Rethinking Abu Ghraib

Townhall.com Dinesh D’Souza February 26, 2007

HBO’s documentary “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” aired a few days ago, is yet another attempt to use the scandal to portray the Bush administration as soft on torture. Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to minimize the significance of what happened there. Some characterize Abu Ghraib as no big deal, what James Schlesinger termed “Animal House on the night shift.” Others defende Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable information about potential terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique, “it sounds pretty effective to me.”

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Let my people go

The abolitionists’ lament is older than William Wilberforce—whose anti-slavery campaign brought transatlantic slavery to an end 200 years ago this month—but today 27 million people live on in captivity, their lives worth far less than any colonial era slave

World Magazine Priya Abraham February 24, 2007

Premila’s parents sold their daughter for $18 on her 18th birthday. The buyer, from hundreds of miles away, said his Indian village had no good women to marry so he had to buy a wife. He took Premila as a concubine, then sold her into 10 grinding years of prostitution in two cities before rescuers returned the shattered woman to her home.

Premila is a modern slave, one of 27 million in the world today. Two hundred years ago, slaves were relatively scarce, expensive, and publicly owned by men holding title deeds to them. Today, they are plentiful and cheap like Premila—and much harder to spot.

This week Western countries celebrate the life of William Wilberforce, the pioneering abolitionist who labored 20 years to end the British slave trade, a fight he won on Feb. 23, 1807. Today’s abolitionists are no less tenacious but find their work is different: Unlike in Wilberforce’s time, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. Yet modern slavery flourishes because corrupt governments and law enforcers do not enforce the law.

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Why Israelis are afraid — very afraid

Jewish World Review Yossi Klein Halevi & Michael B. Oren January 29, 2007

The Jewish State’s worst nightmare

The first reports from military intelligence about an Iranian nuclear program reached the desk of Yitzhak Rabin shortly after he became prime minister in May 1992. Rabin’s conclusion was unequivocal: Only a nuclear Iran, he told aides, could pose an existential threat to which Israel would have no credible response. But, when he tried to warn the Clinton administration, he met with incredulity. The CIA’s assessment — which wouldn’t change until 1998 — was that Iran’s nuclear program was civilian, not military. Israeli security officials felt that the CIA’s judgment was influenced by internal U.S. politics and privately referred to the agency as the “cpia” — “P” for “politicized.”

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Ahtisaari’s proposal unacceptable, Bishop Artemije

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BRUSSELS, Feb 2 (Tanjug) – Bishop of Raska ad Prizren Artemije said in Brussels on Friday, shortly after his talks with European Union (EU) special envoy for Kosovo status Stefan Lehne, that the proposal of (UN special envoy) Martti Ahtisaari was unacceptable for Serbs and Serbia because it viewed Kosovo as being separate from Serbia.

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The New Totalitarianism: Forcing People to Be Tolerant

New Oxford Review David J. Peterson July-August 1999

On a cold night early in 1998 a college freshman in Wyoming decided to engage in one of his periodic bouts of very hazardous behavior. He went out cruising the bars looking for rough sex with a male stranger or strangers. From a bar, the youngster went off into the night with two men who pistol-whipped him, robbed him, and left him tied to a fence by the side of a road. He died some days later in a hospital. The young man’s name was Matthew Shepard. Shepard’s parents instantly found themselves, their dead son, and their grief being exploited to publicize what the activists endlessly interviewed by the media announced was rampant anti-homosexual bias in American culture. His father told the thronging media that the death of his misguided and unfortunate son should not be so used. But the opportunity for exploitation was irresistible, and Shepard was made the poster-boy for a campaign to write into law a special protected status for homosexuals. This campaign had already been vigorous, and Shepard’s iconic murder turned it positively frenzied. The ever-opportunistic Bill Clinton appeared on television to condemn “gay bashing” and to demand new federal and state laws to combat it. He expressed perfectly the wishes of the liberal elite who intend to blanket the country with laws that will punish such “hate crimes.”

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