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Blessed are the Peacemakers

Trish

In the spring of 2003, I was fortunate to be among a group of about 50 other people in a seminar taught by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In the first few sessions, he lectured about the Peace and Reconciliation process, which allowed South Africa to begin to heal the wounds of apartheid. The last meeting was reserved for him to answer our questions on any subject we liked.

It was the night of March 16, and Bush had issued his moronic ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to get out of Iraq by St. Patrick’s Day or else. Everyone was thinking of what might happen the next day as we listened to Tutu.

A remarkable man with an air of both impishness and solemnity, Tutu believes that no one is beyond God’s love or God’s redemption. His speech reflects his absolute rejection of the idea that some people are good and others evil. We are all both.

I held my question, sure that someone else would ask it so I wouldn’t have to. Finally I raised my hand. Tutu came and stood next to me and I asked if he had any thoughts for us on the eve of Bush’s threatened invasion of Iraq.

I could see he actually had many thoughts and seemed to be struggling to rein them in. Finally, he spoke. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said. And that was all.

I subscribe to the usual daily emails: horoscopes, inspiration, news, etc. Today I received one that said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Are other people worrying about Iran and North Korea, as I am? Are other people realizing just how long two years and three months is, and wondering if we will make it, as a country and as people, out of the Bush presidency? Is it time to wake up from our stupor and shed our outrage fatigue and take back our future?

If we do, we have nothing to fear — after all, blessed are the peacemakers.

Fox News: North Korea Nukes Are ‘Good News’

Jon Ponder

Only in the mindset of a Fox News anchor and his viewers could North Korea’s purported test of nuclear bombs be considered “good news” that could counterpoint the “bad news” of the Foley scandal:

[JOHN] GIBSON: Does the fact that the North Koreans actually tested a nuclear weapon balance out the bad news from this Foley scandal?

[TONY] BLANKLEY: It doesn’t balance it out. It’s not a big enough story. As big as it should be, I don’t think it will take the oxygen out of the news cycle. I think it will take some of the breathlessness out of the reporting of the Foley story, but there will be some room, as we’re seeing today, both stories are getting coverage.

RIP Habeas Corpus – 1215-2006

Jon Ponder
If you are imprisoned for no reason, First Amendment rights to free speech and Second Amendment rights to bear arms are of no use to you, for example.

On the day the Foley scandal broke, the Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which includes a provision that eliminates habeas corpus from the canon of United States law. Habeas corpus is an ancient right of citizens to be informed why they have been arrested and what charges are being brought against them.

The Constitution allows habeas corpus to be suspended under two conditions: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

But the new law does not suspend habeas corpus. It eliminates it.

On Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann examined the potential damage that could be done to American democracy if the law is allowed to stand. He went through each provision in the Bill of Rights suggesting how elmininating habeas corpus makes nine of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution moot. If you are imprisoned for no reason, First Amendment rights to free speech and Second Amendment rights to bear arms are of no use to you.

Crooks & Liars has the video and a rough transcript.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the text of the section that suspends habeas corpus indefinitely:

SEC. 7. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS….

`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

Study: Iraq War Dead Exceeds 600,000

Jon Ponder

Los Angeles Times:

More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.

The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

U.S. Military in Iraq Losing Faith in PM al-Maliki

Jon Ponder
Sec. Rice’s plane was forced to circle Baghdad for nearly an hour before landing because of a mortar attack near the airport.

Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer:

For weeks, unnamed U.S. commanders and officials in Baghdad have been telling journalists that they are losing faith in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They say he is unable to check sectarian violence and foster national reconciliation. Even Rice warned that Maliki’s six-month-old government had reached “a critical time.” Her own plane was forced to circle Baghdad for nearly an hour before landing because of a mortar attack near the airport.

On my last trip to Iraq in June, it was already clear that the prospects for a Maliki government were far from rosy. Why should anyone be surprised?

Having lived under dictatorship, or in exile, for decades, Iraqi leaders have no experience in running a country. Maliki was a compromise choice, a man whose chief qualification was that he had served as an aide to the previous (and incompetent) Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and came from Jaafari’s Dawa Party. The choice was made by the majority coalition of Shiite parties, who fought among themselves for weeks over the pick.

Cabinet posts were doled out to the various sectarian parties according to the number of assembly seats they had won in elections. Many ministers are more loyal to their parties than to the Maliki central government, and operate independent fiefdoms. Maliki didn’t even appoint a cabinet secretary (the official responsible for coordinating ministries and cabinet meetings) until last month.

