May 17, 2004
I think Dick Gephardt does bring a comfort level
with regards to organized labor,"
James Hoffa
said. "He's traveling with John Kerry
today, so I think things are coming along."
Brown vs. Board
Both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are
marking the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. the
Board of Education at the site of the case’s
origins in Topeka, Kansas. Kerry is playing the
racial preference and quotas card in his speech:
“We should not delude ourselves into thinking that
the work of Brown is done when there are those who
still seek, in different ways, to see it undone,"
Kerry said. "To roll back affirmative action to
restrict equal rights to undermine the promise of
our Constitution."
He also took a swipe at the President’s "No Child
Left Behind" legislation that the Bush campaign is
currently running TV ads on behalf of:
"You cannot promise no child left behind and then
pursue policies that leave millions of children
behind," Kerry said. "Because that promise is a
promissory note to all of America's families that
must be paid in full."
Bush, for his part, describes the No Child Left
Behind Act as an extension of the Brown case
because it seeks to end what Bush calls a bigotry
of low expectations for minorities.
During the President’s visit to Topeka he will be
accompanied by Education Secretary Rod Paige, the
first black person to hold that Cabinet post.
[NOTE: Interesting fact: Only 13 percent of black
fourth-graders and eighth-graders were proficient
or better in reading on a national test in 2003,
compared with 41 percent of white students.]
Nader now consultant
Ralph Nader, interviewed Sunday on CNN's "Late
Edition," said Kerry is "getting free consulting
from this campaign. We are putting on his desk
twice a week issues that could win if the
Democrats are smart enough to pick them up."
Nader’s unsolicited advice only goes so far. When
asked if he would get out of the race if he saw
that his candidacy would reelect President Bush he
said, "No. Of course not, you don't run a
presidential campaign nationally and say to your
volunteers who have worked their heart out
sometime in October, well, sorry."
The Kerry campaign is still trying to schedule a
meeting with Nader. A spokesman said, "The Kerry
campaign would like the two of them to meet when
it can be scheduled," the aide said. "Their shared
commitment to the environment, reform and health
care add up to strong mutual interests in
defeating George Bush."
Rumsfeld guilty?
The journalist Seyymour M. Hersh has found
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld guilty of the
abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison. His indictment and
conviction come in the opening paragraph in the
New Yorker article:
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.
Hersh also writes the contrary view that the
source of the problem were legalistic barriers
that prevented the U.S. from prosecuting the war
on terrorism, and Rumsfeld’s move to correct the
problem:
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks
after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the
American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the
start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda
members in the war zone, and its worldwide search
for terrorists, came up against major
command-and-control problems. For example, combat
forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to
obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On
October 7th, the night the bombing began, an
unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile
convoy that, American intelligence believed,
contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban
leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States
Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida,
refused to authorize a strike. By the time an
attack was approved, the target was out of reach.
Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a
self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due
to political correctness. One officer described
him to me that fall as "kicking a lot of glass and
breaking doors." In November, the Washington Post
reported that, as many as ten times since early
October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had
senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their
sights but had been unable to act in time because
of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems
throughout the world, as American Special Forces
units seeking to move quickly against suspected
terrorist cells were compelled to get prior
approval from local American ambassadors and brief
their superiors in the chain of command.
Hersh writes that Rumsfeld’s solution was to turn
to a cold war operations group, which would
operate what is known in intelligence circles as
‘black operations.’ Hersh writes:
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush
Administration to respond immediately to
time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed
borders without visas and could interrogate
terrorism suspects deemed too important for
transfer to the military’s facilities at
Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant
interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret
C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the
world. The intelligence would be relayed to the
sap command center in the Pentagon in real time,
and sifted for those pieces of information
critical to the "white," or overt, world.
Hersh’s story offers the conclusion that this
operation was wrongly brought into the Iraq War
and the prison at Abu Ghraib Prison in order to
get better intelligence regarding who was carrying
out the attacks on American troops:
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out
by Stephen Cambone [Under-Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence], was to get tough with those Iraqis
in the Army prison system who were suspected of
being insurgents. A key player was Major General
Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention
and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had
been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review
prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army
report on the abuse charges, written by Major
General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that
Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change
policy and place military intelligence in charge
of the prison. The report quoted Miller as
recommending that "detention operations must act
as an enabler for interrogation."
