AAC Blog
Now, despite the company's efforts to solicit input from a group of high-profile black women, including Cookie Johnson, wife of former basketball star Magic Johnson, some parents are saying the dolls aren't black enough. They complain that five of the six dolls feature fine-textured, waist-length hair; half of them have blue or green eyes.
Moreover, all have the freakishly skinny body of a Barbie (something that irks some white parents as well).
"I thought it was unfortunate that once again we're given a doll with hair that is so unlike the vast majority of black women," says Cheryl Nelson-Grimes, the mother of a 7-year-old girl and a resident of Queens, N.Y. "I feel very strongly that I want my daughter to love herself for who she is and not believe that using a hot comb or straightening her hair is the only way to be beautiful."
Still, her daughter Noni says that Grace, her doll from the new Mattel line, is her favorite "because she looks like me. She has black hair and has a ponytail."
The criticism over Mattel's new black fashion dolls underscores how difficult it is for large commercial companies to please a widely diverse black community with a single image or two depicting young African-Americans.
"If they had given the dolls short, kinky hair or an Afro, people might have complained that it was too Afro-centric," says Nicole Coles, a 40-year-old mother from Temecula, Calif. "We're so hard and picky."
Mattel nonetheless has taken the comments to heart and plans to expand the line in the fall of 2010 to include a doll with more of an Afro hairstyle.
Like Mattel, Walt Disney Co. met with a number of black advisers while making its first animated movie featuring a black heroine, "The Princess and the Frog," which opens widely next week. Based on their feedback, the heroine's name was changed to Tiana from Maddy, which was thought to be too close to mammy, and her job went from a maid to a waitress, according to Dee Dee Jackson, national president of Mocha Moms, a support group for women of color that Disney consulted for input on the film. "Her skin hue is darker, her hair is in Afro puffs as a young child, and her features are full but not exaggerated," Ms. Jackson says.
"During development it is common for us to make changes, and 'The Princess and the Frog' is no exception," said Disney spokeswoman Heidi Trotta.
This isn't Mattel's first foray into creating black dolls. The El Segundo, Calif.-based toy maker first introduced a black doll in 1967, when it painted Barbie's cousin Francie brown. Two years later, Barbie got a black friend named Christie. A black Barbie came along in 1980, but her features were almost identical to those of her white counterpart.
The expensive line of American Girl dolls, also owned by Mattel, features a black doll named Addy Walker, a runaway slave whose story is set during the Civil War. But with a price tag of $95, it is out of reach for a lot of families.
Other toy lines, including the popular Polly Pocket miniatures, also made by Mattel, include only a few black dolls. "Polly Pocket only has one or two brown dolls, and my daughters fight over them," says Mary Broussard-Harmon, a mother of three girls from Corona, Calif.
Doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby says she sought to fill the black-doll void when she dreamed up So In Style dolls for Mattel two years ago. Ms. McBride-Irby says she wanted to give her 6-year-old daughter a wider choice of "dolls that looked like her."
Ms. McBride-Irby devoted about two years creating three teenaged dolls—Grace, Trichelle and Kara—who have skin tones ranging from chocolate to caramel. They are paired with smaller, younger-looking dolls they are supposed to advise and help; the toy packaging says: "Mentoring … It's So in Style." Also written prominently on the back of the box are the dolls' interests, which include science, cheerleading, art, journalism, math and music.
"I didn't want the dolls to just be about fashion and friendship," Ms. McBride-Irby says. "I wanted to them have a positive message."
She also wanted them to be fun. She loved playing with Barbie's long hair as a child, she says, and Mattel's extensive research repeatedly shows that young girls want their dolls to have long hair they can brush and style. The So in Style dolls also have a hair-styling kit to curl and straighten the hair.
The black women recruited by Mattel to give input during the dolls' production had extensive discussions with the company about giving at least some of the dolls varied and representative hairstyles, says Ms. Johnson, the mother of a 14-year-old girl. Mattel's concession was to make one doll's hair wavy and give one of the little sisters short puffy pigtails.
While Ms. Johnson would like to see even more representative hairstyles, she still thinks they're "fabulous. I can show my little girl that you don't have to have a pointed nose to be beautiful."
Loanne Hizo Ostlie says she also likes the dolls, but thinks Mattel did black girls a disservice by not giving them a more varied, representative look. For more than 10 years, she has been customizing dolls, specializing in creating black dolls from Kelly dolls, Barbie's little sister, and selling them on the Internet.
In the past, she also customized Barbies, but the field got increasingly crowded, she says. Now, she's turned to the So In Style little-sister dolls, painting their eyes brown and giving them "dreadlocks, Afros, cornrows and kinks."
J. Lorand Matory, chairman of the Department of African and African American studies at Duke University, says that there is a history of self-hatred in the African diaspora that stems from the value attached to European hair, features and skin color. "Mattel didn't send the message, but they are reinforcing it," he says.
"These dolls are a much better representation than what has been in the marketplace," says Mattel spokeswoman Michelle Chidoni. "But we hear the argument."
