Considering that many Puerto Ricans have been killed and injured in Iraq, it is appropriate and timely to post this topic on Puerto Rico News - Topix. Also, much of Puerto Rico's economic difficulties today are a result of the Cheney-Bush years in the White House. What Washington does concerning the war on terror, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, does have a serious impact on Puerto Rico. It is important that all Puerto Ricans keep well informed and listen to all sides concerning the War on Terror. -- Upfront Yankee.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 21, 2009
President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.
The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive.
The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago.
By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear.
From 2003 onward, people like Bellinger and Goldsmith were fighting against legal judgments that allowed enhanced interrogation techniques. By 2006, Rice and Hadley brought Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in from a secret foreign prison to regularize detainee procedures. In 2007, Rice refused to support an executive order reviving the interrogation program. Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil. (It didn’t occur to them that they could announce the closure of Gitmo first, then figure out what to do with prisoners.)
Cheney and Obama might pretend otherwise, but it wasn’t the Obama administration that halted the practice of waterboarding. It was a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004.
When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.
The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy. It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy.
In the first place, it is absurd to say this administration doesn’t take terrorism seriously. Obama has embraced the Afghan surge, a strategy that was brewing at the end of the Bush years. He has stepped up drone activity in Pakistan. He has promoted aggressive counterinsurgency fighters and racked up domestic anti-terror accomplishments.
As for the treatment of terror suspects, Jack Goldsmith has a definitive piece called “The Cheney Fallacy” online at The New Republic. He lists a broad range of policies — Guantánamo, habeas corpus, military commissions, rendition, interrogation and so on. He shows how, in most cases, the Obama policy represents a continuation of or a gradual evolution from the final Bush policy.
What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”
Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world. In his speech, Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect.
Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Personal Essay: An Argument for Puerto Rican Statehood - Latina - 05.20.2009
American citizens enjoy all kinds of rights and privileges that most of us simply take for granted. Think about the presidential election—if you were over 18, did you have any doubt about your right to vote for Obama or any other candidate?
Yet this is not the case for the 2.9 million eligible voters who live on the island of Puerto Rico, despite their status as legal citizens of the United States. Only residents of the 50 states can vote in national elections, and as a commonwealth—poised between statehood and independence—Puerto Rico doesn’t make the cut. Many find this state of affairs outrageous.
Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory for 111 years, yet Puerto Ricans remain second-class citizens. Though excluded from presidential voting and Congressional representation, they were drafted to fight in every U.S. conflict from World War I to Vietnam, when the military became all-volunteer—and they continue to serve. According to Pentagon figures, more than 12,000 island Puerto Ricans have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Juan Perez of Manate, P.R., a proud U.S. soldier, says he hopes to see his voting rights expanded because “if you have to follow the orders of your government, then you should be able to vote for them.” Congressman Jerry Weller (D–Ill.), who supports statehood for Puerto Rico, echoed that view when he recently said, “I believe that if you are eligible to join the United States military and defend our constitution and defend our freedoms, then you should have the right to vote for president.”
Of course, Puerto Ricans themselves have repeatedly voted against both statehood and independence in favor of commonwealth status, which, among other benefits, exempts them from paying federal income taxes. However, the tide may be changing: A pro-statehood governor, Luis Fortuño, was inaugurated in January, and a recent poll reported that 57 percent of islanders now favor statehood.
Even if Puerto Rico doesn’t achieve statehood, Congress can accord voting rights by Constitutional amendment, either by abolishing the electoral college (which ties the presidential election to state-by-state votes) or by defining territories such as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as eligible to hold electoral votes—just like the District of Columbia. Based on population, Puerto Rico could have eight electoral votes, the same as South Carolina and more than 25 smaller states.
As a Nuyorican girl whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, I’ve come to understand the constitutional barrier, but I cannot accept the inaction of Congress, especially while nations like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have testified in support of the island’s fringe independence movement during anti-colonialism hearings at the United Nations.
Puerto Ricans have done everything their adopted country has asked of them since being acquired by the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Many Puerto Ricans were initially happy to be granted territory status in 1917, assuming that it was the first step to becoming full and equal citizens of this country. It saddens my 79-year-old cousin, Wilfredo Hernandez-Lopez, a retired University of Puerto Rico professor, that so little progress has been made. “All we want is the same equality, rights and obligations as any other citizens within the United States. This situation has caused us great pain,” he says. Another cousin, Anabel Franceschini Rosa, 44, an attorney living in Puerto Rico, explains her frustration this way: “Puerto Rico continues to be the Latina mistress of the United States government. While we have benefited from this relationship in many ways, we’ve also been hurt in the process.”
It strikes me that my fellow boricuas living here on the mainland are fairly quiet about this issue. Juan Conde, 43, a television newsman in Richmond, Va., summed up what may be a common sentiment when he said, “I’m ambivalent about getting involved because I’m the best and worst part of what happens when you come to the States. My assimilation here reduces my concern for what happens there.”
