New news thread (sorry no witticism lol)

[elpollodiablo]

I've been following the Panjwai massacre story closely since it broke early last week, and this short column by George Packer for the New Yorker is the best piece of writing on it I've yet come across: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/03/sergeant-bales-shame-and-ours.html

It’s hard not to be haunted by the story of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. Everyone in Norwood, Ohio, where he grew up, seemed to like him: outgoing, a joiner, a middle linebacker who played above his size, thoughtful toward others. He enlisted in the Army after the September 11th attacks, out of patriotism and righteous anger.
Three deployments over six years in Iraq, including one during the “surge” with intense fighting. A wound that cost him part of his foot, then a head injury in a vehicle accident. Frustration at being unable to find and kill the enemy. Over the years, as the deployments pile up and the mission gets lost, he starts to sound jaded, coarsened. Ten years in, he misses out on being promoted to sergeant first class, and he doesn’t land the recruiting job he wanted, or the coveted posting to Germany or Italy. Instead, he’s sent back to the wars—this time to a remote combat outpost in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, where he sees a buddy lose a leg to a land mine.
Back home, his wife loses her job when Washington Mutual goes under, and there are mortgage problems on their house in Washington state. You couldn’t write a more succinct history of what went wrong in the decade after September 11th.
In a sense, none of these facts matter. It shouldn’t be hard to see the bright line between war fatigue, or P.T.S.D., or whatever name you give it, and hunting down, shooting, and stabbing little children in their homes, and women and men, burning their bodies, and then returning to base and demanding a lawyer. If there was alcohol, it doesn’t matter; if there were marital strains (how could there not be), it doesn’t matter. That Bales assaulted a woman ten years ago is irrelevant. None of these facts begin to explain why he stands accused of monstrous crimes. The idea that no non-combatant is fit to judge a man in uniform is ridiculous—an insult to all the combatants who, in the same extreme circumstances, don’t lose all sense of the humanity of the other and descend into criminality. Worse than ridiculous is the ugly praise Bales has received on some right-wing Web sites, as if war crimes were a blow against political correctness. The smugness of the I-told-you-so anti-war crowd isn’t much better. Pundits and commenters of all stripes find that the Panjwai episode proves what they were saying all along. How satisfying.
No: shame is the only response the rest of us are allowed.
Part of the shame goes beyond the massacre. Just as it should be possible to stare at this nightmare without medicalizing or psychologizing it away with a few biographical details, it should also be possible to see its singularity and its context: a decade of war with no clear, measurable goals and no end in sight, fought by the tiny number of Americans who belong to our all-volunteer military. President Obama has recently been eloquent on the subject of war, its seriousness, its costs. But it has been in the interest of neither his Administration nor his predecessor’s for the electorate to think too much about the fighting on the other side of the planet. Politically, both Presidents have downplayed it—Bush by creating a false image of a clear moral cause demanding relatively little sacrifice, Obama by talking about it as little as possible.
So the fighting goes on and on without a national discussion, or a national investment. It’s easy for most Americans to go days without giving the war a thought. That’s a quieter, longer source of shame. It’s wrong to put the whole burden of a protracted war on so few people while the rest of us get a pass, though that didn’t make the massacre in Panjwai either inevitable or understandable.
The military, on its end, seems to want things this way. However often you hear soldiers complain that the rest of the country is at peace while they’re at war, the institutional military tries very hard to keep the citizenry out of it. Leave it to the experts: this is the view of the top brass, echoed by Mitt Romney in his opportunistic attacks on Obama. The experts kept the name Robert Bales secret for days. Before anyone knew it, they whisked him out of Afghanistan to Kuwait, and when Kuwaitis got wind of his presence, he was whisked home, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Though I know all the reasons why a trial in an Afghan court would be impractical and unfair, I don’t have any more confidence in the ability of an American military court to conduct a trial that gives people in this country or, especially, in Afghanistan, a sense of justice done. This isn’t conspiracy thinking—the military is capable of finding war criminals guilty when the circumstances are this clear, as in the case of Private Steven Green, who committed atrocities in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. (On the other hand, if killings of civilians take place within an hour or a mile of combat—as in Haditha—forget it.) The military, to all appearances, didn’t attempt a cover-up, as in the case of My Lai, and if convicted Bales won’t get house arrest followed by a Presidential pardon, like Lieutenant William Calley. But there’s a culture of secrecy in any military, which has grown worse in the post-9/11 wars, and leaving it to the professionals is part of this.
There’s still more to the shame than the willed irresponsibility of the American public and government. What makes the Panjwai massacre even more bitter is that it comes at a moment when the war in Afghanistan appears all but hopeless. No one in this country sees the point of more fighting there, except maybe some of those experts, and the politicians who hide behind them. Obama’s surge failed, as Bush’s surge in Iraq ultimately failed, because we don’t have the means to solve these problems other than by fighting—and fighting alone won’t solve them. Counterinsurgency turned out to be a tactic, not a strategy, and a limited one at that. That’s the wonkish way to put it. The straightforward way is to say that all the deaths, Afghan, American, and other, are proving to be a colossal waste.
It’s easy and currently fashionable to sneer at the entire ten-year effort. To say that it was doomed from the start, and no one but a fool would try to change Afghanistan. Didn’t we learned anything from the British and the Soviets? Wasn’t this the graveyard of empires? When would we ever realize we can’t police the world or occupy Muslim countries? It looks pretty obvious now. It gets less obvious when you go back to where we were after September 11th and give it an honest reckoning. Pursue bin Laden but leave the Taliban in power after they refused to give up Al Qaeda? Get rid of the Taliban and then leave Afghanistan to its own and the U.N.’s devices? More troops, more money, a harder push against corruption and warlordism, when our presence is so obviously part of the problem and we could never do it “right”? Afghanize faster and watch the Taliban return even sooner? Find a better partner than Karzai—if so, who?
I hope thoughtful, informed writers will write excellent books that ask questions like these, and maybe answer them. I hope they will tell the story of the American experience in Afghanistan fully, which means sparing none of us but also avoiding the easy condemnations that come when there’s a failure on this scale. I hope Sergeant Bales will appear in these accounts not as a symbol of the American heart of darkness, or a victim of a heartless military machine and a checked-out public, or a case study of post-traumatic stress disorder, but as the author—if he is—of the single worst episode of the war, for reasons that might remain known only to him.
But to be honest, what I expect in the next few years is the willful amnesia that always comes with the end of unsuccessful wars. We will have a lot to forget, starting with Robert Bales.

