasperation, concerned Liu Xiaobo, the very man that his Confucius Peace Prize had been designed to eclipse.
"Our Confucius Peace Prize has no connection with the three characters you mentioned", said the Professor, refusing to even speak the name of "Liu Xiao Bo" out loud, adding instead that the prize was timely given the recent skirmishes on the Korean peninsula.
Asked if he was "supporting a supporter of Liu Xiaobo" by nominating President Carter, who has publicly backed the Nobel peace laureate, the Professor finally cracked and said the name that is only rarely spoken by public officials in China.
"If you really want me to talk about Liu Xiaobo," he said, "then let's just say, we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now." After more than an hour the ceremony was brought to tempestuous close with a hot-tempered, anti-American rant attacking the decision of George W Bush to invade Iraq and the Nobel Committee's widely questioned decision to give the 2009 award to his successor, Barack Obama.
"Don't bully a weak country, as one day it will grow up," warned Zhou Guidian, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University, "At the moment everyone wants to make trouble for a rising China. China once was strong but it was defeated because it was contemptuous of others. Now a similar fate might befall you Westerners."
China's attempts to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize with a rival version ended in near-farce in Beijing yesterday when the winner of the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize failed to show up to collect his prize.
Zeng Yuhan holds the trophy for the winner of the Confucius peace prize Photo: AFP
By Peter Foster, Beijing 9:54PM GMT 09 Dec 2010
But unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who is unable to attend today's ceremony because he's in a Chinese prison, the first Confucius laureate said he wouldn't attend because he'd never heard of the prize in the first place.
The office of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan, who according to the citation won the Confucius award for his work in improving relations across the troubled Taiwan Strait, said it knew nothing of the hastily assembled £10,000 prize and had no plans to collect it.
The peace prize with Chinese characteristics had been billed as Beijing's riposte to this year's Nobel which has infuriated Beijing.
RELATED ARTICLES
Nobel Peace Prize winners 09 Dec 2010
Nobel peace prize row: 18 countries turn down ceremony invitations09 Dec 2010
Nobel Peace prize boycott is blow to US prestige09 Dec 2010
Ai Weiwei blocked from leaving China09 Dec 2010
China imposes blanket ban on Nobel ceremony09 Dec 2010
Russia joins China in boycotting Nobel peace prize09 Dec 2010
Laureate or no, the Confucius jury, a collection of Chinese academics gathered in a packed Beijing conference facility, pressed ahead with their ceremony, handing over a glass trophy and a bundle of banknotes wrapped in a bow, to a six-year-old girl.
"For Peace!", shouted one of the jury members, while the girl, a "symbol of peace" who stood looking rather frightened as the lenses of the world's television news media were trained upon her.
The prize had been consciously styled as offering a democratic alternative to the secretive, closed-door decision making of the Nobel Committee, putting an end to what the official brochure described as Oslo's "black-box operations".
The nominees, including the former US president Jimmy Carter, software magnate turned philanthropist Bill Gates and Yuan Longping, a brilliant Chinese scientist known as the "father of hybrid rice" were supposed to have been selected by a "democratic" online primary.
But as so often in China when it comes to democracy, the theory was not matched in practice, as the jury confessed it hadn't had time to actually conduct the poll this year but promised it next year's prize would be democratic.
Opening up to the floor, the jury chairman Professor Tan Changliu of the Institute of Ideology in Beijing, was met with a barrage of questions, almost all of which, to his obvious exasperation, concerned Liu Xiaobo, the very man that his Confucius Peace Prize had been designed to eclipse.
"Our Confucius Peace Prize has no connection with the three characters you mentioned", said the Professor, refusing to even speak the name of "Liu Xiao Bo" out loud, adding instead that the prize was timely given the recent skirmishes on the Korean peninsula.
Asked if he was "supporting a supporter of Liu Xiaobo" by nominating President Carter, who has publicly backed the Nobel peace laureate, the Professor finally cracked and said the name that is only rarely spoken by public officials in China.
"If you really want me to talk about Liu Xiaobo," he said, "then let's just say, we will see who is remembered by history, five hundred years from now." After more than an hour the ceremony was brought to tempestuous close with a hot-tempered, anti-American rant attacking the decision of George W Bush to invade Iraq and the Nobel Committee's widely questioned decision to give the 2009 award to his successor, Barack Obama.
"Don't bully a weak country, as one day it will grow up," warned Zhou Guidian, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University, "At the moment everyone wants to make trouble for a rising China. China once was strong but it was defeated because it was contemptuous of others. Now a similar fate might befall you Westerners."
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
US Says Chinese Nobel Peace Awardee Should Attend Oslo Ceremony
US Says Chinese Nobel Peace Awardee Should Attend Oslo Ceremony
David Gollust | State Department 08 December 2010
The Obama administration Wednesday reaffirmed its intention to attend the Oslo ceremonies at which jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo will be given the Nobel Peace Prize, and said Liu and his wife should be allowed to take part as well. China is reportedly pressing governments not to attend the Friday event.
The State Department says the decision on the Oslo ceremony is for individual governments to make. But it says the United States will be "pleased" to be there, and that China should allow the imprisoned human rights activist and his wife to attend.
The comments here came amid reports that China, which has labeled Liu a criminal and denounced his award as an "obscenity," has mounted a diplomatic campaign to persuade governments around the world not to attend.
Liu, who was named to receive the Peace Prize in October, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in late 2009 after organizing a petition, called Charter '08, calling for greater political rights in China.
At a news briefing, State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. will be represented in Oslo by American ambassador Barry White.
He said the United States strongly supports the Nobel committee in selecting Liu and that the honor is well-deserved.
He said there should "absolutely" be a ceremony and international recognition for Liu. "We think the Nobel committee has made a strong statement, and we will associate ourselves with that statement and this event. It sends a strong statement about what all countries should strive to achieve, which is full human rights for all their citizens, the ability to express their views, participate in the political process, and enjoy freedom of expression, freedom of association and the opportunity to play a role in the future of any country," Crowley said.
Crowley said the United States encourages other countries to embrace those universal human rights, while saying governments will make up their own minds about attending the Oslo event.
China has said a majority of governments will not attend, though the Norwegian award committee says two-thirds of those invited have accepted.
The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday approved a resolution congratulating Liu for winning the peace prize and calling for his release from custody.
The non-binding measure, approved by a vote of 402-1, calls on China to stop censoring news of the award, and says that human rights violations in China and elsewhere are matters of legitimate concern for other countries.
David Gollust | State Department 08 December 2010
The Obama administration Wednesday reaffirmed its intention to attend the Oslo ceremonies at which jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo will be given the Nobel Peace Prize, and said Liu and his wife should be allowed to take part as well. China is reportedly pressing governments not to attend the Friday event.
The State Department says the decision on the Oslo ceremony is for individual governments to make. But it says the United States will be "pleased" to be there, and that China should allow the imprisoned human rights activist and his wife to attend.
The comments here came amid reports that China, which has labeled Liu a criminal and denounced his award as an "obscenity," has mounted a diplomatic campaign to persuade governments around the world not to attend.
Liu, who was named to receive the Peace Prize in October, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in late 2009 after organizing a petition, called Charter '08, calling for greater political rights in China.
At a news briefing, State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. will be represented in Oslo by American ambassador Barry White.
He said the United States strongly supports the Nobel committee in selecting Liu and that the honor is well-deserved.
He said there should "absolutely" be a ceremony and international recognition for Liu. "We think the Nobel committee has made a strong statement, and we will associate ourselves with that statement and this event. It sends a strong statement about what all countries should strive to achieve, which is full human rights for all their citizens, the ability to express their views, participate in the political process, and enjoy freedom of expression, freedom of association and the opportunity to play a role in the future of any country," Crowley said.
Crowley said the United States encourages other countries to embrace those universal human rights, while saying governments will make up their own minds about attending the Oslo event.
China has said a majority of governments will not attend, though the Norwegian award committee says two-thirds of those invited have accepted.
