Brother West was having none of President Obama's bland and measured post-post-trial statement on the "not guilty" verdict of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin:
I think we have to recognize that [President Obama] has been able to hide and conceal that criminalizing of the black poor as what I call the re-niggerizing of the black professional class. You’ve got these black leaders on the Obama plantation, won’t say a criminal word about the master in the big house, will only try to tame the field folk so that they’re not critical of the master in the big house. That’s why I think even Brother Sharpton is going to be in trouble. Why? Because he has unleashed—and I agree with him—the rage. And the rage is always on the road to self-determination. But the rage is going to hit up against a stone wall. Why? Because Obama and Holder, will they come through at the federal level for Trayvon Martin? We hope so. Don’t hold your breath. And when they don’t, they’re going to have to somehow contain that rage. And in containing that rage, there’s going to be many people who say, "No, we see, this president is not serious about the criminalizing of poor people." We’ve got a black leadership that is deferential to Obama, that is subservient to Obama, and that’s what niggerizing is. You keep folks so scared. You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they’re still scared. And as long as you’re scared, you’re on the plantation.
Most liberal and moderate pundits gave Obama high marks for his unprepared remarks last week about being a black man in America. Nevertheless, it's kind of pathetic that we need our President to interpret the African-American experience for us. If you're black, you already know about it. If you're white, and you don't acknowledge your own prejudices, then you're kidding yourself and lying to everybody else. So who was Obama addressing, the history books?
It looks like the more they deny it, the more likely they're doing it. Kind of like Anthony Weiner.
Seriously though, Bush & Cheney were bad but Obama seems just as determined to continue torturing, despite his lofty oratory to the contrary.
We Americans cannot rely on politicians, the military, or the CIA to do the right thing; we need a national conversation about our values and the law, then we must demand the truth about what evil, sadistic acts they are performing in our name, supposedly for our safety.
Like it or not, we are all accessories to illegal imprisonment and torture, including torture resulting in homicide. Are we OK with that?
A private letter sent from CIA head Leon Panetta to Senator John McCain destroys the claim that torture ("enhanced interrogation") provided key intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan. A copy of this letter was leaked to journalist Greg Sargent and its authenticity was later confirmed by CIA spokesperson Marie Harf.
Wrote Panetta to McCain:
"Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one "essential and indispensible" key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier's role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the "only timely and effective way" to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.
"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier's nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier's role were alerting.
"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier's full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."
On separate but related note, we as a country ought to decide if our safety requires and merits throwing hundreds of people in prison without charges, access to a lawyer or their families, and torturing them for years whether they were originally guilty of anything or not. (Most people involved admit that most detainees at G'itmo were rounded up because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
Let's keep in mind that many Mideast countries like Egypt, Iran and Syria have followed similar practices to ensure their "safety" from "terrorists." The definition of terrorist depends on who is in power. Do those in power deserve extra-legal or illegal means to fight those whom they label terrorists? And do we trust them to use those means wisely? If we're discussing countries like Iran or Syria, the answer is certainly, "No, we don't trust them."
So why do we trust our military and intelligence services with such power? What gives them -- and ultimately, us -- the right? Because we're the "good guys"? Do good guys torture others? People like Sen. John McCain, who was a victim of torture, states clearly that good guys do not practice torture. This is a moral and ethical issue as much as it is a security issue. So I return to the original question: Is our personal security (or in most cases, our peace of mind, since we're not really at risk from terrorism) so precious that it requires imprisoning and torturing possibly innocent people for years if not decades?
Yeah, but torturing your enemies for years feels good. As a nation we need revenge on our enemies, especially if they're inconsiderate enough not to wear uniforms and wave a country's flag.
Anyway, waterboarding somebody more than 100 times in 2 weeks is not torture -- neocon Christopher Hitchens did it once, after all, and he was just fine -- it's "enhanced interrogation." These hippy-pacifist journos just don't get it....
Below is the link to a long but excellent article, which shows you why and how some young Muslims in Britain chose violent jihad -- then chose to renounce their former selves. Some takeaways...
In Western countries, the jihadists are like a gang. The gang recruits young men, usually second-generation immigrants, who are looking for an identity, real values, a purpose, and friends. The allure of jihad wouldn't be so strong if the separation between Muslim immigrants and white (and sometimes black) Britons wasn't so big. They don't feel at home in their adopted country, although their parents brought them there to escape the extremism and privation of their Muslim homelands.
