Total Information Awareness

But what is very clear in all of this is that the coup in Chile is exactly what Kissinger's boss wanted. As Nixon put it in his ineffable style, "It's that son of a bitch Allende. We're going to smash him." As early as October of 1970, the CIA had warned of possible consequences: "you have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile. ... We provide you with a formula for chaos which is unlikely to be bloodless. To dissimulate the U.S. involvement will be clearly impossible." The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 long and brutal years.

Kornbluh's bill of particulars and the supporting documents he has uncovered confirm the deep involvement of the U.S. intelligence services in Chile prior to and after the coup. In outline, this story has been known for many years and will be no surprise to Chileans. The extent of the involvement was originally hinted at during the Senate hearings conducted by the late Frank Church in the mid-1970s. The scope and nature of these clandestine activities are significantly amplified by the documents released in the extensive declassification ordered by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000 and reprinted in Kornbluh's book. These documents include: transcripts of top-secret discussions among President Nixon, Kissinger, and other cabinet members on how "to bring Allende down"; minutes of secret meetings chaired by Kissinger to plan covert operations in Chile; new documentation of the notorious case of Charles Horman, an American murdered by the Chilean military and subject of the movie Missing; comprehensive documentation of the Letelier case and the extensive CIA, National Security Council, and State Department reports surrounding it; and U.S. intelligence reporting on Operation Condor.

Rogers arranged for Falcoff to visit Kissinger in New York where he was granted access to Kissinger’s telephone transcripts of this period. But the ploy did not work. Foreign Affairs rejected the article. [The editor of Foreign Affairs James] Hoge told me he regarded Falcoff’s piece as "too narrow a defense of Kissinger." He then asked me to write a more wide-ranging review essay on Kornbluh’s book for the next issue.

Falcoff’s rejected article was subsequently published in Commentary magazine with the title "Kissinger & Chile: The Myth That Will Not Die."

To prove his point Falcoff quoted from a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger on September 16, 1973, five days after the coup in Chile. Nixon asked Kissinger: "Well we didn't—as you know—our hand doesn't show on this one though." According to Falcoff, Kissinger answered: "We didn't do it."

As a result of the release of the full text of these telephone conversations by the National Security Archive on May 26, 2004, we now know what Kissinger actually said on that occasion was as follows: "We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them. _______ created the conditions as great as possible (??)" [ed note: according to Maxwell's footnotes, the blank underline and parenthesis with the double question mark are in the original transcript].

My review of Kornbluh’s book in Foreign Affairs was not inflammatory. Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that he had read it three times and found it to be "straight down the middle." Nor did Hoge find it "biased" before Kissinger made known his displeasure. Hoge's editorial comment on the review, found in the table of contents of the issue in which it appeared, reads as follows: "Thirty years after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, The Pinochet File, a 'dossier' of declassified documents, lays out the true U.S. role."

I now know that the die had been cast from the beginning. As Rogers himself inelegantly put it to Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times, "[Hoge] promised me that I would have the last word and that Maxwell was shut off."

Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, publicly confirmed Kissinger’s anger and his own role in communicating it to Hoge. In fact, Peterson saw no conflict at all in his action:

[According to an article appearing in the Chronicle Of Higher Education discussing the matter] Mr. Peterson, who is also chairman of the Blackstone Group, a capital-investment firm, says he called Mr. Hoge in December merely to convey Mr. Kissinger’s unhappiness. "I didn’t ask him to do anything," he says. "I’m the chairman of the organization. If a member calls, and he's unhappy about something, I don’t think it’s unnatural for me to say, 'Jim, this is your area. You deal with it however you see fit.' ... But that I would interfere with anything specifically like that is really an outrageous suggestion. I have great respect for Hoge and for the independence of that magazine."

Kissinger, I was told, had not only enlisted Peterson to convey his anger, but also his old friend Maurice ('Hank') Greenberg, the vice chairman emeritus of the Council’s board and the powerful head of the giant American International Group (AIG) insurance conglomerate, the largest commercial underwriter in the United States.