The interior minister, Jawad Bolani, was chosen because he had no close affiliation to any party. The hope was that such “independence” would enable Bolani to purge the ministry of sectarian death squads that have infiltrated the police and commando forces. But, lacking a political base, Bolani has proved too weak – with one recent exception – to control or clean out this crucial ministry.

It is difficult to see how Iraq’s government will get much better.

Polls: Public Not Buying Hastert’s, GOP’s B.S. in Page Case

Buck Banks

Foley factor: According to National Journal’s PollTrack, recent polls seem to indicate the American public have a growing distrust and distaste for the GOP. To many, the Democrats are looking better — though the sentiment may be more like, “They may be ineffectual, but at least they ain’t creepy.”

The newest batch of polls following the week-old Mark Foley scandal confirms congressional Republicans’ worst fears: A majority of the country believes they chose to save their own political hides over the safety of young male pages.

Most respondents said their feelings about the president will impact their choices in the voting booth.

Nearly two-thirds of ABC News/Washington Post respondents said Republican leaders tried to cover up the Florida Republican’s sexually tinged communications with pages after first learning of them more than a year ago. Fifty-four percent of Gallup/USA Today and 52 percent of CNN respondents smelled a GOP cover-up. And nearly eight in 10 Americans polled by CBS News/New York Times believe GOP leaders fretted more over protecting their political standing than the teenage pages.

Republicans have tried to ping cover-up talk back onto Democrats and the “liberal media,” but Americans aren’t giving the party a pass. Three-quarters of CNN respondents and a slim majority polled by CBS/Times said the Republican leadership improperly handled the situation.

The new polls indicate that Americans want House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who knew of the inappropriate e-mails and whispers about Foley’s predilections for at least a year, to lose his post. More than half of CNN respondents said the Illinois Republican should step down; pluralities of 43 to 46 percent agreed in the four other polls.
[…]

U.S. Border Patrol: A Longer Fence Will Just Increase Corruption In the Ranks

Buck Banks

Do the math: Southern California has a 200-mile-long fence along its border with Mexico. Of the 172 current corruption cases involving U.S. Border Patrol guards, 72 – 40 percent – involve guards from Southern California. Now, if the U.S. government extends the wall another 700 miles, increasing its length by a factor of 3.5, then we could realistically expect the percentage of corruption cases centered on the U.S.-Mexico border to approach 90 percent or more.

Why? Because when they make it more difficult to cross the border, it causes an escalation in tactics by criminals. The bribe money goes up, the women they use to entice agents get more irresistible and the potential payoffs increase geometrically, not arithematically. And then there are the illegal aliens working for the Border Patrol, helping friends, relatives and countrymen to come to this great country where you can lie about your citizenship on a job application, pass a nonexistent background check, get a cool badge and be given the keys to the henhouse.

Of course, with the Border Patrol among the lowest-paid federal agencies, with morale in the toilet and the fact that the BP has started scraping the barrel bottom for new recruits, it’s no wonder picking up a few grand of easy money for letting a couple of cars pass through unsearched is difficult to resist.

Sorry Mr. Frost, good fences don’t make better neighbors, they just make worse border guards. For more details, go here.

Breaking: Dennis Hastert to Hold News Conference at 11AM Eastern

Jon Ponder

C-SPAN just reported that House Speaker Dennis Hastert will hold a news conference this morning at 11AM Eastern.

UPDATE: Hastert let it be known that he is throwing his staff to the lions, purporting that they knew details about the Foley scandal that they did not share with him — which brings us to the standard GOP conundrum: Is Denny Hastert lying or is he an incompetent manager who is kept in the dark about serious matters like a chickenhawk running amok among the page boys?

Poll: 3% of Americans Believe Iraq War Is ‘Going Very Well’

Jon Ponder

New York Times/CBS Poll:

The public’s view of Iraq is as dark as it has been since the war began in 2003: two-thirds said the war was going somewhat or very badly, while only 3 percent said it was going very well. Two-thirds said they disapprove of how Mr. Bush is handling Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s job approval has slipped to 34 percent, one of the lowest levels of his presidency, posing a complication for the White House as it seeks to send him out on the road to rally the Republican base voters. Mr. Bush’s job approval rating has even slipped with his base: 75 percent of conservative Republicans approve of the way he has handled his job, compared with 96 percent in November 2004.

Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of pre-9/11 intelligence reports that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware.