I would imagine Maritinez has a completely different take if the terrorists are named Bosch, Reich, Romero, and Suarez...

Bernbart made the statement that McClatchy news service isn't known for good journalism. He is so right. McClathchy was the only news service not to swallow the Bush admin claims on WMD. They actually do what reporters are supposed to do, verify claims made by gov't officials instead of being stenographers. They clearly suck by the standards of what passes for journalism now a days. Bernbart just because you get proven wrong time and time again, doesn't mean you can disparage the quality reporting of McClatchy. Sorry if they don't print what you want to read, that's your problem. Go read the propaganda at the NYT of Washpo, it's more to your suiting.

"...nothing worse than an alternate culpability status determination and ongoing enhanced undocumented national hospitality."

You take my breath away.

Then, you get to write,

bernbart is half right when she notes...

You're free to deal with whatever part of her comment you choose. As am I. She separated her last sentence as a stand-alone. It, then, should stand alone. It doesn't.

"You're free to deal with whatever part of her comment you choose. As am I."

Nothing I wrote indicates otherwise.

http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/tours/gulag/documents/solzhenitsyn_preface.html

Preface

In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream-and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.

The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.

As for us, however--we understood instantly. We could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.

We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent--an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.

But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence.

By an, unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now, hold out their palms in reconciliation:

"No, don't!

Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say:

"Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander.

I would not be so bold is to try to write the history of the Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents. And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them? Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough time--and will have more--to destroy all the documents, down to the very last one.

I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander--which, incidentally, is still alive.

- - from the preface of
- - The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 - 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
- - by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, (Harper & Row, 1974).

__________

Bill, you and I know why the press (especially bird-cage-lining like the WaPo) vilified Cynthia McKinney, and now take the first opportunity to marginalize, mock and misrepresent her actions. The assignment was seized upon to remind the rest of the pool of potential whistle-blowers what will happen to them if they go public.

It seems to be working, but I think the walls are beginning to crack.

Remember Gandhi's line: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

We can view the current Obama actions through the prism of our belief that there is a massive cover-up taking place, and that's the real reason why the "detainees" who cannot be tried in a normal court of law cannot be released, nor can the results of their interrogations be released. It certainly isn't because they are too dangerous or because a relative handful will return to terr-ist activities.