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Indiana Is on the Wrong Side of History |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33264"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME</span></a>
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Friday, 03 April 2015 08:52 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "The state took a step toward establishing an American version of Sharia law."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty)
Indiana Is on the Wrong Side of History
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME
03 April 15
The state took a step toward establishing an American version of Sharia law
 n the 1987 movie Moonstruck, Nicolas Cage plays a contentious man who, when confronted with his unreasonable and unjust behavior, shouts in defense, “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice!” That line echoes in my head when I think about Indiana’s hypocritical and anti-American Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). At its core, rather than being a monument to justice, RFRA is a step toward establishing an American version of Shari’a law.
I know that sounds hyperbolic, in the tradition of, “If Obama is re-elected, the terrorists have won” or “If the pipeline isn’t approved, you’re Nazis because Hitler once nixed a pipeline.” However, in this case, the comparison is not so crazy. Shari’a law, when imposed on a population by force, makes a single religion’s teachings (often a single sect of that religion’s teachings) the law of the land. The mission is to force everyone to follow the teachings lest they be punished. Although RFRA supporters aren’t physically assaulting people, they certainly are attempting to punish those who don’t follow their own very specific interpretation of God’s teachings.
The U.S. Constitution is one of the greatest documents ever written because it has a clearly articulated mission of creating a country in which all people are given equal opportunity and equal protection in order to seek those opportunities. Simple, but sublime. One major component to the spirit of the Constitution is that we don’t promote any single religion above any other. To favor any religious teaching just based on popularity contradicts the spirit of the mission of the Constitution and is as direct an attack on the principles of this country as was the firing on Fort Sumter.
Indiana’s RFRA is also unfairly tarnishing the image of Christians. Christians have been at the forefront of fighting for equality since this country was founded. They were on the front lines of abolition, the Civil Rights movement, and in expanding LGBT rights. They risked their careers, families, and lives. Refusing service isn’t an expression of Christian love, but an example of shaming. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is a revocation of some of the harsher judgments of the Old Testament (“an eye for an eye”) in order to embrace all people as fellow travelers on the path to salvation. While most Christians want to help people along that path, Indiana’s RFRA supporters want to set up road blocks.
Indiana is roughly 80% Christian, so whom exactly is this law protecting? What religion is being “restored”? Practitioners of Christianity in Indiana are not in jeopardy of losing their right to worship or practice their faith. That means the only reason to pass such a law is to allow people to extend the practice of their faith to include discriminating against those who don’t share their values. That’s the kind of thinking that drove Christians out of Europe to found this country.
Some question why all the attention is suddenly on Indiana when 19 other states and the federal government have passed similar laws. Here’s why: (1) RFRA is similar to the other laws but has two fundamental differences. Indiana’s law allows for-profit businesses the same right as an individual or church to use this law to discriminate. And it protects the for-profit business from a private lawsuit claiming discrimination. (2) Just because someone else gets away with committing a bad act doesn’t mean we don’t punish the next person we catch. (3) The law is clearly a pouty response to gay marriage in the state; it’s an attempt to tell government not to interfere in private moral choices by passing a law that interferes in private moral choices. (4) It’s also clearly a thumbed-nose toward the cultural awakening taking place across the country in support of LGBT equality.
Finally, the main reason the bill’s supporters deserve this wrath is because they passed RFRA as a cynical political ploy to appease Indiana conservatives. Scrambling Indiana politicians suddenly protest that the law’s intention is not to discriminate. In fact, that’s its only reason to exist. Even if no one actually uses the law, it’s still a loaded weapon with one intended victim: Anyone Who Isn’t Us.
The politicians thought it would cost them nothing and gain them voter appreciation. Fortunately, it is costing them much more than they imagined. Angie’s List, Salesforce, the state of Connecticut, the cities of San Francisco and Seattle, and others are threatening to cancel buildings, conventions, and other business enterprises in Indiana. Also, the NBA and NCAA are debating how to express their outrage. Charles Barkley rightly called for the NCAA Final Four tournament to be held elsewhere.
People of all religions and races and ethnic backgrounds should join together to condemn this law and boycott the state because whenever we allow any discrimination, we make it possible for the infection to spread.
Maybe as a result of this economic pressure, Indiana lawmakers, like Nic Cage’s character, will proclaim, “You ruined my life!” To which we respond with the same words as Cher’s character: “That’s impossible! It was ruined when I got here!”
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On Iran, Obama Gets His Breakthrough |
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Friday, 03 April 2015 08:50 |
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Davidson writes: "If a nuclear deal with Iran succeeds, it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity."