Stephanie Archer thinks the criticism is much ado about nothing. A chapter vice president of Mocha Moms, Ms. Archer took her daughter Sydney, age 6, to a tea party in Manhattan, where Mattel unveiled the new dolls in late September.
"Mattel did a good job getting the facial features right," she says. "The dolls are beautiful, and the event made our daughters feel beautiful, too.
"Sydney's hair is curly, rather than kinky," adds Ms. Archer, who lives in Queens. "She knows her hair texture is different than the dolls', and that's OK. We have to give our kids more credit."
Ms. Irby-McBride says she was a little surprised by the negative comments about the dolls. "Three dolls can't represent the whole African-American community," she says.
In addition to more Afro-centric dolls, Mattel will be coming out with a black male So in Style doll named Darren. That will please Claire Jefferson-Glipa, a Corona, Calif., mother of a 6-year-old girl and 3-year-old son.
"If you think finding black dolls for girls is hard," she says, "try finding black action figures or super heroes."
AFGHAN WAR TO ESCALATE
30,000 more troops; pullout begins mid-2011
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
WEST POINT, N.Y. -- President Obama announced Tuesday that he will send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan by next summer and begin withdrawing forces in July 2011, making his case to the nation that Islamist extremism in the region remains an enduring threat to the security of Americans.
Obama cited the solemn responsibility he has felt as commander in chief as he outlined a sharp escalation that makes him the main architect of the eight-year-old war. The speech was among the most important of his presidency, and he sought to prepare the country for the heavier fighting and higher casualties that are likely to result from his strategy in the months ahead.
Addressing an audience of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, many of whom will be sent to the war in the coming year, he warned bluntly that "huge challenges remain" before U.S. forces begin leaving Afghanistan toward the end of his first term in office.
"If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan," he said, "I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow."
Obama concluded a three-month review of war strategy by placing extraordinary confidence in a strained U.S. military and applying fresh pressure on the uncertain government of President Hamid Karzai to reform itself in months rather than years.
Adding 30,000 U.S. troops to the roughly 70,000 that are in Afghanistan now amounts to most of what Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces there, requested at the end of August. But by setting a date for when he will begin removing U.S. troops, scheduled to number about 100,000 by next summer, Obama is effectively holding McChrystal to the urgent timeline that the general laid out in a bleak assessment of the situation.
Obama's simultaneous escalation of the war effort and presentation of an exit plan reflects the divisions that emerged within his administration during the strategy review and the difficult politics he faces in selling his plan at home and abroad. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other senior officials who participated in that review, sometimes in opposition to one another, watched his speech from the front row of the academy's Eisenhower Hall
As details of his strategy emerged Tuesday, some Republicans accused Obama of aiding the Taliban insurgency by setting a date to begin a withdrawal, even though administration officials said the pace will be determined by the country's security and political stability. Democrats criticized Obama for an expensive, if time-limited, expansion of an unpopular conflict at a time of economic hardship at home.
In a sign of how difficult it will be for the president to find support within his party, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a consistent Obama ally, offered only a terse statement: "President Obama asked for time to make his decision on a new policy in Afghanistan. I am going to take some time to think through the proposal he presented tonight."
Obama spoke for about 40 minutes at this historic campus on the bank of the Hudson River. Clad in gray uniforms, the cadets watched placidly as the president delivered a largely technical argument for his war strategy, shifting toward the end to a lofty celebration of U.S. resilience and values.
Only occasionally did an audience with more at stake than most interrupt his remarks with applause. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 73 West Point graduates have died in foreign wars, and Obama told the cadets: "I know that this decision asks even more of you -- a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens."
But his audience extended beyond Eisenhower Hall to include a skeptical American public, reluctant allies abroad, a weak government in Pakistan and an Afghan population waiting to see whether international forces or the Taliban will win the war.
A minority of Americans believe the battle remains worth fighting, according to recent opinion polls, and Obama's decision to rapidly deploy tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops, along with his appeal to NATO allies for more forces, will sharply intensify the conflict in the coming months.
More than 920 U.S. troops have died in the Afghanistan operation since 2001, and the pace of combat deaths has accelerated this year with Obama's earlier decision to send an additional 22,000 forces, along with 11,000 that administration officials say were authorized by his predecessor. So far this year, 298 U.S. troops have died in the Afghan effort, surpassing the 155 who died last year.
In his assessment of the conflict, McChrystal wrote that the war probably would be won or lost in the next 18 months. Senior administration officials emphasized that July 2011 -- about 18 months from when the first batch of additional U.S. troops arrives in Afghanistan -- will mark the start of the U.S. withdrawal.
Administration officials have said that, while the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, the goal is to weaken the movement to the extent that it cannot threaten the central government or provide sanctuary for al-Qaeda.
Obama is essentially gambling that Karzai, reelected last month by default, will feel more pressure to reform his government and that the Taliban will not simply wait out the U.S. military presence.
"Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground," Obama said. "But it will be clear to the Afghan government -- and, more importantly, to the Afghan people -- that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country."