Kissinger had chosen his messengers well. In addition to their central roles on the Council’s board of directors, Peterson and Greenberg have been highly engaged and generous benefactors of the Council, contributing more than $34 million between them directly in personal donations and indirectly, via the privately-held Blackstone Group in the case of Peterson, and, in the case of Greenberg, via the Starr Foundation, of which he is chairman. They had both provided major funding for Hoge’s endowed chair, the Peter G. Peterson Chair. Peterson had also been a generous contributor to the endowment of the chair I myself held at the Council on Foreign Relations. Neither is a man to be crossed lightly.

Hoge explained he had been subjected to great pressure from Henry Kissinger. He said that "Henry will not speak to me or shake my hand." He again told me Peterson had called on Kissinger’s behalf. He said he was called and "sworn at for half an hour" by Greenberg. He said of Kissinger: "Henry has a very dark side," and that Kissinger had sought to interfere before in Foreign Affairs during the editorship of his predecessor William ('Bill') Hyland. He said that he did not think that the breach that resulted between Kissinger and Hyland, who were old friends, had "ever been fully repaired." Very much on his mind, it seemed to me, was how far he could go in criticizing Kissinger without having a similar breach. [emphasis added]

To the Editor:

We members of the Council on Foreign Relations have devoted much of our professional lives to the study of Latin America and the relations between the United States and this region. We read Kenneth Maxwell’s balanced and thoughtful review (November/December 2003) of the recent collection of official documents edited by Peter Kornbluh and published by the National Security Archive under the title The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.

We were thus dismayed by the tone and the content of the two letters from former Undersecretary of State William D. Rogers (January/February 2004 and March/April 2004), and appalled by the journal’s decision not to publish a response by Maxwell to the second of the Rogers letters, which sought to impugn the motives and integrity of Maxwell, a scholar of impeccable rigor and honesty. This decision denied readers an opportunity to weigh competing views, contrary to the journal’s policies and traditions.

The "Letters to the Editor" section where this exchange appears has not been posted on the magazine’s online edition of this issue, the first time such a letters column has been excluded. Rogers' letter attacking me for bias, for example, is posted online under the title "Crisis Prevention." Nor is there any acknowledgment in this issue of Foreign Affairs that book reviews on the Western Hemisphere are missing, the first time this has happened.

More seriously, Hoge, without the consent of the signatories, removed the final sentence of the letter sent to him. The uncensored version had concluded with a request:

We urge you to find an appropriate way to repair this lapse before it becomes a permanent stain on the reputation of Foreign Affairs.

I may be naive, but to me it is deeply shocking that Kissinger, who found refuge in the United States when his family escaped the Nazis, should as U.S. Secretary of State undermine the human rights protests of his own diplomats and of the U.S. Congress in private conversations with representatives of the murderous regimes of the Southern Cone, one of which (the Argentine) was virulently anti-Semitic. And it is no less shocking for Rogers to assert that Kissinger’s defense of human rights was "robust," and to claim for Kissinger the initiation of a human rights policy that was in fact begun and sustained by his Democratic and Republican successors and by the continuing pressure of U.S. Congress, if only for one very simple reason: subsequent U.S. policy saved lives. Kissinger’s evidently did not, not Letelier’s, nor many thousands other less notable victims of state terror. It is sad that an editor who I respected—especially one who is the vice chair of the board of Human Rights Watch—should let these misrepresentations and obfuscations stand without challenge.

// posted by Eric Martin @ 5:35 PM |

The American healthcare system is the best in the world. Or so we are often told. But is it really true?

It is certainly the best system for drug companies, which can charge the highest prices in the world to some U.S. consumers. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that average prices for patented drugs in 25 other top industrialized nations were 35% to 55% lower than in the United States.

But it's not a good system for American citizens. The U.S. has shorter life expectancies and higher infant and child mortality rates than Canada, Japan and all of Western Europe except Portugal, according to the WHO.

I'm a drug company executive who has spent 20 years marketing pharmaceuticals. And I'm troubled. I'm most troubled by the fact that we stick it to the people who can afford it the least.

For instance, elderly people who use a Medicare discount card and have to pay $1,299 annually for a drug that the Department of Veterans Affairs purchases for $322, according to a comparison by Families USA. Or middle-class families that lose health insurance and have to pay $29,500 for an overnight hospital stay, when Medicaid would have paid only $6,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It just doesn't make any sense. And, not surprisingly, the companies with the biggest profits - those in the drug industry - have been fighting hardest to maintain the status quo.

