Filed under: Europe, Foreign Policy, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Arrogant, Classless, Rude
President Obama is off to Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. Rejecting it politely as undeserved, seems never to have occurred to Mr. Obama. He is writing his own acceptance speech, we are told.
He has been invited to lunch with King Harald V, as is customary, but has turned down the opportunity, and will skip his own exhibition in the Nobel Peace center, which prize winners usually open. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” said the Norwegian daily Aftenposten. “A bit arrogant — a bit bad,” said another headline. The Norwegian public is upset.
“In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that and Obama’s actions have been clumsy” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wegeland. “You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”
Filed under: Environment, Junk Science, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Global Warming Fraud, Scientific Scandal, Taxpayer Funded Fraud
An enormous scandal is roiling the scientific world. A researcher, investigating the climate numbers behind anthropogenic global warming, had filed a Freedom of Information request to look at the data behind recent claims, from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), and was met with stalling, refusal, files not available, that sort of thing.
A hacker broke into the University’s CRU and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. The files include 1,079 emails and 72 documents exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing the anthropogenic global warming theory. Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed in an interview that they are genuine.
The emails suggest manipulation of evidence, destruction of evidence, private doubts about whether the world is really heating up, efforts to force dissenting scientists out of the peer-review process, attempts to delegitimize journals that allowed publications by skeptical scientists, and manipulation of IPCC reports.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988 as a political organization to publish special reports on climate. They do issue occasional reports, and more importantly issue a summary of each report written by bureaucrats and politicians which is usually the only thing read by governments and the media, for the actual report comes along months later.
Much of the drama in the IPCC reports came from a graph of global temperatures over many centuries by Dr. Michael Mann. It showed temperatures going along without much variation for hundreds of years and then suddenly shooting up in the late 20th century, like the blade of a hockey stick. Here was cause for real alarm. If temperatures were climbing, so was the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Correlation does not mean causation, but that rule was quickly tossed to the winds, for hated fossil fuels are clearly the greatest source of carbon. Governments wanted to know how bad, and what to do. Vast amounts of money flowed from governments all over the world to scientists who would establish how humans were causing the warming. Scientists in every field were suddenly writing grant proposals. Career advancement, prestige, money, university distinction.
Canadian researchers got interested in the data behind Dr. Mann’s “hockey-stick” graph. After all, it eliminated the Medieval Warm Period — a time when the climate was much warmer, when the Vikings farmed in Greenland, wine grapes grew in England and civilization flourished. They found statistical errors that would have produced a “hockey-stick” graph no matter what data was entered. The graph was in error.
Then James Hansen, head of the Goddard Center at NASA, was found fudging data in the claim that October of 2008 was the warmest year on record. Anthony Watts enlisted hundreds of citizen volunteers to photograph the temperature stations around the United States and measure and describe their location. Situated next to parking lots, air-conditioner exhausts, trash burners, reflective concrete walls, busy streets their location precluded any accurate temperature being recorded. The surface temperature records were flawed, and recorded temperatures much higher than actuality.
Stephen McIntyre, the aforementioned Canadian researcher, looked into tree-ring data from an examination of tree rings from 12 trees from a Siberian peninsula that seemed to be proof of warming. When rings from 35 nearby trees were included, temperature anomalies disappeared. A senior researcher at the EPS’s National Center for Environmental Economics, Alan Carlin, dared to say that “available observable data..invalidate the hypothesis” that humans cause dangerous global warming. He was silenced.
Viscount Monckton is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails and says you should be too:
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up.
It is fraud for the EPA to claim that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies that have encouraged the global warming fraud. Christopher Horner, author of Red Hot Lies said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer-funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”
Don’t bet on a quick or easy resolution. Careers, reputations, money, funding are all involved along with government and media exposure. Nobody is going to give up easily, and governments are inclined to protect their own.
The most thorough coverage be followed at Climate Depot, and at Anthony Watts website where you can find a video from Dr. Timothy Ball. Dr, Roy Spencer’s comments can be found on his website. Climate Depot has constantly updated links to the emails, the documents and comments from all over the world.
Filed under: Europe, Freedom, History, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Peter Robinson, Ronald Reagan, The Berlin Wall
Germany today celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of East and West Germany that resulted, and the collapse of Communism. It was a big day for the Germans, and they have been celebrating for some time. The leaders of all the Western Democracies were there.
