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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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."

"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."

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.

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.

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.

a burning sense of what was the decent thing to do

In Harrisonville, thousands line street to keep Phelps clan away from soldier’s funeral

By DONALD BRADLEY

The Kansas City Star


Todd Feeback
In Harrisonville on Tuesday, James Turner of Independence was among the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people who came to ensure that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church/family congregation did not disrupt the funeral of Army Cpl. Jacob R. Carver.

Thousands support fallen soldier
Funeral of Cpl. Jacob R. Carver in Harrisonville
Breaking News

As if a bell tolled a neighbor’s trouble, folks came running.

The first showed up before the sun Tuesday, huddling and shivering in the cold and the dark. Others soon came, and before long their numbers stretched a block on both sides of Mechanic Street in front of Harrisonville’s Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church.

People drove from three or four counties away. Buses arrived, bellowing exhaust into the cold, bringing loads of schoolkids and senior citizens. People took off work. Some brought dogs. Farmers parked pickups nearby.

It wasn’t a fire, but a burning sense of what was the decent thing to do for one of their own who had given his all.

By 9 a.m., an hour before the funeral of Army Cpl. Jacob R. Carver, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people, many of them waving American flags, lined nearly a half-mile of the street in front of the church, making sure Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church/family congregation were crowded out, peacefully kept far from shouting distance of the funeral.

“This soldier died so (Phelps) could do what he does, as stupid as that is,” said Steve Nothnagel of Harrisonville as he looked at the turnout. “I’m so proud of what is happening here today. This is a community coming together. I know it’s not just Harrisonville; they’re coming from all over.”

The call had gone out by word of mouth and Facebook: Come to Harrisonville, line the streets. Let’s protect this family on this saddest of days.

Not long ago, the same strategy against Phelps was pulled off in Weston. As one woman that day said: “We’re like any small town. We fight a little between ourselves. But today, we’re all together.”

By the time the Phelps clan rolled into Harrisonville, the only spot open to them was next to a Casey’s Store nearly a third of a mile from the church.

The seven protesters got out of their van and waved their signs and ranted their slogans that soldiers’ deaths were God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Opponents drowned them out with a rousing rendition of “God Bless America” and chants of “USA! USA!” and “Go home! Go home!”

“We can’t stop them, but we can be louder,” a man said.

After a near skirmish between the two groups, the Topeka group bailed before the funeral procession passed.

Angel Needham, 15, a sophomore at Cass Midway High School — from which Jacob Carver graduated in 2008 — said she believed in free speech and the First Amendment.

“I just don’t get why he (Phelps) has to do it at funerals,” Angel said.

With parental permission, Cass Midway students were allowed to attend the funeral and take part in the human buffer.

Carver, 20, a member of the 101st Airborne Division from Freeman in Cass County, was killed Nov. 13 along with four other soldiers in a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan.

He came from a large family and joined the Army shortly after graduation from Cass Midway, where he played football, loved to dance, and was known as the boy who would take any dare.

“He was a really good kid,” said Principal Doug Dahman, who joined a group of letter jacket-clad students in the line in front of the church.

Next to him was a man from Platte City, who got up at 4:30 a.m. Farther down was John Yeager, who came as part of a group of Blue Springs firefighters.

“We’re here for the family,” Yeager said. “Nobody should have to hear that on this day.”

So many people agreed with that sentiment that officers from the Belton and Pleasant Hill police departments, the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, and the Missouri Highway Patrol helped with crowd control.

Truck driver Tom Anderson said of the outpouring: “It’s heartbreaking and it’s heartwarming.”

As usual, the Patriot Guard Riders, braving subfreezing temperatures to get to Harrisonville, provided a motorcycle escort for the funeral procession.

“Look at all those flags out waving out there,” said Donna Byam, a member of the group. “He’s (Phelps) responsible for that.”

Her husband, Brad Byam, nodded: “A silver lining in a dark cloud.”



Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/11/23/2467169/in-harrisonville-thousands-line.html#ixzz16DvAxuR8

whats the connection: Palins' backers

Sarah Palin's Mystery Research Firm

— Flickr/Roger H. Goun

Why's an incendiary Dutch journalist on the payroll of the ex-Alaska governor's political action committee? A Mother Jones investigation.

— By Andy Kroll and Daniel Schulman

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Mon Nov. 22, 2010 3:00 AM PST
In recent months, Sarah Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, has paid thousands of dollars to a mysterious company that's gone to significant lengths to mask its ownership. Addresses linked to the firm lead to mail drops. It has no website. No phone number. Not even the California lawyer who incorporated the company knew who was behind it. But a Mother Jones investigation has found that this firm is run by an unlikely foreign political operative.

Federal Election Commission filings show that SarahPAC has paid the company, Paideia Research LLC, at least $16,000 for its services. The payments to Paideia—which takes its name from the ancient Greek word meaning "education" or "instruction"—are the only research-related expenditures listed on the PAC's latest disclosures.


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Managed by a shell company, and incorporated in a state with favorable tax laws and scant disclosure requirements, Paideia's corporate structure virtually assured anonymity. But interviews and a review of domestic and international business records led to the identity of Paideia's owner—which presented yet another mystery: Why is Palin's political action committee employing a Dutch right-wing journalist named Joshua Livestro, who is known for incendiary rhetoric?

Two recent federal filings for SarahPAC list a Sheridan, Wyoming, address for Paideia Research. When one local blogger visited the address, he found a low-slung, non-descript building that's home to Sheridan Answering and Secretarial Services, a company that handles phone calls and mail for customers. (Other bloggers soon started asking questions about Palin's mystery research firm.) When asked by Mother Jones about Paideia, Sheridan Answering's owner, Ginger Horton, replied, "I have no idea who they are."

Wyoming business records show that Paideia was incorporated in July. In addition to the local Wyoming address, these records list another in southern California. That address, in turn, traces to another mail forwarding service. Paideia's corporate filings also indicate that it is managed by Pyramid Management LLC, which belongs to a California-based ex-lawyer and realtor, David DeLoach, who specializes in setting up untraceable LLCs and pre-fab shell companies in Wyoming and Nevada—states that don't tax corporate income and have exceedingly lax disclosure rules.

In a brief phone interview, DeLoach said he vaguely remembered setting up Paideia. But as his website promises, the entire process was confidential. He said he himself didn't know who was behind Paideia or why it was created.

So it appears the owner of Paideia truly wanted to keep its origins secret. And he might have succeeded, had Karen Wheeler, the Wyoming Secretary of State's business compliance director, not told Mother Jones that she had recently spoken to Paideia's owner by phone. She didn't get his name, but said he "had quite the English accent" and told her he was based in England.

A search of British business records turned up a company called Paideia Limited. Livestro is its sole director and shareholder.

The 40-year-old is not your typical hire for an American political operation. He has worked as a columnist for the Benelux version of Reader's Digest and the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf. He's also the founder and editor-in-chief of De Dagelijkse Standaard (or, The Daily Standard), a right-wing political blog that weighs in frequently on Palin. In the 1990s, he worked with England's Conservative Party; he went on to become an assistant to Frits Bolkestein, then a European Commission member for internal market and financial services.

More recently, he's been a combative contributor to the website Conservatives4Palin. There he took on Palin's critics on the left and the right, attacking journalists including Marc Ambinder (then of The Atlantic, now of National Journal), Politico's Ben Smith, and National Review's Jonah Goldberg, among many others.

Not surprisingly, Livestro's views skew to the right. He helped to found the Edmund Burke Foundation, a right-wing Dutch think tank created to push back against progressive politics in the Netherlands. In one manifesto, citing the number of Muslims in the Netherlands, the foundation warned of ethnic conflict and said the country's borders should be closed. In the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, Livestro once wrote that the gruesome photos depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib resembled little more than an out-of-control frat party; he complained that Abu Ghraib critics were "cry-babies" exaggerating the episode's signficiance. On his blog, Livestro similarly quipped that the CIA's torture techniques—with the exception of waterboarding—were milder than the hazing methods of fraternities. On the issue of climate change, Livestro falls into the denier camp: Last year, he wrote that the Climategate e-mail scandal showed there was no need for tackling a global climate treaty.

SarahPAC's filings note that Paideia provides "research consulting." On Friday, in an article about Palin's 2012 aspirations, Real Clear Politics reported in passing that Livestro had been hired by the Palin camp to advise her on the European debt crisis. (The story didn't mention Livestro's company, Paideia.) Recently, Palin, who is positioning herself for a possible presidential bid, has increasingly been weighing in on financial matters. Earlier this month, she panned the Federal Reserve's decision to buy billions in Treasury bonds to boost the economy. And she jousted with the Wall Street Journal, which had debunked some of her views on monetary policy.

