From "I have a dream" to "I will seek authorization for the use of force"

From "I have a dream" to "I will seek authorization for the use of force," the final week of August 2013 was an intense one.

"I have a dream"

We had the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington reminding us of how far our nation has and hasn't come in achieving race equality, putting us in a self-reflective mood and highlighting the conflict between those who climbed up and, as a part of the establishment, are now standing on the shoulders of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other heroic civil rights advocates versus those who see such leaders as sellouts rather than as examples of the movement's successes.

Fifty years is not much time, in the grand scope of things; yet, because of the increasingly accelerated speed of change in modern society, it constitutes a huge generational gap in which the synergy of King's life and work has become subtly diluted.

Eward Snowden Strange Love, or How I Haven't Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bumb

This Snowden NSA leak saga is doing strange things to me.

For starters, it has me obsessed. This real-time spy thriller has me scanning through the Internets, searching for the latest news and looking for any and all information about this snowy-white computer whiz kid that I can dig up. I want to know everything.

Freedom of information

I want to know more details about Snowden's life, like when he switched from believing that whistle blowers were traitors to believing that they are heroes.

I want to know the details of his military service, along with what Snowden's opinion might be about the fact that the US Army is declining to release his records. Would he condemn the government's refusal to reveal the truth, or would he applaud the government's respect for his right to privacy?

I want to know why the initial sensational reports by both The Guardian and The Washington Post about the PRISM Internet surveillance program had gotten the details of the NSA's access to information wrong, erring, of course, on the side of sensationalism.

Overcoming Inertia

Note: This article was written a few weeks ago, but due to some engrossing assignments, I didn’t have time to clean it up and post it until now. So please accept my apologies for lagging a bit behind in the national conversation. I feel that the main ideas discussed are important, despite this. Thanks to all my readers, Julie

Pre-script: So this commentary is not so out of the loop after all: 
US Aids Honduran Police Despite Death Squad Fears

A report published 30 January 2013 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that during fiscal years 2008 through 2011, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Aid spent $97 million of the allocated $350 million in support of the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), a spinoff of the 2007 Mérida Initiative that was aimed at fighting drug crime in Mexico and Central America. The funds were funneled through four foreign assistance accounts into programs to “strengthen law enforcement and maritime interdiction capabilities, support capacity building and training programs, and deter and detect border criminal activity,” according to the GAO.

Islamophobia: Hate Destroys the Hater

All over the Muslim world, people are angry.

They have every right to express their anger

 – as long as it is done nonviolently toward both persons and property and within the laws of the land –

...just as the maker of a trailer of the fake movie has the First-Amendment right to express his opinion

 – as long as it is not fraudulently harmful or willfully offensive within the limits of freedom of speech in the United States.

The laws in the United States strongly protect the freedom of speech

– to the point of the absurdity that money has been deemed a form of speech by the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.

However, there are limits to freedom of speech that are based on the “harm principle” and the “offense principle,” i.e. limits on pornography, hate speech, and crying “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

In U.S. law, there is legal precedence for prohibiting “fighting words,” which cause those hearing the words to react with a “breach of the peace.” A stampede in a theater would qualify for that, as would an attack on an embassy, it would seem to me.

Can President Santos Bring Peace to Colombia? or, Let the Wars be of Words

This week, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that his government has begun engaging in peace talks with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia (FARC). In a nationally televised speech on Monday, 27 August, he acknowledged that "exploratory talks" had been taking place since February in Cuba, and now, the stage is set for dialogue to be formally launched in Oslo in October that will continue in Havana. Reporting on Colombian media reports, Mercopress states:

The agenda of the dialogue will include issues such as “integral agrarian development policy”, “political participation”, “end of the conflict”, “solution to the problem of illicit drugs”, “victims” and “implementation, verification and ratification” of the agreement.

Correa and Assange: Contradictions and Convolution as Antiheroes Align

Ah, the poignant poetry, the rich wrinkling, the incising irony, the heartbreaking hypocrisy, the contradictory clusterfuckery, the alluring alliteration!