President Obama. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
On Iran, Obama Gets His Breakthrough
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
03 April 15
If a nuclear deal with Iran succeeds, it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity.
ALSO SEE: Iran Agrees to Framework of Nuclear Deal
t is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good—and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June—it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced them. The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s. It would have been easy, on Tuesday, when the original deadline for the talks expired, for the American negotiators to walk away—and for Obama to blame it all on the Republicans and just say that they had made it too difficult to reach an agreement. He’s done that in the past. (Guantánamo.) But the President told John Kerry—whose efforts he referred to in his statement on Thursday as “tireless, and I mean tireless”—to keep going, and Kerry and his fellow diplomats seem to have come up with something that, while not perfect, does look pretty good.
“Found solutions. Ready to start drafting immediately,” Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted just before noon. In the past few days, when it looked like things might not work out, there was talk of something that would be less than a success but not quite a failure: a vague outline, a commitment to getting it right, and the hope that, somehow, it would all fall into place by June. As Zarif suggested, that is not what this deal is. It has more detail than most observers expected, which will hopefully mean that the drafting of the actual accord will truly be a technical process and not a deferred round of diplomacy. The deal, which is between Iran and the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany) covers all the life stages of a bomb. For example, during the next twenty-five years, inspectors will be able to enter mines known to contain raw uranium ore. One sticking point had been Iran’s unwillingness to completely do away with any of its existing facilities; the negotiators had talked about this as a matter of national pride. But the Arak nuclear plant, which was designed with the sort of reactor that could produce plutonium for bombs, was not one whose operations could simply be slowed down—there’d still be plutonium. So under the deal, according to the White House’s fact sheet, the “original core of the reactor” would be “destroyed or removed from the country.” A different, safer sort of reactor would be put in its place. There would still be an Arak facility but, from a proliferation perspective, it would be a shell of itself; this is the sort of middle territory that diplomacy can find. Arak was one of the targets that John Bolton, the U.S. representative to the U.N. under George W. Bush, suggested bombing in an Op-Ed in the Times last week.
Centrifuges can be used to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs. The deal will reduce the number of centrifuges that Iran has, from close to twenty thousand now to just over six thousand—keeping only its oldest models, rather than the newest and best ones—and for the next ten years it will only be able to operate five thousand of them. Stockpiles of enriched uranium that Iran already has will be reduced—with the excess sent abroad—and kept at the lower level for fifteen years.
Iran gets something for all this: the removal of American and international sanctions when it becomes clear—and inspectors verify—that it is keeping its side of the bargain. How to ascertain exactly when this happens may be a point still to be negotiated. But a robust part of the deal, from an American perspective, is its “snap-back” provisions. Sanctions will not actually be removed but suspended, and what the fact-sheet refers to as their “architecture” will remain in place for quick reactivation if necessary. (“And while it is always a possibility that Iran may try to cheat on the deal in the future, this framework of inspections and transparency makes it far more likely that we’ll know about it if they try to cheat,” Obama said.) Also, the non-nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, for things like its support of terrorism, will remain.
That raises an objection to the deal: Iran will still be Iran. Twenty minutes after Zarif’s tweet signalled a breakthrough, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “Any deal must significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and stop its terrorism and aggression.” It was never likely, as desirable as it would be, that Kerry was going to get the Iranians to sign something saying that they would no longer be aggressive. It would have been a little like demanding that there could be no missile-reduction deal with the Soviet Union until the Russians stopped quoting Lenin all the time. Having this deal needn’t, shouldn’t, and surely won’t mean never challenging Iran about anything else again.
There are multiple time frames in the deal: no enrichment research at the Fordow facility for fifteen years; no inspections at bellows-production facilities for twenty years; adherence to certain enhanced nonproliferation protocols forever. One of the criticisms of the deal, in the past few months, has been that it would “sunset” in ten years—that Iran would get a free decade without sanctions, grow rich and strong, and then start building a bomb the moment that the time was up. Kerry, speaking in Switzerland, said that there was “no sunset.” That was somewhat a matter of semantics; there are, at least, mini-eclipses at certain intervals. But it is true that significant aspects of the deal have an indefinite life. (And that may be more than can be said about the Iranian regime itself, which could change in less time than it takes to get inspectors out of the uranium mines.)