Contacted by Mother Jones, Livestro would not discuss his work for Palin or answer questions about Paideia. He referred questions to SarahPAC, which did not respond to calls and emails.

Livestro's hiring has raised eyebrows on the right. "Why is a potential president relying for economic advice on freelance journalists rather than Nobel Prize winners?" David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, asked on his blog. "It's almost as if Gov. Palin finds the idea of expertise—not merely incomprehensible—but actively repugnant." Livestro shot back: "I know it's not on a par with a Nobel Prize winner, but to suggest Gov. Palin's decision to hire me instead is evidence of some anti-expertise attitude is perhaps a tad off the mark—like all of your writing about her."

For Livestro, working for Team Palin is a significant step toward fulfilling his biggest dream. "His greatest wish is to work for the 2012 Sarah Palin presidential campaign," reads his bio on one conservative blog. With Paideia's cover blown, the mystery that remains is why this Palin fan was so secretive about his work for her.

Andy Kroll is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips and insights at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. Follow him on Twitter here. Get Andy Kroll's RSS feed.

Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones' Washington-based news editor. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Email him at dschulman (at) motherjones.com. Get Daniel Schulman's RSS feed.

Can't get no respect Bush says

British deny George Bush's claims that torture helped foil terror plots
British officials say there is no evidence that waterboarding saved lives of UK citizens, as Bush claimed in his memoirs

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319

Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010 21.37 GMT
Article history

George Bush at a booksigning in Dallas, Texas. The British have contradicted the former US president's claims about torture helping to save lives in the UK. Photograph: Tom Pennington/Getty Images
British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by "waterboarding" saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He said Mohammed, below, was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. "Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States," he wrote.

It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.

British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush's claims. They said Mohammed provided "extremely valuable" information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida's structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed's waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.

Kim Howells, former chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee and Labour foreign minister, told the BBC that, while he did not doubt the existence of plots, he doubted whether waterboarding provided information instrumental in preventing them coming to fruition.

David Davis, the Conservative former shadow home secretary, said: "For [Bush] to demonstrate the use of torture saved British lives he has to demonstrate you can't get information any other way." He added: "We know from Iraq that whenever brains rather than brutality was involved, you get better results." Davis pointed to claims made by one detainee, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, after he was tortured that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, both of which have proved not to be true.

Bush also mentioned Abu Zubaydah, waterboarded after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. Zubaydah told his interrogators that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein and that there was a plot to attack Washington with a "dirty bomb". Both claims are now recognised by the CIA to be false.

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said that, by confessing to ordering torture, Bush risked prosecution. "George W Bush has confessed to ordering waterboarding, which in the view of almost all experts clearly passes the severe pain threshold in the definition of torture in international law."

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty said: "After the atrocity of 9/11, the American president could have united the world against terrorism and towards the rule of law. Instead, president Bush led a great democracy into the swamp of lies, war and torture in freedom's name. Democracy can do better and, learning from the past, it will."

Syria maintained a discreet silence after Bush's revelation that he had considered a US attack on a suspected nuclear facility at Israel's request in 2007. The 2007 Israeli attack at al-Kibar on the Euphrates was and remains embarrassing for Syria, which is under investigation by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Satellite imagery showed that the remains were razed after the Israeli raid.

Diplomats said that Syria's silence was explained by its wish to avoid further deterioration in relations with the US at a time of renewed tensions over Lebanon which have set back hopes for a rapprochement under the Obama administration.

Iranian media reported the story but played down the fact that Bush had asked the Pentagon to study an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, focusing more on Syria and his comments on the war in Iraq. Bush's account is likely to be incorporated into the catalogue of Iranian charges against the US.

Bush wrote that the-then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, asked him to bomb Syria in 2007, that he discussed the idea with senior officials but did not pursue it because "bombing of a sovereign state without warning or justification would greatly affect the prestige of the United States". But the following year US forces mounted a commando raid on Syria's border with Iraq against a man suspected of smuggling foreign fighters, killing at least eight people.

US intelligence reports have said the al-Kibar site was a nascent North Korean-designed reactor. Syria denies concealing nuclear work from inspectors.