We can also thank the strong and well-funded and extremist Saudi Wahhabist influence in Britain for creating so many extremists. "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free," said one ex-jihadist.
One notorious (now reformed) jihadist named Maajid never even attended mosque as the son of liberal immigrant parents. His journey toward extremism started when he and his white friend were attacked by skinheads. One by one, a group of neo-Nazis targeted his white friends and attacked them! From there he started associating with blacks, then read Malcolm X, then met a radical Muslim group when he was in college living among mostly fellow Muslims, and the rest was history.
You should also note how he says it was hard from him to recruit extremists in Egypt after 9/11, because of the people's sympathy for America, but then the bombing in Afghanistan and Guantanamo made recruitment "much easier." His turnaround really started after he was arrested and tortured by the Egyptians, abandoned by his Islamist erstwhile comrades, and forgotten by the British government. Amnesty International, despite knowing who he was and hating his beliefs, fought to have him released on the grounds of free speech. "I felt," he said, "maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously." Then he met two of the repentant murderers of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in prison, who told him he had "got the theology wrong," and, "It was always left for people to decide for themselves what interpretation [of the Koran] they wanted to follow." Moreover, he realized that "the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practiced since the beginning."
Other ex-Islamists all report similar experiences. When Bush invaded Afghanistan and imprisoned Muslims in Guantanamo, world events seemed to confirm their radical ideology. But when they saw white non-Muslims standing up for human rights and protesting the war in Iraq, "their jihadism began to stutter." These British ex-jihadists also couldn't help but notice that "whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build paradise, but hell."
It's not really that complicated. If white Western societies can successfully integrate Muslims, they will not feel alienated and look for a radical identity. (I cannot fail to mention that, for whatever reason, I haven't yet figured it out, the USA is light years ahead of Britain in this regard.) And if white Christians would be, well, more Christian, and embrace Muslims with love and acceptance, there would be many fewer terrorist recruits. That is not to say, "It's all our fault," but we do have a role to play, and a responsibility to build tolerant, loving societies -- as saccharine and heretically un-military as that solution may sound in today's post-9/11 world, where violence is always the answer.
Wow, what an amazing interview with a career U.S. soldier and an insider in the Bush Administration. Some highlights:
> "I wouldn't have said that a couple of years ago but now I've come to the conclusion that the man [Cheney] truly is -- whether he was that way when I knew him before, when he was Secretary of Defense, I don't know, that's not at issue with me any more -- the man now is just crazy."
> At least 700 of America's illegal detainees (aka "enemy combatants") were not terrorists and had no business being detained in the first place!
> "There's just no courage, there's no moral courage whatsoever in the Democratic Party."
> "But it was something [the Bush] administration made a cult of doing -- not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don't talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know."
I'm so happy Bush & Cheney are gone! Wilkerson's insights make me glad we made it through that Dark Age without even more things going dangerously wrong....
Former Vice President Dick Cheney's high-profile speech Thursday defending the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements, according to intelligence officals and the historical record, including:
Cheney said waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." He also quoted Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair as saying the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization."
In his statement April 21, however, Blair said "these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."A 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that the information helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four secret Bush-era memos released last month. And FBI Director Robert Muller said in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
Cheney said his administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks." In fact, the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan, leaving Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, at large nearly eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since 2001, and extremists have launched a concerted attack on nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
In fact, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting release of materials that are subject of lawsuits.
Cheney said only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
[But now many of these innocent detainees may indeed be ready for jihad, after being imprisoned with real terrorists for years, and mistreated by guards, and denied lawyers or habeus corpus. Might not you be pissed off and ready for revenge if another country imprisoned you for no good reason, taking away several years of your life? This is the no-win dilemma that Obama inherited from Dubya. And Guantanamo is not the only prison. Dubya set up a network of prisons with no clear plan what to do with these detainees, or how to screen and release the innocent ones. - J]
Cheney denied there was any link between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards." But a bipartisan Senate Armed Services report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to approval of the techniques by senior Bush officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
I would pay good money to see Noam Chomsky debate Dick Cheney (or Rumsfeld, Bolton, Negroponte, Kristol, or similar) in public.
Chomsky, to his credit, gives Obama no special treatment, and criticizes him for being as bad as Bush when it comes to legalizing torture.
All moral & legal considerations about torture aside, this excerpt in particular worries me, and confirms some of my earlier fears about the unintended results of our using torture "to keep us safe:"
Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture had cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by Major Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym], one of the most seasoned US interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports.
Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration's harsh interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the US," he believes, not only elicits no useful information but "has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11." From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.
There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of "engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians.
After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen soldiers--"the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantánamo detainee," according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.
This WSJ editorial burns me up."Isn't responsibility fun?" WSJ asks snidely.No, Obama never said he was in this for s--ts and giggles.And no, taking responsibility for your predecessor's messes, after he failed to do it himself, is no fun at all.Not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Guantanamo Bay.
The creation of "G'itmo" is a mirror image of Bush's disastrous Iraq policy: act quickly and decisively, giving yourself no back door or parachute, and then worry about the consequences later.Apparently, Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney, and Bush didn't stop to think for one minute what they were going to do with these hundreds of inmates.What, eventually have them all shot?Keep them locked up for life without charges or trials, and not suffer a single outside inquiry from concerned family, friends, or home governments?
The shrug-of-the-shoulders irresponsibility of Bush's thoughtless decision to build a place like G'itmo in the first place is astounding and infuriating.You'd expect school children to come up with such a naïve, undeveloped idea: "Hey, let's build a jail on the moon, or deep under the ocean, and send all the terror suspects there!"Hey, let's send every Muslim with a beard we find in Afghanistan to some God-forsaken corner of Cuba, where U.S. laws and human rights don't apply! Um, not so fast.
The WSJ will prove itself to be infinitely snarky and immature if its attitude toward Obama every time he tries to clean up on one of Dubya's doo-doo piles is to snap, "See, it's not so easy now, is it, Mr. Messiah?"
Thanks to Bush's handling of G'itmo, Iraq, the economy, etc., I'd say a good metaphor for Obama's first term is going to be Andy Dufresne's escape in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: crawling on his belly through 500 yards of the worst slime and filth you can imagine, before finally emerging to sweet freedom.
Fighting terrorism is simpler when you're a candidate.
January 22, 2009|WSJ.com
Campaign promises are so much easier to adhere to when they're strictly hypothetical, as Barack Obama is discovering. The then-President-elect said 10 days ago on ABC that while he still plans to close Guantanamo, "it is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize" and that "many" of the enemy combatants are "very dangerous."
Merely for gesturing at this reality, Mr. Obama suffered the blunt-force trauma of his left-wing allies, and the panicked transition leaked new details on the Administration's intentions last week. On Tuesday the Pentagon halted military commissions at Guantanamo for 120 days, and reports as we went to press yesterday said Mr. Obama would sign an executive order today that the base be closed within a year. This was after he told the Washington Post that closure might take even longer. Isn't responsibility fun?
The first practical question is where to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 245 or so other remaining G'itmo prisoners. Dangerous enemy combatants can't simply be released into the streets. The Obama camp says that after reviewing the classified files, it will try to repatriate as many as safely possible. But 60 already cleared for release remain because they may be persecuted by their home countries. And even Mr. Obama's vaunted diplomacy is unlikely to convince rights-protecting countries to resettle people he believes are too dangerous to release in the U.S. -- and the more willing Mr. Obama is to release prisoners, the more difficult this problem will become.
One suggestion is moving the remaining prisoners to Kansas's Fort Leavenworth, but state politicians are already sounding a red alert. The military base is integrated into the community and, lacking Guantanamo's isolation and defense capacities, would instantly become a potential terror target. Expect similar protests from other states that are involuntarily entered in this sweepstakes.
[This is a terrible idea. Thank goodness Obama didn't give it a thought. – J]
In any event, this option merely relocates Guantanamo to American soil under another name. The core challenge is not a matter of geography but ensuring a stable legal framework for detaining and punishing fighters engaged in unconventional warfare against the U.S.
In the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Bush Administration and Congress painstakingly set thresholds for who can be detained and under what rules. Mr. Obama argues that work was flawed and that the trials should not continue in their present form. But he also said in his ABC sitdown that he wants to create "a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system, but doing it in a way that doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up."
Sounds great. But this "balance" is difficult to strike because many of the Guantanamo prisoners haven't committed crimes per se but are dedicated American enemies and too dangerous to let go. Other cases involve evidence that is insufficient for trial but still sufficient to determine that release is an unacceptable security risk.