Many of Obama's political advisers, including Vice President Biden, argued for a more narrowly focused counterterrorism strategy that would have accelerated Afghan troop training, stepped up aerial drone strikes against al-Qaeda operatives in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and helped shore up the nuclear-armed government of Pakistan against a Taliban insurgency inside its borders.
Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, also opposed sending additional troops, arguing that doing so would increase Karzai's dependence on the U.S. military and prolong the country's involvement in the war.
Although Obama selected more troops than Biden and Eikenberry had wanted, the specific timeline he set for the start of the withdrawal was a nod to their concerns, administration officials said.
"The people of Afghanistan have endured violence for decades," Obama said. "They have been confronted with occupation -- by the Soviet Union, and then by foreign al-Qaeda fighters who used Afghan land for their own purposes. So tonight, I want the Afghan people to understand: America seeks an end to this era of war and suffering. We have no interest in occupying your country."
In his speech, Obama appealed to NATO allies, which under his strategy will be asked to contribute at least 5,000 additional troops. In many European countries, the conflict is even less popular than it is in the United States, and few governments so far have stepped forward with new commitments.
"We must come together to end this war successfully," Obama said. "For what's at stake is not simply a test of NATO's credibility -- what's at stake is the security of our allies and the common security of the world."
The president reaffirmed that destroying al-Qaeda is the chief objective of his strategy and emphasized that turning over government and security responsibilities to Afghans as quickly as possible is essential to the mission. He called the region "the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda."
Of the 30,000 additional U.S. troops that Obama plans to deploy, 5,000 will be dedicated to training Afghan security forces. A senior administration official said the goal for the Afghan army, for example, is to increase its ranks from 90,000 to 134,000 by the end of 2010.
All the U.S. troops are due to arrive by the end of May, moving up by about six months the expected deployment schedule. Most of the combat forces will be used in the south and east, where the Taliban is the strongest.
During the review, Obama asked for province-by-province assessments of the Taliban's strength, the effectiveness of provincial Afghan leaders and the overall security outlook to determine how quickly U.S. forces could leave certain regions.
Those calculations, likely to evolve as the conflict intensifies, will help determine the shape and timing of the eventual U.S. withdrawal.
At the same time, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is concerned that an abrupt U.S. departure will leave his country vulnerable to the Taliban, which the Pakistani army is fighting in the tribal areas. But many Pakistanis believe the U.S. role in the region is inflaming the war and weakening the government, something Obama sought to address in his speech.
"In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly," he said. "Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect and mutual trust."
Staff researcher Alice R. Crites contributed to this report.
By Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith
Friday, November 20, 2009
Reasonable minds can disagree about Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 perpetrators in a Manhattan federal court. But some prominent criticisms are exaggerated, and others place undue faith in military commissions as an alternative to civilian trials.
Mohammed is many things: an enemy combatant in a war against the United States whom the government can detain without trial until the conflict ends; a war criminal subject to trial by military commission under the laws of war; and someone answerable in federal court for violations of the U.S. criminal code. Which system he is placed in for purposes of incapacitation and justice involves complex legal and political trade-offs.
A trial in Manhattan will bring enormous media attention and require unprecedented security. But it is unlikely to make New York a bigger target than it has been since February 1993, when Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef attacked the World Trade Center. If al-Qaeda could carry out another attack in New York, it would -- a fact true a week ago and for a long time. Its inability to do so is a testament to our military, intelligence and law enforcement responses since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In deciding to use federal court, the attorney general probably considered the record of the military commission system that was established in November 2001. This system secured three convictions in eight years. The only person who had a full commission trial, Osama bin Laden's driver, received five additional months in prison, resulting in a sentence that was shorter than he probably would have received from a federal judge.
One reason commissions have not worked well is that changes in constitutional, international and military laws since they were last used, during World War II, have produced great uncertainty about the commissions' validity. This uncertainty has led to many legal challenges that will continue indefinitely -- hardly an ideal situation for the trial of the century.
By contrast, there is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder's critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again.
In terrorist trials over the past 15 years, federal prosecutors and judges have gained extensive experience protecting intelligence sources and methods, limiting a defendant's ability to raise irrelevant issues and tightly controlling the courtroom. Moussaoui's trial was challenging because his request for access to terrorists held at "black" sites had to be litigated. Difficulties also arose because Moussaoui acted as his own lawyer, and the judge labored to control him. But it is difficult to imagine a military commission of rudimentary fairness that would not allow a defendant a similar right to represent himself and speak out in court.
In either trial forum, defendants will make an issue of how they were treated and attempt to undermine the trial politically. These efforts are likely to have more traction in a military than a civilian court. No matter how scrupulously fair the commissions are, defendants will criticize their relatively loose rules of evidence, their absence of a civilian jury and their restrictions on the ability to examine classified evidence used against them. Some say it is wrong to give Mohammed trial rights ordinarily conferred on Americans, but a benefit of civilian trials over commissions is that they make it harder for defendants to complain about kangaroo courts or victor's justice.
