Letters to the Editor
MereMortal
Published Letters: 151 Editor's Choice: 19
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But for a camera
[Read the article: Imperial presidency declared null and void]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061707A.shtml
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
this is a very brief extract from the article listed above:
The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld's former military aide, was in charge of the Army's Southern Command, with jurisdiction over Guantánamo - he had been promoted a few months after Taguba's visit to Rumsfeld's office. Craddock appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller's tenure.
"I followed the bread-crumb trail," Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. "I found some things that didn't seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib."
End of Extract
it amazes me that Bush & co have no concept that pissing that many people off is going to cause some kind of rebound. And I don't mean just in the detainees, but in the public, in those who occupy positions in public life and particularly in the judiciary system, the professionals who care about the kind of country that they are helping to keep civilized.
You don't even have to be an elementary buddhist to understand that placing hostages to fortune here there and everywhere and then behaving like as if you really really really haven't will some day come back and bit you on the ass.
This is about dismantling the Al-Qaeda apparatus that was encouraged and set up by both the CIA and the ISI. They're trying to contain the frankenstein monster they unleashed, they're also using torture to ascertain which in the Al-Qaeda movement are CIA assets and are still dependable and loyal and which have turned, it's the ones that have turned and the new recruits since 9/11 that they're scared about, for the relationship between the very top Al-Qaeda brass and Western intelligence is murky indeed, and they thought they could just contain the whole thing with a pair of pliers and some loudspeakers. They are idiots, and highly malevolent idiots at that.
It's nearly 6 years since 9/11, why isn't the American public suspicious that there has been no trial in Manhattan for KSM and the others?
It's clear that any country that valued the rule of law would try KSM in open court in downtown Manhattan and prove to the world the evidence against him i.e show itself to be fair and open. A dictatorship or fascist state on the other hand would torture him and keep him in hiding all the time endlessly repeating incoherent threats about dirty bombs and hypocritically talk about nuking Iran.
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talking of blastocysts...
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]which wag was it who said that for the conservatives the 'right to life' started at conception and ended at birth...
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as someone else has said here...
[Read the article: My boyfriend is nice, but I fantasize about wilder times]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]people are complex
I think some of the correspondence here has been unduly [and smugly] harsh towards LW.
I think that in relationships we are looking for a soulmate of the imagination. It's not a question of someone being perfect. I look all around me and I see coupled up people making terrible compromises and making each other very unhappy into the bargain. They come round, they have dinner and they wound each other once they have a gallery to play to.
I also see another woman friend who has bagged herself a gem of a man, who is bright, intelligent, imaginative and thoughtful. I know quite a few of the other women really like him [but know that it's hands off] he's only got eyes for her...
you can make all sorts of compromises but relationships that aren't truly mutually felt are unfair on both partners in the end. LW's relationship sounds like she fell in with some guy who is perfectly decent but does not float her boat. The person you have sexual relations with, and long term, ought to not be the kind of person who inspires you to write some despairing letters to Cary Tennis.
I sympathise with both her and her boyfriend, they're not bad people, they're just the walking wounded like all the rest of us, trying to make the best of what they have.
The truth is that boring people are distributed between men and women. We all know really limited boring, uncurious and soul-sapping men & women. There's very little you can do with someone who doesn't lead a self-directed life of curiosity and imagination...
LW's boyf sounds like someone who is decent but unimaginative in the way he conducts his inner life and is therefore unable to share with her what she craves so desperately which is a sense of edginess and aliveness when being receptive to the important to and fro between lovers that is so vital for any one of us to truly flourish in this world.
Generally relationships suffer due to the flaws of two people, no single party is every completely unblemished, but to try to have us believe as some correspondents are here, that no unequal relationships exist, and that they aren't terribly unsastisfactory is in my view ludicrous.
if I'm wrong about that, how about relationship counselling to get it al out in the open and see if it can be salvaged.
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if only
[Read the article: Rudy can fail]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"His presidential candidacy will implode on the day that Americans finally grasp the full truth about his performance as mayor."
if only...
until then Adolph Guiliani will run and run with no electoral tactic too slimy or ludicrous and no position to placate his right wing audiences too triangulated.