I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Sequester-related budget cuts to air traffic control could cause big delays at Los Angeles International Airport.
Self-Radicalized, Redux
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Now that “self-radicalized” is entering the lexicon thanks to Obama, my cartoon from 2010 seems apropos.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Closing Guantánamo Is Easy
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Obama Doesn’t Need Congress. He Needs Travelocity.
Guantánamo is complicated. Everyone says so.
Everyone is wrong.
There’s nothing complicated about it. Guantánamo should be closed.
Mainstream media pundits don’t get it. They suggest a lame hodgepodge of solutions: a few repatriations here, a few extraordinary renditions there, maybe convincing some allies to take the victims of our stupid “war on terrorism.”
Immoral and idiotic.
All of the detainees — every last one of them, the schlubs who have been officially cleared by the Pentagon and, yes, even the scary dudes the government insists are “the worst of the worst” — can, should and — if the United States Constitution means anything at all — must be released.
Here.
In the United States.
I don’t find myself saying this very often, but President Obama is finally doing talking about doing something right. Granted, he let five years pass before he took the problem seriously. It took a hunger strike, now entering its fourth month, which could begin claiming the lives of some of the more than 100 participating POWs, to get his attention. Even now, he is violating the detainees’ human rights and the standards of the American Medical Association by violently shoving feeding tubes up their noses to —irony alert! — save their lives. Still, better late than never: Obama (finally) says he wants to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise by closing this monstrosity.
“Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” he told a news conference. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us, in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”
So close it. You don’t need Congress. All you need is a Travelocity account.
When Obama became president in 2009, there were 245 prisoners at Gitmo. Now there are 166. (None have been released since 2011, which demoralized the remaining prisoners to the point that many are willing to die from hunger.) Some of these wretches been there since the concentration camp — look it up, there is no better term for it — opened 12 years ago.
It’s been ages. Three inmates arrived at Gitmo as children. As they passed through adolescence and entered adulthood, they were tortured, abused, and denied basic human rights by American soldiers and CIA agents, left to rot in American dog cages. (At least 28 children have done time there.)
American officials worry that their experience may have radicalized them. How could it not? If it hasn’t, they must be insane.
The horrors are just beginning to come out. A Spanish investigation censored in U.S. media found that American soldiers have abused Gitmo prisoners with “blows to [the] testicles,” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep,” being “inoculated…through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts,'” smearing feces on prisoners and (of course) waterboarding.
Actionable intelligence obtained under torture: none.
This was in 2009. Under Obama.
Few Americans are aware of how the vast majority of the so-called detainees got there. Mostly, they were sold. Yes, like slaves: Afghan warlords and Pakistani tribesmen sold anyone they could find, especially Arabs and other foreigners fleeing the 2001 US invasion, to the CIA and the US military for bounties ranging between $3,000 and $25,000. Hundreds of men and boys shipped to America’s new gulag were innocent, simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. As for the rest, the majority were never a threat to America. Their jihad was against the governments of U.S. frenemies like China, Pakistan and Yemen.
The 166 survivors — several have committed suicide, and some deaths classified as suicides were almost certainly murdered under torture using an obscure technique called “dryboarding” — can be classified into four categories:
Eighty-six have been cleared for transfer or release but can’t be sent back to their home country — Yemen, for most of them — because, as political dissidents, they might be — irony alert! — tortured or killed.
The Obama administration considers 47 too dangerous to release, but cannot prosecute them because there isn’t enough evidence against them, or the case against them has been compromised by the fact that they were tortured.
Twenty-four are deemed prosecutable but no one can say when a trial might take place.
Six have been charged and three have been convicted in the kangaroo court “military commission” system invented by George W. Bush’s legal team to prosecute “unlawful combatants,” a phony term that doesn’t exist under U.S. or international law.
Obama should stop blaming Congress. Yes, the Republicans did refuse to allocate funds to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the United States. But Obama signed their legislation into law. He owns this mess.
All 166 men should be offered the choice of a ticket back home or permanent residency in the United States. After all, what are we talking about? 166 one-way tickets. Even if we fly these guys first-class, $250,000 isn’t going to break the bank. Obama is worth about $12 million. Who needs taxpayer money? He could cover that personally.