[They are guilty because they are guilty. Their guilt is assumed. The problem is how to display their guilt in a court and guarantee a guilty verdict. This is the point of view of all G'itmo defenders. Mao or Stalin would have recognized such legal reasoning. – J]
The stock anti-antiterror position is that detainees should be charged with crimes, either through military courts-martial or (preferably) the ordinary criminal justice system. Anyone who can't be indicted should be set free. But such trials are unworkable even for the 70 or 80 detainees that prosecutors had planned to try with military commissions, let alone prisoners who are too dangerous to release but for which there isn't sufficient evidence for a tribunal, much less civilian courts. Critics like to point to aggressive interrogations as somehow tainting these cases, but the real problems are far more prosaic. For instance, any evidence probably can't be admitted in civilian courts because terrorists aren't read their Miranda rights when picked up in combat zones.
[I like the way the WSJ acknowledges the anti-torture argument without actually addressing it. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that a confession elicited under torture can't be considered admissible in a court of law. Otherwise, you must be prepared to explain why hundreds of thousands of innocents who were tortured and sent to Soviet gulags or executed were not guilty. – J]
An alternative to military commissions that is gaining political traction is the idea of a national security court, composed of Article III judges to supervise detentions and administer trials. There are real risks here. Politically, it will cost time and capital that Mr. Obama probably prefers to spend elsewhere. Practically, any new system is likely to face the same legal challenges from the white-shoe lawyers at Shearman and Sterling and anti-antiterror activists that for years tied down military commissions.
But legal experts across the political spectrum including Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, the Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes and Georgetown's Neal Katyal advance this option as a way to restore "credibility" to the detainee process. The national security court would operate under rules of evidence and classification that would allow the military to avoid compromising intelligence sources and methods, as well as admit intelligence gathered under battlefield conditions.
[Harvard, Brookings, Georgetown: Part of the neocon axis in U.S. think tanks and academe. WSJ is right, a national security court is also a stupid idea. – J]
Then again, such rules would be almost identical to those now used in . . . George Bush's military commissions. On wiretaps, interrogations and now G'itmo, the new Administration is discovering that the left-wing attack lines against Bush policies are mostly simplistic illusions. Now those critics are Mr. Obama's problem.
Russia's Soviets used to justify their actions by saying, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." When it comes to U.S. security, will we similarly allow our leaders to assume God-like powers, in our name, at the expense of our laws, our morality, the truth, and innocent people's lives?We're better than this!
A journalistic investigation into terrorism suspects held at U.S. prison camps around the world found that possibly hundreds had been wrongly imprisoned, McClatchy newspapers said on Sunday.
An eight-month investigation in 11 countries on three continents found that the U.S. wrongfully imprisoned suspects in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of "flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments," a story posted on their website said.
McClatchy said it interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials, primarily in Afghanistan and several U.S. officials and former officials. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
According to their investigation "at least seven (detainees) had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials."
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that those held at the high-security prison camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can go before U.S. federal judges to challenge their years-long detention.
I hate to say "Friedman is right," because the guy has reversed himself so many damn times, and will probably disavow this op-ed, too, that you never really know what he stands for, but... in this particular op-ed, Tom Friedman is right on. (Anyway, I guess changing one's mind too often is better than never at all, like G.W. Bush....)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN September 30, 2007 | The New York Times
Not long ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion ran a fake news story that began like this:
"At a well-attended rally in front of his new ground zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11. 'My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,' said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. 'As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.' If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world's conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions."
Like all good satire, the story made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected something so true — how much, since 9/11, we've become "The United States of Fighting Terrorism." Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but there's no rule against saying who will not get my vote: I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don't need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.
What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.
It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don't. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.
Before 9/11, the world thought America's slogan was: "Where anything is possible for anybody." But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: "Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints."
You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it's a place we send visitors who don't give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
Roger Dow, president of the Travel Industry Association, told me that the United States has lost millions of overseas visitors since 9/11 — even though the dollar is weak and America is on sale. "Only the U.S. is losing traveler volume among major countries, which is unheard of in today's world," Mr. Dow said.
Total business arrivals to the United States fell by 10 percent over the 2004-5 period alone, while the number of business visitors to Europe grew by 8 percent in that time. The travel industry's recent Discover America Partnership study concluded that "the U.S. entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers and hurting America's image abroad." Those who don't visit us, don't know us.
I'd love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can't keep chasing that rainbow this way.
Look at our infrastructure. It's not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich's ultramodern airport to La Guardia's dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I still can't get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda — crystal clear.
I just attended the China clean car conference, where Chinese automakers were boasting that their 2008 cars will meet "Euro 4" — European Union — emissions standards. We used to be the gold standard. We aren't anymore. Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver. That's in Canada, folks. If Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can't America?
We can't afford to keep being this stupid!We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.
