Selves and Others

When Bush’s choice for attorney general faces a Senate hearing Thursday, human rights advocates and even military lawyers hope he will face tough questions about his advocacy of torture and dismissal of international law.

Jan 5 - An array of rights organizations and even a group of retired high level officers from all four branches of the US armed forces are raising loud concerns about President Bush’s attempted appointment of Alberto Gonzales to the cabinet seat of Attorney General. Activists have kept the nominee under fire since Bush named Gonzales to replace the departing John Ashcroft, but efforts urging the Senate to resist Gonzales’ appointment have spiked in the New Year, with Senate Judiciary Committee hearings scheduled for Thursday. (...)

I conducted interviews with Franz Kafka and Joe Strummer on separate occasions recently...in preparation for my first interview with Joe Bageant. We’re roughly the same vintage, me just pre- and him just post-Nagasaki. Same diff between Kafka and Strummer, with just a wider range. But one thing we all have in common is —from grave complaint to mild musing— our collective tsk tsk tsk vis-a-vis America’s momentum/abominations. (...)

Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly. (...)

WASHINGTON, Jan 5 (IPS) - While the world’s attention has been focused for the past 10 days on the catastrophic tsunamis in South Asia and the subsequent relief efforts, the situation for the United States and its dwindling number of allies in Iraq appears to have worsened.

The administration of President George W. Bush and its supporters continue to insist that elections to a constitutional assembly scheduled for Jan. 31 will turn the tide against the insurgency, even as key figures in Baghdad’s interim government, as well as outside analysts, are expressing growing doubts about whether the poll should even go ahead, given the deteriorating security situation. (...)

Former CIA analyst McGovern steps out of his usual role and speaks about good and evil. Plenty of critics have argued that torture is both illegal and counterproductive. But in this press conference held by Veterans for Common Sense, McGovern appeals to the conscience of the senators who will be considering Gonzales’ nomination.

Having helped to bring about the horrendous mess that has been unfolding in Haiti following the overthrow of elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Bush administration faces a tremendous dilemma. There is no stability at all. The puppet government has proven totally incompetent in addressing anything ranging from natural disasters to the reign of terror by the thugs of the former Haitian military. The obvious hope of the Bush administration was for a smooth transition, but there is nothing smooth about the situation in Haiti. (...)

Since the tsunami hit, the mainstream press and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast and cable network news programs, have been chockfull of images of the freshly dead. We’ve seen images of bodies of children and adults where the water left them; we’ve seen them arranged in neat rows; we’ve seen them bagged and stacked.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was. TV executives say that is because their images come into people’s homes where children might come upon them unawares, so they have to limit the reality on the airwaves. Hardly anyone believes they have the children in mind when they plan their programs. (...)

The New Year is here, and as we take stock of the state of the world and our nation, we must put media reform even higher on our priority list. The movement to fix our badly broken media system is gathering momentum, but the decisions made this year could resonate for decades to come.

The frustrations of millions were echoed in Jon Stewart’s no-nonsense critique of corporate media for "hurting America," shown live on CNN’s Crossfire. People are tired of the media’s partisan hackery, celebrity obsession, failure to hold government accountable, narrow range of debate, unchecked commercialism, and lack of investigative journalism. (...)

Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, is coming out with a new book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. PA will provide, hopefully, a full review when we receive it. Now we have a preview based on Diamond’s huge op-ed summary ("The Ends of the World as We Know Them") - taking up almost the whole page - published in The New York Times on 1-1-05.

Why do some societies thrive and last for thousands of years (Japan) while others die off (the Maya)? This is the question that Diamond sets out to answer. We shall see what he has to say and, most importantly, how relevant it is to our own society. (...)

Leading up to Sunday’s presidential election in the Palestinian Authority is the sort of frenetic activity characteristic of every election campaign - the quarreling and prognostications, the rumors and mudslinging. Discussion of the differences between the candidates - mainly Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Mustafa Barghouti - is even finding its way into children’s conversations. (...)

After the First Lady announced her intention to adopt a 13-year-old Acehnese boy whose parents were swept away by the tsunami, different actors started to express rising concern that orphans are falling prey to child trafficking rings in a country that sees 100,000 children and women trafficked each year.

JAKARTA, Jan 5 (IPS) - Some call it a ’’philanthropic act’’, others a ’’big blunder’’ when Indonesia’s First Lady Kristiani Herawati Yudhoyono publicly expressed her intention to adopt a 13-year-old Acehnese boy whose parents were swept away by the tsunami that devastated Asia, a day after Christmas.

A footage taken by a private television station last Monday showed the wife of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono saying she wanted to adopt Mirwanda and send him to a school in Jakarta. (...)