Obama said on Thursday that the current estimates indicated that Iran could have the materials for a bomb, if it wanted to, in two to three months. Under the deal, that “break out” time—the minimum post-cheating bomb-acquisition interval—would be at least a year, for the next decade. He continued, “So when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East? Is it worse than doing what we’ve done for almost two decades with Iran moving forward with its nuclear program and without robust inspections? I think the answer will be clear.” Those critics talk as though it’s just as clear that he’s wrong. John Boehner, on Thursday, said that the deal appeared to be “an alarming departure” from what Obama had said his goals were. Obama didn’t agree.
“Iran is not going to simply dismantle its program because we demand it to do so,” the President said. “That’s not how the world works. And that’s not what history shows us.” Is that cynicism or optimism? The world is not a place where you can simply look tough and your enemies will crumble; but it is a place where, with some work and some luck, you can try to get something done.
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Yemen as Vietnam or Afghanistan |
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Friday, 03 April 2015 08:48 |
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Polk writes: "With U.S. intelligence help, Saudi Arabia has launched air strikes into Yemen and wants Egypt and Pakistan to invade, threatening to turn a long-simmering civil war into a regional conflict."
Houthis battle Hadi loyalists in Aden, Yemen. (photo: Getty)
Yemen as Vietnam or Afghanistan
By William R. Polk, Consortium News
03 April 15
With U.S. intelligence help, Saudi Arabia has launched air strikes into Yemen and wants Egypt and Pakistan to invade, threatening to turn a long-simmering civil war into a regional conflict, a scenario that reminded retired U.S. diplomat William R. Polk of his work for President Kennedy on an earlier Yemeni war.
 s the events unfold with the Saudi and Egyptian engagement in Yemen, I was reminded of my discussion with Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser on “his” Yemen war, sometimes called the North Yemen Civil War that began in 1962, became a stalemate and finally ended in 1970. As Mark Twain may have said, “history doesn’t repeat but sometimes it rhymes.” The rhymes, at least, seem unmistakable.
In the course of our first lengthy talk on Yemen, Nasser (rather angrily) replied to one of my comments, “you don’t think I will win the war, do you?”
“No, Mr. President,” I replied, “I don’t.”
“Well, you would be surprised to know that I have acquired your [America’s] secret analyses of guerrilla warfare.”
“Oh, Mr. President,” I shook my head, “I know the people who wrote those reports. They are rubbish. I would throw them away if I were you.”
He just looked at me, even more angrily, thinking I suppose, that having pulled off an intelligence coup, I was trying to trick him by claiming that it was really not a coup but a mistake. Then he said, “I know how to use helicopters, too.” (Their use was then being touted by our military as our great weapon against the Viet Minh fighters in Vietnam.)
“And you lost one yesterday, didn’t you?” I jibed.
“How did you find out about that?”
“Well, Mr. President, we spend a lot of money on the CIA finding out about such things and one way or another they usually do. That is what the CIA is supposed to do They don’t always succeed but sometimes they do.”
“Well,” Nasser retorted, “you American’s think you know all about everything, and you don’t even have any of your people in Sanaa and none up in the north where the fighting is going on. You don’t know anything about Yemen.” Then, without thinking of the implication, I suppose, he said, ” You should go see.”
“Mr. President,” I quickly said. “I regard that as an invitation.” Impolitely, I then stood up. He looked at me with narrow, angry eyes. He obviously had not meant what I had inferred.
“All right, go see,” he said. “I will give instructions that you can go anywhere you want, talk to anyone you want, see everything..”
“But, of course, I cannot even get there without your help,” I said.
“You can have my plane.”
Rather off-handedly and not warmly, we shook hands. I said goodbye and rushed back to our embassy and wrote an “eyes only” message to President John Kennedy. I did not want it scattered around our government so I prevailed upon the CIA station chief to send it by his rather more restricted route. It was encrypted and sent in three batches. Before the second batch got sent, a reply came back: “go.”
Off to Yemen
So I went, and Nasser was as good as his word. I spent hours with his military commander, Abdul Hakim Amr who gleefully unfolded the huge map of showing the planned Egyptian sweep of the mountains to the east (while Anwar Sadat, then rather on the fringes of the Egyptian Establishment, angrily protested against Amr’s indiscretion with a foreigner. He never forgave me for being there).
I went up to the supposed battle zone, near Saada, went out to all the villages where the war was, according to the CIA and British intelligence, being fought, met with the new Yemeni Leader Sallal and all the new Yemeni leaders, and then flew back to Cairo.
Disclosure (as they like to say in the media): I was bribed. As a going-away present, I was given 500 pounds of Yemeni coffee. Nothing so welcome to a traveler as 500 pounds of anything! But thanks to me, our Cairo embassy was “in coffee” for years!
