hypocricy and true international outrage. The 2nd is on point. -Ed
From: Sid Shniad
http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/2009/08/24/lockerbie-outrage-moves-obama/
August 25, 2009
Lockerbie Outrage Moves Obama to Extradite Long-Wanted Terrorist
by Thomas Harrington
WASHINGTON – In a dramatic announcement made yesterday shortly after the
president's arrival on Martha's Vineyard, the administration declared its
intention to hand over Luis Posada Carriles, the widely acknowledged
mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73
people in 1976, to the Venezuelan government for prosecution. According to
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama's change of heart on the
long-requested extradition of Posada, who was a citizen of Venezuela when he
allegedly planned the crime, came after watching Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the
convicted planner of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988, return home to a
hero's welcome in Libya.
"The president was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility for
ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and forever
altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk free. Feeling
their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it was to continue to
let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana bombing has been implicated in
numerous assassinations and as many as 41 other terrorist bombings
throughout the Caribbean and Central America, get up each day in Miami and
sip his morning coffee in complete freedom."
Since the "declaration" of the "War on Terror" in late 2001, the avowed goal
of the U.S. government has been to prosecute terrorists wherever they might
be in the world. As former president George W. Bush put it in a speech
before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 of that year, "It will not
end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and
defeated."
Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for Posada
and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics on behalf of
the U.S. government or organizations backed by what is often termed the
"U.S. intelligence community."
A brief examination of Posada's career demonstrates just how large this
loophole is. In addition to his role in planning the Cubana bombing in 1976,
Posada worked for the Reagan White House supplying U.S.-backed irregulars in
Nicaragua and the armies of the Salvadoran and Honduran dictatorships with
the arms they used to kill thousands of innocent civilians in the late
1980s. In the late 1990s, Posada directed a series of terrorist bombings in
Cuba designed to cripple the growth of that nation's burgeoning tourist
industry, attacks he took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with
the New York Times.
Yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other cases
of terrorism, Posada lived a relatively unfettered life in the U.S. He did
so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the country illegally,
under an assumed name, sometime prior to 2005. In recent years judges have
regularly deported Muslim immigrants for the slightest procedural
infractions, but Posada was freed on bail by an immigration judge in Texas
and allowed to return to Florida under house arrest in April 2007. A month
later, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in Miami dismissed all seven
immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in El Paso, Texas,
recently issued a new set of indictments against Posada in relationship to
the Cuban bombings and his entry into the U.S. on a fraudulent passport,
Posada remained a free man until President Obama's stunning announcement
yesterday.
Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. "In the wake of
September 11th, it was frequently asked 'Why do they hate us?'. Many
concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. We now know,
however, that it is really because of the way we selectively condemn in
others the types of murderous activities that we regularly license ourselves
and our close allies to carry out with impunity. We believe that the
extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a valuable first step in closing
our enormous credibility gap around the issue of terror."
(Satire courtesy of Macondo News Service)
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/opinion/21krugman.html?th&emc=th
Obama's Trust Problem
"The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it's
also a proxy for broader questions about the president's priorities and
overall approach."
By Paul Krugman
NY Times Op-Ed: August 20, 2009
According to news reports, the Obama administration - which seemed, over the
weekend, to be backing away from the "public option" for health insurance -
is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.
Well, I'm shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.
A backlash in the progressive base - which pushed President Obama over the
top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general
election victory - has been building for months. The fight over the public
option involves real policy substance, but it's also a proxy for broader
questions about the president's priorities and overall approach.
The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was
introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards
during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health
care plan.
One purpose of the public option is to save money. Experience with Medicare
suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private
insurers; in addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums
down.
And let's be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham.
That's not just my opinion; it's what the market says: stocks of health
insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to
negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public
plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real
competition to private insurers.
Also, and importantly, the public option offered a way to reconcile
differing views among Democrats. Until the idea of the public option came
along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of
true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as
perpetuating the flaws of our current system. The public option, which would
force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled
some of those qualms.
That said, it's possible to have universal coverage without a public
option - several European nations do it - and some who want a public option
might be willing to forgo it if they had confidence in the overall health
care strategy. Unfortunately, the president's behavior in office has
undermined that confidence.
On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives
thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat
who talks of "bending the curve" but has only recently begun to make the
moral case for reform. Mr. Obama's explanations of his plan have gotten
clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his
speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.
Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention,
the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or
change Bush administration policy.
And then there's the matter of the banks.
I don't know if administration officials realize just how much damage
they've
done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry,
just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying
giant bonuses is playing. But I've had many conversations with people who
voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money.
When I press them, it turns out that they're really angry about the bailouts
rather than the stimulus - but that's a distinction lost on most voters.
So there's a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my
colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that's why the mixed signals
on the public option created such an uproar.
Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get
everything his supporters wanted.
But there's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and
progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side
of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will
draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death
panel smear, warning that reform will "pull the plug on grandma," and two
days later the White House declares that it's still committed to working
with him.
It's hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to
appease people who can't be appeased, and who take every concession as a
sign that he can be rolled.
Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept
co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced
that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.
So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted,
and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.
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