I believe all boricuas should actively push for island voting rights because our combined influence could convince members of Congress that they will be held accountable by their Puerto Rican constituents throughout the country. And we should urge advocacy organizations like the National Council of La Raza to do more to advance the cause.
As the nation celebrates the election of our first African American president, it is my deepest wish that our congressional leaders will hold the door open just long enough to empower Puerto Rico to share in the joy of full constitutional equality. Our nation’s leadership, with respect to civil rights, human rights and the American principle of “liberty and justice for all,” must be demonstrated right here in our own backyard if we are to be taken seriously around the globe.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Ten Things You Can Do to Fight World Hunger and to Oppose War in Afghanistan
Our planet produces enough food to feed its more than 960 million undernourished people. The basic cause of global hunger is not underproduction; it is a production and distribution system that treats food as a commodity rather than a human right. In developing countries huge agribusinesses, fat with government subsidies, sell their unsustainable (and sometimes genetically modified) products at a reduced rate, thus making it impossible for local farmers to compete. Farmers who can't compete can't feed their own families or work their own fields. Hunger becomes both the cause and effect of poverty.
Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, says sending food aid is not a sustainable way to end hunger. Rather, people must be empowered to raise their own food. She proposes Ten Things we can do to help solve the world's growing hunger problem.
1 Write letters to the editor and op-ed articles in your local paper calling on the government to cut or end subsidies that encourage large agribusinesses to overproduce grains and dump their surpluses on the developing world at sub-market prices. This ultimately places poor communities at the mercy of volatile global commodity prices. Learn more at The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for more information.http://tradeobservatory.org/issue_foodSecurity.cfm
2 Ask your representatives in Congress to demand that more foreign food aid be in the form of cash and training rather than food. Farmers in the global South know how to grow food but lack the resources, inputs and tools to farm effectively, develop markets and compete in the world marketplace.https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
3 Learn the specifics of what makes products "fair trade." Buy them where available. Download "Green America's Guide to Fair Trade" for a definition of "fair trade" and a list of organizations that follow these specifications.http://coopamerica.org/programs/fairtrade/orderguide.cfm
4 Conserve energy. With a reduced demand for fuel, global commodity prices--which spiked as the cost of fuel for shipping rose dramatically last year--can remain more stable. This is important because while sending food to poor countries is not the ultimate solution for ending hunger, Food Aid has a role to play due to the desire for variety in food supplies. And, more importantly, natural disasters or political instability will always cause humanitarian emergencies where the flow of aid is crucial.
5 Pressure the Obama administration to come up with a renewable energy policy that does not stress ethanol and other biofuels. As demand for biofuels has grown over the past few years, farmers in the developed and developing worlds have set aside more and more land for fuel production, degrading the environment and reducing food for human consumption.
6 Eat less meat. Every pound of meat produced requires sixteen pounds of grain; food given to farm animals each year could feed the world's hungry with plenty to spare. Search "Diet for a Small Planet" and "We Feed the World".
7 Support grassroots projects that advance sustainable agriculture at the community level. Organizations like American Jewish World Service partner with grassroots organizations in the global South that use sustainable farming techniques.
8 Persuade your local editorial writers to cover hunger in a way that focuses on economic rights rather than food scarcity. Emphasize that the underlying causes of poverty are political instability, joblessness, gender inequality, illiteracy and limited access to education, loss of land, disenfranchisement, forced migration and preventable epidemics. These hamper local food production and sustainable development. Click here for current coverage.
Read "The Politics of Hunger." Remember that global hunger is a local problem, a feminist problem, a socioeconomic problem and, most urgently, a political problem that can be overcome.
http://wfp.org/content/politics-hunger-foreign-affairs
This early period of Obama's presidency is an opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan. It is a chance to become clearer than "out now," while still using the same force in opposing the war. In addition to education on the specifics of the administration's plan and the after-effects in Afghanistan, take these concrete steps to build infrastructure from the bottom up.
1. The immediate demands should be opposition to more troops, predator attacks, human rights abuses and escalating budget costs.
2. Support a regional diplomatic solution (exit strategy), including withdrawal of US/NATO troops and bases. Read Tariq Ali's book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.
3. Demand of Congress and President the same accountability that was demanded of Bush and never won: verifiable casualty figures, transparent budgeting, oversight of contractors, compliance with human rights standards, including women's rights--clear metrics to measure progress towards a defined exit strategy.
4.With these focuses in mind and using United for Peace and Justice as an organizational base:
• assist in doubling their membership
• build a local e-mail list of at least 300 names
• build a coalition (at least a letterhead or leadership alliance) of clergy, academic, human rights, environmentalists, African-Americans and Latinos, labor and other progressive organizations.