The United States sent a delegation headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. President Obama did not attend. He sent a video of himself, noting that Jack Kennedy once spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, and that he, Obama, was the first African-American President of the United States. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John-Paul, Helmut Kohl and all the people who had a real part in bringing the wall down, were not mentioned.
Power Line has printed an excerpt from Peter Robinson’s memoir How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Robinson was the speechwriter assigned to write the Brandenburg Gate address and the excerpt is an account of how the speech came about.
The usual liberal pieces have appeared on schedule today, noting all the world’s walls. The Israeli wall, the wall between the U.S. and Mexico — supposedly comparable. What they never seem to grasp are the differences. The Berlin Wall was constructed to keep the German people in East Germany in. It was a prison wall, tall— with barbed wire, watch towers, floodlights armed guards and machine guns — to keep desperate citizens from escaping to freedom.
And the idea that communism killed over 100 million of their own people has been conveniently assigned to the memory hole.
Filed under: Europe, Foreign Policy, Freedom, History, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Angela Merkel, Collapse of Communism, The Berlin Wall
German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. She said:
[F]or me America seemed completely out of reach . . . then on the 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
And this border which had divided a nation, for decades, keeping people in two different worlds, was now open. And this is why for me, today is first and foremost a time to say thank you.
I thank all those American and Allied pilots who heard and heeded the desperate appeal of then-Mayor of Berlin Ernst Reuter, in 1948, who said, you, the nations of this world, cast your eyes towards the city.
For months, these pilots flew food to Berlin for the airlift, saving the citizens from starvation. Many of these soldiers risked their lives. Dozens lost their lives. We shall remember and honor them forever…
I think of John F. Kennedy, who won the hearts of the Berliners, when, during his visit in 1961, after the wall had been built, he reached out to the desperate citizens of Berlin by saying, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I think of Ronald Reagan, who, far earlier than most, clearly saw the sign of the times and, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate, already in 1987, called out, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” This appeal shall remain forever in my heart.
The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall is a very important occasion. Americans, in 1989, didn’t seem to really grasp that shift in the condition of the world, or perhaps the leftists among us didn’t consider it an event to be celebrated. There have been books written about the lack of appreciation for the enormity of the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War.
But then Liberals prefer to attribute the whole thing to Gorbachev and Perestroika. Ronald Reagan, who? Pope John Paul? Margaret Thatcher? George Meany? Why do they always try to rewrite history? And once rewritten, it becomes gospel. Obama has made a major mistake in not attending, but so far he is not doing well with the foreign policy thing. No character, no class.
Filed under: American Elephant, Europe, Politics | Tags: Debunking Liberal Lies, Eugene Robinson, Nobel Peace Prize, Obama
At least according to the half-wit, Eugene Robinson, who claims Republicans who criticize Obama’s undeserved Nobel prize do so because they hate America.
The problem for Robinson is that nobody else thinks Obama deserves the prize either. Polls in the UK show most Brits agree that Obama did not deserve the award. Another poll shows Norwegians (the peace prize is awarded in Norway) agree. Indeed, reaction all across Europe has been fairly unanimous, and the world agrees with Republicans — they don’t think Obama deserved the award either!
So I guess the only conclusion we can reach, if we are to use the torturous contortions Eugene Robinson calls logic, is that Obama has increased world hatred of America!
Filed under: American Elephant, Foreign Policy, News, Politics, United Kingdom | Tags: Gordon Brown, Lockerbie, Obama
Obama knew about the Lockerbie bomber release all along:
‘The US was kept fully in touch about everything that was going on with regard to Britain’s discussions with Libya in recent years and about Megrahi,’ said the Whitehall aide.
‘We would never do anything about Lockerbie without discussing it with the US. It is disingenuous of them to act as though Megrahi’s return was out of the blue.
‘They knew about our prisoner transfer agreement with Libya and they knew that the Scots were considering Megrahi’s case.’ [read more]
Filed under: Economy, News of the Weird, Taxes, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Doncaster, Efficiency, The Mayor
Here’s an unusual story from the town of Doncaster in England. The newly-elected Mayor, Peter Davies, has some curious ideas. Davies is one of only eleven directly-elected Mayors in England. Most mayors are selected by the local council. Not only that, but he is a member of the English Democrats, not Conservative, Liberal or Labor. But, as you will see, of no relation whatsoever to our Democrats.
