My feet in the air: Congressional Recidivism, the Guantanamo Variations

“I did hang on chains for five days. When the doctor come to check if I was okay, if I can survive or not, then they put me back down. And, if they say okay, then they put me back up again.” -- Murat Kurnaz testifying before the Congressional Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights via satellite, May 20, 2008.


If they gave Emmies for CSPAN Theater, yesterday’s hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee should have been a shoe in. The hearing, chaired by Mr. DeLaHunt (D-MA), managed to proceed as if no one in Congress nor any one in the American public has yet been made aware that innocent people have been detained at Guantanamo for years and that during their illegal detention, they have been subjected to abuse and torture. It’s hard to keep it fresh after so many performances; it demands a sort of inverse sprezzatura to make old news look new, to make the habitual seem difficult, surprising, even exotic.

At one point, Mr. DeLaHunt called the hearing “the end of silence”. “The End of Credulity” seems a more apt title for anyone who has been paying attention these last six years and who desires never again to be insulted by a panel of representative grimaces or expressions of outrage from well meaning House members who apparently never watch their own re-runs on C-SPAN. Maybe Congress should have fewer hearings on the torture of innocents at Gitmo. Maybe they should start holding listenings.

Yesterday’s hearing did have a new element disrupting the tedium of these Kabuki-like presentations. A young man who had been among the wrongfully detained for more than five years was testifying via satellite from the safety of Germany. The American public has been largely protected from the first hand accounts of those fortunates who have managed to process out of our prison camp in Cuba. He read a statement in measured, badly inflected English. He was at every point co-operative, respectful and more generous than I could have been had the American Government stolen five years of my life and deposited them in some hidden hell of isolation, abuse and torture.

Mr. Kurnaz was a religious tourist in Pakistan when he was taken off a bus by the Pakistani army and sold to the United States for $3,000.00. The evidence brought against him was that he had associated with a well known religious organization whose membership numbers in the tens of millions and which has no known ties to any terrorist organization. The better piece of evidence was that his traveling companion was a suicide bomber – some two years after Mr.Kurnaz was already in custody. (This particular friend is alive and well back home in Germany and has never been charged with any such crime, let alone, has never blown himself to kingdom come. These facts never fazed the prosecutors at Gitmo.)

It was revealed during the hearing that both the American government and the German government were aware and had discussed Mr. Karnuz’s innocence as early as 2002 -- after he’d been beaten, shocked with electricity to his feet, and tortured with forced water inhalation in Kandahar for three months by American agents and sometime after he’d been flown to Guantanamo Bay. So, for years after both governments knew to a certainty this was an innocent man, he continued to be caged, abused, threatened and tortured. For years.

Now, the problem with this story and, indeed, the problem with this hearing, and with all future hearings like it, is that this story is only a variation of many stories we’ve already heard many times. Mr. Kurnaz was, on his way to freedom after being cleared, shoved into a room and threatened by one last interrogator. He could either sign a statement saying he’d never again fight with Al Qaida or he could plan on staying in the American prison camp for the rest of his life. Mr. Kurnaz didn’t sign, again. Having never fought with Al Qaida, he couldn’t swear he’d never do it again.

His story is simply a variation of Sami al Haj’s story. al Haj was detained for five years as well. The evidence against him was that he trained to work a camera. Mr. al Haj was a photographer with al Jazeera at the time of his kidnapping by American forces. For six years, his American captors tried to coerce him into declaring that al Jazeera was an Al Qaida front. Mr. al Haj never capitulated to that falsehood; instead, he went on a hunger strike for over four hundred days, preferring a clear path to death than the easier path to dishonor or to complicity with criminality. Sami al Haj was finally released, put on a 20 hour flight back home, during which time he was given no food, no water, and no medication. Upon his arrival, he was rushed to a hospital.

We’ve heard Sami’s story, Murat’s story, many times.

So, it’s baffling to hear House members talk about the “problem of Guantanamo”. They speak of it in committee and on camera as if the “closing of Guantanamo” could be done if the right key were found. Turn it in the lock, we’re done, we won’t speak of this again.

During this particular hearing, Mr. DeLaHunt suggested that some abstract “we” needed to reread the Framers – some Franklin, some Jefferson, some John Quincy Adams. As if “we” had the leisure to sit in a quiet room and read while some miles away, men are dying a little bit more every day as their wives are marrying other men and as the world is erasing them from the global database.