I did not see President Nasser on my return but sent him a message through the Governor of Cairo, Salah Dessouki, that I hoped to go down to the Saudi-Yemen frontier to meet with the guerrilla leaders, and somewhat jokingly I said to my friend Salah, “I want to be very sure that President Nasser knows exactly where I am going. And,Salah, please tell the President not to do anything silly.”
Salah burst out laughing and said, “Bill, I certainly will not say that to the President!”
So I flew to Riyadh and, with the permission of then Crown Prince Faisal, with whom I had a rather close relationship, I took the American ambassador’s airplane and flew down to Najran where I spent an evening with a group of the guerrilla leaders.
As we sat around a campfire, outside of Najran, we drank tea, ate a lamb roast and then, in a fairly typical desert encounter, we had a poetry duel. By pure luck, I happened to know the poem being recited and I capped the verse of one of the men. In their terms, that was like a passport for me. And we could then have a serious and frank discussion on the war, the strengths and weaknesses of the royalist forces and what might bring the war to a conclusion.
Our talk went on almost all night. Finally, just at first light, I had barely gotten to sleep when the first of four Egyptian but Russian-piloted TU 16 jet bombers arrived overhead from Luxor. They dropped 15 200 kg bombs on the oasis and on us. My pilot was just worried about his plane. The rest of us had other worries!
The biggest danger, in fact, was from the shrapnel falling from the anti-aircraft cannon. They were totally ineffective against the TU 16s as they could not reach them. (One of my aides, an Air Force colonel informed me that the TU-16s were at about 23,000 feet and the 90 mm cannon would reach about 18,000 feet.)
But a few people around us were killed. Another of my aides, a Marine Colonel, presented me with a wicked looking piece of one of the bombs. It had fallen or been blown not far from the place I was lying.
On our return flight to Riyadh, I wrote Nasser a “thank you” note, saying “Mr. President, I am most grateful for your kind hospitality in Egypt and Yemen, but I don’t think you needed to entertain me in other countries.”
Our ambassador, my good and old friend, John Badeau, was not amused. He said, “Bill, just say thank you and, please, don’t hurry back!”
It was a few months later when I next saw President Nasser. We had a long and very frank talk then about Yemen. I compared it to Vietnam which I was already sure would be a disaster. I pointed to the huge cost to us of Vietnam, how it disrupted all our domestic social goals and how it poisoned Americans trust in one another. I warned that in my opinion, Yemen might do the same to Egypt, disrupting what Nasser was trying to do to uplift his people and end their tragic poverty.
In our talk, Nasser said, “I certainly didn’t agree with you, Bill, but I knew you would tell me the truth as you saw it.” Somehow, the Israelis found out about this and later the chief of Prime Minister Golda Meir’s cabinet, Mordachai Gazit told me, “We know that President Nasser trusts you.”
As I was leaving, Nasser took me out to my car and even opened the car door for me. His guards were as astonished as I was, Apparently, he had never before done this. As we shook hands, he said, “Well, Bill, where are you off to this time?”
“This time, Mr. President, I am not going to tell you!”
He burst out laughing as did I. We did not meet again but our frankness and respect later enabled me to work out the 1970 ceasefire on Suez with him shortly before his death.
It is hard to believe that history now seems to be repeating with Egypt and Saudi Arabia again engaged in a counter-guerrilla war in Yemen! For Nasser, it was Egypt’s Vietnam. Will the new Yemen war be Egypt’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) Afghanistan? I think it is very likely. All of the signs point in that direction.
And, as I have laid out in numerous essays on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Mali and Algeria, and in my little book Violent Politics, guerrilla wars are almost never “won” but usually drain the supposedly dominant power of its wealth, moral position and political unity.
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Drug Trafficking, Theft and Rape: US Border Patrol Is Out of Control |
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Friday, 03 April 2015 08:43 |
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Turck writes: "On March 20, the Michigan Attorney General's Public Integrity Unit charged two U.S. Border Patrol agents with theft and misconduct while on duty."
US Border Patrol. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Drug Trafficking, Theft and Rape: US Border Patrol Is Out of Control
By Mary Turck, Al Jazeera America
03 April 15
Border agents abuse their power and refuse to follow legal procedures
 n March 20, the Michigan Attorney General's Public Integrity Unit charged two U.S. Border Patrol agents with theft and misconduct while on duty. The two agents allegedly stole from a home while executing an agency-authorized search warrant. The case exemplifies the type of unchecked abuse and corruption that has become so rampant within the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
From 2010 to 2014 CBP agents shot and killed 28 people. Other charges against CBP agents included drug trafficking, theft, assaults, kidnapping and rape. Investigative reports from multiple sources paint a picture of a law enforcement agency that is out of control. Even worse, most of its victims are people who cannot fight back — undocumented immigrants and refugees with limited or no access to U.S. courts.