[Anne the Man]

The Search and Surveillance Bill became law today. Similar to the Patriot Act, I think. We're all fucked.

[Antero]

Ugh. Contents?

[peacocks]

I'm on the phone doing field work so no links, sry- but this Trayvon Martin thing is incredibly disgusting. Most of you probably already know about it. Sanford is known for being serious red neck territory (larry the cable guy is from there) but chee-rist. Does anyone have any information on where Zimmerman is? If they decide to arrest him how will they find him?

[elpollodiablo]

That Stand Your Ground law is monumentally insane. And there are 21 other states with laws like that! Basically if you can convince a responding officer or pre-trial hearing judge that you "feared for your life" you can kill a person in public with impunity.

[mountmccabe]

That description of what the law does sounds awful, but a friend linked to a post on FoxNews (sorry) where the Representative what was the "prime sponsor of this legislation in the Florida House" claims that it does not cover this situation:

However, the castle doctrine does not provide protection to individuals who seek to pursue and confront others, as is allegedly the case in the Trayvon Martin tragedy in Sanford.

He is mostly defending his law and, as the guy who linked to the article said "I'm not sure what I trust less: The ability of a state legislator to draft the law competently, or the ability of state prosecutors ... to use prosecutorial discretion competently" but maybe it isn't as bad as it looks on that front?


It looks pretty bad on all other fronts, though at least there has been some movement towards improvement with investigations coming from state and federal agencies.

[jebreject]

I thought this New Yorker piece on Trayvon Martin was incredible.

The election of a black President and appointment of a black Attorney General could not realistically remedy decades of complex relations between African-American men and law enforcement. The parameters of hope had already become vividly apparent in October of last year, when the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis despite serious questions about his guilt. Some quarters of black (and white) America demanded, or at least hoped for, some type of Presidential intervention—even though, under the law, there was no clear route into a state case for Obama.

In this context, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin (black, male, seventeen, unarmed save for a packet of candy and a bottle of iced tea) did not so much raise questions as it confirmed suspicions: that we remain stratified or at best striated by race, that “innocent” is a relative term, that black male lives can end under capricious circumstances, and that justice is in the eye of the beholder—ideas that are as cynical as they are applicable. At this juncture, events in Sanford, Florida, suggest the benefit of the doubt in the shooting of a black teen-ager extends even to unauthorized, untrained, weapon-toting private citizens who pursue unarmed pedestrians.