Ms. Jackson-Lee remarked that the “hardest hill to climb” was the problem of recidivism – ignoring for an insane moment that of all the Gitmo detainees, only a small handful have been found to be fighters with the Taliban. Fewer than ten of the hundreds of teachers, janitors, children, journalists, cooks and shepherds that have been our guests, bought at about $3K in our tax dollars a head, all these years.

Mr. Rohrabacher was very candid. He said of our European allies, “Why won’t they take these people into their custody?” – and he makes a good point, right there.

The problem of closing Guantanamo isn’t about closing Guantanamo at all. It’s about repatriating these men. The problem is releasing innocent people who have been illegally detained and tortured to some nation where they will not be able to seek reparations from the American government and, more clearly, from the Bush government.

Clive Stafford Smith was one of the group of human rights attorneys that testified to the committee yesterday. He detailed how one of his 80 Gitmo clients, cleared of all accusations, had been accepted to return to Somalia. His testified that our State Department would not speak to him. And that’s the hold up. At State.

If the State Department will not facilitate the repatriation of detainees cleared of all accusations – that would be over 88% of the human souls imprisoned at Gitmo -- these men will languish there until George Bush and his government are out of power and most likely, until he and his crew are clear of any possible prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mission accomplished.

So, the problem isn’t really one of “closing Guantanamo”. The problem is, in reality, that the Bush Administration has used strappado against our Constitution, that she has been hung up by her wrists, left turning in the wind and in plain sight for the world to see. No matter the carefully choreographed hearings that well-meaning House members attend with their best C-SPAN face, the American people know it. The world knows it. The most beautiful legal structure ever to describe and to prescribe the welfare of a civil society the world has ever seen has been kidnapped, tortured and hung. Feet off the ground, once, and for years now.

Any reasonable person should have understood, when they saw the footage of the prisoners “captured” in Afghanistan, flown to Cuba and marched into Gitmo hooded and shackled, our government was very far down the road into abusing human rights and human bodies. Rumsfeld called these random souls sold to us by bounty hunters “the worst of the worst”. That was a lie.

The flight from Afghanistan to Gitmo was a rendition flight and it was done in plain sight. We were all complicit from the moment the cable channels aired that film. We can never say we didn’t know what was happening to theses teachers and photographers and janitors and children and grandfathers and tourists bought with our tax money for the Pentagon’s terror parade. The Bush government made sure we all saw it. They inoculated themselves by implicating the public as the crime was in progress.

The remaining 275 Guantanamo detainees will continue to be abused in confinement until George W. Bush is safely out of office and so, beyond prosecution. That’s also on all our heads. And on the heads of every Congressional committee that has played and replayed their stale surprise and outrage where human decency and due diligence was needed to redress these ongoing war crimes. It may just be more tidy for this Congress to wait until the Democrats get a real working majority before they truly deal with the lost souls in the Guantanamo prison camp. Political neatness trumping human rights – is that the new American M.O?

Gentlemen and gentle ladies, human rights organizations have been protesting these detentions since 2002. Your feigned surprise in the year 2008 in the absence of reparative action is a failure to execute your oath of office so immense as to be beyond describing in the English language, in any language for that matter. If you expect that your constituencies will be satisfied with performance art instead of job performance, you are very much mistaken.

We’re cutting the Constitution down from where you have left her swinging, feet in the air. We’re going to resuscitate, to take care of her. We’re going to make sure that she is released into more diligent hands than yours. And we will work to make sure the innocent people you have abandoned for years in that hellhole get justice. Make no mistake, we can only surmise our own turn at injustice, abuse, and abandonment at your hands is next. And we will not have that.

Elizabeth Ferrari
San Francisco

Happy trails, Robin
A response to Robin Morgan’s “Good-bye to all that #2”
Elizabeth Ferrari

US elections 2008: The women's movement must condemn the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton and must also unite to reject her candidacy anchored in racial division and pseudo-masculinist bullying.


To Robin I can only say this on the occasion of your good-bye: Happy trails to you.

Happy trails, double standard. I grew up in the seventies. And I fought for and lived by the idea taught to me so carefully by my feminist mentors that my life really was for itself and not for spectacle. And that dwelling in possibility was the way forward. Both, not either. As a young feminist, I fought shoulder to shoulder with other women but also, with anyone marginalized right out of their sneakers in this culture. I didn’t see the oppression foisted on me by this culture as more especially wrong. It was all wrong. It still is all wrong. The strides that any of us have made were and are due to our collaboration – not to the privileging of one form of bigotry over another.

