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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Going After Bergdahl

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Ted Rall

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Why Don’t More Soldiers Walk Away?

American news media portrays Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and his apparent decision to simply walk away from the war in Afghanistan as bizarre and incomprehensible.

I wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time.

From The New York Times:

“Sometime after midnight on June 30, 2009, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl left behind a note in his tent saying he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life. He slipped off the remote military outpost in Paktika Province on the border with Pakistan and took with him a soft backpack, water, knives, a notebook and writing materials, but left behind his body armor and weapons — startling, given the hostile environment around his outpost.”

There’s little doubt. Bergdahl was politicized by what he saw.

“The future is too good to waste on lies,” a 2012 Rolling Stone article quotes an email from Bergdahl to his father. “And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”

Among other traumas, the then 23-year-old Idaho native witnessed an Afghan child run over by a U.S. Army vehicle. His fellow soldiers, he recalled, didn’t seem to care.

The Times paints a portrait of a soldier who was alienated, burned out and possibly a victim of PTSD. “He wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds,” the paper quotes Cody Full, a member of Sergeant Bergdahls platoon, in an interview arranged by the Republican Party. “He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there [in Afghanistan], learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto.”

Bergdahl’s walk-away echoes Tim O’Brien’s allegorical 1978 novel “Going After Cacciato,” in which a U.S. soldier serving in Vietnam goes AWOL, determined to walk all the way to Paris. His buddies go after him. It soon becomes clear that Cacciato’s comrades are less interested in catching him than in following his example.

All military forces contend with deserters, and the United States is no exception. “Army desertion rates have fluctuated since the Vietnam War — when they peaked at 5 percent. In the 1970s they hovered between 1% and 3%, which is up to three out of every 100 soldiers. Those rates plunged in the 1980s and early 1990s to between 2 and 3 out of every 1,000 soldiers,” according to NBC News. By 2007, the fourth year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the rate was up 80%, to nine out of 1,000.

450,000 U.S. troops deserted during Vietnam.

Few deserters pull a Cacciato, opting out in the combat zone. Instead, while on leave, most just fail to report back.

Given the conditions faced by many U.S. soldiers in war zones, it’s surprising that more don’t lose it and take off.

Contrary to standard practice among armed forces in the West for hundreds of years, American soldiers are assigned to repeated, long combat tours without sufficient time between missions to recuperate. They are often underequipped and, as was apparently the case in Bergdahl’s unit, poorly disciplined and rarely given any context for their operations.

Then there’s the nature of the wars themselves.

Since 1945, since they weren’t authorized by Congress, every single one of America’s wars have been illegal. They’ve all been wars of aggression — neither the Koreans nor the Vietnamese nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans posed any threat to the United States. And they’ve all featured aspects of what historians dubbed “total war” after World War II: combat in which civilian casualties are not regrettable accidents, but strategically considered and intentional.

When soldiers become vets, they’re cast out into the streets, where many become homeless.

It doesn’t take long for the truth to hit home. All but the stupidest active-duty soldiers realize that they’re peasant mercenaries for a cruel and uncaring empire.

Why don’t more guys (and women) pull a Bergdahl? The main incentive to remain at their posts has to be the unremitting hostility of the locals — something Bergdahl no doubt experienced during five long years of captivity.

(Ted Rall, Staff Cartoonist and Writer for Pando Daily, is the author of the upcoming “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Sick Days as “Job Killer”

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Ted Rall

Sick Days as Job Killer

There they go again.

Whenever anyone floats an idea that would improve the lives of workers — shorter hours, higher wages, or better working conditions — employers claim they’ll be forced to fire workers.

They’re always wrong. But they never shut up.

The California Chamber of Commerce, which represents business, has elevated this argument to a media event. This year’s annual CCOC “Job Killer” list features 26 bills the organization would like to kill. (Last year, the CCOC killed 35 out of 36 pro-worker bills on its hit list.)

Among the “killer 26” is AB 1522, sponsored by Lorena Gonzalez, a San Diego Democrat. Gonzalez’s bill would guarantee California workers at least three paid sick days a year. (The exact formula is one sick hour for every 30 hours worked.)

To hear employers whine, you’d think that letting employees stay home sick less than one percent of the year — as opposed to dragging themselves to their jobs where they may infect coworkers and customers — would destroy the capitalist system.

Assemblyman Donald P. Wagner (R-Irvine) called the bill an “ill-considered, heavy-handed, one-sided piece of legislation,” Melanie Mason reports in The Times.

