Month: May 2011

Clinton Supports Same-Sex Marriage

Trish

Our nation’s permanent mission is to form a ‘more perfect union’ – deepening the meaning of freedom, broadening the reach of opportunity, strengthening the bonds of community. That mission has inspired and empowered us to extend rights to people previously denied them. Every time we have done that, it has strengthened our nation. Now we should do it again, in New York, with marriage equality.

— Former Pres. Bill Clinton, supporting same-sex marriage. Both the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy were codified under Clinton.

Grenier: Death Was a ‘Good Career Move’ for bin Laden

Buck Banks

AFP
AFP
In my ongoing efforts to puzzle Trish with the range of esoteric electronic newsletters I subscribe to, I admit to reading the weekly Al Jazeera in English newsletter. It provides an interesting perspective on the news.

Robert Grenier, a former CIA spook, penned an interesting column for AJ that questions Osama bin Laden’s relevance in the world prior to his death, and posits that dying was the best thing that could have happened to him:

But for bin Laden, who might well have met martyrdom with many of his followers at Tora Bora, such was his megalomaniacal conception of his importance that he believed his greatest contribution to the movement would be to ensure his own survival, even as those around him were martyred for the cause.

Consider, then, what it must have been like for such an ego to fade into functional obscurity. As he was reduced to issuing occasional audio tapes of increasing irrelevance, even the core of the organisation he founded learned to live without him. And the scattered little groups around the globe which had appropriated the al-Qaeda name in fact had little connection to bin Laden’s organisation, and still less to bin Laden himself.

Indeed, what must have been most crushing for bin Laden was the rise of the so-called Arab Spring. The very people in the Arab world whose concerns bin Laden claimed most importantly to represent have revealed the utter fallacy at the heart of Sheikh Osama’s message.

The al-Qaeda leader had long professed that the only means of liberation for the Muslims was to strike at the Western powers who propped up their repressive leaders, and thereby to undo the vast US-led conspiracy to subjugate them. What the Arab youth have shown is that the means of their liberation is in their own hands, and has always been. Indeed, they have shown that in the face of their moral example, the Western world, more often than not, will be forced to support them.

Burden of Proof on bin Laden

Buck Banks

Perhaps, then, instead of shouldering the risks of trying to prove that bin Laden is dead, the White House should shift the burden of proof to bin Laden. Presumably, if bin Laden was still alive, he’d want everyone to know. So let him proclaim his continued existence to the world. Bin Laden has had no trouble getting his messages out to the Arab media in the past. Surely one of his wives could grab a Flipcam and film him holding the day’s newspaper and reciting the score of a recent NBA playoff game. And when bin Laden never releases that tape, when months and years pass without a peep from bin Laden (saying something about contemporaneous events, at least — intelligence officials expect an old recording to surface soon), skeptics will gradually come to accept that it’s because he’s rotting at the bottom of the ocean.

— Dan Amira, writing in New York Magazine.