Manuel Noreiga is being extradited from France to Panama. He was first arrested by the United States, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. The U. S. invaded Panama to get him. At his trial, Noreiga tried to introduce evidence that he had worked for George H. W. Bush when that Bush was head of CIA; this evidence was disallowed--so Noreiga held up a large photograph of himself with Bush, and Bush with his arm around his good drug-running friend.
Maybe Panama should try extraditing George H. W. Bush, too. Nicaragua might also want the former U. S. president. And Cuba? Who was resp[onsioble for those 28 U. S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro?
But back to Panama. It would be a shame to let George H. W. Bush die of old age, without ever having to face justice.
zondag 11 december 2011
zondag 4 december 2011
SENATOR RAND PAUL, HERO
People--like me--ridiculed Rand Paul when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was a young know-nothing, we said. But now he has proved to be freedom's hero--a position ninety-nine other U. S. Senators refused.
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked for a voice vote that would have turned the U.S. into a full-fledged police state. It would have authorised the U.S. military to capture and incarcerate--for life--any U.S. citizen, without any judicial oversight and without the requirement of charges of the possibility of trial.
A voice vote doesn't record who votes yes and who votes no. And Levin was sure a voice vote would produce an affirmative majority.
Nobody objected but Rand Paul. And his requesting a recorded roll-call vote saved us. The prospect of being known for having voted for the end of the rule of law, for having voted to turn the U.S. into a police state, caused at least ten Senators to change their minds and vote against the measure. Among them, of course, was Senator Carl Levin.
What an extreme of dishonor. What dangerous dishonesty. Senator Levin should resign from the Senate, in shame. And Rand Paul ranks--by this one action--with the greatest of American heroes.
Bert Hornback
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked for a voice vote that would have turned the U.S. into a full-fledged police state. It would have authorised the U.S. military to capture and incarcerate--for life--any U.S. citizen, without any judicial oversight and without the requirement of charges of the possibility of trial.
A voice vote doesn't record who votes yes and who votes no. And Levin was sure a voice vote would produce an affirmative majority.
Nobody objected but Rand Paul. And his requesting a recorded roll-call vote saved us. The prospect of being known for having voted for the end of the rule of law, for having voted to turn the U.S. into a police state, caused at least ten Senators to change their minds and vote against the measure. Among them, of course, was Senator Carl Levin.
What an extreme of dishonor. What dangerous dishonesty. Senator Levin should resign from the Senate, in shame. And Rand Paul ranks--by this one action--with the greatest of American heroes.
Bert Hornback
zondag 27 november 2011
OOPS! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. . .
I probably should look at what the American response to the killing of 24 Pakistani troops--allies--has been. But I don't want to. I don't want to read about or hear "apologies" for a "mistake"--which is a euphemism for "So what?"
A country that exists as far outside the idea of law as the United States does is not to be trusted for anything, anywhere, at any time. Torture, vigilante murders carried out--proudly--in other countries, the concentration camp at Guantanamo, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning: these are the signatures of the United States. And all are violations of what the world has agreed are the standards for civilised conduct on this planet.
Perhaps the rest of the world should pool its resources, and build a huge rocket that could send the United States into outer space. The hole left by its absence would hold enough water to reduce world flood threats, eliminate 65% of the world's carbon emissions, and get rid of most of the world's nuclear weapons. Our planet would be a better, safer, more livable place if most of North America could be sent into exile.
A country that exists as far outside the idea of law as the United States does is not to be trusted for anything, anywhere, at any time. Torture, vigilante murders carried out--proudly--in other countries, the concentration camp at Guantanamo, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning: these are the signatures of the United States. And all are violations of what the world has agreed are the standards for civilised conduct on this planet.
Perhaps the rest of the world should pool its resources, and build a huge rocket that could send the United States into outer space. The hole left by its absence would hold enough water to reduce world flood threats, eliminate 65% of the world's carbon emissions, and get rid of most of the world's nuclear weapons. Our planet would be a better, safer, more livable place if most of North America could be sent into exile.
maandag 14 november 2011
SHOCKING NEWS
It has just been revealed that BRADLEY MANNING is not who we thought he is. He is actually an Arab--which in the United States is officially called an Islamic Terrorist. Looks can be deceiving--and his disguise as a gay young man has misled everybody.
Because the Obama administration has now identified Manning as an Islamic Terrorist--and not an American citizen with constitutional rights--it is now clear that the Obama administration's holding him in solitary confinement since 5 July 2010, and its regular torture of Manning during these last fifteen months, is entirely justified.
Because Manning has been declared an Arab, an Islamic Terrorist, President Obama is now free to order Manning transferred to his illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where Manning can be tortured all the time. And at Guantanamo, Manning will be a short-timer: he has been in solitary confinement for only 510 days. Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been held--and tortured--for more than ten years: 3,650 days minimum!