Bush's account of the Syrian reactor affair is likely to confirm Arab views of intimate coordination between the US and Israel, even though he insisted that he had not given a disappointed Olmert a "green light" to carry out its own attack. Olmert called the site an "existential issue" for Israel — the same terminology it uses to describe Iran's nuclear ambitions.

what is left to say

US veteran who killed unarmed Iraqis wins Tea Party support
Murder charges were dropped against Ilario Pantano, who now verges on election victory buoyed by right-wing backing

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265

Ed Pilkington in Wilmington, North Carolina
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 October 2010 12.18 BST
Article history

Ilario Pantano, who is standing as a Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district in the US midterm elections. Photograph: Logan Wallace/AP
The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.

Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.

Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: "No better friend, No worse enemy."

Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina's 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.

With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.

"We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific," he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.

Pantano is one of the new breed of hardline Republicans thrown up by the turmoil of the economic meltdown and the ensuing Tea Party explosion. He served in the first Gulf war, then worked for Goldman Sachs before rejoining the marines days after the 9/11 attacks.

A few months after he killed the two unarmed Iraqis, a member of his unit reported him to senior officers and he was charged with premeditated murder. At a pre-trial military hearing, prosecution witnesses testified that the detainees, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Hanjil, were unthreatening and that their bodies were found in a kneeling position having apparently been shot in the back.

The defence countered that weapons had been found in the house from where the Iraqis were fleeing. The men had turned on Pantano unexpectedly as he was guarding them. He shouted "Stop!" but they didn't respond and he opened fire in self-defence.

Defence lawyers highlighted inconsistencies in the accounts of the prosecution witnesses and portrayed the main witness, who had been demoted by Pantano, as a soldier with an axe to grind. Forensic evidence was said to conflict with the prosecution case.

In the event, all charges against Pantano were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence. But the officer presiding over the hearing recommended that Pantano be given non-judicial punishment for having displayed "extremely poor judgment", adding that by desecrating the Iraqi's bodies with his placard he had brought disgrace to the armed forces.

Pantano declined to be drawn on the specifics of his case. "I'm running for Congress. I'm not defending myself for something that happened five years ago," he said.

But what about that placard? "I don't need to explain anything to people. If folk are alarmed, well war is alarming. All of my men that are alive are grateful for my service."

Neither Pantano nor McIntyre, who has held the seat for the Democrats for the past 12 years, have raised the shooting incident in their campaigns. The only criticism, paradoxically, has come from the Republican who Pantano beat in the primary election, Will Breazeale.

"I myself was a veteran of Iraq. I've detained Iraqis, and in my view Pantano is no war hero," he said.

Pantano dismissed his criticisms as "an historic case of sour grapes".

But in this district, which has a large military population due to its proximity to Camp Lejeune, the marine base where Pantano's pre-trial hearing took place, most voters know Pantano's story intimately. "He's a war hero," said a top local Republican official who declined to give his name. And the placard? "Doesn't bother me."

Arthur Plante, a veteran of the US coastguard, said: "If I had been in his situation over in Iraq I would have done the same thing." His wife, Cynthia, also a veteran, said: "I would follow Pantano to war any time, any place. He did what had to be done."

Pantano is fighting the election on a national manifesto for change. He wants to cut back on government spending and clamp down on extremist Islam.

He recently spoke at Ground Zero in New York where he opposes plans to build an Islamic cultural centre nearby. "America objects to what's happening there. The folks in this district think it's an abomination," he said.

He has been endorsed by Pamela Geller, one of the leading opponents of the cultural centre who has built bridges between her group Stop Islamisation of America and the British far-right group the English Defence League.

"I don't have any anxieties about Pam Geller," Pantano said. "She is a patriot. I'm thrilled to have her endorsement."

Cheney and Libby are traitors: Wilson

"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth

WEDNESDAY, OCT 6, 2010 20:30 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
"Secretariat": A gorgeous, creepy American myth
Diane Lane shines in a Tea Party-flavored, Christian-friendly yarn about one big horse and our nation's past
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
"Secretariat" is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.

In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.

Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.

Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)

One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.

Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."

Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!

If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.

To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).

Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.

Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!

FRIDAY, OCT 8, 2010 10:58 ET
ANDREW O'HEHIR
Ebert attacks my "Secretariat" review -- it's on!
My response to the critic's takedown of my takedown
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

Diane Lane in "Secretariat"
I recently published a review of the new Disney film "Secretariat" that took an unorthodox and admittedly inflammatory approach to a would-be inspirational movie about a lady and a racehorse. Nearly all viewers will choose to see or not see the movie based on their level of interest in watching Diane Lane in an awesome array of early-'70s fashions, or watching exciting re-creations of the 1973 Triple Crown races. I accused the film of concealing -- or embodying, that's a better word -- an ideological worldview that is never made explicit but is present in every frame.

