Hanging Saddam - A small lesson learned

I will leave it to others to draw the larger conclusions about the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I haven't much to say about his passing, but I did learn something about Amy Carter as a result.

Way back when, her father, Jimmy Carter - President at the time - quoted her as saying that she felt the largest problem in her thirteen year old world was "nuclear weaponry - and the control of nuclear arms." Many people, myself included, scoffed. How could a child that age see beyond her Barbie dolls to the problems of the adult world? President Daddy was making political hay at his daughters expense. Shame, shame!

Fast forward to the present - I have a nine year old daughter, and she has an opinion about Saddam Hussein. She understands that he killed innocent people in horrible ways, but says that it was wrong to execute him. When I asked why, she said it violates the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." How about that? She put her finger on the core issue of the death penalty debate.

My kid is no prodigy. She does OK in school, but can't keep her room clean and fights incessantly with her little sister. However, once in a while she will come out with a question that shows she has her eyes open to what's going on with the adults, and thinks about it.

We had a serious chat about the death penalty, and I found that topic to be easier than when she asked about tax cuts. If you want to test your command of a subject, explain it to a child!

I guess I owe Amy Carter an apology. We can see today the looming threat of nuclear proliferation. It's not so unreasonable that a President's daughter in 1980 might see it too.

Besides, grown ups aren't the only ones who worry about the world we are leaving to our children.

If there's more, it's here.

Amy Goodman on the Media

Since the video with the smart-mouthed little girl worked so well, I am going to put up something a little more substantive.

This is a documentary called Independent Media In A Time Of War, and it's worth the half hour it takes to watch it. It's anti-war, but that's not the primary message here - rather, it's about how the mainstream media promoted the Iraq war and excluded dissenting voices.

If you favor freedom of speech and press, this is a must see.

Be warned, however, there are some graphic parts unsuitable for kids.

If there's more, it's here.

O'Reilly Backtalk

OK, I have reservations about a kid using this kind of language, but it has it's humorous moments and gives me a chance to try posting a YouTube link the way my hero, Susie at Suburban Guerilla does.

If there's more, it's here.

We should we have invaded Texas instead!

I was randomly surfing the other day, when I found this article from 2003 on the Christian Science Monitor website

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and anti-government literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

I never heard of this, did you? A WMD in Texas, 175 miles from Crawford? The good people of Law Enforcement who caught this wacko and his friends before they could do us harm were surely feted in the media and basked in the gratitude of the nation.

Well, they weren't, and they didn't, and there's an explanation:

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Now hold on Mr. Journalism Professor! We all knew that while this was a scary bunch of hombres, the big threat was those Muslim nutjobs who hate us: the Hamas, Hezbollahs, al Qaedas, Iranians, Shias, Sunnis, Wahabbis, Salafists, Taliban, and others among the 42 foreign terrorist organizations listed by the State Department, and that's where we focused.

But wait, there's more:

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

Levitas estimates that there are approximately 25,000 right-wing extremist members and activists and some 250,000 sympathizers. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 708 hate groups in 2002.

I had to check that out, and it's true. According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, of the 115 incidents of terrorism in the US since they started tracking domestic terrorism in 1998, 110 were the work of Americans.

Was Jensen on to something? There's been a lot of attention given to foreign terrorists in our media and public debate, but not so much to the domestic ones. Plus, the people most worked up about foreign terrorists were the ones in favor of invading Iraq.

How would your views on the War on Terror have been different had you known about this?

And you pro-war folks, were you misled?

If there's more, it's here.

In Memory of Gary Webb - The Perils of Telling the Truth.

Two years ago today, Gary Webb died. He had lost his career, reputation, and his family, and had nothing to live for. Deeply depressed, he committed suicide.

How many people have heard of Gary Webb?

Webb was a crackerjack, Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News who in 1995 unearthed the story of his life, the Contra-Cocaine affair and it's link to the LA crack epidemic. His editor agreed, and it was published in the Mercury-News as a series, with great expectations. However, Webb was not hailed as the next great Pulitzer candidate. Instead, he was pilloried by the major media as having gotten it wrong - an unprecedented attack on a fellow journalist allegedly orchestrated by the CIA.

His editor abandoned him, he was discredited, forced from his job, and his wife took their children and left him. He later published a book, an incredible story called Dark Alliance that was mostly ignored, sank into anonymity, and finally took his own life.

Telling the truth is not always the safest course of action.

Yes, Webb's story was true, confirmed by Congressional hearings and CIA investigations. So when you get news from the major US media, remember Gary Webb, and this cautionary tale. The media isn't always in the truth business. It has a dark alliance of its own, serving unseen masters and not necessarily the public interest.

I'll leave you now with Webb's own words:

Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff -- stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion.

Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed (in his book, The Lords of the Press) that "it is possible to fool all the people all the time -- when government and press cooperate." Unfortunately, we have reached that point.

and a eugoly, written by a man who suffered a similar fate.

RIP Gary Webb (August 31, 1955 – December 10, 2004)

If there's more, it's here.