A similar law recently went into effect in New York over the objections of the city’s billionaire then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who argued that sick leave laws “hurt small businesses and stifle job creation.”

But there’s a problem with the Chamber of Commerce “job killer” talking point: it’s baseless. There’s no evidence that requiring companies to provide paid sick leave hurts business. A year and a half after such a law went into effect in Connecticut, for example, a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that “the impact of the new law on business has been modest…nearly two-thirds said it had led to no change or an increase of less than 2% in their overall costs. About another 12% didn’t know how much their costs had increased.”

“Virtually none [of the companies] reported reducing wages,” the authors wrote. “About 90% did not reduce their workers’ hours; 85% did not find it necessary to raise prices.”

Job killer? Job annoyer, at most.

Meanwhile, Seattle enacted a major increase in the minimum wage, to $15 per hour, prompting predictions that similar wage hikes could spread across the nation. As usual, pro-business extremists are predicting doom. ” Seattle’s economy will be hurt by this policy and so will some low skill workers who will lose their jobs thanks to the people claiming to be helping them,” Jeffrey Dorfman writes in Forbes.

In the real world, however, minimum wage increases have not caused job losses — even in isolated hamlets like SeaTac, Washington, where restaurants and other low-wage employers could seemingly pick up and move a few miles away.

Courtesy of the big business lobby, that’s the screw-the-workers propaganda machine for you. Why let facts get in the way of the eternal quest for an extra buck?

Recent Work for Pando Daily

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Ted Rall

Here, in reverse chronological order, is a summary of art and writing I’ve done for Pando Daily recently:

Cartoon: Disrupting Darwinism: AT&T offers $50,000 to stop cellphone users getting hit by cars

Cartoon: Apple’s virtuous cycle of post-Steve letdowns

Essay: A lot of Europeans want to be forgotten

Cartoon: Google finally admits its workforce is overwhelmingly white and male

Essay: The 9/11 cheese plate goes, the 9/11 gift shop stays: Proof of social media’s limited power

Essay: Fact checking Uber’s claims about driver income. Shockingly, they’re not true

 

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Elegy of the Hero Cat

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Ted Rall

No Ball Chasing in Hell

 

Last week the world Internet took notice of a “hero cat” that pounced upon and drove off a dog that attacked a 4-year-old boy in Bakersfield. Sadly, the boy required 10 stitches to his leg.

Television networks around the globe showcased images of the large tabby mix being pat, scratched and generally coddled as a reward for his behavior. The at even was invited to “throw” out the first pitch at a baseball game for the Bakersfield Blaze, a minor league club.

What happened on that suburban driveway was probably better explained by the psychological theory of “transferred aggression,” but the world Internet and the media went with the anthropomorphized “hero cat” instead.

Now comes the news that the dog, an 8-month-old Labrador-Chow mix, has been euthanized at the request of local authorities.

If I were a nicer person, which means not a cartoonist, and/or not a cats rule/dogs drool person, I probably would have given a silent “huh” or “too bad” — because, truly, for the dog’s owner, this really is awful — and turned the page or scrolled to the next story.

Since those qualifiers don’t apply to me, I came up with this cartoon instead.

There was something about the satisfied expressing on Tara the Hero Cat’s face that inspired this piece. (Don’t tell me cats don’t smile; it’s been proven that animals can and do.) She looked smug in that way that only cats can be. Is any animal more capable of expressing pure contentment?

So rather than revel in the maudlin reality, I went with the Tom and Jerry (I know, mice aren’t dogs, but you get the idea) conceit of an eternal conflict between species. Could there be a starker example of pure victory than this one?

To dog lovers who will no doubt point out that (a) I am mean and (b) this is hardly the most important story in the world, I plead guilty. I toil in the service of that most wicked of all muses, Humor. Sometimes she demands a sacrifice in the form of discomfort and annoyance on the part of some people (dog people) so that the rest of us (cat people) may guffaw all the louder. I know, dogs are not evil. Not even the dog that bit that kid (though it’s hard to argue such a violent creature should be allowed to roam freely through a neighborhood full of humans).

If anything, this is a comment on the pure id that is cat.

An approving comment.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Reparations for Blacks? For an Exceptionally Vicious Nation, Just a Start

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Ted Rall

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In the latest of periodic revivals of the argument that the United States ought to issue reparations to African-Americans as compensation for slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic: “Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

That discrimination, poverty and genocide are at the heart of the black American experience is not in doubt — at least not in the minds of people of moderate intelligence and good will. That tens of millions of blacks continue, “even” after the election of the first black president, to suffer systemic racism along with its attendant symptoms — schools starved of funding, grinding poverty, police brutality, a viciously skewed judiciary, bigotry in every aspect of life from the workplace to housing to romance — is obvious to all who care to open their eyes the slightest bit.