Happy trails, toxic viciousness. It’s not enough to assert that because a woman is running for the highest office in the land that women should accept the toxic viciousness that emanates from the campaign that Clinton is waging. It wasn’t enough to be told that Clinton was inevitable, it wasn’t enough to listen to her apologies for her race baiting surrogates, it isn’t enough to watch her out-roar Obama, McCain and Bush. That she reflexively mimics the violent rhetoric of the right wing is not an achievement although it may be a measure of her ability to lead – poll-based and intemperate. This country has had enough of war mongering; the world has had enough of our war mongering to last a lifetime. A lifetime of mourning for the millions of lives lost, crippled, displaced.

Happy trails, news coverage target practice. It’s possible that if we get an actual progressive into the White House, the horrendous surrenders that the Clinton administration ceded to the corporate media might be reversed. I’m at the moment confused as to whether that surrender is a piece of the Clinton years that Hillary is claiming or disavowing. And perhaps if we succeed, the sexual predator Bill O’Reilly won’t have the privilege of hosting former First Ladies or Presidents. We can hope.

Happy trails to the meme that all blacks are male, and that all women are white. And that would herald the silence of the Clinton campaign that has figured Obama as a drug dealer, a mugger and a carjacker. That would mean that a thoughtful black man wouldn’t be “feminized” as somehow “weak” by the Clinton campaign because he prefers to deploy that old tool, diplomacy, over the mindless escalating rhetoric of obliteration as a first measure. Has anyone notified Hillary Clinton that the women’s movement and the anti-war movement have been entwined since their inception? Robin?

Finally, happy trails to, you, Robin for calling me a pouting hand-wringer:

“Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn't as "likeable" as they've been warned they must be, or because she didn't leave him, couldn't "control" him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. . . Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn't bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. -- Robin Morgan.

Happy trails to the politics of gas lighting. It’s not my problem, nor any voter’s problem, what accommodations Hillary Clinton made in her marriage. It becomes my problem when the consequences of that deal impact my government. It isn’t her cookies that disturb me. It was her support for NAFTA and later, her lies to Ohioans about her support for NAFTA. It wasn’t Bill’s blow job that I care about, but about his blowing the Colombian government for a fat fee – a government that has the highest assassination rate of labor organizers in the world -- that bothers me. That should bother you, too, Robin. They do it with chain saws. Do you get it? Hillary is claiming the lunch bucket vote while her partner is taking blood money from the murderers of union organizers.

Happy trials to overlooking vote suppression! Hundreds of thousands of black voters have been targeted for robo calls that deliver confusion ahead of the North Carolina primary. The same Clinton connected organization, Womens Voices, Womens Vote, has caused the same havoc in five other states among black voters, and all the while, pretending to be advocates for women voters. Qui bono? And, how egregious is that cover? Perhaps because I was fostered in a feminist movement that actually did believe in equality, that makes me furious. And I will continue to work for equal protection for these voters.


I will forgo voting for Hillary not because she is a woman. I cannot vote for her because I am a feminist. And because selective bigotry deployed for political purposes is anathema, is not what I busted my ass for all these years. Happy trails, Robin.

Elizabeth Ferrari
San Francisco

(Sorry: link to Morgan's piece: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robin_... )

They're at it again, the politicians, trying to make us think we're not only not on the same side, but that we have nothing in common and that we wouldn't even like each other if we met up, by accident, in line at the grocery store. Who they think this will benefit is beyond me -- except, it probably won't be us. Any of us.

If you've never been to San Francisco, you might not know that it is a small city and that it feels like a small town community for those of us who try to keep the place running. We're on the coast and get new families all the time but, the same families have been in our police and fire fighter forces for generations. The same families have been grocers and butchers, carpenters, beekeepers and teachers -- except for those that are getting squeezed out of their family businesses by retail chains. San Francisco liberals have to band together and fight tooth and nail to protect our family owned businesses, our open spaces and our local public schools, just like you do.

We have to fight developers who prey on our community just like all working people do nowadays. They come here and see a business opportunity to build expensive housing none of us can afford, hotels for tourists and office space for businessmen who need to be local for their China or South America trade. These developers don't realize (or, likely don't care) that they're pricing our working families out of the market, causing our taxes to go higher than we can afford or tearing down housing that will wind up putting people on the street with nowhere to go. San Francisco liberals, these days, spend a lot of time just trying to keep people in their homes when we're not fighting to hold on to our own homes.