Report after report recounts tales of unchecked abuse of power. Agents frequently respond to cross-border rock throwing with deadly force. Sometimes CBP officers step into the path of moving cars to justify shooting the drivers as a “response to deadly force.” The agency has refused to ban either practice, disregarding recommendations from a report that it commissioned. Other kinds of corruption also plague the agency. A 2011 internal study by the CBP found that the agency’s disciplinary system “does not foster timely discipline or exoneration.”
The story of failure traces back to 2001. After 9/11, any legislation to protect U.S. borders sailed through Congress. Need more agents? Done. More money? Done. Lawmakers were eager to support border enforcement. In 2003, they merged the previously understaffed Border Patrol with Customs enforcement and Department of Agriculture inspectors to create the CBP. The new agency now has more than 60,000 employees, a $12.4 billion annual budget and a reputation for corruption and abuse. On average, at least one agent is arrested daily for misconduct, according to Politico Magazine’s Garrett M. Graff.
What happened was predictable. But no one bothered to consult law enforcement experts. Effective law enforcement requires high standards, careful screening of candidates for criminal backgrounds and for psychological fitness, and intensive training by experienced officers. The rush to fill a lot of vacant positions meant inadequate screening and skimping on training.
“[Illegal entry] is now less than a third of what it was in the year 2000, and it’s at its lowest level since the 1970s,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said in October. The estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has dropped by more than a million since 2006. Yet throwing money at CBP remains a way for Congress to boast of protecting borders and getting tough on immigration. The agency continues to grow, with 2,000 new jobs listed in 2014.
“From an integrity issue, you can’t grow a law enforcement agency that quickly,” Robert Bonner, the former federal judge who headed up CBP’s reorganization, told Politico last year. Not only did the old Border Patrol more than double in size, it also merged employees from customs, immigration and agricultural inspectors.
CBP’s record on corruption and abuse is appalling. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has documented cases of excessive force, drug smuggling, theft and numerous other abuses. “Between 5 and 10 percent of border agents and officers are actively corrupt or were at some point in their career,” James F. Tomscheck, the former CBP chief of internal affairs, told CIR in August.
A 2011 CBP internal study of employee integrity questioned whether the problems could be attributed to the surge in hiring, but acknowledged the severity of the problem. The report attributed the spike in cases of abuse to lack of psychological assessments and ethical training for officers.
CBP’s problems start at the top. While Congress was happy to appropriate money for enforcement and more officers, it balked at confirming CBP commissioners, leaving the agency without a confirmed commissioner for five years. The current commissioner, R. Gil Kerlikowske, was confirmed in March 2014. But his authority was undercut from the very beginning.
Graff’s article tells the story of a CBP agent who arrested, kidnapped and raped three women from Honduras, and tried to kill two of them. This happened in March 2014, just days after Kerlikowske’s confirmation. The commissioner’s statement condemning the kidnapping and rape was stalled for two days while he argued with senior CBP officials.
An agent under his command committed a heinous act. When FBI agents approached the suspect’s apartment, where one of the victims was naked and tied to a chair, the CBP agent shot and killed himself. Yet Kerlikowske’s subordinates prevented him from immediately denouncing the crime.
CBP’s defensiveness and disregard for the law appear pervasive. While only a small number of its agents commit violent or criminal acts, indifference to immigrants' legal rights seems to be standard practice across the agency.
Border Patrol agents are required by law to ask whether a person they detain is afraid to return home. If migrants express fear of return, the law requires agents to refer them for a “credible fear” screening by an asylum officer, who can assess eligibility. The law requires referral precisely because CBP agents are not qualified to make eligibility determinations.
In case after case, migrants report that CBP agents refused to allow them to tell their stories to an asylum officer. Instead, they tell people fleeing gang violence, rape and persecution that they have no rights.
From excessive force and shootings to peremptory denial of access to asylum, the CBP violates the laws it is charged with upholding. Reform is imperative. It should begin with implementation of the recommendations of the 2013 study conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, ranging from training to prohibition of use of deadly force unless officers’ lives are actually threatened.
The second sets of recommendations come from CBP's own internal studies that called for polygraph and psychological testing for all job applicants, and for ethics and integrity training across the agency. A third step would be actual and transparent reporting of misconduct, corruption and disciplinary actions against agents who break the law. Ultimately, respect for the law must begin with those charged with upholding it.
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