Our dirty little secret is that the drug industry already sells its products, right here in the U.S., at the same low prices charged in Canada and Europe. It's done through rebates. These are given to those with enough power to negotiate drug prices, such as the VA.

A 2001 study by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that drug companies' favorite customers paid just a little over half the retail price. This leaves the 67 million Americans without insurance to pay cash, with no rebates, at double the prices paid by the most-favored customers....

People today have to choose between drugs and food. The journal Diabetes Care recently reported on a study of older adults with diabetes. One in three said they went without food to pay for drugs.

It's encouraging to see that the American Medical Assn. recently came out in favor of a system that would allow U.S. pharmacies and wholesalers to re-import drugs safely from other countries. This is exactly what Europe has had for more than 20 years. It is outrageous to claim, as politicians and drug companies have done, that the U.S. wouldn't be able to safely and cost-effectively handle re-importation. A key trade association for European pharmaceutical companies claims there has never been a confirmed case in Europe of a counterfeit medication reaching a patient as a result of re-importation. In Germany, this was verified last year by the Federal Ministry of Health.

In the next five years, branded drugs with annual sales of $72.9 billion are expected to lose patent protection. So we in the drug industry are fighting re-importation because we're worried about the bottom line. But when we have to choose between that and the lives of those who can't afford drugs, we have to choose life. [emphasis added]

As a drug company executive, I care about profits. When I was responsible for a region in Northern Europe, I doubled sales in two years by lowering drug prices, and in the process increased my company's sales ranking in Sweden from No. 19 to No. 7 in less than two years. I proved that it is possible to do good business with lower prices.

I joined this industry to save lives, not to take them. And that's the reason I've chosen to speak out.

// posted by Eric Martin @ 3:27 PM |

Privately, investigators say that with so many mysteries unsolved, they have little confidence that the illicit atomic marketplace has actually been shut down. "It may be more like Al Qaeda," said one I.A.E.A. official, "where you cut off the leadership but new elements emerge."

Given the urgency of the Libyan and Khan disclosures, many private and governmental experts expected that the Bush administration and the I.A.E.A. would work together. But European diplomats said the administration never turned over valuable information to back up its wider suspicions about other countries. "It doesn't like to share," a senior European diplomat involved in nuclear intelligence said of the United States. "That makes life more difficult. So we're on the learning curve"...

The chill from the White House has blown through Vienna. "I can't remember the last time we saw anything of a classified nature from Washington," one of the agency's senior officials said. Experts see it as a missed opportunity because the two sides have complementary strengths - the United States with spy satellites and covert capabilities to intercept or disable nuclear equipment, and the I.A.E.A. with inspectors who have access to some of the world's most secretive atomic facilities that the United States cannot legally enter.

In the 11 months since Dr. Khan's partial confession, Pakistan has denied American investigators access to him. They have passed questions through the Pakistanis, but report that there is virtually no new information on critical questions like who else obtained the bomb design. Nor have American investigators been given access to Dr. Khan's chief operating officer, Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir, who is in a Malaysian jail.

This disjunction has helped to keep many questions about the network unanswered, including whether the Pakistani military was involved in the black market and what other countries, or nonstate groups, beyond Libya, Iran and North Korea, received what one Bush administration official called Dr. Khan's "nuclear starter kit" - everything from centrifuge designs to raw uranium fuel to the blueprints for the bomb.

Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, went to Pakistan soon after the Sept. 11 attacks and raised concerns about Dr. Khan, some of whose scientists were said to have met with Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda's leader. But Mr. Hadley did not ask General Musharraf to take action, according to a senior administration official. He returned to Washington complaining that it was unclear whether the Khan Laboratories were operating with the complicity of the Pakistani military, or were controlled by freelancers, motivated by visions of profit or of spreading the bomb to Islamic nations. The Pakistanis insisted they had no evidence of any proliferation at all, a claim American officials said they found laughable.

