The Rag Blog

Nothing emphasizes the decline of America into an authoritarian police state more than the treatment of children as possible enemies, deviants or criminals. A few cases, involving very young children, have caught our attention this month that indicate in the current climate any sniff of power is corrupting absolutely those who believe they have it.

The AP reported today that a five year old boy has been accused of sexually harassing a kindergarten classmate:

Washington County school officials told Charles Vallance that his son pinched a girl’s buttocks earlier this month in a hallway at Lincolnshire Elementary School. The school says that meets the state’s definition of sexual harassment.

The father of the child insists that his son knows nothing about sex and was just playing. Nevertheless the “offence” will remain on the child’s file.

This is not an isolated case. The same report from the AP says that in Marlyland alone, where this incident took place, 28 kindergarten students were suspended for sex offenses in the last school year – 15 of those suspensions for sexual harassment.

Earlier this month a four year old boy was accused of “improperly touching” a female school employee. The principal of La Vega Primary School sent a letter to the parents of the boy that said the pre-kindergartener demonstrated “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment.”

The school says that the boy rubbed his face in the chest of the employee. Again the parents were outraged insisting that a four year old cannot know what it means to act sexually.

When one does not have roast beef for Christmas (we had a seafood extravaganza – see just above), it is appropriate to serve for the end of the Second Millennium, Anno Domini. Do you have any idea how few people have the good fortune to observe such a significant human chronometric event?

And if you care to recall, those of us in North America also had the opportunity to observe a very rare celestial event, a partial solar eclipse on Christmas Day. Sadly, it was overcast at Mom’s house on Christmas day, even though I got up early to see it inside my little pinhole cardboard camera box (the “over-the-shoulder” model). Thanks to the gift and scourge of television, I saw several excellent video images on CNN.

LIMA, Peru: President Alan Garcia on Tuesday suggested an unorthodox use for the coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine: Why not toss it in a salad?

“I insist that it can be consumed directly and elegantly in salad,” Garcia told foreign correspondents at the Government Palace. “It has good nutritional value.”

Garcia’s comments put him in the company of leftist presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who have publicly promoted mixing the high-calcium, vitamin-rich leaf into everything from toothpaste to soft drinks.

Coca has for centuries been considered a sacred medicinal and ceremonial plant in Andean culture, and Garcia said it should not be vilified as useful solely for producing the illegal narcotic.

Garcia said Gaston Acurio, one of Peru’s best known chefs, recently served several coca-based dishes for an event at the Government Palace.

There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn’t read that wire service report, I’ll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

The South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of major nations, and there was the two-day summit of what’s called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the AP report, left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, the South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Saudi Arabia, fearful of a nuclear Iran and a Shiite Iraq, is taking steps to influence U.S. policy in Iraq. The kingdom may also be building its own nuclear program.

Early in November, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, in a memo leaked to the press recommended that Saudi Arabia play a leadership role in talks about Iraq’s future. But even before the memo landed on Bush’s White House desk, the Saudis were positioning themselves to directly influence strategy in Iraq:

• While the debate about negotiating with the Iranians and the Syrians raged in America’s leading circles, Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Riyadh for talks. Topic of conversation? The safety of Iraq’s Sunni minority should American forces disengage. Simply put: the king read the riot act to the vice president.
• A few weeks later the Iraq Study Group asserted that Saudi private citizens, and probably a few members of the Saudi royal family, have been financing the Sunni opposition in Iraq all along. This is the same opposition that is targeting U.S. troops. Last week, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah confirmed that his loyalty must lie with Iraq’s Sunni tribal chiefs, even if his support also helps insurgents who have been fighting Americans and the Brits.
• Early in November, the Saudis announced their intention to build a $10 billion wall (give or take a few billion) on the border with Iraq, with Raytheon as the top bidder. Raytheon, one of America’s premier weapons manufacturers, has close ties to the neocons, including Richard Armitage, former undersecretary of state and Sean O’Keefe, secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Raytheon’s stock price is hovering near a seven-year high.

