Author: Ed Weathers

HITHER AND ‘YON’

Now that the U.S. has captured Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration should return its attention to the larger issue of combating international terrorism and repairing our relations with the rest of the world.

There is a good chance now that Saddam’s former troops will end their resistance in Iraq, but the suicide bombers there and in Saudi Arabia and Turkey have not been Saddam’s men, who seem to value their own lives too much for suicide. The terrorists have been, almost certainly, not traditional soldiers, but young men from other lands trained to hate the United States and willing to kill themselves to damage us. That training has been relatively easy, because the rest of the world today–not just Islamic countries, but almost every country–resents the power and arrogance of the United States. All the terror-teachers have had to do is turn that resentment into hatred and add a dash of religious fanaticism. Voila: a generation of suicide bombers.

But there is a relatively simple way, I think, to disarm some of the terrorists–at least, some of the potential terrorists. I don’t mean “disarm” in the sense of taking away their guns or their grenade launchers or their car bombs. I mean “disarm” in the happier sense of the word: to dissipate some of their resentment and anger.

My suggestion is this: that President Bush declare 2004 the “Year of Other Nations” (“YON,” for short) and that he make a well-publicized attempt at least symbolically to equalize the exchange of culture between the United States and other nations. Recently, for example, the Iraqi National Orchestra played in Washington, D.C. The next time that happens, President Bush should make a big deal about attending. He should also make a big deal of serving French and German food at state dinners. He should invite the ambassadors of other nations to the White House to watch Canadian and Iranian movies with him. (He might even enjoy them; they make some good movies.) He should call the locker room to congratulate the team that wins the soccer World Cup. (Be assured: this will not be the U.S. team.) President Bush and his well-read wife should break bread with the best Palestinian poets and the finest Syrian writers. He should travel to Sweden and speak admiringly of their form of semi-socialist democracy, even if he points out that it’s not quite in tune with his own conservative capitalism. His supporters say that Bush speaks better than passable Spanish; he should go to Spain and deliver a speech in that language. It absolutely doesn’t matter what the speech is about.

This is not a trivial suggestion, and I don’t propose it off-handedly. There is no overestimating how far a little internationalism will go toward improving the world’s perception of the U.S., and some of that change-for-the-better will trickle down to the young men whom the terror-teachers will continue trying to recruit. Instead of hating us, there is a chance that, if we work at it, some of those young men may actually admire us a bit. If we make an attempt to recognize and respect their cultures, they will be more likely to respect ours. Not all of them, certainly–the hard-core terror-mongers will find new reasons to hate us and new young men to listen to them–but some of the potential terrorists will be left, well, a bit disarmed. Terror-chic will no longer seem so cool to the worldwide young. In the long run, this kind of disarmament will be as important for the safety of the U.S. as the guns-and-grenades kind.

Most Americans don’t know it, because it receives little media attention, but right now perhaps the greatest cause of anger and resentment against the United States around the world–not just among our enemies but among our strongest allies like Canada and Australia and England–is the perception that we are cultural imperialists. Our current administration acts, for example, as if our form of democracy is the only kind that works, barely acknowledging the success of parliamentary republics like England and Australia. When we travel, we expect everyone to speak English. Indeed, we presume, arrogantly, that English–American English–will be the language of international aviation, international business, and the Internet. Other than Hispanic immigrants, not one American in a hundred can speak another language well enough to get along in another country.

And then, of course, there is the stuff of culture itself. We consciously and arrogantly export our movies, our television shows, and our fast food. Our movies dominate the markets in Europe and the Far East. Our television shows fill prime time in places as far away as Australia. This has nothing to do with U.S. shows or movies being better than those the rest of the world can produce. It’s just that American production companies make so much money in the U.S. market that they can then sell their shows and movies to foreign broadcasters and theaters at discount prices that their own nations’ producers can’t match. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it costs an Australian producer $200,000 to make a one-hour TV show; a broadcaster there can buy a one-hour U.S. show for just $33,000. Just as Wal-Mart is killing small-town toy and clothing stores in the U.S. with its cut-rate prices, the U.S. is killing the film and TV industries in many foreign nations. As any film-lover will tell you, France and Australia and Canada make some pretty decent movies, but their film industries are in danger of being overrun by a swarm of Terminators and Matrixes–the kind of high-budget movies they can’t afford to make, because they don’t have the market for them. If the French did make a $200 million blockbuster, no matter how good it was, it would never find a big enough market in the U.S. to earn its money back. Americans will not sit for subtitles, Crouching Tigers notwithstanding.