Correa and Assange: a match made in someplace decidedly unheavenly, a place where hormones betray heroes and authoritarians rally righteously upon their duplicitous daises.

On their blog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) begins their analysis of this bizarre matchup like so:

Keeping Tabs on the Situation in Afghanistan (because somebody oughta be doing it)

Kabul, Afghanistan (image via Wikipedia)

As reported by the The New York Times on 26 April 2012,

Acting at the behest of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, senior American officials told a California congressman last weekend that he was not welcome in Afghanistan because of concerns that his sharp criticism of Mr. Karzai would undermine Washington’s efforts to rebuild trust with the government and restart preliminary peace talks with the Taliban.

The congressman, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, has made little secret of his desire to alter the Obama administration’s policies there radically. He has joined Afghan opposition leaders and former warlords in calling for a revamp of the Afghan government into a decentralized, federal state.

Here’s the kicker: 

Mr. Rohrabacher contends his approach would create a more stable Afghanistan...

Global Connections: Guinea-Bissau

The Sixth Summit of the Americas is currently being held in Cartagena, Colombia (after a bit of alleged pre-event partying that caused 11 U.S. secret service and five U. S. military personnel who were linked to the use of prostitutes to be sent home), and one of the most attention-grabbing issues, if not on the official agenda, is a serious discussion about changing the way that the War on Drugs is being fought, including debate about some level of decriminalization. For some great analysis, check out the excellent series that InSight Crime has presented on this proverbial Gorilla in the Room.

Adrift in a Sea of Military Exportation

Rachel Maddow, via Wikipedia

In my previous post, I discovered the strange but true nature of the military mindset, that dreamy, quixotic, incurable optimism that has been perceived and discussed by such realists as Rory Stewart and Howard Zinn. What an amazing set of realizations – that it is members of the armed forces who are regularly deluding themselves about what can and cannot be, with Rory Stewart focusing on over-ambition and the failure-is-not-an-option determination, while Howard Zinn’s take pinpoints the inevitable overconfidence in the military’s ability to tame chaos and unpredictability.

The Answer for Afghanistan

Gentle Giant - Rory Stewart

Well, how is one to be hopeful about Afghanistan now, after these horrific incidences – the accidental Koran burning, and then the insanity unleashed in the Panjwai district of southern Kandahar Province on a dark, disastrous night last week, supposedly by an angry, possibly drunken soldier? Sixteen innocent civilians, mostly women and children killed – this goes beyond cultural insensitivity. It reveals the cancerous mass that has taken hold of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan like Hugo Chávez’s bald head no longer allowing his secret truth to remain hidden from the public. But, as with cancer itself, the road forward is fraught with fear, the treatment, painful, the future, uncertain.

The Nuclear Iranian Fear Factor

Astronomical Clock, Prague (image via Wikipedia)

Time, I am convinced, is not a linear dimension. Rather, I believe it is a mysterious force of cyclical motion, propelling events along the nearly imperceptible curve of reality. It is at those moments that stand out for their enduring personal impact that time’s cyclical nature reveals itself. And for me, such a time is when fears of war between the West and Iran are flamed.

Give Afghanistan Peace a Chance!



Mujahideen crossing in from Pakistan border,
Afghanistan, 1985 (image via Wikipedia)

This is another article slamming the discombobulated way that members of the United States Congress have influence over the nation’s foreign policy (see my last diatribe here), and again, Dana Rohrabacher’s name appears – which means that something untoward is afoot.

A Rambling Diatribe Against How The US Conducts Its Latin American Foreign Policy: or How I Learned Who Exactly Is In Charge of this Ship of State Department

On Tuesday, 5 April, the US Ambassador to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was declared to be persona non grata by the Ecuadorean government. At issue was an article in the Spanish newspaper, El País, about a WikiLeaks cable in which the ambassador had expressed her suspicions that police corruption rose all the way up to the level of President Rafeal Correa. When confronted about the allegations, the ambassador refrained from comment, her reason being that the cable had been illegally obtained.