The potential procedural advantages of military commission trials are relatively unimportant with obviously guilty defendants such as Mohammed, but they help explain the attorney general's related decision last week to consign five men accused of attacking the USS Cole to a military commission. Holder indicated that he was doing so in part because the Cole was a military target outside the United States, but that reason does not hold up. The Pentagon was a military target, many aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks were planned abroad, and the Cole attack is already the subject of a federal indictment in New York.
It is more likely that Holder decided to use a commission system still learning to walk because the Cole case is relatively weak and will benefit from the marginal advantages the commission system offers the government. It is also likely that the Justice Department will decide that many other terrorists at Guantanamo Bay will not be tried in civilian or military court but, rather, will be held under a military detention rationale more suitable to the circumstances of their cases.
These decisions have already invited charges of opportunistic forum shopping. The Bush administration, criticized on similar grounds, properly explained that it would use whatever lawful tool worked best, all things considered, to incapacitate a particular terrorist. Holder's decisions appear to reflect a similarly pragmatic approach.
Of course, the attorney general made a different call on Mohammed than did the Bush administration. The wisdom of that difficult judgment will be determined by future events. But Holder's critics do not help their case by understating the criminal justice system's capacities, overstating the military system's virtues and bumper-stickering a reasonable decision.
Jim Comey, a deputy attorney general and U.S. attorney in Manhattan during the Bush administration, is general counsel of Lockheed Martin Corp. Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general during the Bush administration, teaches at Harvard Law School and is on the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law.
DEMOCRATIC DISSENT
Reid must find compromise to pass health-care bill
Democrats had little time to savor their weekend Senate health-care victory, as two of the lawmakers who voted to move the debate forward Saturday night indicated Sunday that they will not vote to pass the package if it includes a government-run insurance program.
Despite the success in the test vote, the fragile consensus in the Democratic caucus will face its greatest test yet as the health-care debate moves to the Senate floor and Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) struggles to stave off internal schisms. The cracks in the 60-member caucus are most obvious over the public insurance option.
One member of the Democratic caucus, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), reiterated Sunday that he will oppose any bill that contains a public option. Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," he called such a government-run plan "radical."
"We have a health-care system that has real troubles, but we have an economic system that is in real crisis," Lieberman said. "And I don't want to fix the problems in our health-care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis."
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), another centrist who supported the move to continue debate but has made it clear he has many objections to the legislation as currently written, restated his opposition to a public plan. "I don't want a big-government, Washington-run operation that undermines the private insurance that 200 million Americans now have," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Moderate Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) also have deep misgivings about the Senate language -- a public option with a state opt-out clause -- and have expressed varying degrees of unhappiness about other approaches under consideration.
Some liberals in the chamber were just as insistent that they will press to keep the bill largely intact. "I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country -- when the public option has this much support -- that [a public option is] not going to be in it," Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) said on CNN's "State of the Union."
Reid announced after the vote that the Senate will begin deliberations on the $848 billion bill Nov. 30 and will consider amendments through most of December. What Democrats lack in consensus they make up for in determination to pass a bill. Not for years has the Senate seen legislation as big as the health-care measure -- weighing in at more than 2,000 pages -- move forward at such a steady, if plodding, pace. "We know not all 60 senators in my caucus agree on every aspect of this bill," Reid told reporters after the vote. "But all Democrats do believe now is the time to make sure all Americans can access affordable health insurance."
And the deadline pressure is mounting. With less than a year until the 2010 midterm elections -- and with Reid himself facing a potentially tough race at home in Nevada -- senators are eager to vote on health care before Christmas and complete negotiations with the House no later than the end of January, so they can turn their attention to legislation aimed at creating jobs.
"We have to finish it in the Senate or it's going to be maybe a long lunch break over Christmas," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) said on "Meet the Press," suggesting that lawmakers may be forced to cut into their holiday recess to work on the bill. "We've got to really focus, refocus our attention -- all of our attention on getting people back to work."
Durbin argued for the public option but indicated a willingness to compromise to pass the measure.
For every member of the Democratic caucus Reid loses, he must gain the support of a Republican, and at the moment the number of potential converts adds up to no more than two. Maine moderates Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins are probably the only GOP senators Reid has any hope of attracting to the 60-vote bloc necessary to head off a filibuster.
Polls show that a public option -- essentially a government-sponsored insurance plan that would be offered alongside private policies on exchanges created for people who do not have access to affordable employer coverage -- remains popular with voters, although less so in more conservative states. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, a government plan as outlined in both the Senate and House bills would cost more than private coverage and, as a result, attract few customers.
The question is whether Reid and the many Democratic senators who are working to resolve the issue can identify an acceptable compromise. If not, some of Reid's Democratic colleagues think the only way liberals will relent is if he calls a vote on a Senate bill with a public option and the legislation fails.
Given the concessions that Reid offered to Landrieu, Lincoln and Nelson to secure their votes on Saturday, including a $300 million Medicaid provision for Landrieu's home state of Louisiana, liberal senators are fully aware that the public option is vulnerable.
But other flash points also have emerged. One that surfaced last week, and could cause political indigestion for Democrats from conservative states, involves provisions in the Senate bill that the gun-ownership lobby has identified as potentially problematic.