Believe me, for the rest of the world, this cultural imperialism is not a trivial issue. Two months ago, in October, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted to convene a “convention on cultural diversity” in 2005, largely for the purpose of devising policies that would protect the rest of the world from U.S. cultural hegemony. This made headlines in Canada and France. The United States had boycotted UNESCO since the Reagan administration because it felt the organization was not sufficiently pro-American; it rejoined the organization only three months ago and already it is at odds with the rest of the world over cultural issues. Only reluctantly, after much pressure from the Canadians and French, among others, did the U.S. agree to the cultural diversity convention. The convention is likely to support policies allowing foreign countries to pass laws, for example, limiting how many foreign films and tv shows may be shown in, say, Paris or Toronto or Sydney. But the U.S. doesn’t like that idea. After all, movies and television shows–not to mention Starbucks and McDonalds and Euro Disneys–are big sellers overseas and help balance our trade deficit.

But I think it’s worth the small hit to our national pocketbook to support the cultural protectionism that the vast majority of our allies feel they need. The return in good will would be immense.

In fact, I think the Bush administration, as part of the “Year of Other Nations,” should set aside a few million symbolic dollars to sponsor a traveling international film festival that would go from U.S. city to U.S. city showing great movies from other lands. Heck, let Mr. Bush record a short introduction to be shown before every performance. In it, he can speak of how much he admires foreign art and believes in international cultural exchange. It would be the kind of photo-op–a moving picture op, you might say–that his handlers so relish. So what if it’s all for show? In this case, symbolism counts.

The fact is, Mr. Bush right now is perhaps the most unpopular president, world-wide, in history, and because of that, the reputation of the United States is the worst it has ever been. The world resents our arrogance, and out of this resentment terrorists are bred. From the beginning of his presidency, it has been clear that George W. Bush sees the world through a red-white-and-blue lens: America is all good, he seems to believe, and the rest of the world should just do it our way. When he and colleagues like Donald Rumsfeld speak of other countries being “either with us or against us,” they don’t seem to mean just in the struggle against terrorism; they seem to mean in everything. This administration will brook no foreign independence. Why else are France and Germany and Canada–Canada!–blocked from bidding on Iraqi reconstruction projects, even if allowing them to do so were to mean lower costs and a good-size savings to the American taxpayer? In the Bush administration, only Colin Powell seems to have the world’s respect–because he actually seems to listen to what the rest of the world has to say.

In my lifetime, the most popular American president overseas was John F. Kennedy. He went to Berlin and said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Imagine if George W. Bush went to Paris and said, “Je suis Francais.” An entire nation would hang on every word, however bad his pronunciation. Then imagine if he learned just three sentences in Arabic: “We all have the same God.” “Let us work for peace.” “I like your architecture.” A few phrases in a foreign tongue could save thousands of lives in the future.

I see only one drawback to this suggestion: It would almost certainly mean that Mr. Bush would become so popular that he would be easily reelected next year, and I worry about the reactionary judges he will nominate to the federal bench in his next term. But in the name of international well-being, I’m willing to take that chance.

On the streets of Baghdad, U.S. soldiers are now trying to win the hearts of Iraqi children. Mr. President, you can learn from your soldiers. They’re in the streets kicking around soccer balls with the kids. If you want to win back the world’s good will and turn potential terrorists into friends, don’t insist that all those kids play baseball.

David Kushma, editorial page editor of The Commercial Appeal, is leaving the newspaper, according to sources in the newsroom.

Kushma declined to comment when contacted by the Flyer.

He came to Memphis from the Detroit Free Press in 1997 and worked for most of his time here under former editor Angus McEachran, who retired one year ago. New editor Chris Peck has implemented a community journalism approach that some old-line reporters see as being light on hard news.

Peck could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Sources told the Flyer several other veteran newsroom employees are leaving either to accept the newspaper’s buyout proposal or for personal reasons. A source said that includes some of the paper’s better known names.

The Commercial Appeal has not written about staff departures under Peck’s leadership. Peck did not mention any impending staff changes in a Flyer cover story on The Commercial Appeal two weeks ago.

Kushma often wrote a bylined article in the Sunday newspaper in addition to overseeing the overall editorial and viewpoint pages.

THE AGENDA

Your marriage is in trouble.