The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday approved a resolution congratulating Liu for winning the peace prize and calling for his release from custody.
The non-binding measure, approved by a vote of 402-1, calls on China to stop censoring news of the award, and says that human rights violations in China and elsewhere are matters of legitimate concern for other countries.
China Resisted U.S. Pressure on Rights of Nobel Winner
China Resisted U.S. Pressure on Rights of Nobel Winner
Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
A security guard waited in October outside the residential compound where Liu Xia, the wife of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, is being held under house arrest in Beijing.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: December 8, 2010
BEIJING — It was just before Christmas 2009, and Ding Xiaowen was not happy.
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A gallery of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Oslo includes the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
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The United States ambassador had just written China’s foreign minister expressing concern for Liu Xiaobo, the Beijing intellectual imprisoned a year earlier for drafting a pro-democracy manifesto. Now Mr. Ding, a deputy in the ministry’s American section, was reading the riot act to an American attaché.
Mr. Ding said he would try to avoid “becoming emotional,” according to a readout on the meeting that was among thousands of leaked State Department cables released this month. Then he said that a “strongly dissatisfied” China firmly opposed the views of the American ambassador, Jon Huntsman, and that Washington must “cease using human rights as an excuse to ‘meddle’ in China’s internal affairs.”
On Friday, exactly one year after Mr. Huntsman wrote his protest, Mr. Liu, now serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony that he is unable to attend. And if anything is clear, it is that China no longer resists becoming emotional.
In the two months since the Nobel committee honored Mr. Liu, China has waged an extraordinary and unprecedented campaign, domestically and internationally, to discredit the award and to dissuade other governments from endorsing it.
It sent diplomats to capitals worldwide, sometimes to two and three offices, to warn that attendance at the awards ceremony in Oslo would be a black mark on relations with China. It staged a briefing for its neighbors, the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to make clear its unhappiness with the award. It has punished Norway, the site of the ceremony, by suspending trade negotiations.
On the Chinese island of Hainan last month, State Councilor Dai Bingguo, China’s most powerful foreign policy figure, bluntly told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that his government regarded the Nobel award as an American conspiracy to embarrass Beijing.
Perhaps most strikingly, China’s media and spokespeople have trained a stream of vitriol on the award and its sponsors. The prize is “an anti-China farce” and its sponsors are “clowns,” a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said this week at a briefing. Honoring Mr. Liu is “a crazy act,” “a political tool” and “a trick that a few radical people use to entertain themselves,” the Communist Party tabloid Global Times reported Wednesday.
On Oct. 15, after the award was announced, the state-run news service Xinhua called the Nobel decision “a desecration of the rule of law” and Mr. Liu an opportunist who had “tried his best to maintain the Western hegemony of his Western masters and make China a vassal of the West.”
And on Tuesday, a somewhat murky Beijing group announced a counter-Nobel, the Confucius Peace Prize, apparently in response to a Global Times commentary last month that called for an Eastern alternative to prizes based on values it said were Western.
At least 19 governments, most of them staunch China allies like Myanmar, North Korea and Russia, have decided to boycott the Nobel ceremony on Friday. But the list also includes the Philippines, whose president, Benigno S. Aquino III, has been an advocate of human rights in places like Myanmar, where China holds great influence.
Philippine press reports quoted diplomats on Friday as saying that Manila opted out of the ceremony because it did not want to annoy China, already angered over a bungled hostage rescue in August that left eight Hong Kong residents dead.
But a senior adviser to Mr. Aquino, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said that Foreign Secretary Alberto G. Romulo “did it without telling us.” The adviser called the move “a clumsy attempt to balance the administration’s more distant stance on China.”
“This administration will be a voice for human rights in this part of the world,” the official said, “and now, this.”
Why China’s leaders have made Mr. Liu’s award a foreign policy red line is far from clear. Political analysts and scholars variously suggested that Mr. Liu’s manifesto, Charter 08, was too radical and represented a threat, that China’s newfound global prominence had given it an oversize impression of its influence and that party leaders were toeing a hard nationalist position as jockeying began for a new leadership in 2012.