The conservative group Gun Owners of America sent out an action alert to its 300,000 members on Friday warning that the Senate legislation would mandate that doctors provide "gun-related health data" to "a government database," including information on mental-health issues detected in patients, which could jeopardize their ability to obtain a firearms license.
In addition, the group said the legislation's "wellness" provisions -- designed to encourage more healthful lifestyles -- would allow federal officials to mandate that companies charge higher insurance premiums for employees who own guns.
Also unresolved in the Democratic caucus is the degree to which employers should be required to provide coverage. Nelson, like Republican Snowe, has said he will seek to modify the Senate bill to ease the financial burden on small businesses.
But liberal senators want the Senate measure to impose tougher rules for companies. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a proponent of a robust employer mandate similar to the one in the House bill, is weighing whether to offer an amendment that would toughen the Senate legislation by adding fines for uncovered part-time workers and by lowering the threshold for penalties to firms with as few as 25 workers.
And while Reid is managing Democratic skirmishes, Republicans are expected to offer their own series of provocative amendments, including measures related to abortion and illegal immigration intended to underscore the GOP's argument that Democrats are orchestrating a government takeover of the health-care system.
"The important thing is for the American people to understand that this bill doesn't fix what's wrong with health care," Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a physician who is expected to play a prominent role in the floor debate, said on ABC's "This Week." "We're treating symptoms, not the disease."
Staff writers Paul Kane and Lori Montgomery contributed to this report.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/16/terrorism/index.html
Monday, Nov 16, 2009 | Salon.com | Glenn Greenwald's 'Unclaimed Territory' blog
Why are such glaring truths about the effects of our policies continuously ignored?
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
The British journalist Johann Hari has written an absolutely vital article for The Independent, examining a growing movement of former hardened Islamic militants who are now devoted to teaching a more moderate and less fundamentalist Islam. Hari focuses on understanding what motivates some Muslims to turn to radicalism and terrorism in the first place, and how that process can be reversed. Though these ex-militants have very diverse backgrounds, they all stress two critical facts: (1) the more the foreign policy of the West is seen as aggressive, violent and oppressive to the Muslim world, the easier it is to convert Muslims to violent radicalism, and (2) the most potent weapon for undermining Islamic extremism is the efforts of Westerners to work against their own governments' belligerent policies:
To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy -- which was real, and burning -- emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. . . .
But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community -- they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 -- from Guantanamo to Iraq -- made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think -- anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"
But the converse was -- they stressed -- also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.
One of the leaders of Britain's movement of ex-Islamists, Maajid Nawaz, recounts how his hardened militarism began when, as a youth, he read "leaflets saying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia to Southend." In 2000, he moved to Egypt and began recruiting students into radicalism. Listen to what he says about what helped and hindered his efforts:
He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 -- until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."
Nawaz was ultimately imprisoned in Egypt and was surrounded by Egyptian prisoners who were being brutally tortured by a government propped up by the U.S. (he was spared only because he was a British citizen). Consider what began to change Nawaz's views on the rightness of his Islamic extremism:
Maajid's Islamist convictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions -- the men who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.
HT [the Islamic group which he had headed] abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.
"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt -- maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."
In other words, the very policies the U.S. has been pursuing in the name of combating Terrorism -- invading, occupying, and bombing Muslim countries; locking them up without trials; torturing them; violating the values we've been preaching to the world -- have been the most potent instruments for fueling Islamic radicalism and terrorism. By contrast, those who have been continuously accused of being "soft on Terrorism" and even being allied with the Terrorists -- those who opposes our various wars, who demanded and provided basic human rights protections and equal liberties to Muslims, who objected to their own governments' oppressive and belligerent policies -- have done more to diffuse and impede Muslim radicalism than virtually anyone else in the world.
These truths are so self-evident that they shouldn't require journalists like Hari to document. If we invade, bomb and attack Muslim countries -- and uniquely deny to them the rights we claim are universal (such as the right to be free of torture and imprisonment without trials) -- then far more Muslims are going to wallow in rage and hatred for the West and be willing and eager to return the treatment. Conversely, seeing Westerners speak out against their countries' attacks on, and oppressive policies towards, Muslims renders far harder to sustain the divisiveness and demonization on which all radicalism feeds. This is all basic cause and effect, as even the Pentagon's own Task Force concluded all the way back in 2004 in explaining how and why our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are severely exacerbating the threat of Terrorism.
Despite how obvious and well-documented these truths are, so many American elites continue to ignore them. Writing in Newsweek this week, Slate's Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg looks at the Fort Hood shootings and various disrupted terrorist plots and concludes that Obama has perhaps been too conciliatory towards Muslims; that "Obama's [so-called] olive-branch strategy" has not made us safer, at least in the short-term; and that "Obama's heritage feeds a broader suspicion that he is too casual about the threat from America's Islamist enemies." In what fantasy world is Jacob Weisberg living?