“Stand Up for Canada” appears to have been devised as a technique of mass deception, under the joint auspices of former ultra-right wing Alliance Party and U.S. Republican Party advisors.

In the last 2006 Federal Election, the Conservative Party kept trumpeting its slogan that it would “Stand up for Canada”. Then, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper during that election indicated that he would similarly “Stand Up” for Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Mr. Harper portrayed his party, as a party which would govern Canada with integrity and openness in a spirit of renewed democracy, in contrast with the ‘corruption’ of the Martin Liberals. As it turns out, these assertions by Mr. Harper could not be further from the truth.

Mel Hurtig, the founder of the Council of Canadians, and also a variety of other reliable sources including veteran CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, now reveal that senior elected representatives and advisors to the Conservative Party, are currently planning a scheme that would hand over Canada to the Bush regime by 2007. The official name for this scheme, is called “North American Union”.

Alberta “Conservatives”, including at least one former Premier, are reportedly among prominent Harper Government operatives of this ultra-right wing effort.
Mel Hurtig, a noted Canadian author and publisher who was the elected leader of the National Party of Canada, provided researchers with the agenda and attendee list of the so-called “North American Forum” at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Sept. 12-14, 2006.

Mr. Hurtig said the “secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process.” In addition, the reported Agenda undermines the Statutory position of Her Majesty the Queen of Canada, as the constitutional expression of a Canada independent from the U.S.

A highly sympathetic crowd of a few hundred people gave Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada standing ovations before, during and after a speech at the Church of the Crossroads in Moiliili.

Watada, a Honolulu native, faces court-martial in Fort Lewis, Wash., next month on six counts for refusing to deploy to Iraq and for conduct unbecoming an officer, charges that carry a maximum six years’ imprisonment. He was back in Honolulu to meet with his attorney and visit with family.

Watada acknowledged that his actions have divided the community. “That was not my intent,” he said. But upon learning the facts of the war, he said he was in turmoil.

He called the war in Iraq an illegal war of aggression.

He quoted Nazi Germany’s Hermann Goering, who said while the common people are usually not willing to go to war, “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”

Watada said the American people were deceived by the Bush administration, which manipulated intelligence to fit policy and regime change in Iraq.

“We have been lied to, deceived and betrayed,” he said. “A crime has been committed against the constitution.”

The United States’ so-called “liberation” of Iraqi women has made them less free than they were under the Baathist regime, with abduction, rape, and “honor” killings now a daily reality.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently issued a frightening report documenting the growing practice of public executions of women by Shia Militia. One of the report’s more grisly accounts was a story of a young woman dragged by a wire wound around her neck to a close-by football field and then hung to the goal post. They pierced her body with bullets. Her brother came running trying to defend his sister. He was also shot and killed. Sunni extremists are no better: OWFI members estimate that no less than 30 women are executed monthly for honor related reasons.

Almost four years into the Bush Administration’s ill fated adventure in Iraq, Iraqi women are worse off than they were under the Baathist regime in a country where, for decades, the freedoms and rights enjoyed by Iraqi women were the envy of women in most other countries of the Middle East.

Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women’s movement had successfully forced Saddam’s government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law. Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. In other words, they had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular — albeit brutal — Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.

Even realism has an obligation to be realistic. –George Packer.

The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article, Without a Doubt, published in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the 2004 election. It was in that article that the famous passage appeared quoting a senior administration official on the myopia of the “reality-based community” when it came to understanding the government of George W. Bush.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about that article because the “realist” school in foreign policy is thought to be back in charge. The release of the Iraq Study Group’s report on December 6th and the re-emergence of James Baker, famous for being pragmatist, a realist, and a fixer, were the triggers for this observation. The Guardian’s report was typical: “This is a return to the realist policy of Mr. Bush’s father.”

Dan Froomkin said the report and reactions to it “marked a restoration of reality in Washington.”

Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are quite different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that–fuzzing things up–because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004. Of course, neither did the political system. Or the Republican party, or its sensible wing– the elders, the responsible people.

I think they all regret it now. But they’re happy with this month’s theme, “realists are back.” It sounds almost… normal.