This story and increased investigation by Congress
will continue for weeks if not months. It will
play out the question of whether Donald Rumsfeld
survives as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld himself
has said that those responsible for the abuse at
Abu Ghraib Prison will be punished.
Dean op-ed on gay marriage/civil unions
IN THE SPRING of 2000, Vermont became the first
state in the union not only to recognize same-sex
partnerships, but to make sure that every single
right outlined in the Vermont Constitution and
Vermont laws applied equally to heterosexual and
homosexual Vermonters. Every right but one. Gay
and lesbian Vermonters do not have the right to
call their unions marriage. The fallout was the
least civil public debate in the state in over a
century, since the "wets" and "dries" battled in
the middle of the 1800s. Death threats were made,
epithets were used, not only on the streets and in
the general stores but on the floors of both the
Senate and the House, as the bill was being
debated. Otherwise respectable church leaders
railed against homosexuals and not so respectable
ones organized political action committees vowing
to oust any legislator who voted for the bill.
Five Republican members of the House lost their
seats in primaries. In the general election,
Democrats lost control of the House for the first
time in 14 years, as the Republicans piled up
nearly a 20-vote majority. My own race, for a
sixth term, was the most difficult in my
Four years later, we wonder what the fuss was all
about. Civil unions were never an issue in Vermont
in the 2002 election and will not be this fall.
The intensity of anger and hate has disappeared,
replaced by an understanding that equal rights for
groups previously denied them has no negative
effect on those of us who have always enjoyed
those rights. My marriage has not become weaker.
In fact, the gay and lesbian community has had to
undergo a significant adjustment. Couples who have
been together for many years have had to reexamine
their commitments not only in the light of the
full legal rights that married couples enjoy, but
in light of the full legal responsibilities that
also bind married couples. Same-sex couples in
Vermont pay the marriage penalty when filing
taxes, and are entitled to equal division of
property under Vermont law if they split up. The
state and other major employers no longer
recognize domestic partnerships for health and
other benefits since those benefits are available
for those in civil unions or those in marriages,
no longer for those of either sexual orientation
who are simply living together. Although a
majority of Vermonters opposed the bill when I
signed it, that is no longer true today.
Is there a lesson here for Massachusetts? Perhaps.
The Commonwealth will not collapse today, and the
prognosis, based on Vermont's experience, is good.
Just as the civil rights movement and subsequent
integration began the process of removing painful
stereotypes held by whites about
African-Americans, so does the open declaration
and subsequent demand for equal rights begin to
remove stereotypes about the gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered community. Here are
some facts about gay and lesbian Americans.
·
Like straight Americans, gay and
lesbian Americans are far more concerned about
family matters such as jobs, education, and health
care than they are about sexual matters.
·
Gay Americans are patriotic, serve
in the armed forces, and die in the service of
their country. One of the most extraordinary
people I met when I was running for President was
an 80-year-old gay veteran who had served on the
beach in Normandy during D-day.
·
From a medical point of view, there
is a strong genetic component to being gay or
lesbian. Despite the protestations of the right
wing, there is virtually no scientific evidence
that sexual orientation can be changed, although
we know that throughout history, sexuality both
gay and straight can be repressed, often with
disastrous results.
While it is true that the Bible (largely the Old
Testament) condemns homosexuality in a few places,
it equally condemns eating shellfish. Jesus never
mentions homosexuality. The bottom line is this:
America is grappling with the discarding of old
stereotypes about a group of people who have been
part of our country since America has been a
country. This is a painful process. Massachusetts
hopefully will not have as hard a time as Vermont
did, but the struggle is a real one, and will be
painful for institutions as well as individuals.
All Americans are diminished when we allow
stereotyping to dismiss the worth of fellow
Americans. All Americans are stronger, and the
nation is stronger, when we judge people by who
they are, not what they are.
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