Obama is presiding over active wars in three separate Muslim countries -- Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. All year long, there has been an abundance of video footage of Muslim villages -- including scores of women and children -- being wiped out by American air raids. Obama has already escalated the war in Afghanistan. His administration is actively demanding the right to abduct people and imprison them at Bagram with no charges and is actively protecting those who spent the last decade torturing Muslims and disppearing them to secret camps. Our steadfast alliance with Israel -- which The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti documented this weekend was a prime motivating factor in the militarism and hatred of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- has been symbolically altered by Obama but otherwise remains fully in place. It's true that Obama has sand-papered some of the roughest rhetorical and policy edges of the Bush/Cheney approach -- explicitly barring torture and CIA black sites, trying to close Guantanamo, sounding a far different tone in how he speaks about and to the Muslim world -- but, at least so far, many of the fundamentals remain largely in place, and it's thus unsurprising that Obama's intense international popularity has not yet translated to much of the Muslim world.
Despite all that, people like Jacob Weisberg fret that Obama "has not taken the radical Islamist threat to American security -- at home or in Afghanistan -- seriously enough," and demand that Obama announce to the world that "America does not face a threat from the perversion of faith in general. We face a threat from the perversion of one faith in particular." Even in the face of mountains of evidence that this sort of heightened aggression and oppression exacerbates the threat of Islamic terrorism, people like Weisberg continue to demand more of it. And even in the face of the most compelling evidence imaginable that accommodation to the Muslim world and treating Muslims equally and respectfully is the greatest threat to the Islamic extremist, people like Weisberg perpetually worry that we're doing too much of that. At some point, a rational person has to wonder whether people like Jacob Weisberg -- who endlessly advocate policies that fuel Islamic extremism and intensify tension between the West and the Muslim world -- aren't desirous of exactly that outcome. After decades of pursuing this blatantly counter-productive approach, what else could explain such moral and intellectual blindness?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/hostage-takers-in-the-sen_b_359283.html
November 16, 2009 | Huffington Post
Dean Baker
Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
As most of us are preparing for the holidays a small clique in the Senate, with their collaborators in the Washington punditry, are planning for a dramatic hostage-taking event. Their target of opportunity is a bill to increase the nation's debt limit. The hostage-takers propose to obstruct the bill's passage unless the rest of the country gives into their demands to cut Social Security and Medicare and takes other steps to meet their warped sense of fiscal responsibility.
The debt limit must be increased at regular intervals in order to allow the government to function normally because the government is currently operating at a deficit. If the debt limit is not passed, then at some point the government will not be able to pay workers and contractors. It won't be able to send out Social Security checks or make payments for Medicaid and unemployment insurance to state governments. And, it will not be able to make interest payments on government bonds, effectively defaulting on the national debt.
As a condition of allowing a bill to increase the debt limit to pass the Senate, the hostage-takers are demanding that Congress agree to establish a special commission to make recommendations for reducing the long-term budget deficit. This commission would be stacked with people who want to cut Social Security and Medicare.
When the commission makes its report to Congress, which would include huge cuts for these programs along with some tax increases, the report would not be subject to regular Congressional procedures. It would be fast-tracked, which means that it could not be amended, debate would be limited, and there would not be the usual 60 votes required to bring the report to a vote in the Senate. In short, the deck would be stacked toward approving large cuts in ways that would not ordinarily be the case.
The hostage-takers argue that such a commission is necessary because the current system is broken. This is another way of saying that the hostage-takers have been unable to get what they want through the normal democratic process. Rather than trying to organize popular support for their position, like people pushing for health care reform, restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, or an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this group of senators and their collaborators prefer the route of hostage-taking. They hope that by threatening the passage of a vital bill, they can advance measures for which they lack public support.
This adventure in hostage-taking is especially infuriating since this gang did so much to push the country into its current economic crisis. At a time when some of us were trying to warn of the housing bubble and the economic disaster that would inevitably follow in the wake of its collapse, this crew was filling the airwaves and newspapers with their scare stories of huge deficits in 2050. Of course, these deficits were driven almost entirely by the cost of maintaining a broken health care system, a point that they rarely chose to highlight.
As a result of the bubble and its collapse, we have enormous deficits today, in addition to 15 million unemployed and tens of millions of homeowners underwater in their mortgage. But the hostage-takers act as though nothing has changed. They acknowledge no responsibility for this disaster and just press on in their drive to gut Social Security and Medicare, two programs that are now more important than ever as a result of the economic mismanagement of the last decade.
The key here is to refuse to give in to the hostage-takers. This is a high stakes game of chicken, but at the end of the day, the hostage-takers, many of whom are financed by Wall Street money, stand to lose far more than the rest of us. None of us should want to see the government defaulting on its debt, but if this crew wants to press the matter, the Wall Street gang will lose much more than those of us who don't possess great wealth.
The Wall Street gang may have suckered us with getting the TARP bailout money last year, but we don't have to let them get away with the same trick again. If they want to threaten to crash the financial system with their irresponsible hostage-taking, then we should steal a line from a former president: "bring it on!"—
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 16, 2009
General Motors is expected to announce on Monday that it will begin repaying its debt to the United States next month, years earlier than required.