By the time the holidays roll around next year, your wife will have left you for another woman. Or, if you’re a wife, your husband will be shacked up with another man.

Not to worry, though–your family is in even bigger trouble than your marriage. Next year, when your teenage daughter has a sleepover at your house, it will mean she’s having an orgy with other girls. Next Christmas, your college-age son will bring home, not his fiancée, but his fiancé. Meanwhile, your elementary school son will spend most of his days in third grade fending off sexual advances from predatory cross-dressing male teachers, and Grandmommy and Granddaddy’s fiftieth wedding anniversary will be mocked by an announcement in the local liberal newspaper calling the two of them old hetero fossils celebrating a dying hetero institution. Actually, Granddaddy won’t mind too much–he’ll be too busy having sex with your aunt, his daughter. None of these troubles will last long, though, because everyone in your family will have AIDS and die in a little while. Then you’ll all go to hell.

There’s nothing you can do to stop any of this, at least not legally, since most of the judges in the federal courts will by that time be atheist drag queens and dykes, and they’re all for it.

This, you see, is the famous Homosexual Agenda, and on November 18 the runaway liberal judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Court issued a decree that makes the death of marriage and the American family inevitable. The court declared that homosexual couples who want them must be offered the same legal rights as married heterosexuals. As the Reverend Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition has put it, “the dark forces who oppose the family are on the move.” Any good Christian American (which is, of course, a tautology) knows who commands the dark forces.

But, wait, there is some hope. Thanks to forward-thinking statespersons like Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and Representative Marilyn Musgrave, Republican of Colorado, Satan’s forces might yet be beaten back; Grandpa might yet be pried from Auntie’s bed and Junior saved from a life of pederasty. Brownback and Musgrave plan to introduce legislation calling for a Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As Roberta Combs, President of the (needless to say) Christian Coalition of America, has said, we must pass this amendment “to secure the future for our children and grandchildren.” Indeed, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins (no relation to the homocidal–I mean, homicidal–maniac in the movie Psycho) has declared that this amendment must be passed or “we will lose marriage in this nation.” Wow. Who’d have thought that the Constitution was missing this key piece–a piece that saves our grandchildren’s future, not to mention the whole institution of marriage? That represents a pretty big omission on the part of the Founding Fathers, who seem to have been, in this respect, delinquent parents.

Mr. Perkins’ logic is irrefutable. Clearly, if a man in Massachusetts or anywhere else is allowed to spend the rest of his life with another man while being covered by the second man’s health insurance, everybody’s marriage is headed for trouble. And if a woman is allowed to share a bed with another woman while together they try to raise children, then wedlock in the (tautology coming) Biblical American sense is as good as gone. I mean, think about the single women you know who are raising children now; put two of them together, and things will almost certainly be twice as bad. Besides, anyone knows that a properly wed man and woman, even if their relationship is measured mostly in screams and black eyes, can do better raising kids than two women perverse enough to fall in love with each other.

Should any moral relativists of your acquaintance question this logic, send them immediately to the web site of Concerned Women for America (CWA). This is a “pro-family” group that I suspect was formed in reaction to an anti-family group called Unconcerned Lesbians Against America, but I can’t prove it. On the CWA web site, the moral relativists (who almost certainly hate marriage) will find a section called “Talking Points: Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ Is Wrong”; the web site is http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=4589&department=LEGAL&categoryid=family. Here the relativists will learn in the deepest metaphysical sense why homosexuals should not be allowed to have marriage rights. Among the CWA’s incontrovertible arguments are these: “A licensed electrician cannot produce power by taping two same-sex plugs together.” “Homosexual marriage is as wrong as giving a man a license to marry his mother or daughter or sister or a group.” “A license to marry is a legal document by which government will treat same-sex marriage as if it were equal to the real thing . . . . If the Smithsonian Museum displays a hunk of polished blue glass next to the Hope Diamond with a sign that says, ‘These are of equal value,’ and treats them as if they were, the Hope Diamond is devalued in the public’s eye.” And finally: “Engaging in sex doesn’t equal marriage.” We certainly all needed that reminder.