I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.

I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")

UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.

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Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)

I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.

I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.

Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.

Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!

Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.

Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)

Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)

You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!

I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?

On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).

Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?

For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.

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UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:

Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.

We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."

Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize
CHARLES HUTZLER AND KARL RITTER | 10/ 8/10 06:06 PM |


Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
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BEIJING — China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.

In naming Liu, the Norwegian-based committee honored his more than two decades of advocacy for human rights and peaceful democratic change – from the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.

President Barack Obama, last year's peace prize winner, called for Liu's immediate release.

Anticipating the award, Chinese circumvented Internet controls and called friends overseas to learn the news. Supporters and friends gathered outside Liu's central Beijing apartment, where his wife was kept inside by police. At a park, a civil rights lawyer, a retired official-turned-blogger and a dozen other people cheered and waved placards saying "Long Live Freedom of Speech." The demonstrators were later taken away by police.

A buzz of congratulations coursed through Chinese instant messaging sites before censors scrubbed postings and blocked cell phone text messages that contained the characters for Liu's name. Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989, joined Obama and other leaders in congratulating Liu.

"Last year, I noted that so many others who have received the award had sacrificed so much more than I," Obama said. "That list now includes Mr. Liu, who has sacrificed his freedom for his beliefs."

The president praised China for its stunning 30 years of transformative economic growth. "But this award reminds us that political reform has not kept pace, and that the basic human rights of every man, woman and child must be respected," Obama said.

Two years into an 11-year jail term for subversion at a prison 300 miles (500 kilometers) from Beijing, the slight, 54-year-old literary critic was unlikely to have found out about the award. Prisoners are restricted to state media, which mostly ignored the news. His overjoyed wife, Liu Xia, said she hoped to give him a hug and tell him if police allow her to travel to the prison on Saturday.

The contretemps points to the sticky predicament the prize poses for the communist leadership. Liu is the first Chinese and first member of the much persecuted group of political activists to be given the peace prize, but he is virtually unknown among ordinary Chinese. The award is likely to carry his name and his call for democracy to a wider audience, especially among young Chinese who are avid Internet and cell phone users but due to censorship know little of the rights camp's past struggles with the government.

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"They are going to want to know who Liu Xiaobo is and why he won this prize. They are going to learn who he is and this way they are going to learn more about freedom, democracy, justice and about the Tiananmen generation," said Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who has become a fierce champion of human rights.

"It also sends a message to China and the Chinese government, that while the international community recognizes the economic achievements of today's China, it still cannot forget that China is falling behind in terms of some basic values and human principles, such as human rights and freedom of speech."

A Nobel for a Chinese dissident is one prize not wanted by a government usually hungry for international approval. It has launched a deep-pocketed campaign to win science prizes. And the peace prize lands squarely in the middle of a brewing debate among the Chinese leadership and the elite over whether to begin political reforms, and if so, how quickly.

In recent weeks the premier has called for changing the political system to safeguard China's stunning economic achievements while the powerful Politburo member overseeing law enforcement has urged officials to resist "erroneous Western political and legal perspectives."

Chinese Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing and Oslo lodged protests. The agency's spokesman issued a stinging condemnation, branding Liu a criminal, warning Norway that relations would suffer and accusing the Nobel committee of undermining the prize's mission to promote international understanding.

"Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement. "The Nobel committee's decision to award such a person the peace prize runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and also desecrates the prize."

Jonas Gahr Stoere, foreign minister of wealthy, oil-rich Norway, said any punishment would backfire. "I think that would be negative for China's reputation in the world, if they chose to do that," Stoere told National Broadcaster NRK.

In announcing the prize in the Norwegian capital Oslo, the Nobel committee issued a challenge to China to live up to responsibilities as the world's second-largest economy and a burgeoning diplomatic and military power.

"China cannot only demand to have political and economic power, without being exposed to the same kind of discussions as other superpowers have been," committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. He called Liu the "foremost symbol of Chinese human rights activists," adding: "So it was natural to give the prize only to him as a symbol of the whole Chinese society's wish for more democracy."

Liu is the first peace prize winner chosen while still in prison, although several laureates, including Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1935) were in custody. Still others, like Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975) and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1983), were prevented by their governments from going to Norway to accept the prize.

