Beautiful Horizons

Legalized murder

OHMIGAWD!  South Dakota's legislature is considering a "law" that would create a "justifiable homicide" category for killing abortion providers.  John Cole has it HERE.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

When I lived in Germany in the 1970's, the Baader Meinhof Gang aka the Red Army Faction (RAF), were the Al Qaeda of that decade. A group of leftist middle class terrorists, they targeted media, especially the Axel Springer Group, publisher of the wretched Bild Zeitung, US military sites in Germany, including Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, resulting in the death of three, and numerous bank robberies to finance their activities, one of which took place in Kaiserslautern about nine months before I moved there.

I recently got the BluRay disc of The Baader Meinhof Complex, a film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008 and cannot recommend it enough. It faithfully captures the era, but it is also an excellent character study of the main protagonists: Andreas Baader, the leader was captured effectively in all his rage, sexism and bombast, Gudrun Ensslin, Baader's girlfriend and a fiercely dogmatic and subtly cruel "revolutionary" and Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist, willing to wreck her daughter's lives in the name of "revolution." The two scenes that resonated with me deeply were the blatant culture clash at the Fedayeen training camp in Jordan and the moment when Ulrike Meinhof has the opportunity to say no to terrorism and, by jumping out a window, says yes.

I am also reading the book on which the film is based, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., by Stefan Aust. While the book is gripping, it appears to have been translated rather poorly and for a British English reader, using such terms as holdall (a duffel bag in England, I believe) and boot for a car trunk.

Notwithstanding the fact that he and Ulrike Meinhof worked for the same publication at one point and he knew her, he injects precious little of himself in the book. Indeed, it was him along with a former RAF member who rescued Meinhof's daughters from being turned over to a guerrilla training camp in Jordan and reunited them with their father. He did so, I might add, at great personal risk. His account in the preface may be one of the most dry examples of understatement I have ever read:

There was an attempt after that to shoot us in Hamburg, but it failed.

I do believe that I would find it difficult to be quick that casual about it.

"Is Obama's Af-Pak strategy actually working ?"

Bill Bradley, a political analyst whose work appears at New West Notes and Huffington Post - and a critic of Obama's escalation strategy in Afghanistan - asks the question and has some informed and useful thoughts and reflections on certain of the hopeful signs, as well as the inherent dangers.  Here.

Is the Times Carrying Andrew McCarthy's Water?

In this article profiling right-wing screed writer Andrew McCarthy, I believe that there is a factual error. The author makes the following comment:

Ms. [Mary Jo] White, who was the United States attorney [for the Southern District of New York] from 1993 to 2002, declined to discuss Mr. McCarthy’s comments. But in a 2008 panel, Ms. White, who has said she favors military commissions, made clear she agreed with Mr. McCarthy’s view that the prosecutions had not deterred attacks. She said “9/11 happened despite all those cases.”

I attended a panel with White, McCarthy and two of their former colleagues and blogged about it here, writing my post the next day based on my notes. I took copious notes and here's what I wrote about what White said about military tribunals:

Mary Jo White initially was supportive of the military tribunals, but now believes that they were a "big mistake." She also pointed out that the historical record of military commissions shows a significantly lower conviction rate.

McCarthy came off as the outlier in that panel - and I'm being charitable in my language. The author of the article is either being sloppy or being disingenuous. In any event, if it's the same panel I attended, he's grossly misrepresenting what White said on the subject.

In the wake of Ft. Hood

Marc Lynch has some important observations on the implications of how we respond to the Fort Hood tragedy, disturbing revelations about the gunman and the authorities failure to isolate him (via Kevin Drum):

(H)ow America responds to Ft. Hood really is important in the wider attempt to change the nature of its engagement with Muslim publics across the world.  Get the response right, as the administration thus far has done, and they show that things really have changed.  Get it wrong, as its critics demand, and the world could tumble back down into the 'clash of civilizations' trap which al-Qaeda so dearly wants and which the improved American approach of the last couple of years has increasingly denied it. 

Astounding Wingnuttery

First, this bit of hate mail at Daily Kos.

Then, buried deep within this article is the following bit of information:

Merrill Metzger, who worked for the group for six months just as it was getting started in 2007, said Ms. Forde had often traveled from Washington to Arizona with weapons. In March, while stopping over at his home in Redding, Calif., she presented a plan for the group to undertake, Mr. Metzger, her half-brother, said in a telephone interview.

“She was sitting here talking about how she was going to start an underground militia and rob drug dealers,” he said.

