Perhaps it has been mentioned elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it. In U.S. history, slavery was abolished and black men got the right to vote some fifty-five years before women got the vote. And the civil rights movement preceded the (3rd wave of) women’s liberation.
So maybe it’s par for the course that we can have a black president before a woman president … for whatever difference it may make.
But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer [2002] returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”
The torture policy of the Bush Administration is a policy of, by and for torturers. It marks a radical departure from prior U.S. policies of honorable compliance with the Convention. We have every right to expect it to end on January 20, 2009.
Starting from the top, Horton lists:
President George “W” Bush
Vice President Dick Cheney
Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfield’s deputy, Dr. Stephen Cambone
Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld’s lawyer in the Pentagon
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of ground forces in Iraq
Major General Geoffrey Miller, Rumsfeld’s emissary to Iraq and Abu Ghraib
Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, and later Attorney General
John Yoo and Jay Bybee, senior figures in the Justice Department, also Alice S. Fisher, Michael Chertoff and Steven Bradbury
U.S. Attorney (Paul McNulty) for the Eastern District of Virginia
Condoleezza Rice, who became Secretary of State
Rice’s legal adviser John Bellinger
The story of this team and its dark enterprise pursued under the guise of national security remains lamentably underdeveloped.
That is about to change. A number of the details and connections are about to be illuminated. Next month, Palgrave Macmillan will bring out Philippe Sands’s new book, The Torture Team, which will connect the dots and show how this group engaged in a joint enterprise for the purpose of introducing a regime of torture in American detention facilities.
“One day this president and vice-president will be prosecuted for war crimes,”Andrew Sullivan comments. And considering the positions marked in bold above, it seems that his title for the post, “The War Criminal President,” doesn’t say the half of it.
On his way to the Constitution Center in Philadelphia a few days ago, to give a historic speech about race relations in America, Barack Obama stopped outside a Quaker school to “meet and greet” with a group of second graders.
This picture was taken on Race Street, outside the Friends Select School.
Race Street ??? Hmm . . . What political genius thought that up? :-)
Actually, this is by a back entrance, in an area where access could be better controlled. We do hope and pray that Obama will be well protected!
The above and another picture are posted by the Philadelphia Daily News, in their “online extras” section. The blurb reads: “Friends Select School second graders greet Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday during an unscheduled stop outside the school on Race Street.”
Unscheduled? Maybe the stop wasn’t on the schedule distributed in advance to reporters, but someone thought to line up some school children to come out at that particular time, and I’m guessing the Secret Service put some thought into where it would be safer. What’s interesting, I think, is what process connected Obama with that particular group of second graders. He had been working on that speech for several days, and was still editing and re-editing it that day. Who thought to call the school and set up the event?
A Friend from my meeting, with a child in those pictures, told me Dennis came home saying he would never wash his hands again (after shaking hands with Obama). Wow!
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
In his emphasis on the community as well as the pastor, Obama seems to work tacitly from the sort of premises that make Quakers skeptical of the “hireling priest” as the only significant link between the congregation and divine Spirit. But overtly he has to stick within the parameters of the general discourse concerning “church” and “priest.”
The Greek word for “church,” according to a bible scholar in my meeting, translates better as “meeting” in the Quaker usage. It’s not the building, and certainly it’s not the pastor or priest.
_____________________
Update: Here’s another spin on the same theme, Obama and his Church. Ed Kilgore quotes roughly the same paragraphs as above, and comments:
… it’s an argument that the church is the embodiment of the community it serves, with all its imperfections …. This is a very old, very “Catholic” idea of the church as an organic expression of “the people” as they happen to exist. It is likely to be baffling to those white Protestant Americans who think of church membership as more of a matter of consumer preference, doctrinal agreement or family heritage … and who also probably don’t understand why Obama didn’t just choose a different congregation the first time he heard something objectionable from Wright’s pulpit.
In my own musings, I get a lot of mileage out of the concept of “catholic,” and its counterpart in the idea of a “covenanted” community which one might choose to join or leave. This distinction was pivotal in the period that fostered the early Quaker movement.
No wonder Bush/Cheney are so blasé about the prospects for a Democratic sweep this fall…
Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former professor at the Naval War College, … predicts that if Fallon leaves his position at Central Command, “it may well mean that the president and vice president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don’t want a commander standing in their way.”
I lived in Portugal for a couple of years, and in studying Portuguese history I learned of a peculiar quirk of Portuguese political culture called Sebastianismo.
