Sherry Chandler

Texan mayors threaten court to stop border fence:

LAREDO, Texas (Reuters) - Texan mayors on the border with Mexico are threatening to take the U.S. government to court and are encouraging ranchers to do the same to block construction of a fence to keep out illegal immigrants.

Six mayors fear the planned fence, part of Washington’s crackdown on illegal immigration, will hurt trade, split closely knit Mexican-Texan communities on both sides of the border and endanger wildlife.

Part of a federal plan to build 700 miles of barrier along the entire border, the fence will also cut off Texan ranchers’ access to the Rio Grande, the main source of fresh water in the region, the mayors say.

Isn’t there a basic contradiction between this administration’s push to establish free trade agreements with South American countries and the building of this border fence?

I was willing to give Laura Bush, presidential apologist extraordinaire, some credit this week for speaking out on Myanmar, but like a stray dog that’s been kicked too many times, I was a little suspicious of this gesture. Frank Rich explains to me why that was so in The “Good Germans” Among Us:

Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

Rich argues that it’s time for us, the American public, to admit our own complicity in the atrocities committed by our government. We’re too willing to obey Bush’s admonishment that our role is to go shopping:

A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

I’m not so sure about the truth of that last statement. Just what is the extent of our credit card debt? I think we believe very strongly in a free lunch. Or at least in “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday…” I also think we’re in for a rude awakening. I’ve been thinking that for some time, however, and so far our bubble just keeps expanding.

And remember that old term, the third degree? My only knowledge of it is from old gangster movies and it had completely slipped my mind until Andrew Sullivan explained its origin in the Times of London:

George Orwell would have been impressed by the phrase “enhanced interrogation technique”. By relying on it, the White House spokesman last week was able to say with a straight face that the administration strongly opposed torture and that “any procedures they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful”.

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions).

The Nazis even argued that “the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement”. This argument is almost verbatim that made by John Yoo, the Bush administration’s house lawyer, who now sits comfortably at the Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe what we need to do right is leadership. In asking the question Who Will Succeed Al Gore?, Tom Friedman seems to be implying that Gore is our de facto president, filling the need that our supposedly-elected president is too small to fill even though he holds the most powerful office in the world. Friedman isn’t too impressed with the presidential candidates on either side but I think his column begs the question by assuming that we need a successor to Mr. Gore. We will, I hope, have Mr. Gore himself for some time to come. And there are, perhaps, better things in the world to be than President of the United States of America.

from The House by the Sea: A Journal (W. W. Norton, 1977):

Tuesday, March 30

What is it to be a woman? I have been thinking a lot about this lately because of Karen Elias-Button’s PhD thesis (I am an adjunct for her at Union Graduate University) that uses mythology and comes out over and over again with how male-oriented mythology is. We are born and bred reading about Eurydice, the passive, who has to be rescued by Orpheus, and so on. Leda!

But mythology cannot be artificially created. We have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves, and that must include our own instincts both for kinds of nurturing and kinds of self-preservation. This cannot be done against men, and that’s the real problem. It is what makes me less than enthusiastic about a good deal of feminist literature at present. It is not either/or. It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.