"Spy, Adulterer, Whatever"

Jacob Sullum

Capt. James Yee's prosecutors make the case for due process.

When Capt. James Yee was arrested last September, it was easy to assume he was a spy. A Muslim chaplain serving suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, he'd been caught traveling with "secret data." Anonymous government officials told the press Yee might be part of a spy ring at the military base.

The cloud of suspicion was so thick that even people who knew Yee well could not see clearly. His high school wrestling coach, with whom Yee had kept in touch over the years, told The New York Times : "I have to believe in my kids. But if that religion has brainwashed him to change his thinking, then maybe I am wrong."

"Bush: I'm God's Delivery Boy"

Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

Bush's messianic militarism was on full display on March
11, when he addressed, via satellite, the National
Association of Evangelicals Convention in Colorado
Springs.

First, acting as pastor in chief, he said, "You're doing
God's work with conviction and kindness, and, on behalf
of our country, I thank you."

Separation of church and state, anyone?

mobiustrip44 writes:

"Homage to Castilla: 'Appeasement' in Spain"
Julian Sanchez, Reason Magazine

The bodies were barely cold from the attacks of "11-M" in Madrid, the ballots from Sunday's national election barely counted, but American pundits were already competing furiously to heap insult upon injury. The unexpected victory of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) over the more conservative Partido Popular (PP), which had backed the war in Iraq, was widely and roundly denounced as a clear case of capitulation to terror.

Jdgon writes:

"America: Defenders or Destroyers of Democracy?

The US Government has demonstrated its blatant disregard and disrespect for a democratically elected Caribbean leader and a poorer and smaller third world country (Haiti) consistently over the past eight years.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Noam Chomsky, "Kerry Over Nader"

Matthew Tempest, Guardian

[Excerpts from an interview published on March 16, 2004.]

On Iraq

There's a lot of focus on the American death toll but personally I think that's partly propaganda exaggeration. Polls have demonstrated time and time again that Americans are willing to accept a high death toll -- although they don't like it, they're willing to accept it -- if they think it's a just cause.

hydrarchist writes:

"The First London Social Forum:
What Have We Achieved?"

Massimo De Angelis

Achievements and Ways of Seeing

At the end of the first London Social Forum (LSF) meeting on October 4th, we were challenged to answer the question: what have we achieved? Judging from some e-mail correspondence and comments circulated after the meeting, some of our "revolutionary" critics believe we have achieved nothing at all. How should we assess the achievements of our action? By comparing the results of our actions to the intended results. Of course, we all share the aim to create a world of peace and justice without exploitation. Among our movements, however, there are different understandings of what are the intended results of concrete moments like the LSF. Depending on your political outlook, you’ll interpret it differently.

Zapatero!


John Chuckman

There are a few special moments now and then in world affairs that lift your spirit.

One of these came with the fall of Romania's Ceausescu, former chum of Richard Nixon, known appropriately to his own countrymen as "the Dracula." His fall came before the toppling of the Berlin Wall and, for me, was the most poignant symbol of totalitarianism's collapse in Eastern Europe. When Romanian revolutionaries waved their national flag with its center torn out, I made a small copy and posted it on my office bulletin board.

"Bush: Blanc Blanc"
Peter Linebaugh

Following the opening of the Mark Lombardi exhibit of conspiratorial drawings at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco we repaired to North Beach for a grand dinner, our motley crew led by the inimitable Iain Boal, the geographer activist, convenor of Retort gatherings, and people's art critic who had just explained the drawings to us: the penciled constellations, or networks of high and low finance and how they were connected to the parcel of rogues of international power which were on view at the gallery. We raised our glasses to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the black republic.

All over the world people with the least historical sense were doing the same, because it was the disgraceful week following the coup d'état of democratic Haiti and the kidnapping of Jean Bertrand Aristide by the USA and its nefarious creatures among the private security forces, the CIA agents, the DEA thugs, the hitmen of the tontons macoute, or the Haitian Fraph: all those demons who used to only inhabit the gothic imagination or the voodoo nights of Zora Neale Hurston. Now, alas, they were summoned by Bush blanc blanc against the former liberation theologian, friend of the poor, and advocate of jubilee.

Read the rest at Counterpunch

"The Limits of Networking"

A Reply to Lovink and Schneider's "Notes on the State of Networking"

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker

The question we aim to explore here is: what is the principle of political
organization or control that stitches a network together? Writers like
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have helped answer this question in the
socio-political sphere using the concept of "Empire." Like a network,
Empire is not reducible to any single state power, nor does it follow an
architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Empire is fluid, flexible, dynamic,
and far-reaching. In that sense, the concept of Empire helps us greatly to
begin thinking about political organization in networks. But like Lovink
and Schneider, we are concerned that no one has yet adequately answered
this question for the technological sphere of bits and atoms.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

An Israeli anarchist asks whether the widespread fear in his country of the return of Palestinian refugees isn't part of a larger phobia...

"Zionism and the Right of Return"
Uri Gordon, The Lip (UK), Issue #2 March 2004

My friend Sara has a house in Haifa, my hometown. I don’t know exactly where it is; only that according to Sara, it has a view to the sea. If she ever finds out more, my friends and will I seek out the house. If it’s still there, and empty, we’ll squat it. When the police comes we’ll show them a fax of the Kushan, the Ottoman property deed, and a letter of invitation from the rightful owner – who just happens to be Sara, a very cool Palestinian kid born in Lebanon and working in independent media. To evict us, the Israeli authorities will have to contest, in their own courts, the rights of ‘absentee’ Palestinians – refugees and their descendants like Sara, forced to escape Haifa in 1948 during what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call al-Naqba, the Catastrophe.