Global

Perhaps, after all these years, Edmund Burke may have got it wrong: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is not, as the wise Englishman once opined, for good men to do nothing. Sometimes men blunder into evil by the sheer force of their own cowardice. Evil was done in Massachusetts this week, and it was as unnecessary as it was pointless. >From the first, we need to tease apart the lie that the state legislature "made room" for civil unions; or worse, that they were trying to avoid "promoting gay marriage."

In the early morning hours of 25 January 2004, IDF soldiers entered a-Nabi Saleh, a village in Ramallah District. The head of the village council, Bashir a-Tamimi, told B’Tselem that, around 2:00 A.M., soldiers knocked on people’s doors and ordered the residents to go to the village square. At the square, all the residents, including small children, were instructed to go to one soldier who recorded the person’s name, another soldier who took their photograph, and a third soldier who took their fingerprint on a blank piece of paper. When several young men refused to be fingerprinted on a blank page, the soldiers threatened them with weapons. At the end of the operation, one of the soldiers explained to the residents that the reason for these activities was that people from the village had thrown stones and paint at soldiers. The soldier warned the residents that if those acts continued, the soldiers would take harsher measures. A-Tamimi estimated that the soldiers photographed and fingerprinted about 450 of the 500 residents of the village. He added that, before the operation ended, soldiers took away three youths, who were about 13 or 14 years old.

On 18 February 2004, Majdi a-Saruji, age 31, an ambulance driver from the Balata refugee camp, and Jamal Abu Hamdeh, age 30, a medic from Nablus, both employees of the Palestinian Red Crescent, were on their way to a hospital in Ramallah with two patients in the ambulance: an infant heart patient and a person with a broken leg who was in a wheelchair. On their way, the passed three checkpoints, and then encountered an Israeli army jeep parked in the middle of the road near the Ofra settlement. One of the soldiers standing alongside the jeep ordered the ambulance driver to stop. A-Saruji got out of the ambulance, went over to the soldier, and handed over the ID cards of the patients and medical staff in the ambulance. In his testimony to B’Tselem, a-Saruji said: “The soldier looked at our ID cards and then suddenly kicked me, for no reason and without any provocation from me… I went back to the ambulance and sat down in the driver’s seat.” The soldier went over to Abu Hamdeh, ordered him to open the side door of the ambulance, and then ordered them to turn around and go back to where they came from.

On the morning of 12 January 2004, IDF soldiers entered the Tulkarm refugee camp and arrested Fatah member Haytham Luwaisi. According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, Luwaisi had attempted to commit attacks in Israel. Three days later, the IDF demolished the home in which Luwaisi’s family lived. In the course of arresting Luwaisi, the soldiers used Ahmad ‘Asaf, age 33, a resident of the refugee camp, as a human shield. The use of human shields is forbidden by international law and by a High Court of Justice order. IDF operating procedures also prohibit the practice.

      ‘Asaf told B’Tselem: “He [a soldier] told me that I had to go inside houses that he would identify and open the door and windows and turn on the lights. He told me to tell anyone who was in the houses to go outside with their hands raised over their heads. He told me that if someone refused, I had to come outside and tell him and that if I didn’t tell him the truth, he would kill me or put me in jail."

Richard Clarke in "Against All Enemies" paints a picture of wrong-headed leadership making bad judgment calls.  Given the Bush objectives, however, this can all be seen as good judgment, casting an entirely different light on 9/11: It worked, didn't it?  If the 9/11 Commission is to get to the heart of the matter, it cannot ignore this aspect.  

Condoleezza Rice protests vigorously that the Bush team was doing everything it could to attack Al Qaeda, and it is within this arena that Clarke's criticism is contained.  This is a debate about covering the dump to halt a plague of rats.  The homeowner 9/11 survivors are all for that, but they want to know how the rats got into their house to kill the baby, and no one wants to talk about that.  They put up a clamor and a study commission is created to find out.  The question still hangs: How did the rats get in?  

AUSTIN, Texas -- O Karl Rove, Karl Rove, birder thou never wert. If George W. Bush loses the election narrowly in November, put it down to the birders. You read it here first. What was Rove thinking when he allowed William Haynes II to be nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit?

            There are all the usual reasons for rejecting a Bush judicial nominee -- he's only tried one case; no understanding of the Constitution; author of the "enemy combatant doctrine" that allows American citizens to be held in prison without trial, without counsel and without knowing the charges against them. But the fatal faux pas is the feather-blowing tale of Haynes' role as the top Defense Department lawyer in the case of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

As a student, I often worry about just what kind of jobs will be out there when I get out of college.  Many young people with college degrees are working dead-end jobs with no benefits and very low pay.  Many more have no jobs at all.  In fact, a recent study has shown that for the first time in decades, the unemployment rate for college graduates is actually higher than that of high school dropouts.  John Kerry realizes this and that’s why he has created a plan to restore and create 10 million new jobs in the first term of his presidency.  While that is easier said than done, he has a set of new and innovative plans to accomplish this such as expanding the New Jobs Tax Credit to restore jobs that have been lost overseas as well as cutting off all tax incentives for companies that ship profits and jobs overseas and cutting the corporate tax rate by 5% to help jumpstart the economy.  We need to ship products overseas, not profits and jobs and John Kerry has a real plan to end this real problem of outsourcing and the job drain.

Bryan Thompson

Is anyone investigating this "accident"?  I hope you will have some updates for those of us who remember the Karen Silkwood story only too well--and others.  Thanks for the Bob Fitrakis stories.

Joyce Chumbley

Editor's note: To read more about Athan Gibbs and electronic voting, visit www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/853 or www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/834.

Dr. Bob Fitrakis:

I have just run across your article entitled "Death of a patriot: No more" from March 17, 2004.  As a professional in the computer industry for twenty years, I must take exception to some of the claims made by ignorant people in the Democratic and Republican camps who know little, if anything, about computers.

You quote Gibbs as saying "Inevitably, computers mess up".  That is an interesting statement and is clearly used to stir up sentiment without offering any context for the statement whatsoever.

Let's look at that a moment.  If computers "mess up", then it is safe to say that, as one can simply observe from life around them in general, people mess up more than computers.  The facts show that computers only do what people tell them to do, and they do it exactly many millions of times per second.  Computers simply are not known to make any mistakes, while people do all the time.