Consider it retroactive payment for that 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Under the American system of justice, everyone — citizen or noncitizen — is innocent until proven guilty. 163 of these guys clearly can’t be proven guilty, and the three that were found guilty obviously didn’t get a fair trial. The rules might have been different had the Bush and Obama administrations classified them as POWs, but he didn’t want to give them the rights that they were entitled to under the Geneva Conventions. The US has been having it both ways for 12 long years. This disgusting farce needs to come to an end now.
Imagine the visual: Obama flies to Cuba, personally apologizes to each man, hands him a big check for $10 million, throws open the gates of the camp and gives it back to Cuba (from which we stole it in the first place). Hell, let them hitch a ride back to Andrews on Air Force One. Open bar!
Would some of these ex-Gitmo victims join the fight against the United States? Maybe. After all, 60% of American ex-cons reoffend. In a free society, that’s a risk that we take.
Still, you’ve got to think that in a country full of security cameras, with two or three overfunded intelligence agencies and countless domestic police apparatuses, it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the former prisoners of Guantánamo with job training, phone taps, GPS trackers on their cars and two or three agents each to follow them around and make sure that they don’t get into trouble.
And don’t forget that footage of Obama apologizing.
Can you imagine how pissed off the Al Qaeda guys would be?
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
2 Students from Kazakhstan Arrested in Conjunction with Boston Marathon Bombing
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BOSTON (CBS/AP) – Boston police say three additional suspects have been taken into custody in the Boston Marathon bombings investigation. Their names have not been released. Police said more details will be revealed later today. According to CBS News, the three people arrested are friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Two will be charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements. They are not U.S. citizens. According to WBZ-TV’s Karen Anderson, their names are Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev. Both are originally from Kazakhstan and attended the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The third suspect, according to CBS News, is an American citizen and he will be charged with making false statements.
Once again, a Central Asian connection. Maybe, just maybe, people will finally start paying attention to this region I’ve been writing about and reporting from for two decades.
Daryl Finally Reponds to CagleGate
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Like a politician trying to sneak out those sleazy statements that come out late Friday so that they will appear in a Saturday newspaper that nobody reads, cartoon kingpin Daryl finally addressed CagleGate — the outcry that followed the discovery that the ethics-challenged former editorial cartoonist is selling two versions of the same exact cartoon, with just a few words changed so that they can appeal either to the liberal or the conservative side of the political spectrum. (Bear in mind, this follows a multitude of sins: sleazy business deals, bottom-feeding and scabbing, censorship, coddling and encouraging plagiarists, and even publicly calling for other cartoonists to behave unethically.) Actual quote: “It amuses me to reuse old cartoons; I don’t find much opportunity to do it, but when I do, I chuckle to myself and take an extra hour for lunch.”
Perhaps the most remarkable argument here was that editors don’t take editorial cartooning seriously, so editorial cartoonists shouldn’t take themselves seriously either. To which I would answer: (a) if editors didn’t take the profession seriously, why are they doling out millions of dollars for editorial cartoons every year? and (b) maybe we need to take ourselves a little more seriously.
As promised when this remarkable piece of spin and dissembling hit the Internet on Saturday, here is my response to a few choice lines:
This week I drew an unusual cartoon that garnered a crazy response from my outraged, cartoonist colleagues.
“Crazy”? Who’s the real nut here? The scores of editorial cartoonists who find Daryl’s behavior cynical beyond belief? Or the one cartoonist in American history – the first ever – to try to strip the politics out of political cartooning, to try to sell the same cartoon to both Democratic and Republican newspapers?
I drew this last Sunday:
I got no response from editors or other cartoonists to this cartoon, but I got such a strong reaction from readers against the cartoon, with many well reasoned arguments, that I changed my mind – something that doesn’t happen much in this profession. (The comments on my Facebook page are representative of the overall comments I received). So I posted a revised version of the cartoon on Monday. I learned that Tsarnaev was given his Miranda rights shortly before I posted the revised cartoon, so I doubt that this second cartoon got reprinted much.