"It is an unbelievable story, how this administration has given Pakistan a pass on the single worst case of proliferation in the past half century," said Jack Pritchard, who worked for President Clinton and served as the State Department's special envoy to North Korea until he quit last year, partly in protest over Mr. Bush's Korea policy. "We've given them a pass because of Musharraf's agreement to fight terrorism, and now there is some suggestion that the hunt for Osama is waning. And what have we learned from Khan? Nothing."

Federal and private experts said the suspected list of customers included Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kuwait, Myanmar and Abu Dhabi.

John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, echoed those suspicions, saying the network still had a number of undisclosed customers. "There's more out there than we can discuss publicly," he said in April.

// posted by Eric Martin @ 4:27 PM |

The programs are intended to prevent the former Soviet Union’s most dangerous weapons and most experienced weapons scientists from falling into the wrong hands.

President George W. Bush Feb. 11 offered a strong endorsement of U.S. programs to safeguard or destroy the arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and materials formerly possessed by the Soviet Union. However, in his fiscal year 2005 budget request to Congress, released just a week earlier, Bush did not substantially increase funding for these programs and actually proposed cuts to the Department of Defense component as well as suggested spending shifts in programs in the Departments of Energy and State.

December 2002: Daniel Sneider, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News published a story revealing that with the help of a retired Russian military officer, he had walked through a hole in a concrete wall and gained access to the main base at Sergeyev Posad, a naval complex that had already received security upgrades and spent about an hour undisturbed.

October 2003: A Russian businessman agreed to buy several pounds of weapons grade plutonium for $750,000 from two residents of Sarov - a nuclear city closed off to all but residents...The businessman had been planning to sell the plutonium to a foreign client.

February 2004: Ukrainian authorities arrested a suspect trying to smuggle radioactive material across the Ukrainian-Hungarian border...documents found with the material indicate that it included uranium. The suspect may be a former Soviet military intelligence officer.

August 2003: Alexander Tyulyakov, the deputy director of Russia's fleet of nuclear powered ice- breakers was arrested in possession of more than two pounds of natural uranium powder. Tyulyakov had been attempting to sell the material for about $55,000.

December 2001: Seven people were arrested trying to sell more than two pounds of low enriched uranium for $30,000 in a cafe in the town of Balashika, outside Moscow. Although the case did not involve weapons-grade uranium, the composition of the selling group was worrisome: it included a Russian intelligence officer, former members of the nuclear trafficking division of Russia's police, and members of an organized crime group. The uranium had been stolen from the enrichment and fabrication plant Elektrosal, which has suffered a number of thefts, including thefts of highly enriched uranium, and is not scheduled to have upgrades completed until 2009.

According to Russian newspaper report, the Chechen terrorists who took control of a Moscow theater in October of 2002 had originally considered also seizing the Kurchatov Institute - a site with enough highly enriched uranium to produce dozens of nuclear weapons. When terrorists seized the school in Beslan in September, Russian authorities hurriedly dispatched troops to all the country's nuclear facilities. Russian officials claim they have thwarted four attempts by terrorists to infiltrate nuclear warhead storage facilities. [emphasis added]

// posted by Eric Martin @ 4:16 PM |

I’m not sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be. I want to empower people. I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you...I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you. I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.

The [people of the world] ought to look at us as a country that understands freedom where it doesn't matter who you are or where you’re from that you can succeed. I don’t think they ought to look at us with envy. It really depends upon how [our] nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If we’re an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that’s why we've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom. We’re a freedom-loving nation. If we’re an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we’re humble nation, they'll respect us. [emphasis added]

The U.N. is sapping America's prestige, tying us down in Lilliputian legal restraints whose origins and logic are never questioned. To hope that the U.N. will go the way of the League of Nations ignores the vital force America has imparted to it over the last 60 years. Our creation has become a hostile power, one that profoundly distorts the natural power patterns of international security, and protects the gestation of the most terrifying threats we have ever faced. The U.N. should either be reformed to serve the purposes of its founding, or we should kill it off once and for all.

If you approach the United Nations, NATO and European allies with a sincere concern for their opinions, and regard for their institutional mandates, they will be more receptive to your entreaties. Those organizations and nations might not always agree, and they might not always endorse your actions just because you enter negotiations with a respectful demeanor, but it is prudent to minimize their opposition and leave open the channels for rapprochement in the future.

