reflectivepundit

Another Victim of Anti-Abortion-Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, Dr. George Tiller, a long-time target of the extremist anti-abortion milieu, was shot to death while he served as an usher during the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. In 1993, Tiller survived a shooting attack by an anti-abortion fanatic. Nobody should be surprised about the killing because Dr. Tiller was one of the most prominent targets of anti-abortion hate speech and of the revived so-called Nuremberg Files that list the names of abortion providers and advocates. Just take a look at one of these sites that call abortion providers “baby butchers” and ask like-minded fanatics to “Starve Satan: Stop Abortion.” Virtual blood drips from parts of aborted babies on this site and similar ones. And there is a prominent headline “Tiller the Killer” that links to a list of baby butcher’s “evils.” Another web site proclaims that “Abortion is Slavery to Satan. Stop it or God will Destroy the USA.”

Although The Nuremberg Files were banned and disappeared from the Internet for a while, they made a come back more recently and once again list abortion clinic owners and workers as well as pro-choice supporters. Moreover, anti-abortion activists are asked to “locate themselves outside baby butcher businesses across the nation and film the people coming and going” to establish a record of those “who go out to kill God’s little babies.”

While law enforcement circles and the media report regularly on “eco-terrorism” by extreme environmentalist who have not killed a single person so far, they avoid the terms anti-abortion terrorism and anti-abortion terrorists although the perpetrators of this sort of violence killed half a dozen abortion doctors in the U.S. and Canada so far and injured far more. It seems that political violence from the right tends to be characterized as crime whereas political violence from the left is more readily labeled terrorism.

When Peace Negotiations Fail: Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Reporting about talks between “intermediaries” and the Taliban as well as other militant factions in Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins wrote recently that these secret negotiations have taken place “for months,” “accelerated since Mr. Obama took office” and have been conducted with the blessing of the Kabul government and without opposition from Washington. Reportedly, the Taliban and other militants insist that the removal of U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan must be part of any peace deal, whereas the Obama administration demands that the Taliban disarms as precondition for negotiations. Imagine for a moment that the two sides would agree to each these conditions and come to a peace agreement.

You would have to believe in the fairy tale to expect that such an arrangement would work in the real world--certainly not as long as Taliban leader and bin Laden ally Mullah Muhammad Omar and his Afghan counterparts spread violence and terror in order to hold and expand their power positions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Officially, it is the goal of the Obama administration to win over “moderates” within the Taliban and thereby strengthen the support base for peaceful cooperation and legitimate participation in Afghan public affairs. But neither this official position nor the indirect talks with Taliban and other militant leaders promise any progress in the search for a peaceful solution in Afghanistan.

One does not have to look further than neighboring Pakistan for evidence. After all, it was the peace-agreement between the Pakistani Taliban and the provincial government of the North-West Frontier region of early 2009 and approved by the national parliament that led to civil war-like conditions, terrorism, and, most of all, a colossal humanitarian crisis. As part of the settlement, the army withdrew from the region. But although the agreement gave the Taliban the right to impose the most extreme form of sharia law and de facto control over the SWAT valley, the extremists did not lay down their arms as they had agreed to. Instead, they fought to expand their rule of terror into other regions of the country with the goal to take down the central government and bring their brand of religious rule to all of Pakistan. 

In short, the agreement that surrendered a whole province with a population of 1.5 million to the Taliban emboldened the extremists to mount a brutal offensive beyond the Swat region shortly after the “peace” deal was agreed to.

Two Obvious Truths About the Torture Scandal

by David Epstein

Obvious Truth #1: Let’s say there’s this terrorist, and he has plans to blow up a major US landmark, killing lots of people (maybe even your son or daughter!).  I’m walking past his house, ten minutes before the bomb is set to go off, and I see the folder with his plans right there on his kitchen table!  (He’s perhaps not the most organized or secretive of terrorists.)

I can get the plans and save all those people’s lives (maybe even your son’s or daughter’s!), but I have to break into his house to do it, and that’s a crime.  The answer should now be obvious to you: stealing should not be a crime!  Still not convinced by my logic?  This could really, really happen!  I saw it on an old episode of SWAT (or was it Get Smart?).  Why are you still opposing me?  Why are you willing to put innocent American lives in danger?  Tough guys (especially tough guys who got out of fighting real wars when they had a chance) rob houses.

