Front-paged at BoomanTribune.com
AP/Yahoo: "Mrs. Bush said although the report was damaging, Newsweek should not be held solely responsible":
"In the United States if there's a terrible report, people don't riot and kill other people."
I'm racking my brain, index finger sturdily resting on my chin, head tilting to the right.
Can you recall any riots and killings throughout U.S. history that we might share with our First Lady?
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How about KENT STATE, just for starters. Mrs. Bush might put
Philip Caputo's new book on her list of must-reads. Well, she'd remember except she was dealing at the time (oh, that's so awful).
The Civil War? The Haymarket Riots? The civil rights movement? (Three who gave their lives: Remembering the martyrs of Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964)
Perhaps Mrs. Bush could begin with "A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present," by Howard Zinn:
Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
... narratives of national unity and progress are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. Historian Zinn sides with the latter group in chronicling Indians' struggle against Europeans, blacks' struggle against racism, women's struggle against patriarchy, and workers' struggle against capitalists. First published in 1980, the volume sums up decades of post-war scholarship into a definitive statement of leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography. This edition updates that project with new chapters on the Clinton and Bush presidencies, which deplore Clinton's pro-business agenda, celebrate the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests and apologize for previous editions' slighting of the struggles of Latinos and gays. ... (Amazon)
Then there's this. It can't have been our citizens who did this, could it?
From Welshman's diary today:
The New York Times today has revealed the details of the torture and deaths of two prisoners in Bagram Prison, Afghanistan.
The details are so horrifying ...
Yet I have written this diary, despite these feelings, even though I am not going to express fully my outrage and disgust.
What's Welshman talking about? This?
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.
"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Well, it didn't happen in the U.S.
So, what can you tell Laura Bush about the United States, where "people don't riot and kill other people"?