So there you have it. The institution of heterosexual marriage– “our bedrock,” as Mr. Perkins of the Family Research Council calls it–is a rock about to be smashed by men who love men and women who love women. When you think about it, that’s just too much love to be safe. Why, it’s almost like a terrorism kind of love. So as you sit down to say grace over Thanksgiving dinner this week with your loving, pure, heterosexual parents and your loving, pure, heterosexual children gathered around–all, I’m sure, representatives, practitioners, and offspring of happy, strong heterosexual marriages–be sure to say the proper grace to the proper Christian God, and add a little prayer for all the good Republican legislators who would preserve us from the wrong kind of love. Your children and grandchildren–not to mention the Hope Diamond–will thank you.

(For more of Ed Weathers’ views on this subject, see the columns which appear at these web addresses:

http://www.memphisflyer.com/MFSearch/full_results.asp?xt_from=2&aID=2433 OR CLICK HERE.

and

http://www.memphisflyer.com/MFSearch/full_results.asp?xt_from=2&aID=2399 OR CLICK HERE.)

THE RELEVANT QUAGMIRE

American soldiers are dying daily, killed by fervent, faceless, loosely organized foes who wear no uniforms and melt into the landscape, or the cityscape, after they attack. American helicopters are being shot out of the sky by shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles. Back home, the American public begins to grow disenchanted with a military enterprise it initially supported. No wonder anti-war commentators are saying that the U.S. occupation of Iraq threatens to turn into a quagmire like Vietnam. But the commentators don’t have it quite right. They have the wrong quagmire.

The more appropriate historical analogy for what the U.S. faces in Iraq is a different war: the one the Soviet Union tried to fight in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

The similarities between the current U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Soviet-Afghan war are uncanny. Consider:

A superpower, in defiance of most world opinion, invades an Islamic Middle Eastern nation. The superpower is hoping to effect regime change and, citing an “imminent threat,” declares the invasion “an international duty.” Initially, the invasion goes well. Within weeks, all organized military opposition in the invaded nation appears to evaporate, and the invading superpower basks in its success, praised by its domestic media for its military prowess. The superpower imposes its own government on the invaded nation and settles in to oversee a comfortable, presumably temporary occupation.

But almost immediately, resistance forces begin to coalesce, and the guerrilla war begins. The superpower’s convoys are attacked. It’s soldiers are killed one, two, ten at a time. Galvanized by religious zeal and nationalist pride, the guerrillas begin to attract other fighters sympathetic to their cause, from other lands. (One of these is named Osama bin Laden, who, with the help of Saudi Arabia, and the blessing–and perhaps the arms and money–of the United States, establishes his own anti-superpower fighting force.) The guerrillas represent a variety of causes, some purely religious, some secular and local. Some simply represent regional warlords.

Soon the superpower’s casualties begin to grow, and, although the superpower brings the body bags home quietly, out of the spotlight, the people back home begin to notice. The national media begin asking questions. Why are our soldiers still dying? Is this war worth it? Who decided to fight it and why? Commissions are called to look into the justification for the war. The political leadership claims the military and intelligence agencies are responsible. The military and intelligence agencies claim they warned the politicians that the war might be a mistake; the generals, in fact, claim the politicians quashed any intelligence that contradicted their own (the politicians’) preset policies. Meanwhile, the superpower is obliged to keep a rotating force of over 120,000 men in the invaded nation, and the resistance forces continue to grow, swelled each day by zealous international fighters called to “jihad” in order to force out the infidel invader. Quickly the invaded nation becomes a cause for Muslims throughout the world.

Sound familiar?

In the end, it took ten years and the death of 25,000 of its young men at the hands of the Afghan mujahedin fighters before the Soviet Union decided to give up the fight and leave Afghanistan. By the end, the Soviet people had lost faith in both their politicians and their military. Not long after the Soviets left Afghanistan, the Taliban were in power there, among other things shielding a terrorist Islamic infrastructure that was now ready to take on the only infidel superpower remaining after the Soviet Union was dismantled. There are serious foreign policy analysts who say today that it wasn’t capitalism’s victory in the Cold War (and it certainly wasn’t Ronald Reagan) that brought down the Soviet Union–it was, to a large extent, the economic and political devastation wrought by the war in Afghanistan. (For one such analysis, see “The Afghanistan war and the breakdown of the Soviet Union,” click here or go to http://faculty.washington.edu/aseem/afganwar.pdf.)