Reparations are obviously justified. Moreover, they are normative; in the United States, aggrieved parties routinely seek and receive compensation for their injuries and economic losses via class-action lawsuits and the occasional U.S. Treasury payout. During the 1990s, for example, Congress issued $20,000 reparations checks to 82,210 Japanese-Americans and their heirs in order to compensate them for shipping them to concentration camps during World War II (and, in many cases, stealing their homes and businesses).

Better ridiculously late than never; better insultingly small than nothing.

Other U.S. reparations precedents include North Carolina residents forcibly sterilized during the mid 20th century as part of a nationwide eugenics program targeted at minorities and the mentally disabled (they are receiving $50,000 each), victims of the infamous Tuskegee untreated-syphilis experiment ($24,000 to $178,000), and blacks killed in the 1923 mass lynching at Rosewood, Florida ($800,000 for those forced to flee).

Coates admits that complications arise from his proposal: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?”

Should blacks who are not descendants of American slaves, like President Obama, receive reparations? What about wealthy blacks — should a wealthy black person receive a payout while members of other races go hungry? Should poor blacks get more than rich blacks? What about “mixed race” people — if your father was black and your mother was white, should you get half a check?

These are good questions, but as a white man (not descended from Americans who lived in the United States during slavery), I don’t enjoy the political standing to ponder them, much less answer them.

Whatever the details of a theoretical reparation scheme, my only objection to the idea overall would be that no amount of money would or could be enough. Reading through Coates’ survey of centuries of savage rape, abuse and degradation, one can’t help but ask, how could $100,000 make up for a single ancestor turned away from restaurants or rejected for promotions or unable to attend college due to the color of her skin? $1 million? $10 million?

Not that doing the right thing is going to happen any time soon. “For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for ‘appropriate remedies,’ Coates writes.

The bill “has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor,” he says, because “we are not interested.”

Well, I’m interested. And I’d be paying, not getting.

Coates is, if anything, too polite. Congress’ disinterest in trying to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, he says, “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential.”

That existential something, of course, is that the United States and its economic infrastructure are the products of so much brutality, stealing, lying and exploitation, of so many hundreds of millions of people not only within “our” borders but — as the center of a vast economic and military empire — that it would not only be impossible to compensate all of its victims without going broke many times over, reparations would force American political leaders to concede that we are indeed an exceptional nation, if only in our violence and perfidy.

One place to start compiling lists of victims and heirs to consider for reparations would be Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.” All 49 states (except Hawaii) belonged to Native Americans; any fair assessment of compensation would give the total real estate value back to them, plus four centuries of interest and penalties for pain, suffering, and opportunity cost. Hawaii was stolen from native Hawaiians by an invasion force of U.S. Marines.

Chinese railroad workers were abused, discriminated against and in some cases murdered; America’s freight travels the rails they laid down. Except for slavery, Latinos too have suffered many of the same horrors, and still do, as Coates enumerates. There are the victims of America’s countless wars of colonial conquest in North America and around the world: Filipino patriots tortured to death in the early 20th century, two million Vietnamese, Koreans, Afghans, Iraqis and Yemenis — honestly, this is like one of those Oscar speeches where there isn’t enough time to thank everyone who made this “wonderful” exceptional country possible.

By all means, cut everyone a check, then close up shop.

(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Pando Daily: Fact checking Uber’s claims about driver income. Shockingly, they’re not true

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Ted Rall

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

uber-surgeAs I wrote the other day, the traditional taxi industry is going to war with Uber and other ride-sharing start-ups.

Uber’s response makes a diplomatic solution approximately as likely as paying $10 for a ride on a rainy New Year’s Eve.

As Pando’s James Robinson explained yesterday, CEO Travis Kalanick is now portraying his company as engaged in an epic battle for good and evil in which everything is at stake, after which nothing will ever be the same… you’ve seen this movie before.

“You’re changing the way cities work, and that’s fundamentally a third rail,” Re/code quotes Kalanick. We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi,” he continued. “Nobody likes him, he’s not a nice character, but he’s so woven into the political machinery and fabric that a lot of people owe him flavors.”

Uber’s demand? Nothing short of unconditional surrender. “We have to bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.”

If Kalanick sounds a little George W. Bush-y with his “gonna smoke ‘em out” trash-talking, he’s downright Dick Cheney on WMDs when it comes to chatting up the dogs of taxi warfare.