Liu's wife, prevented by police from mixing with the nearly 100 Chinese and foreign reporters outside her apartment, said by phone and messages that the award would give Liu encouragement. She hoped to go to Norway to collect the medal and its prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.5 million), if he cannot.

"I think this prize doesn't only belong to Liu Xiaobo one person, but also for all the people in China who advocate democracy, freedom and peace and for all the prisoners of conscience in jail," Liu Xia told Hong Kong's Cable TV.

In a statement issued by the Washington-based group Freedom Now, she thanked former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, also a Nobel laureate, for nominating her husband.

Havel, who never won the prize but whose own human rights petition Charter 77 inspired Liu's tract Charter 08 and helped bring about the end of communist rule in then Czechoslovakia, said Liu "is exactly the kind of a committed citizen who deserves such an award."

Liu's Charter 08 called for greater freedoms and for the Communist Party to give way to gradual, democratic change. "The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.

The government arrested Liu hours before the document's release in December 2008. It was the most programmatic in the hundreds of essays Liu wrote. Jailed for two years after the Tiananmen protests – when he helped persuade student protesters to leave the square before a military assault – and again for three years in the 1990s, Liu found a computer and the Internet at home on his release in 1999. "God's present to China," he called the Internet.

Thousands of Chinese – civil rights campaigners, professors and young professionals – signed on to Charter 08, which circulated by e-mail and on overseas Internet sites after being expunged from web pages in China.

The ability of Chinese to surmount censorship barriers using proxy servers and coded language kicked into high gear in the hours just before the Nobel announcement.

Excitement pulsed among students at Beijing Normal University, where Liu earned a degree in the '80s, and at Peking University. They passed word via the popular QQ.com instant messaging site.

When messages with Liu's name became blocked and online searches for him or "Nobel Peace Prize" failed – a usual tactic of censors – people began posting oblique congratulations to an unnamed Chinese for winning a Nobel.

Some curious students also said they did not know why Liu won and, echoing an oft-stated government line, wondered whether it was not a backhanded plot to shame China.

"The impact he has made is not Nobel Prize-level so far," said a Peking University English major, who would only give his English name, Eric Zhang. "People abroad know him better than we do. This is not us choosing him. They chose him, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe this is an opportunity to get more freedom so we don't have to go to Twitter to find out about him."

The government blacked out reports on CNN, which can be seen in tourist hotels and places where foreigners work and live, and kept the news off the main nationwide TV newscast. China Central Television-4, which is aimed at Chinese overseas, read the Foreign Ministry statement, providing a back door for Chinese to learn about Liu.

"Millions and millions of ordinary Chinese people, government employees, party cadres, students ... are going to want to know who is Liu Xiaobo and why he was sentenced to prison," said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "They are going to discover Charter 08, which will spread uncontrollably."

The decision to jail Liu, he said, "has backfired spectacularly, and at a very critical juncture when China is coming out in the international community. Was jailing Liu worth the price of the current predicament?"

intolerance at the religious level, media

Yesterday afternoon, the leader of a microscopic cult of idiots who announced plans to stage an "international" day of Quran burning in Gainesville, Florida held a press conference, for a rapt media which decided that his moronic plans were the single most important thing going on in America. At that press conference, in front of "9/11 Truther" signs, this cult leader lied to everyone who was watching, telling them that he was going to call off his 9/11 book burning festival because he had successfully reached a deal with the people behind the Park51 community center in Lower Manhattan, in which they would move their facility away from the site of the World Trade Center.

Not a word of this was true, but it was amazing, all the same -- at one fell swoop, we had finally knit up the strands of a season of irrationality into one big, shiny, synergized knot. This was supposed to be the end of Recovery Summer? More like Relapse Summer.

The story of how one lone idiot, pimping an 18th-century brand of community terrorism, held the media hostage and forced some of this nation's most powerful people to their knees to fitfully beg an end to his wackdoodlery is an extraordinary one. It's a modern media retelling of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", in which a gang of Islamaphobes, cast in the role of Addie Bundren, bamboozle the media into carrying their coffin full of malevolence on a journey of pure debasement. Let's begin at the beginning.