(Back to reality.)  There’s lots of good debunking of ticking-time-bomb scenarios out there, but I have yet to see the simple point made that even if such a situation did arise (which in real life might happen once every decade or two), and even if torture would work in such a case (no real-life examples of that yet, outside of 24), that wouldn’t justify a regime that makes torture legal.  Torture is wrong, hideous, and abhorrent, and if you needed it for a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, you could get the equivalent of a judicial bypass, or warrant, from the President for that one occasion.  But it makes no sense at all to torture what are likely innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, sold to US forces by their neighbors looking to make a buck, and justify it under the ticking-time-bomb scenario. 

Obvious Truth #2: Torture is to the Iraq War what the internment of Japanese-Americans was to WWII.  In both cases the exigencies of war created a special kind of hysteria that let us brand certain human beings as “others” and do unspeakable things to them, to our lasting national shame.  Of course, even by these standards what we’ve done now is dastardly: at least the forces we fought in WWII posed much more of an existential threat to our country than Al Qaeda ever will, and even then we merely forcibly relocated innocent people rather than torture them.

It also follows that in 50 years (or maybe sooner), the US will officially apologize for what it’s done here, just like we apologized to those interned during the Second World War.  And I hope Condi Rice realizes that future school children will watch tapes of her, like others from the Bush Administration, still make the claim that “we didn’t torture” and be told that yes, it’s unbelievable that she could say something like that, but that’s just an object lesson in what bad people do.

What Speaker Pelosi Knew When: Less Than a Sideshow

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Speaker Pelosi’s spoken words and body language did not add up to a convincing defense against the accusation that she was briefed by the CIA about the so-called “enhanced interrogation” methods used to force terrorist and suspected terrorists to reveal important information as early as September 2002. If she remembers being told at the time that waterboarding was considered legal, as the has said, it is difficult to figure out why she thought this kind of torture was not yet used—unless the CIA said precisely that during the briefing in question. On that count, we have Pelosi’s “the-CIA-misled-members-of-congress” and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham’s “the-CIA’s-records-of-briefing-dates-are-wrong” charges versus CIA-Director Leon Panetta’s “CIA-officers-briefed-her-truthfully” and former Congressman and former CIA-Director Porter Gross’s “we-were-briefed-at-the-early-date” positions.

Ultimately it does not matter whether Pelosi and other members of congress, Democrats and Republicans, learned about inhumane treatment and torture of detainees in September 2002, when President George W. Bush and Karl Rove rolled out their marketing plan for the Iraq invasion—or some weeks or months later. After all, the Bush White House with Vice President Cheney in a key role and key departments and agencies did not wait for any advice from the legislative branch for their conduct of the so-called “war against terrorism.”

Nancy Pelosi has admitted that she knew by early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq when the mass-mediated torture debate was still seemingly a hypothetical exercise. Because then majority leader Pelosi remained silent, Republicans now try hard to turn the spotlight away from those highest level administration officials who decided in favor of torture and those in the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice who twisted the law to justify waterboarding and other illegal, inhumane and ultimately ineffective interrogation techniques.

Reality Check on Specter and PA Voters

by David Epstein

Just a quick word on Specter's dropping out of the Republican party to avoid a primary challenge that he might well lose. The Republicans have been playing up this angle of the story, not only to emphasize Specter's narrow political motives for the switch as opposed to broad disagreement with what the Republican party has come to stand for, but also to imply that Specter's move proves he's afraid of rejection by Pennsylvania voters.

That's fine, except that the last sentence should read "he's afraid of rejection by Pennsylvania *Republican* voters" -- i.e., those who would vote in the Republican primary. In fact, given that his erstwhile opponent Pat Toomey (whom Spector beat 51-49 in the 2004 primary) is now running unopposed and will probably get the nomination, Specter will indeed face off against Toomey again, but in the general election rather than the primary. And here, Specter seems right now to be odds-on favorite to retain his seat.

The logic is clear in this new poll of party ID, showing that Republican registration has dropped 7% in the past five years in PA, while Democratic registration has held steady. Thus the Republican primary electorate has gotten smaller and, since most party switchers are moderates rather than extremists, more conservative. So sure, Specter might have lost the primary, but whoever comes out the winner in such a primary is more than likely to lose in Pennsylvania, a moderate state overall if there ever was one.

So the switch, once again, says more about the weakness and extremism -- or the weakness due to extremism, if you will -- of the Republican party than its leaders care to admit. Make no mistake about it; the Republican party will bounce back eventually. We live in a competitive two-party system that over time is balanced between the parties. But it's going to take a while for the GOP to recover from their present sorry state, and when it does, it will be with a new set of leaders, different in tone, experience, and values from those that sit atop the party now.