But for all the attention Kalanick’s comments got yesterday, one other aspect of his rhetoric has passed almost unnoticed by the major tech press.

On Tuesday, Uber released a statement claiming that UberX “drivers around the world are seizing Uber’s economic opportunity by building small businesses for community needs long forgotten by the taxi industry: high quality, safe, reliable and affordable transportation options. At its current rate, the Uber platform is generating 20,000 new driver jobs every month. UberX driver partners are small business entrepreneurs demonstrating across the country that being a driver is sustainable and profitable…the median income on UberX is more than $90,000/year/driver in New York and more than $74,000/year/driver in San Francisco.”

Amazing. And yet untrue. Some drivers claim they’re working for less than minimum wage.

Time magazine points at the weasel words “business income.” Which ain’t, you know, what you actually get to keep. Uber’s “figure excludes many of the costs of running a business, including gas, insurance, parking, maintenance and repairs and the original sale or lease price of the car which can take some hefty bites out of the driver’s take home pay.”

“So the truth still lies somewhere in the vast expanse between minimum wage and $90,000, and no doubt is as varied as the businesses being run by the drivers’ themselves.”

Uber also claims spectacular revenues: “The Uber platform generates $2.8 billion per year for the U.S. economy, and is growing.” But if you follow the supplied link to the “ECONorthwest Analysis May 23, 2014″ that supposedly backs up this claim, www.econw.com, you will not find the word “Uber” or any mention of the company’s purported $2.8 billion contribution to America’s economic wellbeing. The link is merely a front page for a consulting firm.

I also searched ECONorthwest’s list of publications. There is nothing on this website about Uber. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence (despite the missing link) to support the $2.8 billion figure. Which isn’t surprising, given that the U.S. taxi industry generates an estimated total of $10 billion annually. Uber is growing, but it probably isn’t collecting 22% of the national take.

The key is the weasel phrase “generates… for the… economy.” This appears to be a stab at what economists call “economic activity,” not revenues, but the much larger multiplier effect. Under this deliberately confusing formulation, an Uber driver who buys a cup of coffee at Starbucks has just generated $2.40 for the U.S. economy.

In addition to his desire to take over the world (its city streets anyway), Kalanick may just be running for the post vacated by the late Steve Jobs: smart, wildly grandiose, grandmaster of bluster and bullshit. We’ll see if he gets as far.

[Illustration: Brad Jonas for Pando]

Ted Rall at LeftForum NYC (with Stephanie McMillan)

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Ted Rall

I will be speaking twice at LeftForum in NYC this coming weekend, Saturday May 31st and Sunday June 1st, each time with my friend and fellow cartoonist Stephanie McMillan.

( I am also happy to report that Stephanie will be taking over my cartoon “Left Coast” for the Pasadena Weekly and my editorial cartoon for the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News. My new position as Staff Cartoonist and Writer for Pando Daily made it necessary for me to step aside from these, and as much as will miss hearing from readers in Pasadena and Central Pennsylvania, I leave knowing that they’ll enjoy Stephanie’s work at least as much as mine.)

Sat 05:00pm – 06:50pm
Revolution or Omnicide: Our Choice
Room 1.89 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York 524 West 59th st, New York, NY 10019

Sun 10:00am – 11:50am
Comics for Revolution
Room L2.82 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York 524 West 59th st, New York, NY 10019

Please note: Admission is PAID only. Check out the LeftForum website for information.

Pando Daily: By agreeing to redact name of CIA chief, 6000 journalists reveal themselves as pathetic, cowardly hacks

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Ted Rall

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

cowardOn Sunday, the White House accidentally leaked the name of the Kabul station chief — the CIA’s top-ranked spy in Afghanistan — to a press pool of about 6,000 reporters around the world who received a guest list of dignitaries who met Obama during his hit-it-and-quit-it visit to the war zone over the weekend.

“The name and title of the station chief were removed in a later pool report that urged reporters to ‘please use this list’ of attendees at the president’s briefing instead of the previous one,” reports The New York Times.

American media outlets agreed to the government’s request to forget what they’d seen.

Why the hell didn’t they publish the name?

The Washington Post said it was “withholding the official’s name at the request of White House officials who warned publication of his name could put the official and his family in danger.”

That’s untrue and illogical on several levels.

First: Either the guy’s cover has been blown or it hasn’t. Even if all 6,000 journos (plus whoever) agree to keep the spook’s ID on the down low, it’s too late. His name is out in the world. If Langley cares one whit for operational security, they’ll pull him out anyway.