My dog is a hunting dog. We don't exactly hunt anything because I'm one of those people that would most likely shoot her own foot off if you put a gun in my hands but you can't take the hunt out of the dog. Instead, I use her nose to find animals that dispossessed families have dumped in parking lots and in the park in their desperation over not being able to provide for them any more. The dog sniffs them out and I set traps for them. There is a large colony of abandoned cats now in Golden Gate Park and if you saw them, your heart would break because although there are some feral ones, there are many who don't know why their family dropped them off in this coyote rich environment. They only know they went from being someone's pet to being some animal's potential dinner.

I know we're supposed to be "godless" here -- that's one of the things you're supposed to think of when someone says "San Francisco liberal" -- but nothing could be further from the truth. There are four places of worship within a half mile of my home and a lot of city business is conducted through the network these congregations form. The biggest, most beautiful piece of architecture you can see from my kitchen window is St. Cecelia's and there are two modest storefronts used by evangelical congregations on the streetcar line a block away. You might have heard of Glide Memorial Church. Even those of us who aren't everyday churchgoing people go there to sit and listen and sing and volunteer with the work the church does among the poor. Or, we are the poor. Either way. Glide is part of the backbone of this city. We don't make a big deal out of this. We don't talk about it very well but, that's the truth.

It really upsets me to hear the talking heads and certain politicians say "San Francisco liberals" as if we all have high paying jobs at Apple Computer, drive big cars, make too much money and spend our free time finding fault with the rest of the country. We are losing jobs just like everyone else. Our clinics are closing just like they are everywhere else. (The average waiting time in our local Emergency Room is eight hours. Bring a book.) Everything we need to survive is going up in price while our wages lag behind and while the dollar falls. Poverty is doing good business in this town. And our kids are leaving because they can't manage here and are forced to leave family and friends behind to go somewhere else where wages keep up better with prices. Where they have a chance to have a livelihood they can sustain.

"San Francisco liberals" are the service workers that say goodbye to these young people, their children. The ones who fight the special interests at City Hall to try to keep our family businesses open when those big chains try to buy their way in. The ones that walk picket lines when our few remaining unions need help because foreign interests seem to get more attention from our government than our working families do.

We may do it dressed in pink or with funny hair or big angry signs, but that's all we're really doing. We're trying to keep this town for our families, for our neighborhoods just like most of you are doing, when either of us have the energy to borrow from our working lives to share.

That's who San Francisco "liberals" are. Nice to meet you.

Belatedly, this post is for Chris, who opened my eyes to what all of us are truly up against.

Mr. Castro, Senator Obama, and the Case of Don Siegelman

Fidel Castro has now officially stepped down in Cuba, and the candidates seeking their party’s presidential nomination have weighed in on this event.

For those of us who follow events in Cuba, it’s surprising to hear Senator Obama echoing George Bush, and sort of ham-fistedly calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba. That the United States leads the world in caging its citizens doesn’t seem to have made an impression on the Senator. Senator, we hold the most political prisoners of any nation in the world. Imagine that. Better yet, change that.

What is this American impulse to dictate policy to Latin American counties while turning a blind eye to the same (or worse) situation here at home?

Mr. Bush has already shown himself to be impervious to human rights or to social justice, building as fast as he can his legacy as our Torture President. His delusional call for democracy in Cuba is just par for the course. Senator Obama, on the other hand, may simply not know that there are more abuses in Chicago than there are in Havana. Chicago, where black male drivers are stopped by the police more often by a factor of eight than white males. Where the mentally ill sit on forgotten floors in Cook County jails without advocates, let alone justice. Obama may just need a better domestic policy advisor. If that’s the case, he needs one now, before he is again guided to overlook the beam in our eye for the mote in Cuba’s. What competent advisor would have him calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba when the world has witnessed the human rights abuses at Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan? When the world has heard whispers of CIA black ops sites and has watched as this Republican administration used our Department of Justice against their political opponents?

Senator Obama, let me introduce you to Don Siegelman.

Under the Bush Administration, Democrats were targeted by the Department of Justice. We all know that -- despite disgraced Attorney General Alberto “Torquemada” Gonzalez’s inability to recall even his shoe size while testifying before Congress. Of those political prosecutions, the one against Don Siegelman has been the more egregious. Not only is it likely that Don Siegelman’s re-election was tanked by election fraud enabled by the Alabama State Attorney General, but there is a long trail of evidence that the Bush DOJ decided to take him out. Because they could and because their mission is to destroy as many of their political opponents as they can while they can.