As with so many things, Daryl’s response was a dishonest attempt to recast history in order to put him in a better light. Here’s what he said at the time: “I remember when the Miranda decision came down in the 1960′s, on a 5-4 vote. It was controversial for a long time; the only area of the law where ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ didn’t hold true. I got a large enough sampling of e-mails in response to the cartoon (and you can see from the Facebook comments as well) that I realized the Miranda decision no longer seems to be controversial.” In other words, “well reasoned arguments” had nothing to do with it. Like Dick Morris, the pollster who advised Bill Clinton when was the best time for him and his family to take a vacation, Cagle poll-tested the cartoon and found it wanting. Remember, that his defense.
The second version is the same as the first, but instead of “none of them” deserving to be read their Miranda Warning, the revised cartoon says “all of them” should get the warning. I’ve changed my mind before, not often, and usually over a longer period of time, but I won’t go back into the archive to delete the old cartoons. I posted them, I should live with my history. So both cartoons are still posted. (My old cartoons supporting the run up to war in Iraq are still posted too – I’m more embarrassed by those.)
It is standard operating procedure for rogues to describe their nefarious actions as motivated by integrity. In this case, he says he’s taking responsibility for his mistake by refusing to memoryhole the old, bad, wrong version. The problem is, Daryl will happily sell both versions of the cartoon. If he had really changed his mind, he would refuse to distribute the old one. Or he would mark the old one in some way as to indicate that he no longer stood by that opinion and that it was in the archives for no other reason than historic interest. But anyway, given the fact that only one word changed in this cartoon, the appropriate action would have been to delete the older version. After all, the history of the change is online in his blog and in other places. The only reason to put the old one in the archives, is if you plan to sell it again. Which he clearly does.
I remember when the Miranda decision came down in the 1960′s, on a 5-4 vote. It was controversial for a long time; the only area of the law where “ignorance of the law is no excuse” didn’t hold true. Liberals like it, conservatives still don’t like it. I decided to disagree with the talking heads at Fox News and I changed my mind to agree with my readers and conclude that the Miranda decision should no longer be controversial – it has become a part of our national fabric. Most of the responses conflate reading the Miranda warning to the suspect with the suspect’s overall civil rights; I have come to the conclusion that is a good thing. (I really do pay attention to the arguments that readers send to me.)
See above. So interesting that he keeps using the word “controversial.” And so revelatory. Like any other political thinker, an editorial cartoonist takes stands on various issues. As far as I know, Daryl Cagle is the only one who overtly crowdsources his own political opinions. As far as everyone else is concerned, if they don’t like the Miranda decision, they say so and they let the cards fall where they may. Frankly, any editorial cartoonist who worries about being unpopular should get out of the business.
Some cartoonists wrote that I must surely be lying about my reason for changing the cartoon, because the idea that I would change my mind was simply not credible. Others called for me to be punished for my breach of the unwritten laws of cartoon ethics. Some demanded that I remove the old version of the cartoon from my archive, as I would do with a cartoon that was revised to correct a spelling error; the idea that an editor could purchase and print both versions of the cartoon, with two different opinions, was repugnant. Bloggers and journalism sites reported on the cartoon controversy.
Yes, the cartoon police really do exist.
No they don’t, but Daryl Cagle personally is a one-man justification for recruiting such a force. Like most other cartoonists, I spend most of my time focused on my own work. It’s only when you have some butthead crapping all over everything that is good and decent that you have to put down your pen and speak out. The idea that Cagle might change his mind was quite credible. What made his story incredible was the fact that he continue to sell both versions of the cartoon. And here’s my favorite part:
I know this all sounds unbelievable, but I’m not exaggerating. It is fascinating that editorial cartoonists have such a different perspective on their own work than editors and readers do. The cartoonists take themselves far more seriously than anyone else takes them.
I don’t even know where to start with this.
Why do anything if you don’t take it seriously? Yes, I admit it, I think editorial cartooning very seriously. It’s all I have ever wanted to do since I was a little kid. I still get an incredible thrill when I see my work in print. Some of the most amazing artwork I have ever seen has been in this medium. Its potential has yet to be achieved. No one has ever drawn the perfect editorial cartoon, and I plan to spend the rest of my life in a vain attempt to try.
I suspect that Daryl’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t take his own work seriously, it’s that he doesn’t view editorial cartooning as his life’s work. He is a businessman first and foremost. His business is to aggregate cartoons. This business model, beginning in the 1990s, was to collect the cartoonists who were unable to get syndicated by the five major syndicates, aggregate them into a package to be sold to individual newspapers, pay the cartoonists a pittance, undercut the syndicates by offering 100 cartoons for the price of one good one, and flood the market. He takes that job very very seriously.