The nation's largest automaker plans to pay $1 billion per quarter until the $6.7 billion loan is repaid, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The plan does not cover all of the $50 billion the United States has invested in the company.
How much the government will receive on its investment depends on GM's eventual stock value. In exchange for the $50 billion, the United States holds the $6.7 billion debt, $2.1 billion in preferred stock and a 61 percent stake in the company.
But the announcement of the repayment plan indicates that GM has exceeded financial planners' projections.
"This is a result of the company performing modestly above expectations," said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the situation. "Obviously, the company has a long way to go and a lot of important things to execute on."
The repayment plan comes as the company prepares to make its first quarterly earnings report since emerging from bankruptcy proceedings in July.
The $6.7 billion debt is not due to be repaid until July 2015, but the company has exceeded projections, partly by going through bankruptcy more rapidly than it thought it would, and partly by cutting costs.
The company is not expected to be showing a profit when financial results are reported Monday. But it has significantly cut operating costs and is better able to weather the downturn in auto sales that put it and Chrysler on the brink of ruin this year.
In its last quarterly earnings report, in May, the company said its had lost $6 billion and had used $10.2 billion more in cash than it generated from operations. The new earnings report, representing the restructured GM, will be measured against those numbers.
http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/mickey_edwards/2009/11/the_test.php
Nov 14 2009 | The Atlantic | Mickey Edwards' 'The Iconoclast'
By deciding to try an admitted terrorist in federal court, Eric Holder is putting American democracy -- and us -- to the test.
Democracy -- the kind people know in too many other places -- simply means letting the people go to the polls to choose their leaders. But the United States is not just "a democracy"; it's a liberal democracy (that is, one that specifically protects people from government, rather than the other way around) and a constitutional democracy (one in which the precepts and laws are clearly spelled out and binding on everybody from the President to the trash collector).
Our American form of democracy is not about policy but about process: it's about how we make our decisions, under what rules, guided by what principles, committed to what values. The Attorney General has now decided to see whether or not we really believe those words we so casually mouth when we salute the American flag, recite the pledge of allegiance, sing the Star Spangled Banner. We will test whether pinning a flag to a lapel is a paean to American principles or merely to base chauvinism.
Here's the thing: we hold ourselves out to be a nation fully committed to the rule of law. That is no accident. America's founders were familiar with the power of arbitrary rule. They knew first-hand what it was like to have rulers toss opponents into jail and hold them there forever with no opportunity to defend themselves or to even know what it was they were being accused of. They determined that in America, unlike what Donald Rumsfeld later called "old Europe", people would at least be given an opportunity to try to defend themselves. Perhaps they would then end up in a cell for life or at the end of a rope, but the goal was to ensure that they were guilty before punishment was imposed.
This old-fashioned idea -- the right to defend oneself, no matter how heinous the crimes one is suspected of committing -- is at the root of some of the most important principles guiding American life. Consider the freedom of the press. In colonial America, it was a crime to bad-mouth a colony's monarch-appointed governor. When New York publisher John Peter Zenger was taken to court for doing just that, a jury decided that guilty or not (he was) no journalist was going to get tossed into the clink for speaking ill of a government official. Want to know why a member of Congress cannot be punished for something he or she says on the House or Senate floor, or why they can't be arrested (except for treason, felony, or breach of peace) while en route to their official duties? Because rulers in the past knew how to get pesky opponents out of the way. So our Founders established a whole set of procedures to ensure that law, not arbitrary rule, would become the American way. The rules we live by today were put in place by a people who knew that the risk of following rules was ultimately less than the risk of capricious command.
Fast forward to the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who claims credit for the attacks on September 11, 2001. Despite the Bush Administration's apparent comfort level with holding terrorism suspects forever without charges, the Constitution does not permit such an outcome. Except in the cases of invasion or civil war, the federal government is specifically prohibited from suspending the right of habeas corpus, the most important of all individual rights and the greatest protection against arbitrary government rule. At some point, therefore, Mr. Mastermind was going to face trial. The question was where and under what circumstances. Because military commissions do not afford the level of in-court procedures available in government courtrooms, and because Mohammed, like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols attacked a civilian, rather than a military, target, the constitutionally proper venue for his trial was a federal courtroom.
This raised the question not of constitutional propriety but about such ancillary matters as whether he could be held in an American city, American cells, and American courts without a risk of escape. Whether an American judge could be counted on not to inject his or her own anti-American bias into the proceedings. Whether or not the nature of American trials would allow Mohammed a stage upon which to perform. Big questions, and fair.
So high are the stakes that one noted commentator, Mark Shields, who is thoughtful and well respected, believed the decision should have been made by the President, not his underling at the Justice Department. But in fact the opposite is true: Mr. Obama is the chief executive but even though Eric Holder was appointed by Obama, he is not the President's Attorney General, but America's (a distinction the hapless Alberto Gonzales failed to understand). In fact, the selection of Bob Bauer to replace Gregory Craig as the chief White House counsel has been criticized, properly, because Bauer is a Democratic (read, political) insider and the last thing we need in the office of legal counsel down the hall from the President is another John Yoo, bending law to suit presidential preferences. Eric Holder knows that this is not a political call, it is a legal and constitutional call, and there, at least until the Supreme Court steps in, the buck stops with him.