Have the policy makers in the Bush Administration learned the lessons of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? There’s no excuse if they haven’t. In dozens of articles, some recently declassified, analysts in the U.S. military and in the intelligence community have examined what went wrong for the Soviets in Afghanistan. One such article was written in 1996. It is a United States Army document out of the Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It is called “The Soviet War in Afghanistan: History and Harbinger of a Future War?” It is written by General (Ret) Mohammad Yahya Nawroz, Army of Afghanistan, and LTC (Ret) Lester W. Grau, U.S. Army. (The article can be found online by clicking here, or go to http://www.bdg.minsk.by/cegi/N2/Afg/Waraf.htm.) For declassified documents that do a similar analysis, see The National Security Archive by clicking here, or go to http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us.html.) Here is some of what the 1996 U.S. Army article says:

“Now, the only effective way for a technologically less-advanced country to fight a technologically-advanced country is through guerrilla war. Guerrilla war, a test of national will and the ability to endure, negates many of the advantages of technology.”

“[T]he potential for U.S. involvement in a guerrilla war grows. . . [I]t is in the best interests of U.S. military professionals to review the lessons of the last guerrilla war in which a super power was involved. Afghanistan is both past and prologue.”

“A guerrilla war is not a war of technology versus peasantry. Rather, it is a contest of endurance and national will. The side with the greatest moral commitment (ideological, religious or patriotic) will hold the ground at the end of the conflict. Battlefield victory can be almost irrelevant, since victory is often determined by morale, obstinacy and survival.”

“Tactics for conventional war will not work against guerrillas. Forces need to be reequipped, restructured and retrained for fighting guerrillas or for fighting as guerrillas. The most effective combatants are light infantry.”

“Journalists and television cameramen are key players in guerrilla warfare. The successful struggle can be effectively aided when championed by a significant portion of the world’s press.”

“Control of the cities can be a plus, but can also prove a detriment. Support of the population is essential for the winning side.”

I write this on a day when 15 American troops were killed when their Chinook helicopter was shot down over a field in Iraq. It is a day when the world press is not on America’s side, when many Iraqis are losing faith in America’s ability to reconstruct their nation, and when the American people–and more and more American soldiers–are growing demoralized with a war whose justification seems flimsier by the week. I hope George W. Bush–or whoever does his reading for him–is studying the analyses of the Soviet -Afghan war. I wonder if he and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz possess a “national will” and a “moral commitment” that goes beyond the election of 2004. And I wonder if our soldiers will still be fighting and dying in Baghdad in 2013.

READERS RESPOND:

Good article. You are right on the money about the analogy, except for

geography, but there is no perhaps about the US supplying money and arms to the

Afghan resistance units against the Soviet Union from 1979-89. We and the British,

mainly through Pakistani surrogates, supplied and trained these fighters. Our

Special Forces and the British SAS were extensively involved in teaching the

Afghani mujaheedin the art of guerilla warfare. Then, in 1989 we abandoned a

country that had been ravaged by warfare and allowed the roots of our present

situation to germinate.

Sincerely,

Gerald A. Lechliter

Colonel, US Army (retired-1999)

Lewes, DE

Another anaylsis or comparison might be what Israel has been experiencing for

decades. Occupation of peoples that don’t want you there and have no fear of

dying doesn’t work.

Connie Keys

Montclair,NJ

Excellent article. Thoughtful and well-researched. I really appreciate the citations and links.

Peter Hamilton

Consultant

Brooklyn NY 11231

This is an excellent article, its well researched and one which the Bush neocons should certainly read. As a Muslim living in the West, its heartening for me to read such articles by people like you. It gives me hope that there are people in USA who are sensible and wise to the real dangers facing the world.

Ultimately its in all our interests to isolate these fanatics (both Bush and Bin Ladens) who divide humanity and create chaos. May God Bless America and protect its people.

Yours

Mr Z Ali

England

Great article. I just hope somebody in DC can read something other than their daily dose of Bushaganda. As a Viet Nam vet, I am at heartbreak with what is happening to our “kids” in the desolate hole of Iraq. Yep, I called them “kids”, because I was one of those 18 year old suckers that fell for the Big Lie back in 1967, and I WAS a KID, like 85% of my comrades! This administration is the WORST political experience I have lived under, and if the people do not depose it in 2004, I’ll seriously consider repatriation! I have no idea what the point of this senseless invasion/occupation is, nor do they, apparently!!

