FEATURED ARTICLES
- The Gray Zone; How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M. Hersh
- Betrayal in the Ranks, Denver Post
- Transcript: Interview with Senator John Kerry, 'Hannity and Colmes'
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"In an odd way, the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized... Some JAGS hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war. We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar."
- - Kenneth Roth (Executive Director of Human Rights Watch)
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - MAY 17th
1954 -- In Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), the US Supreme Court rules "separate but equal" public education unconstitutional, as a violation of the 14th Amendment clause guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. The Supreme Court previously approved racial segregation May 18, 1896 with the "separate but equal" Plessy vs Ferguson decision which is now reversed.
1957 -- Marking the 3rd anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Martin Luther King, Jr. leads a 30,000 strong Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington D.C.
RHINO HERE:
I recently took action to protect the vote in Ohio, where electronic voting machines are set to be in place in 31 counties without any paper trail verification. The '04 election is going to be close & could come down to just a handful of votes in Ohio. The Rhino urges you to join in signing the "Paper Trail Petition" at:
http://actforvictory.org/act.php/home/petitions/diebold_ohio
Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is the full transcript of last week's "Hannity and Colmes" interview with Senator John Kerry in which faced with difficult questions, the Democratic Presidential candidate spoke clearly & directly. The Rhino recommends this piece to send to your Republican friends & relatives. But first:
A brief rebuff by Peaceroots.org's Michael O'Gorman to those pundits who would compare the killing of Nick Berg with the recent crimes in the American run Iraqi prisons.
"Put it in perspective" say some of the pundits as to how much worse the tragic execution of Nick Berg was than the prison abuse at Abu Graib. Well, of course, it was infinitely worse than most of it, but maybe only equally bad to what seems to be a small number of unauthorized murders at the prisons. And, in perspective, it was 1/800th as bad as the siege of Fallujah and 1/15,000th as bad as the invasion of Iraq altogether (to date).
But then, in perspective, the entire war in Iraq is only 1/2000th as bad as the denying, by the world community, of 30 million Africans with HIV of inexpensive life saving medicine, which we could provide for a fraction of the cost of this senseless war. It also makes us 5 times as guilty as those Germans who lived through the Holocaust and did nothing.
Michael O'Gorman, Peaceroots.org
A new Sy Hersh piece in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker, tells of the responsibility for the trashing of the Geneva Conventions by Secretary of State Don Rumsfeld & his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone. This one gives excellent insights behind the walls of the Pentagon.
THE GRAY ZONE
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, Issue of 2004-05-24, Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A...
MORE: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content
Beware blog readers! The following link takes you into a world covered by a dark shadow, cast by the the effects of men dedicating their lives to violence, and by a system that trains those men in violence and then hides the grim results on their families. Although written and published last year by The Denver Post, this series of articles reveals just one aspect of the dark legacy of those who would choose war before exhaustive diplomacy.
Betrayal in the Ranks
Denver Post, November 16, 2003
Thousands of women have been sexually assaulted in the United States military. Thousands more have been abused by their military husbands or boyfriends. And then they are victimized again. This time, the women are betrayed by the military itself. They are discouraged from reporting the crimes. Pressured to go easy on their attackers. Denied protection. Frustrated by a justice system that readily shields offenders from criminal punishment. The women suffer for it. Some cannot talk about what happened. They were killed by men whose violence was allowed to escalate. Other victims struggle with anger over a trusted system that betrayed them. More than 50 women such as Beverly Kondel, Toni Walker and Iolanda Thompson, above from left, told The Denver Post their stories. "They said they would order him not to talk to me, but I told them that that wouldn't stop bullets from hitting me," Walker says. "I felt the military abandoned me."...
MORE: http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36?7E30137?7E,00.html
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