[jebreject]

Wisconsin's newly enacted Castle Doctrine law has already lead to death as well:

http://www.hudsonstarobserver.com/event/article/id/46750/group/News/

[Thermofusion]

I'm all for castle doctrine laws in principle, but I also think they need to be expressed in strict language so they only apply to, like, armed intrusions into one's home. Neighborhood-watch-nutjob-guy wouldn't be covered by that, obvs.

[elpollodiablo]

Castle Doctrine is something other than the Stand-your-ground laws, though. For the first there's an expectation that you're defending your home or private space, while the Stand-your-ground laws basically stipulate that if you feel your life is being threatened, you do not have to run, back down, seek help or otherwise try to disengage--you can just kill the person whom you feel threatened by. It's not written as cavalierly as that, obviously, but that's about the gist of it. Emily Bazelon was talking on the Slate podcast today about this case in Florida where a man blew away some panhandler at a Häagen-Dazs shop and walked away without getting charged, because he said the guy was making his family feel threatened.

[Thermofusion]

Yeah, that's insane and way too open-ended. Especially in a shitty place like Florida where it seems like everyone is on edge to begin with.

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah if I had to live in Florida and also had legal carte-blanche to commit murders I dunno what would happen.

[jebreject]

I think Castle Doctrine laws are pretty much insane too (at least they way they are usually interpreted), but yeah, Stand Your Ground is a whole other level of batshit and it blows my mind that they exist anywhere.

[peacocks]

Yeah if I had to live in Florida and also had legal carte-blanche to commit murders I dunno what would happen.

I haven't murdered anyone yet.

[elpollodiablo]

Though you could!

[davy]

So, I just got the following texts from the Piedmont College's Alert System (Piedmont College being my place of employment):

#1

SUBJ: Immediate Emergency Alert
MSG: Habersham County Sheriff's Dept warning about white male threatening to go on a shooting spree.

#2

SUBJ: Continued
MSG: White male Wesley Lewallen driving tan Windstar. Banks County tag. Please notify Campus Police immediately.

Umm....

[elpollodiablo]

Please shoot on sight if reasonably sure suspect sighted

[elpollodiablo]

Also that's scary, stay indoors!

[Thermofusion]

It's a dude sitting in his van murmuring happily about the box of Spree Candy he's digging into, shoot 'im in the face!

[jebreject]

Whoa. Stay safe.

[davy]

Piedmont College Alert System
SUBJ: Message
MSG: The suspect for which law enforcement agencies were searching has been apprehended. This threat no longer exists.

Weird.

[Ignatius]

Indeed

[Thermofusion]

"going to go to California and shoot up a school."

pretty sure thats an gandalfs lyric lol

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

are we still talking about trayvon martin?

saw this quote from jack hamilton

Disliking hip-hop doesn’t make you a racist any more than liking hip-hop makes you not a racist, and I’m sure there are plenty of Stormfront enthusiasts with Rick Ross in their iTunes. If you don’t like Jay-Z because you just don’t like the way he sounds, or you’re sick of his cloying ubiquity, or you wish he’d talk about something other than where he’s from for five seconds—hey, I’m not mad, I don’t like Bruce Springsteen for the same reasons. But if you don’t like rap music—a genre that contains multitudes—because of a self-satisfied moralism, or because you’re scared of it, or because you wish those people would stop talking about their problems and get out of your television and radio and kids’ bedrooms: well.

And I’m not just talking about the American right, I’m talking about all the well-meaning white folks who’ve told me how they want to like Lil Wayne but lo, the misogyny, the violence, the drugs. But, but, I’ll say: Bob Dylan aced misogyny; the Rolling Stones sang about violence; the Velvet Underground knew their way around some drugs. Yeeeah, but it’s different, they’ll say, elongating that “yeah” with conspiratorial inflection: you know what I mean. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

Rap music doesn’t get unarmed kids shot to death, “it’s different” does. “It’s different” infuses “these assholes always get away” and gives solace to people who hear that sound bite and nod their empty heads in agreement. “It’s different” is the same logic that suggests a teenager’s skin color combined with the music he listened to means he had it coming, and it’s the same logic that lets a bunch of people feign outrage over a teenager’s use of the n-word to describe himself when they’re really just outraged that he beat them to the punch.

“It’s different” makes me shake with anger because it turns music into a dog-whistle to justify the murder of a kid who doesn’t seem all that “different” from me was when I was his age, not that different at all. I liked Skittles and hoodies and weed, too. And yeah, I’m white and never worried about getting shot for any of it, which is only the most loathsome excuse for not identifying with someone that I can possibly think of.

full text here

[jebreject]

Yeah, that whole piece is on fucking point.