Greg Henson

Melbourne,Fl

REMEMBER THE GUANTANAMO 660

You spend your days in a wire-mesh cell that’s eight feet long and six feet eight inches wide–about the size of a walk-in closet–yet you’ve never been convicted of a crime. You’ve never had a hearing, or stood before a judge, or been in a courtroom of any kind–yet here you are. Your toilet is a hole in the ground in your cell. Your guards keep the lights on 24 hours a day, and there is no air-conditioning, even in the summer heat of this tropical place. You sweat profusely and sleep fitfully under the lights. For exercise, you get to trudge up and down a narrow caged concrete slab in your shackles for 30 minutes three times a week. You’ve been here for almost two years now, and in that time you haven’t seen or spoken to a single member of your family or talked with a lawyer. You are not allowed news from the outside world; you knew nothing about the war in Iraq, for instance, until your guards told you the U.S. had won.

Periodically you are pulled from your cell and interrogated. If you tell the questioners what they want to know–which is much more than your name and serial number–you might get a stick of chewing gum or the privilege of playing checkers with another inmate. Last week, one of your fellow prisoners tried to hang himself; at least twenty other inmates have tried to commit suicide that you know of. Three of your fellow prisoners are children under the age of 16. One was 13 years old when he was brought here.

No one tells you how long you will be here, and that’s the real horror. If you knew the truth, you too might try to hang yourself, for the truth is this: You might be here forever.

This is life for most of the 660 prisoners being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Most of the prisoners were captured in Afghanistan in the war against the Taliban after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The Bush administration has declared these prisoners “unlawful combatants,” claiming that they were not real soldiers and are therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention protocols protecting ordinary prisoners of war. Since the prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, says the Bush administration, they also have no protections under the U.S. judicial system, which apply only to those held on U.S. territory. The Bush administration says it will try the prisoners whenever it feels like doing so (if it tries them at all) in military courts whose judges will be named by the Bush Pentagon. If they are tried, the prisoners will be represented by military counsel also chosen by the Bush Pentagon. They will have no right of appeal to any court not determined by the White House. Some of them could be sentenced to die.

For these 660 prisoners, George W. Bush has made himself God. He has, for all practical purposes, given himself the right to imprison, judge and execute whomever he wishes, without independent judicial review and in defiance of international law, all in the name of his self-declared “war on terrorism.” Guantanamo is Bush’s little self-created world, where law and human rights mean nothing, where George’s word is considered to come from the burning Bush.

On October 10, the International Red Cross, an organization which almost never speaks out publicly on political subjects, issued a press release condemning the U.S. for its treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo. “The main concern today after more than 18 months in captivity is that essentially the internees in Guantanamo have been placed beyond the law,” said a Red Cross spokeswoman. “They have no idea about their fate after 18 months. And they have no legal recourse.”

Others have likewise taken up the cause of the Guantanamo 660. On October 9, nineteen former U.S. diplomats, including former assistant secretaries of state William Rogers and Alexander Watson, and former assistant secretary of defense Allen Holmes, filed a brief with the Supreme Court demanding that the court intervene to protect the rights of the prisoners at Guantanamo and to force the Bush administration to treat them according to accepted standards of U.S. and international law, either providing them with swift, fair and open trials or treating them as POWs according to the Geneva Conventions. Among those condemning the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo are three former U.S. POWs and a retired Navy judge advocate general, Rear Admiral Donald Guter. The POWs and the admiral point out that with its failure to provide due process or judicial review for the prisoners at Guantanamo, the Bush administration is encouraging other nations to treat prisoners the same way. “My concern is fairly selfish,” says Guter. “If we don’t preserve the rule of law, what happens when our own people are taken captive?”

Other organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have pointed out that in fact the Fourth Geneva Convention does apply even to those nontraditional soldiers the Bush administration calls “unlawful combatants” (a phrase which does not appear in the Geneva Conventions). Nearly all international legal organizations have declared that any of the detainees who fought as representatives of the Taliban must in fact be treated as POWs. Furthermore, say most legal observers, the notion that Guantanamo is not “U.S.-controlled territory” is at best disingenuous. The alternative is that the base belongs to the Cuban government, from which the U.S. leases the base. But the Bush administration denies Cuban sovereignty there. Acknowledging Guantanamo as Cuba’s would mean the detainees could then petition the Cuban government for treatment under its laws. In other words, Bush and friends are trying to have it both ways with respect to Guantanamo: it’s not Cuba’s if it means giving the prisoners rights under Cuban law, but it’s not ours if it means having to treat the prisoners there under U.S. judicial guidelines.

