Thank you for visiting the Daily Pundit Parade, a fly-by-early-morn sampling of choice online commentary.
First up today, Margaret Carlson from the LA Times watched the A&E network movie about John McCain's five plus years as a POW, a painful viewing that echoes in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq:
The next morning, I watched President Bush at his news conference respond to a question about an Amnesty International report condemning U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere. Bush called charges of abuse "absurd" allegations by detainees "who hate America."
But how does he explain the Army? The New York Times recently obtained the Army's 2,000-page file on deaths at its Bagram, Afghanistan, detention center. It's as chilling to read as it is to watch McCain's crippled leg being crushed.
More from Carlson, and more pundits below, including:
- Marc Brown on gender bender discrimination
- Steve Chapman needs the Hubble to find Dick Cheney
- William Leddy on urban sustainability
- Bob Novak reviews a antiNeoCon book
- Today's cartoon
Carlson, continued:
The John McCain of this report is an uneducated Afghan villager known as Dilawar, who was sent by his mother to pick up his sisters for a Muslim holiday on Dec. 5, 2002. Before he got there, Dilawar was rounded up as a suspect in a rocket attack.
For much of his five days in custody, Dilawar was brutalized and hung from the ceiling of his cell, even though no one thought he was a terrorist or had any useful information. Military police took turns kicking him above the knee because they found it amusing to hear him cry out "Allah."
When he was too weak to follow orders during interrogations, one sergeant grabbed him by his beard, crushed his bare foot with her boot and then reared back and kicked him in the groin.
That night, an interrogator summoned an MP when he noticed Dilawar's head slumped forward in his hood and his hands limp in his chains. After pressing his fingernail to see that blood was still circulating, the MP left him there. On Dec. 10, dragged in for what would be his last interrogation, Dilawar was incoherent. Angry at his unresponsiveness, an interrogator held him upright by twisting his hood around his neck. An intelligence specialist who spoke Dilawar's Pashto dialect was disturbed enough to notify the officer in charge. It was too late. Dilawar was already dead.
Seven soldiers were ultimately found responsible for Dilawar's death. Lt. Gen. Daniel McNeill, U.S. commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, who initially tried to claim the death was attributed to natural causes, was promoted.
Bush maintains that only enemies of America would allege such abuse. But if the charges are true, it is the perpetrators and their superiors who show contempt for America and what it represents.
Watching the government stonewalling and lie about the fatal beating of an innocent man is as disturbing as watching the torture John McCain suffered 30 years ago rather than betray what America stands for.
Service is gender blind
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Marc Brown tells the story of his college roommate, Dave Schroer, who retired from the Army Special Forces as a colonel but now when he is trying to serve as a civilian with the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C., as an analyst for terrorism and international crime, and is encountering a peculiar kind of discrimination.
Dave was highly qualified for the position, having served in a variety of command and staff posts during his military career before retiring effective Jan. 1, 2004, with the rank of colonel.
In his last assignment after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Dave was assigned to create and direct a 120-person classified organization within the Special Operations Command. His unit had what his lawyers describe as "responsibility for tracking and targeting of several high threat international terrorist organizations." [...]
Dave's combat experience included the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to extract Gen. Manuel Noriega and the 1994 occupation of Haiti that restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide to that nation's presidency after he had been ousted in a coup. Dave speaks only obliquely about other unspecified operational missions over the years in Africa, the Middle East and Central America.
Supervisors at the Congressional Research Service must have recognized Dave's qualifications because they offered him the job, which he accepted.
So far, so good? Sure, until Dave revealed that he was "transitioning" his gender from male to female, and would be starting his job as "Diane".
Diane says the woman called the next day to say that after a "long, restless night" she had decided "for the good of the service" that Diane would not be a "good fit" for the job after all.
Diane told me her first instinct was to just let it go. But the more she thought about it, she felt the sting of injustice, the violation of principle.
The ACLU will file suit on her behalf today.
I'd say the way things are going for the U.S. these days in the GWOT, we need all the talent we can get, and who cares if Colonel Dave wants to be Lady Diane now.
Earth to Dick...Earth to Dick...come in Dick!
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune thinks Dick Cheney must be in orbit:
Watching the recent frenzy of violence in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney is not perturbed. Quite the contrary--he sounds practically elated. "We're making major progress," he said Monday. Iraq, he explained, is "in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
You know that secure, undisclosed location of his? I think we can be sure it's not on this planet.
On the same day Cheney was savoring his delusions, suicide bombers were striking in Iraq.
At least 25 people died and more than 100 were wounded when two coordinated blasts went off amid a crowd of former police officers in Hillah. That incident came the day after a spate of suicide attacks killed at least 16 people in Baghdad.
Lies and incompetence, from Vietnam to Watergate to Iraq
The NY Times' Bob Herbert says the revelation of Deep Throat's identity reminds us that we are reliving the nightmares of Watergate:
The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism.
Trust, said Ronald Reagan, but verify.
Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Building living cities
San Francisco architect William Leddy pens a thought provoking commentary on planning for a sustainable urban America:
Sixty percent of Earth's inhabitants will live in cities by 2030, according to the United Nations -- the same year global carbon dioxide- emissions are expected to increase by almost two-thirds of what they are today. By 2025, worldwide energy consumption is expected to grow by 54 percent, while worldwide oil production is predicted to begin declining in 2016.
Today, we are bombarded with such alarming statistics as these, suggesting a perilous future of constantly growing cities, fractured communities, increasing pollution and declining resources. While the specifics of the data might be debatable for some, the underlying realities are not: We live in a time of unprecedented global change. How can we preserve our way of life for generations to come? What will become of cities in the future?
Sands of Empire
I rarely grace my diaries with the putrid name of Bob Novak, but his column today points up a forthcoming book, that attacks Bush's global ambitions from the conservative point of view:
Sands of Empire by Robert W. Merry, a respected Washington journalist, warns of the United States as the ''Crusader State'' transporting American exceptionalism around the world. The book, to be published this month, contends this crusade threatens ''the American Republic, the greatest civic achievement in the history of mankind.''
This is no anti-Bush political screed seeking Democratic gain and Republican loss in Iraq's casualty lists. Merry over the years has been an objective journalist but considers himself a conservative and is said by friends to be a Republican who voted for Bush. What worries Merry is that Bush mixes the moralism of Woodrow Wilson and the exceptionalism of Theodore Roosevelt to produce fatal U.S. global ambitions.
Today's cartoon
From Tom Toles of the Washington Post: