Newsvine – N.O. Streetcars Welcomed Back With Party

I think almost everyone in North America knows what “Katrina” was. A few of you know my sister and brother-in-law were living in New Orleans at the time (and that Mike rode out the storm at the somewhat infamous Charity Hospital in downtown – who can forget that? Certainly not Mike…).

I don’t share the deep emotional connection to New Orleans that many people have, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the city, having visited a few times. It was always a thrill to see the excitement a ride on the streetcar brought out in my daughter. We made countless trips on the St Charles Avenue streetcar to Audubon Park (from my sister’s apartment on St Charles – which I think was considered “uptown”).

(Beth hugging a tree at an Earth Day celebration at the Audubon Park Zoo in New Orleans, 2003)

It’s nice to see they’re up and running again. A ride on the streetcar through the garden district, under the old trees hanging over St Charles, followed by a stroll through the park and surrounding neighborhoods, was my favorite part of every trip to New Orleans.

(Well, besides getting to visit my sister and her husband of course.)

How do you know if you’re the good guy? Why is it important to be the good guy?

I cringe every time I hear the White House Press Secretary proclaim, “we don’t torture.” It gets said over and over again, and I wonder if it’s like the politician who starts sentences with “honestly…,” or “quite frankly….” I think it’s sad that we have to deny we torture people at all. It should go without saying. That it doesn’t causes me considerable shame.

To be fair, it can sometimes be difficult to prove the negative. If some guy says he saw me speeding on the highway, and I’m all alone in the car, how do I prove I wasn’t speeding – besides saying I wasn’t? That’s when you look to the evidence. What if twenty unrelated people said they saw me speeding, on different occasions? What if a policeman saw me speeding and verified the speed with a radar gun? What if I was seen in public telling people I though there was nothing wrong with driving over the speed limit? Would you still think I’m innocent?

Consider that the torture allegations against us have not been isolated. Consider that some of the suspects we’ve had in custody have been evaluated by physicians, who’ve determined that they show many of the signs of being tortured (including complete, psychological breakdown). Consider that administration officials have claimed that only acts which are capable of causing death can be considered torture.

I’m sorry. That’s called attempted murder. It may be a subset of torture, but if you think someone’s got to be on the verge of death for it to be considered torture, you’ve got the moral maturity of a brick. On second thought, that’s not fair to bricks.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself that torture is justified when there’s a ticking time bomb somewhere… that there’s a different kind of war going on which requires different kinds of tactics. What’s my response? How do I defend my liberal bias? Friends, this isn’t an episode of 24, and Kiefer Sutherland ain’t walking through that door. Maybe if you could say with certainty that the person you had in custody was a terrorist, and you could say with certainty that there was a bomb set to go off in an hour, some form of torture might be morally justified. But how often is that really the case? People in favor of torture love to throw that hypothetical situation at you, so I’ve got a few less hypothetical questions for you. How many of the hundreds of people we’ve had in custody (or shipped off to Syria, Pakistan, et al) to be tortured have been actual terrorists? How many were completely innocent? How many ticking time bombs have been ticking off the last few minutes while guilty and innocent alike are having their sanity and/or humanity plucked from their soul? And even if the bomb was out there, ticking off the last few minutes, how many innocent people is it o.k. to torture and/or kill in the frantic search for the bomb? And even if you do have the guilty person in custody, along with countless other innocent people, how do you determine which “confession” is true? Torture almost always gets you a “confession.” However, it occurs to me that it might be a problem having innocent people “confessing” the wrong information.

What really gets me is that every time the White House says, “we don’t torture,” I think of that Canadian who was shipped off to Syria (from the story I linked to a few days ago). I think about the 2000 election, and Bush running as the anti-Clinton… above the lawyerly semantic games such as the famous discussion about the meaning of “is.” I’m at once disgusted and ashamed by such a perfect example of brazen deceitfulness from my government.

“We don’t torture… we just make the people who do torture… better.”

Just like a deluded liberal, I think we’ve relinquished the “good guy” label for the foreseeable future. I don’t know who’s got it now, but whoever it is won’t have the resources to put it to as good a use as we could.

BBC NEWS – US lawmakers’ apology to Canadian:

“On behalf of my fellow citizens I want to apologise to you, Mr Arar, for the reprehensible conduct of our government for kidnapping you, for turning you over to Syria – a nation that our own state department recognises as routinely practising torture. This conduct does not reflect the values of the American people,” he said.

Rep Dana Rohrabacher also apologised, saying the US should be ashamed of what happened to Mr Arar.

But, he said, “that is no excuse to end a programme which has protected the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans… We are at war. Mistakes happen. People die”.

Huh?

TBO.com – News From AP:

In the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La., the frightening symbol of segregation-era lynchings has been turning up around the country.

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

Maybe we shouldn’t be judged by a few bad apples, but we should be judged by how we tolerate them; and when they start popping up all over, it certainly appears that we tolerate them just fine.

Newsvine – White House: No Cover-Up of Bush’s Flub:

Anyone reading the official transcript of Bush’s statement on education Wednesday would see that he said “children do learn.”

Except that’s not what he said.

Bush flubbed the line and said “childrens do learn” — a particularly embarrassing gaffe given that he was surrounded by young students and talking about the importance of education. It also harkened back to another infamous misstatement, when Bush rhetorically asked “Is our children learning?”

I heard this on the radio (NPR I think). I almost had a bad experience with my coffee when I heard it.

Think of those poor transcribers. Presumably, they’re pretty good with their words. I wonder how hard it is to write with bad English on purpose. I this case, I wonder if they didn’t just key in the sentence correctly by mistake. I wonder if it’s something they’re warned about when they take this particular job.

“Forget everything you learned about English in elementary school, and just type what you hear. I know you already know this. I know you’re used to people saying strange things, but the boss takes it to another level, so look sharp people!”

A friend of my wife’s parents is a priest from Congo. He came here shortly before the civil war began to become a pilot and study airplane mechanics, in order to serve the needs of his people back home. Since the war began, his parents, his siblings, and his bishop have been killed. He’s been waiting for the day when it is safe to return.

This story is sad enough all by itself; but I read it and realized it’s been a ten year wait.

Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo | csmonitor.com:

Kitchanga, Congo – The prisoners are huddled in a classroom, on display for journalists visiting the rebels led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda. The setting is appropriate, because half of these soldiers are boys who should be in school but have been pressed into war.

“[T]hey told us we were going to fight the Tutsis,” says Bahati, speaking in the presence of a rebel intelligence officer. “I’m 14, but there are many boys younger than me. It’s hard to know how many died in battle, but I saw two who died.”

Nowhere has the use of child soldiers been as pernicious as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But in the past three years of relative peace, militia groups as well as the Army were starting to send their adult soldiers into an integrated Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the FARDC, and to send their child soldiers home to their families. But a recent bout of fighting – a tangled conflict of local ethnic militias, Rwandan rebels, and the Congolese Army – is putting that progress at risk. Untold hundreds and even thousands of young boys and girls are being forced to rejoin the fight, or to fight for the first time in a war that few of them understand.

Father Denis with Beth on her sixth birthday.