As to the questions raised: both mass murders and leaders of vast, heavily-armed criminal enterprises have been tried and convicted in American courts. Our cells hold vicious and charismatic and wily men. Our courts have not been founding wanting. Yet many are fearful. Were the Israelis afraid to put Adolf Eichmann -- responsible for far more deaths than Mohammed -- on trial in Jerusalem? America itself was not afraid to put Ramzi Yousef and other terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing on trial in New York (they were convicted).
Perhaps the worst fears of some will be realized; perhaps the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be disrupted or disruptive; perhaps he will be set free. The chances are slim indeed, but if one imagines worst-case scenarios, one must still ask whether that "worst case" is worse than turning our backs on our system on laws and the process guarantees of a free society. On that one, count me with Eric Holder.—
CNN TECH
November 13, 2009 1:29 p.m. EST
NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station.
The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. "Indeed, yes, we found water," he said.
The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, intentionally crashed October 9 into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole.
After the satellite struck, a rocket flew through the debris cloud, measuring the amount of water and providing a host of other data, Colaprete said.
The project team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the best information about the presence of water, Colaprete said. A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining light they emit or absorb.
Although the goal of the $79 million mission was to determine whether there is water on the moon, discoveries in other areas are expected as studies progress, Colaprete and other scientists said at the briefing at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Francisco, California.
"The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon," the space agency said in a written statement shortly after the briefing began.
Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said the latest discovery also could unlock the mysteries of the solar system.
He listed several options as sources for the water, including solar winds, comets, giant molecular clouds or even the moon itself through some kind of internal activity. The Earth also may have a role, Wargo said.
"If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data," NASA said in its statement.
"In addition, water and other compounds represent potential resources that could sustain future lunar exploration
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/11/us/politics/AP-US-US-Afghanistan.html
November 11, 2009 | Associated Press
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.
In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Obama is still close to announcing his revamped war strategy -- most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.
But the president raised questions at a war council meeting Wednesday that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama's thinking.
The president is considering options that include adding 30,000 or more U.S. forces to take on the Taliban in key areas of Afghanistan and to buy time for the Afghan government's small and ill-equipped fighting forces to take over. The other three options on the table are ranges of troop increases, from a relatively small addition of forces to the roughly 40,000 that the top U.S. general in Afghanistan prefers, according to military and other officials.
The key sticking points appear to be timelines and mounting questions about the credibility of the Afghan government.
Administration officials said Wednesday that Obama wants to make it clear that the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended. The war is now in its ninth year and is claiming U.S. lives at a record pace as military leaders say the Taliban has the upper hand in many parts of the country.
Eikenberry, the top U.S. envoy to Kabul, is a prominent voice among those advising Obama, and his sharp dissent is sure to affect the equation. He retired from the Army this year to become one of the few generals in American history to switch directly from soldier to diplomat, and he himself is a recent, former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Eikenberry's cables raise deep concern about the viability of the Karzai government, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with them who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified documents. Other administration officials raised the same misgivings in describing Obama's hesitancy to accept any of the options before him in their current form.
The options presented to Obama by his war council will now be amended.
Military officials say one approach is a compromise battle plan that would add 30,000 or more U.S. forces atop a record 68,000 in the country now. They described it as ''half and half,'' meaning half fighting and half training and holding ground so the Afghans can regroup.
The White House says Obama has not made a final choice, though military and other officials have said he appears near to approving a slightly smaller increase than the war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wants at the outset.
Among the options for Obama would be ways to phase in additional troops, perhaps eventually equaling McChrystal's full request, based on security or other conditions in Afghanistan and in response to pending decisions on troops levels by some U.S. allies fighting in Afghanistan.
The White House has chafed under criticism from Republicans and some outside critics that Obama is dragging his feet to make a decision.
Obama's top military advisers have said they are comfortable with the pace of the process, and senior military officials have pointed out that the president still has time since no additional forces could begin flowing into Afghanistan until early next year.
Under the scenario featuring about 30,000 more troops, that number most likely would be assembled from three Army brigades and a Marine Corps contingent, plus a new headquarters operation that would be staffed by 7,000 or more troops, a senior military official said. There would be a heavy emphasis on the training of Afghan forces, and the reinforcements Obama sends could include thousands of U.S. military trainers.
Another official stressed that Obama is considering a range of possibilities for the military expansion and that his eventual decision will cover changes in U.S. approach beyond the addition of troops. The stepped-up training and partnership operation with Afghan forces would be part of that effort, the official said, although expansion of a better-trained Afghan force long has been part of the U.S objective and the key to an eventual U.S. and allied exit from the country.
With the Taliban-led insurgency expanding in size and ability, U.S. military strategy already has shifted to focus on heading off the fighters and protecting Afghan civilians. The evolving U.S. policy, already remapped early in Obama's tenure, increasingly acknowledges that the insurgency can be blunted but not defeated outright by force.
Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Pamela Hess contributed to this report.