Dozens of leaked State Department cables made it apparent that American diplomats closely followed the travails of Mr. Liu and other activists and regularly pressed Chinese officials to honor international norms for basic freedoms, even as Washington muted its public position on Chinese behavior.
Embassy officials also met frequently with Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, and friends to monitor his case and the increase in repression of political dissidents.
As early as two weeks after Mr. Liu was first detained, President George W. Bush’s ambassador, Clark T. Randt Jr., “urged the Chinese government to release him and stop harassing peaceful dissidents,” a Dec. 29, 2008, cable stated.
The next June, as the Chinese government announced Mr. Liu’s formal arrest on subversion charges, embassy officials expressed “grave concern” and again called for his release. On Dec. 9, 2009, shortly before Mr. Liu was convicted, Mr. Huntsman met with five Chinese human rights lawyers; he sent a letter to the foreign minister the next day calling on the government “to respect those rights it had itself guaranteed in the PRC constitution and to protect internationally recognized freedoms for all Chinese citizens.”
That letter led to Mr. Ding’s dressing-down of the attaché 11 days later. According to the cable, Mr. Ding said then that Mr. Huntsman’s letter contained “inappropriate comments” on Mr. Liu’s case and that “certain ‘so-called’ human rights lawyers and dissidents had sought to advance their ‘selfish interests’ ” by attacking the Beijing government.
“In a lengthy and disjointed digression,” the cable added, Mr. Ding said that regardless of rights to speak and assemble freely, the most fundamental human rights were to food and shelter. And “in this area it was ‘a basic fact’ that the PRC had made huge progress.”
The American attaché’s response, the cable stated, was that “U.S. concerns over abuses of internationally recognized human rights norms remained.”
Carlos H. Conde contributed reporting from Manila, and Seth Mydans from Bangkok. Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.
Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
A security guard waited in October outside the residential compound where Liu Xia, the wife of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, is being held under house arrest in Beijing.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: December 8, 2010
BEIJING — It was just before Christmas 2009, and Ding Xiaowen was not happy.
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A gallery of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Oslo includes the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
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The United States ambassador had just written China’s foreign minister expressing concern for Liu Xiaobo, the Beijing intellectual imprisoned a year earlier for drafting a pro-democracy manifesto. Now Mr. Ding, a deputy in the ministry’s American section, was reading the riot act to an American attaché.
Mr. Ding said he would try to avoid “becoming emotional,” according to a readout on the meeting that was among thousands of leaked State Department cables released this month. Then he said that a “strongly dissatisfied” China firmly opposed the views of the American ambassador, Jon Huntsman, and that Washington must “cease using human rights as an excuse to ‘meddle’ in China’s internal affairs.”
On Friday, exactly one year after Mr. Huntsman wrote his protest, Mr. Liu, now serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony that he is unable to attend. And if anything is clear, it is that China no longer resists becoming emotional.
In the two months since the Nobel committee honored Mr. Liu, China has waged an extraordinary and unprecedented campaign, domestically and internationally, to discredit the award and to dissuade other governments from endorsing it.
It sent diplomats to capitals worldwide, sometimes to two and three offices, to warn that attendance at the awards ceremony in Oslo would be a black mark on relations with China. It staged a briefing for its neighbors, the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to make clear its unhappiness with the award. It has punished Norway, the site of the ceremony, by suspending trade negotiations.
On the Chinese island of Hainan last month, State Councilor Dai Bingguo, China’s most powerful foreign policy figure, bluntly told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that his government regarded the Nobel award as an American conspiracy to embarrass Beijing.
Perhaps most strikingly, China’s media and spokespeople have trained a stream of vitriol on the award and its sponsors. The prize is “an anti-China farce” and its sponsors are “clowns,” a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said this week at a briefing. Honoring Mr. Liu is “a crazy act,” “a political tool” and “a trick that a few radical people use to entertain themselves,” the Communist Party tabloid Global Times reported Wednesday.