The stalking of Don Siegelman began in Jack Abramoff’s heyday. He and Scanlon spent a lot of money to defeat him. Since the voters of Alabama decided to elect him, the Republican machine had to resort to election theft. Then, the first Republican case against him was tossed for lack of evidence. But the right hanging judge was found. And the result is a marred process that wound up with Governor Siegelman being led out of court in leg irons, an unprecedented and flagrant act of abuse.

Siegelman’s supporters have been very unlucky. Their houses tend to burn down and somehow their cars are run off the road. His detractors, on the other hand, tend to be promoted up the state Republican Party ladder and wind up with good jobs like Federal judicial appointments. Under the Bush administration, the Justice Department has become a sewer whose stench is no longer possible to ignore. We cannot allow Don Siegelman to be falsely imprisoned in that sewer if we are to retain our self respect.

During this campaign season, our Democratic front runners are asked to be all things to all people. However, it would be a relief for once to see the front runner reflect on the state of justice in America before reflexively assuming that we occupy some moral high ground from which heights we may judge Cuba when it comes to political detentions. We don’t.

There can be no credible call for the release of political prisoners abroad until the obscenity that is Gitmo has been rectified. Until we’ve honestly dealt with the abuses of the Bush Department of Justice. Until Don Siegelman is free.


The American electorate can handle its candidates’ learning curve as long as it’s clear they are on one. Repeating the same old stale, inaccurate chants about Mr. Castro and Cuba will yield nothing for the repeater but to be filtered out as noise. Castro is mentor to the wave of democracy that is washing over Latin America. When you call upon Cuba to release political prisoners and ignore those the United States is holding, you not only damage yourselves with the electorate. You signal to the international community that they should expect more of the same self serving American myopia. And there is also a signal sent to the struggling democracies in Latin America under Mr. Castro’s wing: the Americans are at it again.

That is not change.

There is no need to go as far as Cuba to find political abuses to decry. Look into the Siegelman case and get this innocent man out of prison. Look into Rove’s involvement, look into the dirty prosecutors, look into the crooked judge. A good start might be taking in the 60 Minutes segment set to air this evening. The millions spent on this year’s campaigns amount to nothing but self indulgent theater if the same old hypocrisy is the result. We want justice for a change. And there could be no better start on that project than to get Don Siegelman’s case back in line with the mainstream of the American judicial process we once could take pride in.

Who will stand up for Don Siegelman? Because that would be real change.


Elizabeth Ferrari
San Francisco

/Torquemada is haunting my OP!

The ES&S iVotronic system has no paper ballot. Not a receipt, not spit. Nothing you can hold in your hand. Nada.

The machines they use STATEWIDE are unstable. Vulnerable to a virus and they've been found to not register your choice. The state can't even keep up their own computers, let alone secure the computers used in statewide elections.

The South Carolina constitution calls for public vote counting. You can't count what you can't see, can you?

You also can't recount what you never saw, can you?

The state provides one machine for every 250 voters. Lines form around the block, people get discouraged and go home. Who can blame these voters? This is a form of vote suppression. An effective one.

In addition to this obvious cr@P!, if you are a first-time voter, you must have ID. That sounds very reasonable, doesn't it? Unless you don't know it until you get to your polling place and have waited in line for hours and can't wait any more.

If you hand in your provisional ballot in the wrong place (no matter if it is accepted by a poll worker) it will not be counted. You have to check the internet to learn the status and if your case is accepted, you have to go to a hearing to assert your case. Vote suppression on skates, anyone?

Reputable election protection outfits like VoteTrustUSA have also reported "challengers" at the polls who prey upon black voters and students in particular.

South Carolina knew exactly what it was doing when it went to this horrible voting equipment. People with election tech cred handed in solid objections.

South Carolina has the biggest block of black Democratic voters in the country.

South Carolina flew the confederate flag at the state house until 2000. They were the last state to recognize MLK Day as a holiday for their state employees.

Tell me this is an accident. Tell me they aren't stealing our elections on the backs of black voters. Then please tell me, what are you willing to do.

ETA:

Swiftboat on the Rocks 3: He’s not a dictator?