George Bush has declared the prisoners at Guantanamo “the worst of the worst” in the war on terrorism. How this determination was made in the heat of battle in Afghanistan is more than problematic. When a 13-year-old is declared “the worst of the worst,” one wonders if the phrase has any meaning at all, or if it just Bush abusing the language as he is wont to do. No doubt some of the Guantanamo 660 are members of Al Qaeda or other organizations that would do harm to the United States. But that doesn’t mean the Bush administration can treat them any way it wishes. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of Bush’s few buddies on the international scene, demanded last week that Bush give the Guantanamo detainees–especially those who are British citizens–a fair trial soon. Blair spoke out under pressure; the British public, like most of the rest of the free world, is outraged at what Bush is doing in Guantanamo.

Simply put, international law does not permit a nation to detain anyone indefinitely without charges or access to counsel. In its treatment of the Guantanamo 660, the United States is behaving like a rogue nation.

And apparently it plans to continue doing so. The U.S. is now building a new “Camp Five” to house the inmates at Guantanamo. According to The Miami Herald, Camp Five, like the rest of the Guantanamo prison expansion, is being built by Kellogg Brown & Root, which so far has been granted $69 million in government contracts without any competitive bidding. Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former company and a big contributor to Republican campaigns. Camp Five will be made of concrete, not wire mesh. When it is finished, it will have all the feel of a permanent place, like a tomb.

ONE CLASSROOM UNDER GOD

News item, October 14, 2003: The Supreme Court agreed today to consider whether public schools violate the Constitution by requiring teachers to lead their classes in a Pledge of Allegiance that includes the phrase “under God.” This is a reprint of an essay first published on this website back in March.

It’s 1954, and I’m eight years old. Every school-day morning in Miss Brawley’s third-grade classroom, my classmates and I gather around the American flag that hangs in the corner, put our hands over our hearts, and recite something called “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

None of us knows exactly what a “pledge” is or what “allegiance” means, but we do it every morning, solemnly, because we’re just kids and Miss Brawley, behind her rimless glasses, is a grown-up. In the world of third grade, kids do what grown-ups tell them. Only bad kids don’t.

Sometimes sullen Wayne Hudson refuses to say the pledge. Instead, he sits at his desk, staring straight ahead, arms crossed. Wayne, we all think, is a bad kid, and we stay away from him at recess.

One morning during this year, 1954, Miss Brawley tells us to add a couple of new words to our ritual. The words are “under God.”

I’m eight years old. I’m a good kid. I add “under God” the way I’m told. It even makes sense, because I know all about God from Sunday school: he’s a big white-bearded old man, white like me, in white robes up in the white clouds. Of course our nation is “under” him.

I’m eight years old. What I don’t know then is that this is how it happens: This is how a government takes a religious idea and drips it into the brains of its kids. It starts with the president (Eisenhower, say), and it seeps down through Congress and the state legislatures and the local school boards (enemies, all, of godlessness), and finally it filters through poor Miss Brawley into the brains of the children.

And the child who resists–well, he is, ipso facto, a bad child. A child like Wayne.

I’m eight years old. All I know is that our morning ritual is a little boring–less meaningful than the jumping jacks we do in gym. I’ve never heard of the “establishment clause,” so I don’t yet know that the whole affair is unconstitutional on the face of it. I don’t yet understand that, despite this, no public official dares speak out against “under God” if he wants to get re-elected.

I’m eight years old. I haven’t yet read Alexis de Toqueville, so I don’t yet know about “the tyranny of the majority.” (I think Wayne Hudson knew.)

I’m eight years old. I don’t think to ask: What kind of nation is so insecure that it requires a daily loyalty oath from its third-graders?

And I donÔt think to ask: What god? Which god? Whose god?

I’m eight years old. I don’t understand that I don’t have to say the pledge, I don’t have to say “under God.” Hey, you don’t want to make Miss Brawley mad. So I say “under God” the way the President and Joe McCarthy and Miss Brawley want me to. . . .

Now it’s 2003, and I’m 57 years old. Now I wonder why God has been stamped on our coins and chiseled into our courthouses and invoked in our city halls and congressional chambers. You see, I think of God a bit differently now.

Of Wayne Hudson, too.

I’m 57 years old, and I don’t want my child every day being asked to give voice to a religious idea that has the whole weight of the government–not to mention his teacher and all his classmates–behind it. I’d prefer that my government didn’t hand us God, gods, anybody’s god.

But of course the majority thinks otherwise.

And after all, with their hands over their hearts and their eyes on the flag, they’re the good kids.