On Oct. 15, after the award was announced, the state-run news service Xinhua called the Nobel decision “a desecration of the rule of law” and Mr. Liu an opportunist who had “tried his best to maintain the Western hegemony of his Western masters and make China a vassal of the West.”
And on Tuesday, a somewhat murky Beijing group announced a counter-Nobel, the Confucius Peace Prize, apparently in response to a Global Times commentary last month that called for an Eastern alternative to prizes based on values it said were Western.
At least 19 governments, most of them staunch China allies like Myanmar, North Korea and Russia, have decided to boycott the Nobel ceremony on Friday. But the list also includes the Philippines, whose president, Benigno S. Aquino III, has been an advocate of human rights in places like Myanmar, where China holds great influence.
Philippine press reports quoted diplomats on Friday as saying that Manila opted out of the ceremony because it did not want to annoy China, already angered over a bungled hostage rescue in August that left eight Hong Kong residents dead.
But a senior adviser to Mr. Aquino, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said that Foreign Secretary Alberto G. Romulo “did it without telling us.” The adviser called the move “a clumsy attempt to balance the administration’s more distant stance on China.”
“This administration will be a voice for human rights in this part of the world,” the official said, “and now, this.”
Why China’s leaders have made Mr. Liu’s award a foreign policy red line is far from clear. Political analysts and scholars variously suggested that Mr. Liu’s manifesto, Charter 08, was too radical and represented a threat, that China’s newfound global prominence had given it an oversize impression of its influence and that party leaders were toeing a hard nationalist position as jockeying began for a new leadership in 2012.
Dozens of leaked State Department cables made it apparent that American diplomats closely followed the travails of Mr. Liu and other activists and regularly pressed Chinese officials to honor international norms for basic freedoms, even as Washington muted its public position on Chinese behavior.
Embassy officials also met frequently with Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, and friends to monitor his case and the increase in repression of political dissidents.
As early as two weeks after Mr. Liu was first detained, President George W. Bush’s ambassador, Clark T. Randt Jr., “urged the Chinese government to release him and stop harassing peaceful dissidents,” a Dec. 29, 2008, cable stated.
The next June, as the Chinese government announced Mr. Liu’s formal arrest on subversion charges, embassy officials expressed “grave concern” and again called for his release. On Dec. 9, 2009, shortly before Mr. Liu was convicted, Mr. Huntsman met with five Chinese human rights lawyers; he sent a letter to the foreign minister the next day calling on the government “to respect those rights it had itself guaranteed in the PRC constitution and to protect internationally recognized freedoms for all Chinese citizens.”
That letter led to Mr. Ding’s dressing-down of the attaché 11 days later. According to the cable, Mr. Ding said then that Mr. Huntsman’s letter contained “inappropriate comments” on Mr. Liu’s case and that “certain ‘so-called’ human rights lawyers and dissidents had sought to advance their ‘selfish interests’ ” by attacking the Beijing government.
“In a lengthy and disjointed digression,” the cable added, Mr. Ding said that regardless of rights to speak and assemble freely, the most fundamental human rights were to food and shelter. And “in this area it was ‘a basic fact’ that the PRC had made huge progress.”
The American attaché’s response, the cable stated, was that “U.S. concerns over abuses of internationally recognized human rights norms remained.”
Carlos H. Conde contributed reporting from Manila, and Seth Mydans from Bangkok. Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.
Friday, December 3, 2010
WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets
TUESDAY, NOV 30, 2010 06:31 ET
WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets
BY GLENN GREENWALD
Wikipedia/AP/Salon
Clockwise from lower left: Jonah Goldberg, Wolf Blitzer, Julian Assange, Bill Keller and Sarah Palin
(updated below - Update II)
The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class. Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has: as usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.
First we have the group demanding that Julian Assange be murdered without any charges, trial or due process. There was Sarah Palin on on Twitter illiterately accusing WikiLeaks -- a stateless group run by an Australian citizen -- of "treason"; she thereafter took to her Facebook page to object that Julian Assange was "not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" (she also lied by stating that he has "blood on his hands": a claim which even the Pentagon admits is untrue). Townhall's John Hawkins has a column this morning entitled "5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange." That Assange should be treated as a "traitor" and murdered with no due process has been strongly suggested if not outright urged by the likes of Marc Thiessen, Seth Lipsky (with Jeffrey Goldberg posting Lipsky's column and also illiterately accusing Assange of "treason"), Jonah Goldberg, Rep. Pete King, and, today, The Wall Street Journal.