His first act was to reduce his own salary from £73.000 to £30,000 (from about $110,000 to about $48,000 per year) and to get rid of the mayoral limousine. Then he ended the “sister city” arrangement with five other cities around the world, saying that it was just an excuse for “people to fly off and have a binge at the council’s expense.” He abolished the town’s diversity policies, and ended funding for the Gay Pride Parade, on the grounds that whatever one’s sexual preferences, there was no reason why they should be paraded at taxpayer expense.
He has driven the green lobby into a panic by building parking places encouraging people to shop downtown. He is trying to reduce the council from 63 members to just 21. He said “If Pittsburgh can manage with nine councilors, why do we need 63?” And to top it all off he is abolishing all council “non-jobs” like the “community cohesion officers.”
He is doing just what he was elected to do: reducing the size and reach of government, and with the savings, reducing taxes. Not everyone will approve — 42 city councilors for example, and an unknown number of community cohesion officers, and the green lobby as well. But if he has accomplished so much, so far, the man has a great deal of courage.
He seems to believe that the job of a Mayor is to administer the public’s business efficiently and effectively. Isn’t that refreshing! We hope he receives loads of publicity and serves as a sterling example to all, even our Democrats.
(h/t The Heritage Foundation)
Filed under: Economy, Freedom, Health Care, Politics, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Comparative Effeciveness Research, Ezekiel Emanuel MD, Who Decides?
Today’s headline reads: “Sentenced to death on the NHS: Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today.”
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.
But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.
This is Britain’s National Health Service. Somebody said something about “Death Panels,” and I hasten to add that the words “Death Panel” do not appear in the U.S. House Bill 3200.
They don’t need to appear in the bill. Bureaucratic control of what treatment you may have already appears in H.R. 1, The Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the Stimulus Bill which contains $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This was the brain child of former Health and Human Services Nominee Tom Daschle.
Well, of course Tom Daschle had tax problems and lobbyist problems and did not become Secretary of HHS; but he did venture that health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.
President Obama’s chief medical adviser is now Ezekiel Emanuel M.D., the brother of the President’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Both Tom Daschle and Dr. Emanuel are very interested in the fact that costs at the end of life are especially high (perhaps because people are often near the end of life because they are ill). Young, healthy people don’t make such demands on a health care system. Which is the kind of observation that people who are more interested in statistics than in human beings are apt to make.
In the British National Health Service (NHS), a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it.
Dr. Emanuel is a bioethicist. He has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is also a communitarian. He belongs to a school of thought that redefines a physicians’ duty, believing that it means working for the greater good of society rather than focusing on an individual patient’s needs. Many physicians find this view dangerous.
According the Betsy McCaughey, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says Dr. Emanuel said:
Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely “lipstick” cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.
True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care. … In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient’s needs.
This may be why Dr. Emanuel doesn’t do doctoring, he does thinking about doctoring.
Strict Youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects… — Lancet, Vol 373, Jan. 31, 2009. p. 425
Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does. — Lancet, Vol 373, Jan. 31, 2009, p.428
Comparative Effectiveness Research is designed to have a panel of bureaucrats in Washington decide what treatments are most “effective” by looking at statistics from across the country and send that information to physicians, which doctors will be required to follow. This ignores the fact that people are not building blocks, all alike, to be moved this way or that.
These may not be “death panels” as such, but they are deciding who gets what treatment, and it is not you and your doctor who would make that decision. At the very least, it is cold. Very, very cold, and I want no part of it.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: al-Megrahi, Gordon Brown, Lockerbie Bombing, Moammar Gadhafi
The release of the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing, Abel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, after serving just eight years of a 27-year minimum sentence, on “compassionate grounds” has shocked friends and families of the 259 passengers and 11 villagers killed by the wreckage.
Whether or not al-Megrahi is actually dying of cancer remains to be seen. Moammar Gadhafi arranged for a large audience to greet him when he arrived in Libya on one of Gadhafi’s jets. The crowd was delirious, cheering and singing patriotic songs.
Canadian journalist David Warren addressed the situation:
The use of the very term “compassionate” in the Scottish decision is two-edged. while it does, indeed, spit on the graves of the bomber’s victims, and in the faces of their survivors, it simultaneously infers that by refusing “compassion” opponents of the decision are unjust. Here we enter into the insanity of “moral relativism” and “moral equivalence” — recently on exhibit in tears shed ignominiously for the inmates of Guantanamo.