Threatening the United Nations with "irrelevance" if they do not accede to your demands is not going to foster cooperation. Considering dissolving NATO because the members were not unanimous in their support for your policies is not productive and not likely to pave a road for future cooperation. Grousing about "Old Europe" and obsolete alliances is not going to induce the targets of your barbs to contribute to your efforts. Closing off reconstruction contracts in Iraq to companies from non-coalition countries is just one manifestation of these punitive, exclusionary tendencies.

Perhaps most importantly though, if your ideological brain trust is churning out opinion after opinion concerning why these alliances, institutions, and organizations are bankrupt, corrupt, and hostile, and then you act accordingly, those same groups will likely treat you with contempt when you ask for their assistance in the future - which we almost definitely will.

"What we're seeing now is a disturbing sympathy with al Qaeda coupled with resentment toward the United States, and we ought to be extremely troubled by that," said Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who commissioned one of the surveys.

The findings reflect the concerns raised in the Sept. 11 commission report released yesterday, which emphasized a losing battle for public opinion. "Support for the United States has plummeted," the commissioners wrote.

The latest survey results out of the Middle East show that America's favorability rating is now, essentially, zero. That's down from as high as 75 percent in some Muslim countries just four years ago.

"We found an unusually low level of support for U.S. foreign policy," Kull said. "This runs in line with trends from recent attitude surveys by the Pew Research Center and may have implications when the U.S. wants to move forward on issues with its closest allies."

The most negative attitude toward the U.S. came from France, Germany and Mexico, where roughly 80 percent of those surveyed thought that the foreign policies of President Bush had made them feel worse about the United States.

The polling in a total of 35 countries was conducted by The Program on International Policy Attitudes and the polling company GlobeScan Incorporated during a period ranging from several days to several weeks, starting in mid-May and running through early September.

The poll of 34,330 people older than 15 from all regions of the world found that the majority or plurality of people from 32 countries prefer Kerry to Bush. "It is rather striking that just one in five people surveyed around the world support the re-election of President Bush," said Steve Kull, director of The Program on International Policy Attitudes of the University of Maryland, a co-sponsor of the survey...

Most traditional U.S. allies came out strongly favoring Kerry, while only those polled in Nigeria, Poland and the Philippines preferred Bush. Polling among some traditional U.S. allies found strongly negative attitudes toward Bush.

"Even where the president does beat John Kerry, there is no enthusiasm apparent from the numbers," Kull said. "Those countries that support him for re-election also tend not to like his foreign policy." [emphasis added]

A unipolar order without a set of rules and bargains with other countries leads to a system of coercive unipolar American empire - and as such it is unsustainable at home and unacceptable abroad. As the Iraq episode shows, under these circumstances other countries will tend to "undersupply" co-operation. They will do so either because they decide to free-ride on the American provision of security, or because they reject the US use of force that is untied to mutually agreed-upon rules and institutions - or both. So the US will find itself - as it does now - acting more or less alone and incurring the opposition and resistance of other states. This is the point when the conservative unipolar vision becomes unsustainable inside the US. Americans will not want to pay the price for protecting the world while other countries free-ride and resist. This appears to be true in the case of Iraq: a majority of Americans now believe that the Iraq war was not worth it, after sustaining barely more than 1,000 military deaths. The US is 5 per cent of the world's population but generates nearly 50 per cent of total world military spending. Is this sustainable in a world where other countries are in open revolt against an American imperium?

On economic terms, we are facing a potentially dangerous trade gap which will only be exacerbated by movements of hostility to American products springing up internationally. When confronted with questions about the trade deficit, President Bush offered a seemingly naive response: "That's easy to resolve. People can buy more United States products [sic] if they're worried about the trade deficit."

While I think the President grossly oversimplified the magnitude and dimension of the problem, and that's an understatement, there is an important point he is making - that America still has international appeal and will continue to play a prominent role in the world's economy. But the question remains, will people buy more "United States products" if brand name America is so tarnished?