For anyone who hasn’t had time to keep up, the news is that the peaceful, progressive leader of Venezuela lost the vote on constitutional reforms in a transparent and orderly election. (Meanwhile, the ex-KGB violence prone leader of Russia stole an election and for some reason, there is no State Department concern over this. The Cold War must really be over!)

Why did the referendum in Venezuela garner tens of thousands of words in our press and barely a word about Russia even after it should have been a matter of simple research that Venezuela elections are clean but Russia’s are not?

On Friday, the New York Times printed the implication that the vote in Venezuela would not be monitored. I don’t know if they got that from State, but State was promulgating this falsehood because it appeared in other outlets such as the Chicago Tribune. Of course the election (held on cleaner systems than Florida has seen for a long, bad time) was monitored. The NAACP and the National Lawyers Guild were among the monitoring agencies. Yet, this “not monitored” meme was promulgated all over. In all fairness to the New York Times, they failed to cover Ohio in 2004 just as well.

Saturday, the Washington Post and the New York Times ran dueling hit pieces on Chavez. Between them, they compared him to every modern authoritarian except King Kong. That might have just been burn out. The hit pieces, as I tracked them about a month out from the election, went from being about one a week to one a day in the last week. That’s got to wear any writer worth their propaganda.

(The smear escalated to the point where they had to drag out an ex-wife, an ex-friend and a bono fide poor person. The bottom of that barrel must be very clean.)

Sunday, the English language press was treated to an OpEd by Donald Rumsfeld accusing Mr. Chavez of being a danger to democracy. This is the same Rumsfeld who said the problem with Abu Ghraib was digital cameras. I’m not sure why this person isn’t in custody for war crimes, and I’m sure the paper’s readership is wondering why a war criminal is allowed to propagandize on the editorial page. Or, perhaps, we aren’t. We’ve known too many Spaniards, to lift a phrase from the “Princess Bride”.

Whether or not the $8 million tax dollars that USAID sent to the opposition was effective or decisive is difficult to tell. The opposition handed out flyers claiming the referendum would make your children wards of the state. Untrue but most likely, frightening to working people. It may be more important for American citizens to understand that we paid for that disinformation ahead of a democratic election in Venezuela. Is this how we want our money to be spent? And, will we recognize the same tactics when they are deployed against our lawful elections, too? These are questions any American who values their vote might want to ask.

The controlling US government meme in the last week was “president for life” even though the referendum would grant Chavez no such power. But, it was repeated over and over in just about every major American media outlet. My own local Fox News outlet surprised me on Friday night by misreporting this story. This is a station that reports our local high school football game scores. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never heard any local channel pronounce “Venezuela” before. That’s how thick the disinformation was over the weekend.

Whatever the back story is, and there is much good information to suggest a concerted effort to manipulate the vote in Venezuela, we need to attend to how the American media reported Venezuela for the last month. The misinformation was overwhelming and it accessed just about every level of government. It went out over national and local television outlets. There was a chorus of the willing in the print press.

If any of us believe our government will only use these tactics on Venezuela or in other countries and not domestically, we are making a very important mistake.

As for Mr. Chavez, his public image has only been burnished by his gracious response to the outcome of the vote and the world has been reminded that Venezuela is a vigorous democracy. I look forward to the time when the United States can enjoy a gracious leader and a vigorous democracy, too.

November 16, 2007


Swiftboat on the Rocks: the failed smearing of Hugo Chavez

By Elizabeth Ferrari

By now, the American public knows that Hugo Chavez is a dictator, that he suppresses free speech and that he shoots college students that dare to protest against his regime. We know that the constitutional reforms sponsored by his party are up for a vote on December 2 and we know they will destroy Venezuela.

We know that, don’t we – because our most respected media outlets say so.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all issued dire predictions about the reforms now being debated in Venezuela. Who can we trust if not our most reliable media outlets -- who did such an outstanding job of informing us, for example, on the immanent threat posed by Iraq?

We can trust them because they have misrepresented the constitutional reforms up for a vote in Venezuela, because they have misrepresented the protests there and because they persist in their misrepresentations even when solid reporting proves them not only wrong, but willfully wrong as the evidence of the inaccuracies of their “reporting” are posted to the net, let alone, admitted in print. In other words, we can trust them to be inaccurate with a great deal of consistency.

Edit: to add a sentence +, fyi, having framed the argument, I'm planning this as a series ahead of 12/2. So sorry, burning rubber today.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_el...