The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented. Recall Palin/McCain adviser Michael Goldfarb's recent complaint that the CIA failed to kill Ahmed Ghailani when he was in custody, or Glenn Reynolds' morning demand -- in between sips of coffee -- that North Korea be destroyed with nuclear weapons ("I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs"). Without exception, all of these people cheered on the attack on Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, yet their thirst for slaughter is literally insatiable. After a decade's worth of American invasions, bombings, occupations, checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, assassinations and civilian slaughter, the notion that the U.S. Government can and should murder whomever it wants is more frequent and unrestrained than ever.
Those who demand that the U.S. Government take people's lives with no oversight or due process as though they're advocating changes in tax policy or mid-level personnel moves -- eradicate him!, they bellow from their seats in the Colosseum -- are just morally deranged barbarians. There's just no other accurate way to put it. These are usually the same people, of course, who brand themselves "pro-life" and Crusaders for the Sanctity of Human Life and/or who deride Islamic extremists for their disregard for human life. And the fact that this mindset is so widespread and mainstream is quite a reflection of how degraded America's political culture is. When WikiLeaks critics devote a fraction of their rage to this form of mainstream American thinking -- which, unlike anything WikiLeaks has done, has actually resulted in piles upon piles of corpses -- then their anti-WikiLeaks protestations should be taken more seriously, but not until then.
WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets
BY GLENN GREENWALD
Wikipedia/AP/Salon
Clockwise from lower left: Jonah Goldberg, Wolf Blitzer, Julian Assange, Bill Keller and Sarah Palin
(updated below - Update II)
The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class. Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has: as usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.
First we have the group demanding that Julian Assange be murdered without any charges, trial or due process. There was Sarah Palin on on Twitter illiterately accusing WikiLeaks -- a stateless group run by an Australian citizen -- of "treason"; she thereafter took to her Facebook page to object that Julian Assange was "not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" (she also lied by stating that he has "blood on his hands": a claim which even the Pentagon admits is untrue). Townhall's John Hawkins has a column this morning entitled "5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange." That Assange should be treated as a "traitor" and murdered with no due process has been strongly suggested if not outright urged by the likes of Marc Thiessen, Seth Lipsky (with Jeffrey Goldberg posting Lipsky's column and also illiterately accusing Assange of "treason"), Jonah Goldberg, Rep. Pete King, and, today, The Wall Street Journal.
The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented. Recall Palin/McCain adviser Michael Goldfarb's recent complaint that the CIA failed to kill Ahmed Ghailani when he was in custody, or Glenn Reynolds' morning demand -- in between sips of coffee -- that North Korea be destroyed with nuclear weapons ("I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs"). Without exception, all of these people cheered on the attack on Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, yet their thirst for slaughter is literally insatiable. After a decade's worth of American invasions, bombings, occupations, checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, assassinations and civilian slaughter, the notion that the U.S. Government can and should murder whomever it wants is more frequent and unrestrained than ever.
Those who demand that the U.S. Government take people's lives with no oversight or due process as though they're advocating changes in tax policy or mid-level personnel moves -- eradicate him!, they bellow from their seats in the Colosseum -- are just morally deranged barbarians. There's just no other accurate way to put it. These are usually the same people, of course, who brand themselves "pro-life" and Crusaders for the Sanctity of Human Life and/or who deride Islamic extremists for their disregard for human life. And the fact that this mindset is so widespread and mainstream is quite a reflection of how degraded America's political culture is. When WikiLeaks critics devote a fraction of their rage to this form of mainstream American thinking -- which, unlike anything WikiLeaks has done, has actually resulted in piles upon piles of corpses -- then their anti-WikiLeaks protestations should be taken more seriously, but not until then.
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