5. Criticize Obama's war from within the Obama structure and MoveOn.org. (Since neither of these structures have a focus on the war, contact them or start on a discussion on Afghanistan under another heading).
6. Start or join a group against military recruiters.
7. Build a visible network in your Congressional district. Buy and wear antiwar buttons, T-shirts and banners.
8. Build a local media list and meet with the editorial board.
9. Start Friday night streetcorner pickets. These are the hundreds of groups in every region that hold up placards on Friday nights. This is the heart of the antiwar movement.
10. Support other organizations, such as American Friends Service Committee, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink etc.
Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, says sending food aid is not a sustainable way to end hunger. Rather, people must be empowered to raise their own food. She proposes Ten Things we can do to help solve the world's growing hunger problem.
1 Write letters to the editor and op-ed articles in your local paper calling on the government to cut or end subsidies that encourage large agribusinesses to overproduce grains and dump their surpluses on the developing world at sub-market prices. This ultimately places poor communities at the mercy of volatile global commodity prices. Learn more at The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for more information.http://tradeobservatory.org/issue_foodSecurity.cfm
2 Ask your representatives in Congress to demand that more foreign food aid be in the form of cash and training rather than food. Farmers in the global South know how to grow food but lack the resources, inputs and tools to farm effectively, develop markets and compete in the world marketplace.https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
3 Learn the specifics of what makes products "fair trade." Buy them where available. Download "Green America's Guide to Fair Trade" for a definition of "fair trade" and a list of organizations that follow these specifications.http://coopamerica.org/programs/fairtrade/orderguide.cfm
4 Conserve energy. With a reduced demand for fuel, global commodity prices--which spiked as the cost of fuel for shipping rose dramatically last year--can remain more stable. This is important because while sending food to poor countries is not the ultimate solution for ending hunger, Food Aid has a role to play due to the desire for variety in food supplies. And, more importantly, natural disasters or political instability will always cause humanitarian emergencies where the flow of aid is crucial.
5 Pressure the Obama administration to come up with a renewable energy policy that does not stress ethanol and other biofuels. As demand for biofuels has grown over the past few years, farmers in the developed and developing worlds have set aside more and more land for fuel production, degrading the environment and reducing food for human consumption.
6 Eat less meat. Every pound of meat produced requires sixteen pounds of grain; food given to farm animals each year could feed the world's hungry with plenty to spare. Search "Diet for a Small Planet" and "We Feed the World".
7 Support grassroots projects that advance sustainable agriculture at the community level. Organizations like American Jewish World Service partner with grassroots organizations in the global South that use sustainable farming techniques.
8 Persuade your local editorial writers to cover hunger in a way that focuses on economic rights rather than food scarcity. Emphasize that the underlying causes of poverty are political instability, joblessness, gender inequality, illiteracy and limited access to education, loss of land, disenfranchisement, forced migration and preventable epidemics. These hamper local food production and sustainable development. Click here for current coverage.
Read "The Politics of Hunger." Remember that global hunger is a local problem, a feminist problem, a socioeconomic problem and, most urgently, a political problem that can be overcome.
http://wfp.org/content/politics-hunger-foreign-affairs
This early period of Obama's presidency is an opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan. It is a chance to become clearer than "out now," while still using the same force in opposing the war. In addition to education on the specifics of the administration's plan and the after-effects in Afghanistan, take these concrete steps to build infrastructure from the bottom up.
1. The immediate demands should be opposition to more troops, predator attacks, human rights abuses and escalating budget costs.
2. Support a regional diplomatic solution (exit strategy), including withdrawal of US/NATO troops and bases. Read Tariq Ali's book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.
3. Demand of Congress and President the same accountability that was demanded of Bush and never won: verifiable casualty figures, transparent budgeting, oversight of contractors, compliance with human rights standards, including women's rights--clear metrics to measure progress towards a defined exit strategy.
4.With these focuses in mind and using United for Peace and Justice as an organizational base:
• assist in doubling their membership
• build a local e-mail list of at least 300 names
• build a coalition (at least a letterhead or leadership alliance) of clergy, academic, human rights, environmentalists, African-Americans and Latinos, labor and other progressive organizations.
5. Criticize Obama's war from within the Obama structure and MoveOn.org. (Since neither of these structures have a focus on the war, contact them or start on a discussion on Afghanistan under another heading).
6. Start or join a group against military recruiters.
7. Build a visible network in your Congressional district. Buy and wear antiwar buttons, T-shirts and banners.
8. Build a local media list and meet with the editorial board.
9. Start Friday night streetcorner pickets. These are the hundreds of groups in every region that hold up placards on Friday nights. This is the heart of the antiwar movement.
10. Support other organizations, such as American Friends Service Committee, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink etc.
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