Letters to the Editor
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@ Mona
@LWM/anon
I'd have to file no such lawsuit, because "Borat" and I would have been mixing it up pretty badly, and if he continued, he'd be out my door.
-- -Mona-
I don't care what Glenn told you. I am not know, nor have I ever been, Borat!
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9/11 Changed Everything
19 Saudis...
plus...
1 lame duck president...
Have changed America!
Why was it so easy?
I suspect that it's because Americans are brainwashed with patriotism from childhood, which is implied in Glenn's article.
Once patriotism is deeply embedded, you just ask the people before every change, "Are you an America-lover or an America-hating traitor?"
Americans don't realise just how brainwashed with patriotism they are - only outsiders see it objectively. After 9/11, I had an American friend who sent an email of herself and her child waving the American flag. And she was an environmental scientist leftie! An intelligent, educated woman!
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"I don't care what Glenn told you. I am not know, nor have I ever been, Borat!"
Now that was truly funny.
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@ Martin
You should read Naomi Klein's book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
It was fairly easy for these people to manipulate a shocked population. They've had lots of practice. I'm not suggesting anything other than cynical opportunists taking advantage of the conspiracy of a small group of extremist Saudis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc
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@karrsic
The way I've understood this is that the US created a 3rd category, ie., not POW, not criminal, but "enemy combatant." Is "enemy combatant" actually the term used in the Geneva conventions?
Pretty close. The conventions don't speak of "enemy combatants" as a phrase. They speak of the collective forces of both sides as "Warfare combatants", and as "combatants" and of those made prisoners of war as "enemy" and as "persons taking no part in hostilities", and as "members of armed forces who have laid down their arms". The Bush people created a class called "illegal enemy combatants", presumably distinguished from legal enemy combatants. They had in mind people who had no rights under the conventions, but actually the convention doesn't have any combatants who have no rights, and none who are legal or illegal. The Supreme Court ruled as much in Hamdan saying that those who weren't entitled to full prisoner of war status still had rights under Common Article 3. The conventions cover war and armed conflict and occupation. They're pretty inclusive. But the language in them is really that there are two types of prisoners of war, those entitled to full rights of signatory parties, and those entitled only to basic rights. The first group is called prisoner of war in Geneva, it doesn't name the other one. I was trying to figure out how to explain it without using the term prisoner of war since the conventions make a distinct class of these, but only to give them a full set of rights and privileges, as opposed to the basic rights everybody gets. Using the expression "enemy combatant" is inclusive of both prisoner of war and of those who don't qualify as that.
The Bush people stretched everything in sight to try to develop a class of people with no rights who could be held indefinitely so they took the indefinitely from prisoners of war/combatants, combined it with the treatment given to illegal immigrants, and combined it with the lack of status of people like spies, sprinkled in the word terrorist, swirled it around with terms like existential threat, and hoped that people would think nobody who had a hand in 9/11 should have rights. Then they set about trying to convince the public that this is how it should be and people who thought otherwise were weird. Pretty nearly worked. People seem to have chucked it all up over cruelty and torture, but otherwise they almost got away with convincing people that anybody that made Americans feel unsafe shouldn't have any rights at all.
But if somebody knows of a fundamental document that has a class of people with no rights at all, I sure don't, and it sure isn't Geneva.
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Reviews
Martin,
The Shock Doctrine has received many positive reviews, including those from the Dow Jones Business News [1], The New York Times[2], and The Guardian[3].
Fred Kaplan has one minor quibble here...
The book's discussion of Russia under Yeltsin was criticised by Fred Kaplan, who said that:
"Klein's depiction of the conflict as a clash between Chicago-style capitalists and honorable, fledgling democrats is ludicrous. The day before Yeltsin opened fire, I was one of many reporters who spent an eerie afternoon in the parliament building, talking with its armed, black-booted, and stinking-drunk occupiers. Believe me—and Klein should, since she quotes one of my [Boston] Globe reports in describing the soldiers shelling the building the next morning—there were no democrats among that lot. Nor, by this time, was Yeltsin a Milton Friedmanite, if he had ever been."[4]
Tyler Cowen's negative review in the Neocon NY Sun is to be expected.
Economist Tyler Cowen slated Kleins rhetoric as "ridiculous", alleged she fabricated claims and commented that:
Most of the book is a button-pressing, emotionally laden, whirlwind tour of global events over the last 30 years…The book offers not so much an argument but rather a Dadaesque juxtaposition of themes and supposedly parallel developments in the global market. Often Ms. Klein's proffered connections are so impressionistic and so reliant on a smarmy wink to the knowing that it is impossible to present them, much less critique them, in the short space of a book review...[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
You should enjoy this too because it has Clintonistas like Carville doing the same thing in Bolivia a few years ago. As a European you should know by now that all of our politicians, left to right, are conservatives, moderate to radical:
Our Brand Is Crisis (documentary)
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Brand-Crisis-Carlos-Mesa/dp/B000GDIBSO
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A heavily propagandized people
I've been traveling this week. It has allowed me the opportunity to hear much more talk radio than usual. The FM talk radio station in this western city is a vehicle for ultra-rightist propaganda, spouted by a deep-voiced, mildly amused, supercilious white man of a certain age. He presents himself as a 'balanced' commentator by taking calls from unreconstructed wackos who haven't left the Clinton-90s behind yet. He gently chides them over their more asinine assertions (which still contain some distrust of authorities). Then he attacks well-documented facts with the same tone, the same smug certainty and reality-denying patter. The inconvenient "liberal" issues he pooh-poohs are factual and verifiable, not black helicopter hearsay. But he creates a sense of equivalence by way of his 'even-handed' presentation.
Your average, under-educated guy doesn't stand a chance -- especially if he didn't want to "question authority" to begin with.This soothing Fr. Coughlin garbage works. Its proliferation into FM is not simply a function of programming chasing the market; it's programming creating the market, by crowding out everything else.
I know I'm not unique in just wanting to hear some music. I don't know many people who prefer DJ patter to tunes -- and yet 24/7 patter is all these kind of stations deliver. In your average back office or warehouse there is usually one bully who wants to hear this shit, and a bunch of 'normals' who just don't want static so they go along. They'd choose light rock if you polled them without the jerk around. But, then they get a little sucked in, because the guy on the radio sounds so..... reasonable.