We reveal, almost everywhere that compassion is invoked, the fact that we no longer have a viable conception of justice. For in the conception we once had,”compassion” had no part.
The operative word was “mercy,” and the idea behind it was radically different from the idea behind compassion. … Mercy has tempered justice, in our western tradition. Note that construction: mercy is not a part of justice, it is “another thing.”(…)
But today it is “justice,” which, in our civilization, was known to be something sharp and hard. Justice is necessary to rectify injustice. The man who intentionally kills many unknown to him, in order to make a political statement, has committed a grave act of injustice, for which an equal and opposite act of justice is required. Justice, not retribution; for a desire for revenge should no more come into a just judgment, than a desire for compassion.
And as it has become clear that the release of this man had little to do with “compassion” and everything to do with millions in British business opportunities in the oil fields of Libya, David Warren added:
It is insulting to be told an obvious lie; more insulting when the lie is insisted upon, in the face of undeniable facts. Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians seem to grasp this, yet they do not always pay for it in the polls. It appears from this distance that at least Gordon Brown, the current U.K. prime minister, will not be returned to office when the British have their next chance to vote, and that his Labour Party will be annihilated. But I wish I could be sure.
Filed under: American Elephant, Europe, Music, YouTube | Tags: Perpetuum Jazzile, Vocal Jazz
Perpetuum Jazzile is Slovenia’s one and only jazz choir, and a very fine one indeed, which we have featured before. Here they are singing an arrangement of an international hit from the 1970’s called “Eres Tu” (“You are”). You may very well recognize the song (but probably not until around the 1:30 mark or so) if you are at all familiar with easy listening from the early 1970’s — or perhaps if you’ve ever ridden an elevator.
The song was Spain’s entry into the Eurovision Song Contest in 1973, and became an international hit after the song reached second place in the contest. This arrangement, however, starts out with another song by the name of “Brez Besed” (“Without Words”) which was the Yugoslavian Eurovision entry seven years earlier, in 1966. The songs are so similar in parts that some Yugoslavs accuse the Spaniards of pilfering their melody.
Here, Perpetuum Jazzile attempts a little musical diplomacy with a happy arrangement that marries the two. They are singing in Slovene, Spanish and English.
The perfect happy little song to start the day.
Filed under: Capitalism, Health Care, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Britain, Medical Care, National Health Service, Rights
British author and physician Theodore Dalrymple had a brief and excellent essay in the Wall Street Journal asking “Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?” It is an interesting question at this particular time.
There are constant arguments for newly invented rights coming from the left. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his State of the Union Message to Congress on January 11, 1944, said that the rights guaranteed to us by the Declaration and the Constitution were no longer enough. He went on to propose a “Second Bill of Rights” based on “Security and Prosperity.”
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; of every family to a decent home; to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; to a good education.
Mark Levin, from whose splendid Liberty and Tyranny I extracted this excerpt, says “This is Tyranny’s disguise. These are not rights. They are the Statist’s false promises of utopianism, which the Statist uses to justify all trespasses on the individual’s private property. Liberty and private property go hand in hand. By dominating one the Statist dominates both, for if the individual cannot keep or dispose of the value he creates by his own intellectual and/or physical labor, he exists to serve the state. The ‘Second Bill of Rights’ and its legal and policy progeny require the individual to surrender control of his fate to the government.”
Hollywood dreams up its fantasies of world’s end with wrecked and vacant cities and perhaps inures us to the very real things that happen in this world of ours. If we do not understand history we neither appreciate what we have, nor grasp the possibilities of what could be.
If you do not look at the stories and pictures coming out of Iran and understand what it is like to live under tyranny, you are missing the point that is so clearly made. Venezuela, under Caesar Chavez, is eliminating the right to free speech. Cuba, we are told, has splendid health care, but it is only for cash-paying tourists. Ordinary Cubans get dirty rooms and abysmal care. Tyranny doesn’t come lumbering in loudly announcing itself, it creeps in gradually offering goodies if you will just allow those who are wiser and more important to control your life.
In Britain, Mr. Dalrymple says, the recognition of a “right” to health care has led to substandard care.
If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.
People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter, and clothing.
Everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating),. but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet, or that if there was, the federal government would be the best at providing and distributing it to each and every American.
Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?
If, on the other hand, the right to health care did not exist in those benighted days, how did it come into existence, and how did we come to recognize it once it did?