President Obama promised--that's a big word--to close Guantanamo within a year of assuming office. He hasn't done so. His excuse is that since we have held these men illegally--and tortured them illegally--for more than ten years, they might not like us.
Slavery was rarely so violent as what the United States government now practices. For most of the last sixty years of history, the United States has only tortured, executed, eliminated foreign nationals. But now? Bradley Manning is one of us.
No. I'm wrong. Mr. Obama has declared that he is an Islamic terrorist, and thus Mr. Obama can do anything to him his unconstitutional presidential heart wants to do.
And anyway Bradley Manning gay. And no real Americans are gay. He must be an Arab. A pale-skinned little Arab with blue eyes, a flat nose, and freckles.
God bless America. It needs it. It needs forgiveness, too. We all do, in America.
Bert G. Hornback
Because the Obama administration has now identified Manning as an Islamic Terrorist--and not an American citizen with constitutional rights--it is now clear that the Obama administration's holding him in solitary confinement since 5 July 2010, and its regular torture of Manning during these last fifteen months, is entirely justified.
Because Manning has been declared an Arab, an Islamic Terrorist, President Obama is now free to order Manning transferred to his illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where Manning can be tortured all the time. And at Guantanamo, Manning will be a short-timer: he has been in solitary confinement for only 510 days. Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been held--and tortured--for more than ten years: 3,650 days minimum!
President Obama promised--that's a big word--to close Guantanamo within a year of assuming office. He hasn't done so. His excuse is that since we have held these men illegally--and tortured them illegally--for more than ten years, they might not like us.
Slavery was rarely so violent as what the United States government now practices. For most of the last sixty years of history, the United States has only tortured, executed, eliminated foreign nationals. But now? Bradley Manning is one of us.
No. I'm wrong. Mr. Obama has declared that he is an Islamic terrorist, and thus Mr. Obama can do anything to him his unconstitutional presidential heart wants to do.
And anyway Bradley Manning gay. And no real Americans are gay. He must be an Arab. A pale-skinned little Arab with blue eyes, a flat nose, and freckles.
God bless America. It needs it. It needs forgiveness, too. We all do, in America.
Bert G. Hornback
woensdag 9 november 2011
COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND HONOR
Joe Paterno? He's just one of the crowd.
I grew up with publicity that called a mean, cruel, vulgar, ignorant man "a builder of men." He was the basketball coach at Western Kentucky, a sort of Penn State of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a disgusting man, and in no way a "coach"--or "a builder of men."
When I was thirteen I was taken to La Guardia airport in New York to meet the plane a country boy, a high school senior from Tennessee, was on. It was awkward when he shook hands with my father and me: He had a suitcase in one hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in the other hand. My father--Western's athletic director and assistant basketball coach--was in New York with the team for the NIT tournament; a "backer" had sent Tom to the tournament, as part of the wooing process. I was given money every day to feed and entertain Tom; my father didn't want him spending Boo's money.
I knew which players at Western went to which local businessmen for their monthly salary, and where they got their free clothes and shoes. And where in Bowling Green they could eat for free. All perks.
When, in the early 1970s Western Kentucky's basketball program was being investigated by the NCAA, my father--at the end of his tenure, then, as athletic director--was called to a meeting with the college president. (The president was an old Western basketball player, my high school basketball coach, a high school principal, the dean of students at Western, and then president.) My father came home and announced proudly that when Dero had told him how worried everybody was about the NCAA investigation, he had responded simply, "My lips are sealed, Mr. President."
I had gone to Notre Dame as an undergraduate. A basketball scholarship freshman--also from Kentucky--was a friend of mine our first year. He told me he had come to Notre Dame because other schools were offering him so much money that his father was scared. (And no, it wasn't Paul Hornung; he played football, and sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets every home-game Saturday in South Bend.)
I went from Notre Dame to Michigan. In the 1970s I met an inmate in a minimum security federal prison in Michigan. He wrote to me because a former Michigan fullback had recommended me to him. This man was being denied parole mostly because he was a black man from inner-city Cleveland. (I helped him get parole. Two years later he invited me to his wedding; he had a good job in Florida.) The former Michigan fullback had been a great star in Ann Arbor. When he graduated he held the record for the most touchdowns scored by a Wolverine. But he was too small to make it in the NFL. And in the fall after he graduated, he got frustrated with having no weekly wad of money, no free big car, no apartment. And he bought a pistol and walked into a bank, demanding money.
After 28 years at Michigan--which was for most of that time a great university at which I was proud to teach, despite its fraudulent athletics program--I left, to take care of my elderly parents and teach at a small college in Kentucky. One spring night a very expensive fifteen-passenger van belonging to the office of Student Affairs was vandalised. The tires were slashed, the windows broken, the interior destroyed. The next morning my freshman English class wanted to know if I had heard about the incident. I hadn't, but they had, and wanted to tell me about it. As they were relating the story, a not-very-bright boy who was at the college on a baseball scholarship interrupted: "Hey, nobody is supposed to know about that! Coach called a meeting this morning, and told us to keep quiet about it." Everybody knew about the vandalism--but nothing was done about it.