Second: By several accounts, Mr. CIA Kabul was already well-known in Afghanistan. Trust me when I say, anything the American ex-pat community knows, the Taliban knows in greater detail. If they wanted to kill him, he’d already be dead.

Third: Does Langley really believe that 6,000-plus random civilians can be trusted with CIA secrets? If so, they’re even dumber than we thought.

If reporters were doing their jobs, they’d try to access government secrets, including classified information such as the identities of CIA operatives. When news like that falls into their laps, as in this instance, media organizations have an ethical obligation to their readers to disseminate it. They are, after all, the eyes and ears of those same readers.

Might someone die? Sure. That’s always a possibility when information about people is revealed in public. When a woman’s address appears next to her name in a public notice about her buying a house, her stalker might find her and kill her. Why should a CIA agent — a man who, incidentally, presides over the administration of an expansive torture facility and concentration camp — receive greater consideration than a female civilian?

And when did it become OK for the US media to ask permission from the US government before telling us what they know?

Pando Daily: NBC’s batso-nutso marketing machine demonizes Edward Snowden

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Ted Rall

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

snowdenfeature

“Demonizing the personality of anyone who challenges political power has been a long-standing tactic used by Washington, including by the media,” Glenn Greenwald notes in his new book “No Place to Hide.”

Confirming this truism out of the gate was establishment hack Michael Kinsley, slagging Greenwald (in a “book review,” inexplicably) as a “self-righteous sourpuss” and “a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky” as though Greenwald’s bromance potential had anything to do with the NSA and its illegal spy programs against Americans.

The Beltway junta’s transparent “kill the messenger” campaign of distraction launched with CBS anchor Bob Schieffer’s oldsplaining (“just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us“) and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen’s trans-baiting (“a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood“).

Now the Snowden-bashing continues with — not a little ironically — NBC’s marketing ahead of its Brian Williams interview with Snowden himself last night.

“INSIDE THE MIND OF EDWARD SNOWDEN,” blares the peacock’s hype machine.

Because you’d have to be crazy to do what he did.

But you know what’s really batso-nutso? NBC’s cognitive dissonance. As cogs in the machine and sister network to primary Obama media organ MSNBC, the network must rip apart the disgruntled spy (watch for Williams’ “objective” snottitude). On the other hand, the profit imperative forces NBC to present Snowden as the undeniably important figure he is.

Sooo confusing.

You can’t have it both ways — well, you can, but strong meds are advised.

For cheese thicker than you’ll find in Philly, check out NBC’s hashtag poll, “Edward Snowden: #Traitor or #Patriot?,” in which viewers (and online readers) are asked to weigh in on their view of the exiled whistleblower, as though there weren’t professional, scientifically sampled opinion polls answering the same question.

Why so binary? I vote for more choices:

#traitriot

#lenscrafters

#bananarepublic

#dunno

#whaaa?

On the “Today” show’s “Orange Room” (NBC, duh), Carson Daly middleagesplains what’s on the Internet to television viewers who hopefully won’t be so tempted by what they see that they’ll stop watching TV. (For a full dose of this inanity, watch here. Warning: Not Safe for Brains.)

This morning, Daly was in fine form, sharing exactly two (2) posts from social media. So. Fair: one #patriot, one #traitor. Naturally, the #traitor receives added establishment oomph from Secretary of State John Kerry:

If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today. We’d be delighted for him to come back. And he should come back and — and that’s what a patriot would do. A patriot would not run away and look for refuge in Russia or Cuba or some other country. A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people. But he’s refused to do that to this date at least. The fact is that he can come home, but he’s a fugitive from justice which is why he is not being permitted to fly around the world. It’s that simple. And he knows it… Let him come back and make his case. If he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice. 

No countercomments allowed by pro-Snowden boldface names.

Oh yeah, the “American system of justice.” Where due process is guaranteed and the chance to make your case directly to the people is always guaranteed, fair and square. Unless you get drone-assassinated like Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who never fired a shot at an American, or his teenage son. Or summarily executed, like Osama bin Laden. Or sentenced to a ridiculously long prison term for a minor weapons offense in a foreign country, like John Walker Lindh. Or locked away and tortured like PFC Chelsea Manning, who revealed U.S. war crimes to WikiLeaks.

Let us all praise the American system of justice, where 97 percent of defendants in federal cases are coerced into pleading guilty, including many who are innocent, because prosecutors lard on additional charges that would otherwise add decades to sentences if convicted.

By the way, Secretary Kerry — this rate is virtually identical to those of China and Russia.

Don’t expect Brian Williams to bring that up.

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