Earlier this year, an organization called the Cordoba Initiative were granted permission by the appropriate authorities in New York City to turn an old Burlington Coat Factory at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan into a community center. The organization was headed by an Imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has made it his life's work to stand against radical cults like al Qaeda and teach young Muslims that America is a place where one can freely worship at the appointed times and then join other faith communities in America in the task of building a great nation. The proposed community center was to include a basketball court and space for different religious communities in New York City to have interfaith relations. It was also going to have a place for Muslims to pray, if they liked.

The news didn't sit well with many people in New York, most notably people who didn't live in Manhattan. This is because they were told by a gaggle of dumb Islamophobes that what was planned was a "Ground Zero mosque." Of course, the planned community center was not, strictly speaking, a "mosque." And it was most definitely not "at Ground Zero." "Ground Zero" is the site of an interminable municipal construction project. There are no plans to build a mosque there. "Ground Zero" is also not the name of a recognized New York City neighborhood, like DUMBO or Murray Hill. But, here's the thing: even if it was, the battle to stop the "Ground Zero mosque" was already lost, because there already is a mosque in that neighborhood.

This logic failed to sink in, because very few people outside of me and the good people over at Wonkette made any attempt to bring these facts to light. But it might not have mattered, because the fertile field of opposition to the Park51 community center was the raw wound of the September 11th attacks. Obviously, many people are still feeling the loss of that day. And that loss breeds many emotions, among them sadness and anger. And people definitely do have the right to express their sadness and their anger. But what people don't have the right to expect is that the government will intervene to remedy claims that have no basis in law.

As soon as the media saw themselves a shiny shiny shining thing shining shinily in New York City, they pounced! How perfect! Something for us to talk about during the slow-news summer! I mean, we could talk about the nation's unemployment crisis, but that would mean we'd have to talk to poor, jobless people, and there's no currency in having access to a bunch of poors. Right away, they accepted the premise that this was a "Ground Zero mosque," when it wasn't. And so, by the power vested in the media, things that weren't in fact true were accorded the privilege of being "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."

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Charlie Brooker, calling out the media for this bullshit, states what should have happened at this very moment:

New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald's and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven't produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.

That's literally all I'd ask them in an interview. I'd stand there pointing at a map of the city. Would it be offensive here? What about here? Or how about way over there? And when they finally picked a suitable spot, I'd ask them to draw it on the map, sketching out roughly how big it should be, and how many windows it's allowed to have. Then I'd hand them a colour swatch and ask them to decide on a colour for the lobby carpet. And the conversation would continue in this vein until everyone in the room was in tears. Myself included.

That hasn't happened. Instead, 70% of Americans are opposed to the "Ground Zero mosque", doubtless in many cases because they've been led to believe it literally is a mosque at Ground Zero. And if not...well, it must be something significant. Otherwise why would all these pundits be so angry about it? And why would anyone in the media listen to them with a straight face?

And because the media couldn't do their job, a group of hack politicians, like Rick Lazio and Newt Gingrich, desperate to get a little famewhore attention for their quixotic political career goals, saw an opportunity to horn in on the "discussion." They started telling all the sad and angry people that they actually did have the right to expect someone to provide a remedy to their claims. Their case was primarily based on the idea that nobody has the rights of religious freedom, no one has property rights and that the government has the right -- nay, the duty! -- to intrude.

Right away, they should have been entirely ridiculed, because the people pimping this bilge were primarily right-wing types who would ordinarily say that church and state should not be separated, that property rights are sacrosanct, and that government should be small and unobtrusive. Someone really should have said to Newt Gingrich, "Is this seriously the stand you want to take? Because if it is, we shall never allow you to claim to be a supporter of small government or a 'Constitutional constructionist' ever again. And if you try to assert that claim, we will drop on you like a ton of bricks. We will cause you real, public pain."

But of course, that's not what happened. The media has too much invested in flattering people like Newt Gingrich, and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets. And so, these inherent contradictions simply became "one side of a great debate" and "an interesting point of view."

And from there, some idiot news producer said, "Hey, I bet we can shoehorn this into our election narrative somehow!" And so the Park51 community center became an election issue. Imagine that, in a world with a nine year-long, going nowhere war and a massive unemployment crisis! Imagine how many times you would have to hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer before you would ask a politician from California how they stood on a local zoning issue in Manhattan.

But ask they did, all the way to the White House. And that's when Democrats like Harry Reid stepped forward to publicly cover themselves in cowardice. This turned the frenzy up several notches for the media, because suddenly, they had obtained a very precious thing -- the right to say "both sides do this." The matter had become a folie a deux -- a madness made for two! -- but the media focused all their attention on the "two" and none on the "madness."