The moral of my story: it's not that the athletes are immoral, or criminal. It's that the coaches and the athletic directors and the university administrators are corrupt. And the Paterno scandal is just another example.
Why not do away with what is called "college athletics." With the money saved, universities could go back to being universities. True, some of the big athletic programs make money--but the money they make goes to athletics, not academics.
Bert Hornback
I grew up with publicity that called a mean, cruel, vulgar, ignorant man "a builder of men." He was the basketball coach at Western Kentucky, a sort of Penn State of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a disgusting man, and in no way a "coach"--or "a builder of men."
When I was thirteen I was taken to La Guardia airport in New York to meet the plane a country boy, a high school senior from Tennessee, was on. It was awkward when he shook hands with my father and me: He had a suitcase in one hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in the other hand. My father--Western's athletic director and assistant basketball coach--was in New York with the team for the NIT tournament; a "backer" had sent Tom to the tournament, as part of the wooing process. I was given money every day to feed and entertain Tom; my father didn't want him spending Boo's money.
I knew which players at Western went to which local businessmen for their monthly salary, and where they got their free clothes and shoes. And where in Bowling Green they could eat for free. All perks.
When, in the early 1970s Western Kentucky's basketball program was being investigated by the NCAA, my father--at the end of his tenure, then, as athletic director--was called to a meeting with the college president. (The president was an old Western basketball player, my high school basketball coach, a high school principal, the dean of students at Western, and then president.) My father came home and announced proudly that when Dero had told him how worried everybody was about the NCAA investigation, he had responded simply, "My lips are sealed, Mr. President."
I had gone to Notre Dame as an undergraduate. A basketball scholarship freshman--also from Kentucky--was a friend of mine our first year. He told me he had come to Notre Dame because other schools were offering him so much money that his father was scared. (And no, it wasn't Paul Hornung; he played football, and sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets every home-game Saturday in South Bend.)
I went from Notre Dame to Michigan. In the 1970s I met an inmate in a minimum security federal prison in Michigan. He wrote to me because a former Michigan fullback had recommended me to him. This man was being denied parole mostly because he was a black man from inner-city Cleveland. (I helped him get parole. Two years later he invited me to his wedding; he had a good job in Florida.) The former Michigan fullback had been a great star in Ann Arbor. When he graduated he held the record for the most touchdowns scored by a Wolverine. But he was too small to make it in the NFL. And in the fall after he graduated, he got frustrated with having no weekly wad of money, no free big car, no apartment. And he bought a pistol and walked into a bank, demanding money.
After 28 years at Michigan--which was for most of that time a great university at which I was proud to teach, despite its fraudulent athletics program--I left, to take care of my elderly parents and teach at a small college in Kentucky. One spring night a very expensive fifteen-passenger van belonging to the office of Student Affairs was vandalised. The tires were slashed, the windows broken, the interior destroyed. The next morning my freshman English class wanted to know if I had heard about the incident. I hadn't, but they had, and wanted to tell me about it. As they were relating the story, a not-very-bright boy who was at the college on a baseball scholarship interrupted: "Hey, nobody is supposed to know about that! Coach called a meeting this morning, and told us to keep quiet about it." Everybody knew about the vandalism--but nothing was done about it.
The moral of my story: it's not that the athletes are immoral, or criminal. It's that the coaches and the athletic directors and the university administrators are corrupt. And the Paterno scandal is just another example.
Why not do away with what is called "college athletics." With the money saved, universities could go back to being universities. True, some of the big athletic programs make money--but the money they make goes to athletics, not academics.
Bert Hornback
zondag 6 november 2011
OCCUPY THE VATICAN
In what must be a preemptive gesture, the current pope has endorsed the "Occupy X" movement. No doubt Jesus would have approved of such a non-violent protest against greed: "Give up all you have," he said, "and follow me."
But the Vatican is the richest corporation in the world. And for the Roman Catholic pope to endorse the "Occupy X" protests is an act of supreme hypocrisy. The Catholic Church is rich enough that it could buy the bankrupt United States of America.
The pope's gesture is pure hypocrisy. Maybe he wants to forestall an "Occupy the Vatican" protest in St. Peter's Square by pretending to support redistribution of wealth.
For all the other sins that Jesus mentions in the Christian gospels, he condemns hypocrisy a dozen times over. And his church--his Catholic church, with all its cathedrals and artworks and gold stuff and fancy vestments and real estate holdings and bank accounts and the banks it owns--is in its pretend Christianity the worst hypocrisy in the world.
Occupy the Vatican!