Mr. Metzger quit the group, alarmed, he said, by a number of things, including Ms. Forde’s demand for extreme loyalty, right down to the choice of cuisine.

“I had to take an oath, and part of the oath was that I couldn’t eat Mexican food,” he said. “That’s when red flags went up all over for me. That seemed like prejudice.”

Yes it did, because clearly refusing to eat a foreign cuisine is a far greater sign of prejudice than hunting down that same nation's citizens.

I can't make this up

Shepard Smith

The only honest man at Fox News:

Terror Plot Foiled In New York City

The FBI and NYPD have arrested four men in a foiled plot to blow up synagogues in New York City.

That makes the fourth such plot foiled in the region, all of which were accomplished through good, hard police work and without torturing anyone.

Thanks for protecting us, for a job well done and for doing so without breaking the law.

Justice Crawling, But Moving Nevertheless

This bit of news seems to have slipped by this weekend:

Luis Posada Carriles, 81, was charged with 11 counts of lying to US authorities over his involvement in the 1997 bombings at tourist sites in Cuba and other matters. An Italian tourist, Fabio di Celmo, was killed in the 1997 bomb blast at the Copacabana hotel in Havana. In addition, Venezuelan authorities have accused Posada of planning the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados that killed all 73 people aboard.

Here's the gist of it:

According to the indictment, during a deportation hearing Posada falsely told an immigration judge under oath that he had not been involved in anti-Castro bombings in Cuba, and that he had not arranged for an alleged accomplice to bring explosives into Cuba. The alleged accomplice, Salvadoran national Raul Cruz Leon, was convicted in Cuba of the bombings and sentenced to death. Among other accusations, prosecutors said Posada lied about how he had entered the US, and lied about holding a false Guatemalan passport.

There's a simple solution for this: deportation. I would favor sending him to Venezuela. A man who said he has not renounced violence has no business being here.

Justice At Last for Jean Charles de Menezes?

Justice has been delayed, but it may no longer be denied in the case of Charles Menezes, the Brazilian immigrant shot to death by British police who claimed that they had been pursuing him thinking that he was a suspected terrorist. A three month inquest has resulted in an open verdict, effectively denying the police cover for their actions. Moreover, the decision of the jurors in the inquest has essentially called the police liars on two important claims:

1. That when entering the subway car where Menezes was shot, they shouted "armed police."
2. That Menezes moved towards the first police officer who shot him.

This is simply appalling:

The jurors’ conclusions showed they rejected as untrue essential parts of police testimony. They concluded that one of the two officers who shot Mr. de Menezes had not shouted “armed police,” as they testified, when they stormed the stationary subway car where Mr. de Menezes was sitting. A total of 17 civilian passengers on the train testified they heard no such warning before the officers fired.

The account of the two armed police officers, identified in court only by their code names, Charlie 2 and Charlie 12, was that the warning was ignored by Mr. de Menezes, who they said had stood up and walked toward them with his arms and hands in a position “consistent with someone who may be about to detonate a bomb hidden on their person or in a belt.” They said his actions left them with no option, consistent with police procedures, but to shoot Mr. de Menezes in the head.

The jurors, in their answers to the judges’ questions, said they had concluded that Mr. de Menezes had stood up, but that he had not moved toward the firearms officers, a finding that also tallied with the testimony of other passengers aboard the train.

Then there's this:

The jurors said the shooting could have been prevented if the surveillance officers had stopped Mr. Menezes from boarding the buses or entering the Stockwell station. The decision to defer an earlier attempt to arrest him was made by Cressida Dick, an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard who was in charge of the operation that ended with the shooting. Inquest testimony showed that Ms. Dick wavered at critical moments during the pursuit, finally deciding against halting Mr. de Menezes before the armed police caught up with him, after he had boarded the train.

And this:

A senior police surveillance officer is under investigation after he admitted yesterday that he deleted evidence relating to the shooting in July 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes.

The officer, based in the Metropolitan Police special operations squad, told the Brazilian electrician’s inquest that he deleted a line in his computer notes only last week.

The line in his notes claimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick initially said that Mr de Menezes could “run on to Tube as not carrying anything”.

As the New York Times article notes, the family is hoping to be able to pursue the matter further as a result of this verdict. I hope they succeed. An innocent man was shot in the head seven times as a result of sloppy police work and the same police department has deleted evidence and lied about their actions. Someone must be held responsible for this.

A summary of press coverage of the verdict is here.