Fortunately for editorial cartoonists and for readers, so do a lot of editorial page editors. Many of them are still willing to pay $20 a week for one high-quality syndicated editorial cartoonist feature as opposed to $50 a week for a package containing 100 low-quality cartoons. They know the difference and they figure that their readers know the difference too.
Even if you take Daryl at his word, even if he’s right that editors don’t take editorial cartoons very seriously, what is he asking us to do, stop caring? Abandon ethics? Forget about working hard to do the best possible work that we can? Pretty much. Because that benefits him. Well, I reject that. I think it’s important for us to take ourselves seriously. After all, if we don’t, who will?
Reviewing the Competition
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Either this week or next week, I plan to write a column about the issue of jealousy. Or envy. The two are not the same, obviously, but not everyone knows that. The reason I bring this up, the reason I’ve been thinking about it, is that I have mentioned the jobs and awards that certain cartoonists have earned in conjunction with my criticism of their work. Am I jealous of them? Not of their careers, certainly not of their work, but I do think it’s relevant to point out when people get praise that they don’t deserve at the same time that others who do better work are ignored. It shows that the system isn’t working. In the meantime, I thought I would give some critiques of cartoons that came out over the last day or two.
Alas, the benighted form of the obituary cartoon once again rears its ugly head. How long did it take Randy Bish to Photoshop this thing? Personally, I bet I could do the whole thing in under three minutes. Not that time of execution determines whether or not a cartoon is good, but man, this time it really shows. Once again, here is my critique of the obituary cartoon: it doesn’t say anything. Not only is it hardly revealing of anything, considering the fact that we already know that George Jones is dead without even reading the cartoon, but the cartoons doesn’t even point out anything about him that we would find interesting.
My problem here is less with the execution than with the dishonest politics. Steve Breen is a nice guy and I consider him a friend, but as a self-defined Republican with a brain, he has to indulge in some cognitive dissonance. 10 years after the US invasion of Iraq, it is widely understood that there was no intelligence failure whatsoever. The Bush Administration was never misled by the CIA or anyone else. They knew that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In fact, they repeatedly pressured the CIA to give them evidence that didn’t exist. It’s time for Republicans and other defenders of the Bush years to stop talking about intelligence failures and admit what really happened: that Bush lied us into war.
Here my complaint is about the format. This sort of metaphor using big block letters is so out of date, it’s hard to imagine that anybody under the age of 75 would be moved by it.
Since I have been picking on Nate Beeler, it’s nice to be able to point to this one as an example of a cartoon that I quite enjoyed. This is a point that can’t possibly be made enough: Pres. Obama has largely continued the George W. Bush legacy. Granted, since the cartoonist is a Republican is a chance that the point that he was making was that this validates Bush. Whatever. What matters is that the point is solid and that it’s based on truth.
Clay Bennett used to be one of the hardest hitting cartoonists anywhere, and this one harkens back to those days. I’m shocked that he didn’t get into a lot of trouble over this one. Just fantastic. My only quibble would be, as an editor, I would’ve replaced “it makes sense” with either “I get it” or “perfect.”
Randy Bish again. This time he is equating terrorism with welfare. Or welfare with terrorism. Which is bad enough, but what really matters is that the point sucks. It’s not like there are going to be catastrophic consequences as a result of welfare, which Bill Clinton pretty much gutted anyway. If the economy collapses, if the government goes broke, it won’t be because of welfare.
From the Archives
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I’m cleaning out my studio and I found this yellowing tidbit from January 8, 2011. Still no sign of progress on this front.
Need a Mac Printer?
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Spring cleaning time.
I have an Epson 960 printer for Mac, along with about $300 worth of printer cartridges, that I can’t use anymore because my current iMac (OS 10.7) won’t talk to it. But if you need a good inkjet printer and you have an older Mac, I’m willing to part with it and the cartridges. Send me $100 for the whole thing to cover shipping and my effort to schlep it to the post office and it’s yours.
Make sure you check the specs for your Mac before you get in touch.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: What to Do About Delays at LAX
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Sequester-related budget cuts to air traffic control could cause big delays at Los Angeles International Airport.
