I HAD another post planned for today, but this news is too big to ignore. Since there are others with way more knowledge and experience on this subject (I’m referring to the shooting in the head till dead of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces last night), I’ll just get out of the way and let them talk.
Tag Archives: george bush
Debating Ahmadinejad at Columbia
25 Sep
The New York Daily News cover when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to New York in 2007
A TALL man with white hair, wearing a US-flag print shirt and pants, patrolled the sidewalk at 116th and Broadway. He waved a huge American flag as he marched, in movements that were nearly metronomic in their consistency. Stacks of brochures sat on a bare and rickety table, waiting to be handed out to anyone who didn’t look away quickly enough. Bystanders stared.
I hadn’t been back to my former school almost since I graduated. Returning as an alumna of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the school that sponsored Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s talk here on Monday, I felt the puff of pride that Columbia had not backed down in the face of media pressure. I also felt just a little bit cheated that it was happening now, when I was attending as an outsider, rather than the first time his talk had been announced, in 2006, when I was still a sleep-deprived student.
Communique Editorial Vol. 16 No. 2
23 Oct
Lynne Stewart
IT’S not just terrorism that the United States is at war with—it’s civil liberties. The Military Commission Act of 2006, which George W. Bush signed into law on September 29, establishes a new system of military tribunals to try terrorism suspects. The MCA also bars non-U.S. citizens from challenging their detention in federal courts.
The law formalizes what has been happening in practice since the “war on terror” began: the suspension of habeus corpus, a right the country’s founding fathers deemed important enough to protect in the U.S. Constitution.
A judicial mandate, the writ of habeus corpus orders that a prisoner be brought to court to determine whether he or she has been lawfully put away. In 1798, Thomas Jefferson—who insisted on including habeus corpus in the Constitution—wrote, “The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen.”
The MCA seeks to take away the “great writ,” as it is often called, from anyone the Bush administration claims is an “enemy combatant.”
The definition of an enemy combatant includes not just members of Al-Qaeda, but also lawful permanent residents and American citizens, if Bush so chooses. It can be anyone who “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”
And that’s not the only way that the Bush administration is intimidating those who stand in its way. The recent sentencing hearing of defense lawyer Lynne Stewart brought another victim of the United States’ war on terror into the spotlight. Stewart, a member of the court-appointed defense team for Sheik Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was charged under the 1996 Terrorism Act with four counts of aiding and abetting terrorism.
Her crime? She violated an agreement not to transmit messages from her client to unauthorized people. In June 2000, after meeting Rahman, she called Reuters to discuss his stance on the Egyptian cease-fire.
Stewart did violate an agreement she signed. But her punishment should be proportionate to her action. Violation of the agreement constitutes a civil, not a criminal, offense. So to be hauled in for aiding and abetting terrorism smacks of intimidation in the legal process, something the Bush administration has not been shy about doing.
The New York Times, in its reportage about a private meeting of high-level officials in 2003 on the military commission structure, quoted then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft as saying, “Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history. But at least we had fair procedures for him.”
These fair procedures are now fading away, thanks to George W. Bush. In the Hamdan case, Justice Kennedy said, “The Constitution is best preserved by reliance on standards tested over time and insulated from the pressures of the moment.” The pressures of this moment are ensuring that these standards are being systematically weakened and that the war on terrorism is turning into a war on civil liberties.
This editorial was printed in the second edition(PDF) of the student newspaper of the School of International and Public Affairs, Communiqué, where I was editor-in-chief, in the fall of 2006.
Travelogues
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Watercolour Island
Belize is a land smooth and green, like a bedsheet tugged flat, with an embroidery of palm trees that only wrinkle and bump the landscape.
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Cape Town | Shark-Struck
When confronted by great white sharks a few feet away from our boat, jaws dropped open and a collective “wow” swept the onlookers. We forgot everything we had seen in scary movies and on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and just stared.
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Snake in the grass
One of the seven wonders of the modern world, the limestone structure that is the Kukulcán pyramid looms at the centre of the vast public ground in Chichén Itzá, the ancient Mayan city in the heartland of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
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A walk on the wild side
Most rapids seemed to be named after people who had died or were rescued at the last minute from a terrible fate. Maybe someone long ago had thought that it would add to the thrill of rafting down the river, but to me it seemed rather depressing. I shivered in the sunlight.
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Chasing a Waterfall
“Cookies for the survivors!” yelled Nelson cheerfully as we climbed up a muddy slope made slippery by the driving tropical rain. It was not the right sentiment to warm the hearts of the dozen or so tourists about to voluntarily zip from treetop to treetop 400ft above the ground.
EST / IST 