St. Benedict--this pope has chosen his name--is famous in history for the inauguration of the idea that though individual priests and monks should take vows of poverty as well as vows of chastity and obedience, the church itself could have as much wealth as it could collect. That clever discrimination is part of the "Benedictan Rule." Never mind Jesus and his teachings.
Occupy the Vatican.
Occupy the Vatican.
Bert Hornback
But the Vatican is the richest corporation in the world. And for the Roman Catholic pope to endorse the "Occupy X" protests is an act of supreme hypocrisy. The Catholic Church is rich enough that it could buy the bankrupt United States of America.
The pope's gesture is pure hypocrisy. Maybe he wants to forestall an "Occupy the Vatican" protest in St. Peter's Square by pretending to support redistribution of wealth.
For all the other sins that Jesus mentions in the Christian gospels, he condemns hypocrisy a dozen times over. And his church--his Catholic church, with all its cathedrals and artworks and gold stuff and fancy vestments and real estate holdings and bank accounts and the banks it owns--is in its pretend Christianity the worst hypocrisy in the world.
Occupy the Vatican!
St. Benedict--this pope has chosen his name--is famous in history for the inauguration of the idea that though individual priests and monks should take vows of poverty as well as vows of chastity and obedience, the church itself could have as much wealth as it could collect. That clever discrimination is part of the "Benedictan Rule." Never mind Jesus and his teachings.
Occupy the Vatican.
Occupy the Vatican.
Bert Hornback
dinsdag 1 november 2011
WHY I MAY VOTE FOR RON PAUL
I voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He had stood for and signed a great Civil Rights Bill. He had launched the bid for the Great Society. And he declared "War on Poverty."
But why, we should have asked, go to "War" to get rid of poverty? We didn't ask that. And anyway, in 1964 he ran against an absolute idiot, Barry Goldwater.
(Though we didn't know it, in 1964 we already had the War in Vietnam. In 1962, Paul H. Corscadden started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam. Corscadden was later the "CIA delegate"--as he described himself--to the Paris Peace Talks. But then he was suddenly called away, "to assume a sensitive desk in Chile"--whence the attempted murder of Salvador Allende, ordered by Richard Nixon, and then Allende's assassination in 1973.)
I have been more careful with my vote since 1964. But the choice didn't even seem to need carefulness in 2008. How wrong I was. It's not that McCain would have been better than Obama, but that he would have been honest. And I would rather have an honest fool in office than a viciously dishonest and unprincipled man who is supposedly intelligent.
So maybe this next time I will support Ron Paul. He supports Bradley Manning, and points out Obama's dishonesty. Whistle-blowers? Bradley Manning is the most important whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsburg--and Obama has had him in prison for sixteen months: has tortured him for eight of those months: and has declared that Bradley Manning "broke the law."
So: Ron Paul for president! And any of my "liberal" friends who are upset at my support for Ron Paul can maybe think about who they are supporting--and what he stands for.
Obama's illegal wars, his political assassinations, his concentration camp at Guantanamo, Bradley Manning in prison. That's Mr. Obama to date. Quite a record for a supposedly intelligent Harvard lawyer who promised to end Bush's wars, close Guantanamo, and support whistle-blowers and a lawful, transparent democracy.
Bert Hornback
But why, we should have asked, go to "War" to get rid of poverty? We didn't ask that. And anyway, in 1964 he ran against an absolute idiot, Barry Goldwater.
(Though we didn't know it, in 1964 we already had the War in Vietnam. In 1962, Paul H. Corscadden started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam. Corscadden was later the "CIA delegate"--as he described himself--to the Paris Peace Talks. But then he was suddenly called away, "to assume a sensitive desk in Chile"--whence the attempted murder of Salvador Allende, ordered by Richard Nixon, and then Allende's assassination in 1973.)
I have been more careful with my vote since 1964. But the choice didn't even seem to need carefulness in 2008. How wrong I was. It's not that McCain would have been better than Obama, but that he would have been honest. And I would rather have an honest fool in office than a viciously dishonest and unprincipled man who is supposedly intelligent.
So maybe this next time I will support Ron Paul. He supports Bradley Manning, and points out Obama's dishonesty. Whistle-blowers? Bradley Manning is the most important whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsburg--and Obama has had him in prison for sixteen months: has tortured him for eight of those months: and has declared that Bradley Manning "broke the law."
So: Ron Paul for president! And any of my "liberal" friends who are upset at my support for Ron Paul can maybe think about who they are supporting--and what he stands for.
Obama's illegal wars, his political assassinations, his concentration camp at Guantanamo, Bradley Manning in prison. That's Mr. Obama to date. Quite a record for a supposedly intelligent Harvard lawyer who promised to end Bush's wars, close Guantanamo, and support whistle-blowers and a lawful, transparent democracy.
Bert Hornback
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