It’s tomorrow! Tune in 6-9 am East Coast time (check airamericaradio.com for local listings) as I fill in as guest co-host for “Morning Sedition” on the national Air America network. I’ll be co-hosting with Mark Riley as we discuss the Terry Schiavo case, the revolution in Kyrgyzstan and other breaking stories. At 8:30 am, I’ll interview fellow Village Voice/ATTITUDE 1 cartoonist Ward Sutton.
See you then.
A Better Idea
Clueless New York Times centist (sorry for the redundancy!) Tom Friedman used his column to note that he’s shocked! shocked! shocked! at recent revelations that US troops have murdered at least 26 Afghans, Iraqis and other detainees under torture at facilities through Bush’s spreading gulag system. Here’s the money quote:
President Bush just appointed Karen Hughes, his former media adviser, to head up yet another U.S. campaign to improve America’s image in the Arab world. I have a suggestion: Just find out who were the cabinet, C.I.A. and military officers on whose watch these 26 homicides occurred and fire them. That will do more to improve America’s image in the Arab-Muslim world than any ad campaign, which will be useless if this sort of prisoner abuse is shrugged off. Republicans in Congress went into overdrive to protect the sanctity of Terri Schiavo’s life.
Got news for you, big guy. Those 26 homicides occured on the watch of Attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who authored the memos building a legal case for torture, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who requested that they be made even more stringent, and former Texas Governor George W. Bush, who repeatedly signaled that torture was A-OK. Think those guys are going to be fired?
But I have a suggestion of my own, one that might curtail incidents of torture in US custody: Just find out who’s involved with torture of foreign nationals and do what we do–send them to the countries whose nationals they murdered for prosecution. Killed a Jordanian? Off to Jordan you go to await trial. This would be consistent with our insistence on the right to prosecute foreign nationals for crimes against American citizens, and it would prove that we respect foreign countries as much as ourselves.