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
The rest of the essay is to be found here. As a physician, Mr Dalrymple has long practiced in Britain, and his reflections on the British Health Care system (NHS) are worth a great deal of thought.
From Argghhh!!!, a message that Combined Joint Task Force Division Headquarters in Afghanistan received this morning:
“To Combined Joint Task Force 82,
65 years ago, at 2h30 (French Local time), you jumped from hundreds of DAKOTAS in the dark skies over Normandie in order to liberate France and Europe.
That D-Day, you wrote the most glorious page of your history and the name of your Division is forever famous in France.
That D-Day, you and the allied forces met their rendezvous with destiny.
6 June 2009, Afghanistan; we are still brothers in arms.
We will never forget what you did on D-Day.
In the name of all the French soldiers embedded with CJTF-82, thank you for what you have done.
Today, in celebration of those events 65 years ago, we are “All Americans.”
Airborne!
Ltc Pierre V.
French LNO
Filed under: Europe, Foreign Policy, Law, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Demagogues, Homeland Security, Military, War on Terror
The headline in The New York Times reads : “US May Revive Military Courts at Guantanamo.“ Back before the inauguration of Barack Obama, President Bush held a meeting with former presidents and Barack Obama so that he could ask them anything he wanted and they could offer advice if it was solicited. One offhand piece of advice suggested that President Obama look into the reasons behind the actions of the Bush administration before he made up his mind. That bit of advice was apparently rejected.
Mark Steyn laughed, in The Corner at NRO, that “Any Day now, the new conventional wisdom will emerge: Obama has turned around Bush’s failed war on terror because he’s had the courage to do the tough things that, while not always attractive, are ruthlessly effective.”
Jules Crittenden snorted more loudly, and goes into a little more detail. Hot Air points out that the leak came on a Friday night, where awkward announcements and bad news sneaks out. The Left, grasping for anything to discredit the Bush administration has tried mightily to discredit the War on Terror in general, and the Iraq War in particular. They tried to discredit the 9/11 attacks, downplay the idea of terrorism — only poor misunderstood souls, acting out their anger at being discriminated against — and in general, insinuate that there really was no terrorism, just something that the Bush administration had dreamed up to help get elected.
The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, an ideal location for housing terrorist combatants, became a symbol of the White House’s intransigence in insisting that detainees did not qualify for the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The political left made Gitmo a symbol of the Bush White House’s alleged hostility to human and constitutional rights.
After years of demands from the left that Guantanamo be closed, Obama signed an executive order in his first week requiring the facility to be closed down within a year. Never mind that visitors have continuously said that it is a model prison. Never mind that the Obama administration has not the slightest idea what to do with prisoners who are ready to kill at the slightest opportunity.
They have cleared 17 Uighurs — Chinese Moslem radicals trained by al Qaeda— for release in the United States, and another 13 detainees, bringing the total up to 30. Well, not to worry, we will pay for welfare for them so they can more easily adapt to American life.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been in Europe asking European leaders for help in relocating Guantanamo detainees. Holder spoke before a select group of policy experts, academics and journalists (European leaders?) in a crowded room of about 100.
In answer to a question about Bush administration officials “decisions to authorize tough interrogation techniques”, Holder said he believed that many of them would, privately, admit to having made some mistakes in the pressure and worry that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I don’t suspect that would be true of Vice President Dick Cheney,” Holder added.
At another point, a questioner earnestly asked if those Guantanamo detainees who are believed to be innocent could be put in a hotel somewhere.
“Those detainees who are believed to be innocent.” Made me snort a little more loudly too. This is not an easy problem, as the Obama administration is beginning to discover. It was after much searching and study that the facility at Gitmo was built in the first place.
Actions have consequences. When you gin up a story about innocent terrorists and all the torture going on at Guantanamo for political advantage, sooner or later you have to face the solid block wall of reality. A hotel with hot halal meals, white glove treatment of prisoners, Mecca pointed out so detainees can pray in the way prescribed by their religion and Islamic reading materials, will be expensive to build and where to put it? Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked Congress for $50 million to build a facility. Who wants such a prison just down the road?
As Investors Business Daily said:
The Pentagon will have to build a facility for the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay if their current housing is closed. We know the perfect spot: a military prison in Cuba on a naval base called Gitmo.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Economy, Obama, Politics
If you need a good weekend chuckle, John Crace of The Guardian has a comment on the Obama visit to Britain, when the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson asked the One a question.
