Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Only one of these people is American

Are you in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or on a college campus? Or just care about why we invaded Iraq? You may be surprised to find out that, as Joe Scarborough explained this morning on MSNBC, you’re not an American.

OBAMA: I do know Al Qaeda’s in Iraq, and that’s why we should continue to strike Al Qaeda targets, but I have some news for John McCain. And that is that there was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq before George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 — that would Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which is stronger now than at anytime since 2001. I’ve been paying attention, John McCain.

GEIST: So are you ready for eight months of that argument?

SCARBOROUGH: Well, you know, it is an argument — Mika’s gonna disagree with me on this one — but I would guarantee you, guarantee you, that while a lot of people in Manhattan and Georgetown and on college campuses are worried about what happened in 2002 and the lead up to the war, Americans are concerned about what’s happening now.

It’s amazing how many people there are prancing around who aren’t Americans. For instance, in December, 2005, 56% of Americans un-Americanically believed it was “very important” for Congress to investigate the way we went to war. By June, 2006 (the most recent poll I can find) that number was still steady at 57%.

It’s a lot of fun to imagine what would happen if someone on MSNBC said, “I guarantee you that while a lot of white boys in Alabama and rural Texas are worried about laws banning hand guns, Americans are not.”

If you want to express your opinion to MSNBC, Democrats.com has set up something here.

Perhaps as you watch Hillary Clinton’s dreams ripped to shreds, you’ve allowed yourself to feel a small measure of human sympathy for her. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. She still feels compelled to blatantly lie about everything important, as Robert Naiman explains here.

I have high hopes that an Obama administration would put more effort into its lying, and produce the kind of higher-quality lies that we as Americans deserve.

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The Most Wanted List
International Terrorism
By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as “one of the U.S. and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, “A militant wanted the world over,” an accompanying story reported that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 and so ranked only second among “the most wanted militants in the world.”

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines “the world” as the political class in Washington and London…

In the present case, if “the world” were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The rest.

This is from James Loewen‘s book Lies My Teacher Told Me, a survey of what the most widely-used high school textbooks on American history leave out. It was published in 1995:

The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is the series of related scandals called Watergate…In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard Nixon, as they should. But they go no deeper. Faced with this undeniable instance of government wrongdoing, they manage to retain their uniformly rosy view of the government. In the representative words of The United States—A History of the Republic, “Although the Watergate crisis was a shock to the nation, it demonstrated the strength of the federal system of checks and balances. Congress and the Supreme Court had successfully check the power of the President when he appeared to be abusing that power.”

As Richard Rubenstein pointed out, “the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon,” because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased powers of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administration, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet members, special operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei and elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than Nixon’s. Textbooks’ failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors’ apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.

Wow, did he get that one wrong.

This is from an interview with Reed College Professor Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy:

REJALI: [T]orture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.

So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you.

The rest.