In 1578, the young king Sebastian of Portugal led a magnificent assault into north Africa, convinced that with the Lord’s power a Portuguese army could vanquish the Muslim infidel. It was said that the Portuguese carried more guitars into Africa than swords. They were utterly defeated, however, and the king was never seen again.
With his disappearance, the Spaniards took over Portugal, ruling it as part of the Habsburg empire. For the next sixty years the Portuguese waited expectantly for their true king to return and set things aright. There were several impostors who claimed to be Sebastian, particularly in the tail end of that century.
After a successful revolt against Spanish control in 1640, the new Portuguese king John IV had to swear that he would relinquish the throne to Sebastian should he return.
On into the 1800s, King Sebastian lived on in the popular mind, both in Portugal and in Brazil, as the true king who would return. When I lived in Portugal there was still a small monarchist party that carried the same theme (they had an environmentalist bent, similar to that of Britain’s Prince Charles).
I’m reminded of this in some of the discourse about Barack Obama, especially by those who disparage him and his popularity, but also as a visible element in his campaign (e.g., see the video below). I’ve thought of mentioning it here. Now a brief post by Andrew Sullivan gives me a bit of a hook.
Apparently, Obama uses a particular line in many of his stump speeches:
“We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For”
In one breath, Obama acknowledges and reframes the Sebastian element implicit in his campaign. It is partly, as Sullivan points out, an indictment of those who wait for someone to come and save them.
The point is surely that we shouldn’t wait for someone else to save us, or lift us up, or fix our problems or address our fate. We are the only ones who can do this. And we’re responsible for our own failure. The sentence is actually a criticism of Obama’s own supporters.
In that vein, here’s a wonderful video produced by some of Obama’s supporters in Texas:
I feel that impulse, and I enjoy the sentiment expressed. (Note that Robert Kennedy — America’s king Sebastian, if there ever was one — appears in the first frames.) I’d like to think that Obama’s already ahead of the curve on that one. His rhetoric seems to show that he understands the complex ironies implicit in the politics of change and renewal.
I’m adding a link to the Friends for Obama group, in the blogroll list of links in the right column. This is a group that I started nearly a year ago. It now has 22 members — with room for many more.
The way the site works, people join and create a my.BarackObama page for themselves. They can then join all the groups that pertain to their particular interests.
The downside to this approach is that it enables a lot of cross-traffic that can clog the function of any particular group. As moderator of the Friends’ group, I am resolved to keep that cross-traffic to a minimum, in order for the group to serve its intended purpose as a forum for “Quakers, i.e. members of the Religious Society of Friends, attenders, fellow travelers, and other interested folks,” who are interested in supporting the Obama campaign.
Tom Engelhardt, one of the best analysts of America’s “Victory Culture,” offers an update on another dimension of the war in Iraq: The war from the air.
Interest and concern with the war in Iraq has slipped quite a bit in the last few months. The candidates have noticed and are basically ignoring it. Of course, we hope that the next President can bring that war to an end, but they make no guarantees. The total and deliberate lopsidedness of American militarism, the belief that overwhelming force can serve as a tool in foreign affairs, and the disregard for “collateral damage,” are not going to be addressed seriously for a long time to come, I’m afraid.
I remember reading somewhere that the proportion of civilians among the casualties of war has been rising steadily over the past centuries. I think we’re still on that trajectory.
Two black guys with funny names, both interested in putting the ethics into politics. Not too many people have pointed out the congruency, but from Philadelphia it seems obvious.
The two above articles look at the legislation they’ve worked on, the themes they developed in their political careers, and their views on policing and how they’ve been able to neutralize some of the nastiness inherent in that topic. This last is, I think, very deep-seated — fear of crime, fear of the black man, fear of terrorism, and fear of dark-colored foreigners… tied in with a cynical willingness to hype these issues for political advantage.
Riots in America in the 1960s. Police brutality. Black power. War in Vietnam. Dirty hippies. War on drugs. Death penalty. Growth and entrenchment of the military establishment. 9/11 and terrorism.
I think Friends in America have been sidelined during the last thirty years or so, particularly by the way these issues have been played in American politics. The dynamic runs along the same lines as Nixon’s “southern strategy,” but across the whole country and with undertones of violence and fear rather than racism and hatred. Anyway, “policing the black man” and the GOP “southern strategy” seem tied together, and it would be nice to believe that those ties are now unraveling.
The politics of hope… Previous posts here about Obama (here) and Nutter (here) and (here).