The likely answer is "no," at least to some extent, and on top of that, economic alliances and arrangements will begin to sprout up in direct opposition to American hegemony. Tim Dunlop recounts the description of events from a member of a predominately Republican Congressional delegation that recently met with counterparts in India:

We don't much care about America. He said they were very polite but almost indifferent. Maybe matter-of-fact is a better description. The conversation went something like this:

We consider ourselves as in competition with China for leadership in the new century. That's our focus and frankly, you have made it very difficult for us to deal with you. We find your approach to international affairs ridiculous. The invasion of Iraq was insane. You've encouraged the very things you say you were trying to fix - terrorism and instability. Your attitude to Iran is ridiculous. You need to engage with Iran. We are. We are bemused by your hypocrisy. You lecture the world about dealing with dictators and you deal with Pakistan. We are very sorry for your losses from the 9/11 terror attacks. Welcome to our world. You threaten us with sanctions for not signing the non-proliferation treaty, but you continue to be nuclear armed and to investigate new weapons. You expect us to neglect our own security because you want us to. We don't care about sanctions.

They also spoke about economic development and the message here was that we're doing fine thanks. We can't address the poverty in our country wholesale--most of it is rural poverty anyway--but we find we have skills in the hi-tech area. We will continue to pursue that. We currently produce around 10,000 (I think, ed) science PhDs a year. We will build up a rich, well-educated strata.

Over the next 50 years, Brazil, Russia, India and China-the BRICs economies-could become a much larger force in the world economy. We map out GDP growth, income per capita and currency movements in the BRICs economies until 2050.

The results are startling. If things go right, in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms. By 2025 they could account for over half the size of the G6. Of the current G6, only the US and Japan may be among the six largest economies in US dollar terms in 2050.

There is a fundamental misconception at the heart of much of the neo-conservative philosophy, that the opinion of the rest of the world doesn't really matter. According to this camp, American military might is so dominant that it can accomplish all of our foreign policy goals, as well as our economic needs. Not only is this an exaggerated perception of our military's capacity, but it ignores the advantages America has enjoyed by virtue of the fact that it has been respected, admired, envied, and held up as the city on the hill - leading by shining example. Now we are perceived as belligerent and greedy, left rationalizing torture, explaining away the deprivation of due process, and embracing intolerance and bigotry, while mother England takes the high ground on the rule of law, and Canada teaches her big brother a lesson in human rights and tolerance.

We are fast learning, hopefully, the limits of unipolarity, and the reality that we are dependent on the world for so much of our power and influence. Without the will of the world filling our sails, forging ahead will be more difficult, perilous and unpredictable - especially worrisome in such dangerous times as these. Yet if we continue to abandon all the principles and values that sold America to the world, and if we continue to behave with contempt for our neighbors, our ship of state will lag where it should lead. And that would be the world's loss.

// posted by Eric Martin @ 8:09 PM |

But anyone with half a brain who continues to insist that the torture (sorry, "abuse") story is about a few bad apples taking a frat hazing a tad too much to heart at Abu Ghraib alone are full of it and doing the country a disservice through their intellectual dishonesty. It's clear that, while not some God-awful American gulag archipelago--torture has manifestly occurred in detention facilities from Afghanistan to Iraq to Cuba. Likewise, it's time to say loud and clear that the fact that those tortured are Arab and South Asian detainees is noteworthy. Why? Because it's reminiscent of the different treatment afforded the Japanese enemy as compared to the German during WWII. Recall that the Japanese during WWII, above and beyond Korematsu, were more viciously dehumanized in the popular culture than their less offensive Kraut partners in crime. Put differently, race matters. Can anyone imagine the tortures that have taken place in places like Bagram, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib having been inflicted against, say, Bosnian Serbs in Brcko or Banja Luka? Highly doubtful indeed. 9/11 happened, of course. And Islam has too often been conflated in the popular imagination with the radical jihadists who would so gleefully kill thousands as they did in lower Manhattan that fateful day...Still, it's time for intellectuals who care about the moral fiber of our polity, on both the Left and Right, to start speaking more loudly about these worrisome trends. America's better angels, and our more aspirational national narratives, simply demand it. [emphasis added]

// posted by Eric Martin @ 1:22 PM |