And in that climate, a pastor named Terry Jones saw an opportunity to make himself famous. Jones heads up a heretofore unknown and uncared-about gang of Florida morons known as the Dove Outreach Church -- minor bit players in the field of antagonizing American Muslims. This idiot announced that he was going to burn some Qurans on September 11th, and was anyone interested in giving this nonsense a whole lot of media attention?

And boy howdy, lots of people took him up on the offer! And you know why they did that? Because of the shame. Because deep down, your media all-stars knew that they had aided and abetted something that closely resembled an intellectual atrocity, and now it was time to atone by finding the lowest-hanging fruit available and make themselves feel better by beating on them repeatedly for being assholes -- something they should have already been doing for months!

And this gave an opportunity for some of those who had opposed the Park51 community center -- who deserved the treatment being meted out to Terry Jones -- to do the same. They joined their friends in the media in this demonstration of game-show absolution, saying, "This level of bigotry is unacceptable! It's so declasse in comparison to our own bigotry, which is a refined, 'Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte' form of despicableness."

A few people, like John Boehner and whoever writes Sarah Palin's tweets went so far as to say, "See, this is exactly the same thing we were decrying with the Ground Zero mosque." Except it wasn't, because the Ground Zero mosque was a thing they had made up!

None of this bothered Terry Jones at all! Why should it? In the long history of fringe religious figures saying and doing stupid things, it is exceedingly rare for the media to provide much attention to them. Pat Robertson has been telling America that gay people cause hurricanes for years, and it never amounts to much in the way of coverage beyond a periodic reminder that Pat Robertson is a complete fool. Terry Jones, however, had been given something very precious: he was now "one side of a great debate" who possessed "an interesting point of view."

And the media worked very hard to push the case that Jones was part of a debate. Now, Quran burning was an election-year issue, for which every candidate had to answer. And they even went so far as to ask Jones repeatedly, "What if President Obama told you not to do this? What if former President George W. Bush told you not to do this?" They were literally brokering negotiations between an idiot cult leader and some of the most powerful and important people in the world!

By now, things were terribly out of control. President Obama had to publicly state that Quran burning is a stupid thing to do. Imagine how out of touch you have to be that you need to go all the way to the White House to find that answer! Other important people were compelled to interject at this point. General David Petraeus had to come forward and state the plainly obvious: that all the public attention being given to this Quran burning would undermine the ability of U.S. forces to conduct their counterinsurgency operations, which depend heavily on winning the "hearts and minds" of Afghans. I think a lot of people read this as Petraeus speaking out against the attention-seeker, Terry Jones. But I think he was speaking more directly to the attention-givers. And everything that Justin Elliot reports here, I believe, lends credence to my contention.

Eventually, Robert Gates -- the Secretary of Defense, who is running two wars! -- had to call Jones up and try to convince him not to do this. "Which is crazy," says Alex Pareene, accurately, because when, exactly, did the Pentagon start negotiating with two-bit terrorists?

All of this finally culminated with yesterday's press conference, where Terry Jones lied and said that the Park51 community center was going to move, thanks to him. You see where this is headed now, don't you? Now the people behind Park51 are on the hook for stopping this Quran burning, and all of the negative external impact it may have. Now, all of the refined hate-merchants from early in the story can say that if the "Ground Zero mosque" isn't moved, immediately, American troops could die!

To go back to Charlie Brooker, let's remember that after sizing up the incompetence that pervaded the Park51 coverage, he warned that the "media" should just "give up" before they "[made] things worse." Pretty prophetic, isn't it? They got played, and played badly, by a dude with 14th-century religious beliefs, 19th-century facial hair and ultra-modern media savvy. Terry Jones has essentially blackmailed some of the most important people in America, with the assistance of the media.

Let's remember that all of this paralysis was caused by 50 people who wanted to burn a book that's available for free, on the Internet!

There were many, many moments where someone could have simply said, "No, we should really not be doing this. These Islamophobes are objectively wrong, objectively stupid, objectively contradictory, objectively harmful, and by God, as someone with a functioning brain and a devotion to the pursuit of reason above all else, I am going to stand here and say no to all of this." But as it turns out, it wasn't until yesterday afternoon that someone finally had the guts to say maybe we cannot really believe a word this man is saying.

Well, they should have thought of that before they decided to point a bunch of teevee cameras at him, I guess.