As exhibit “A” on where the best “reporting” is happening in the American press today I present below two fine pieces from last week’s Los Angeles Times op-ed page. Law professor Jonathan Turley does the simple and obvious thing – too obvious evidently for the news pages of America’s papers – and lists a part of the Bush agenda/record on the loss of civil liberties of every sort. Despite space constraints, he manages to offer a summary vision of the way this administration has turned the Constitution into “an obstacle to national security.”
Columnist Robert Scheer performs a similar task on the Bush administration’s policies on nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation, concluding that “Washington’s foreign policy is now less logical than Pyongyang’s.” Yesterday, Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote a similar column on policy on North Korea, “Games Nations Play,” ending with:
“The incentives for North Korea are clear. There’s no point in playing nice – it will bring neither aid nor security. It needn’t worry about American efforts to isolate it economically – North Korea hardly has any trade except with China, and China isn’t cooperating. The best self-preservation strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build themselves some bombs.”
To read more Krugman click here
The Bush record should come off the op-ed pages of America’s papers. Tom
Liberty Ebbs by Degrees
Bush is twisting the Constitution into an obstacle to defense, and no one is speaking up.
By Jonathan Turley
The Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2003What would happen if you woke up living in a quasi-police state? It is a question that seems entirely academic — if not absurd — to Americans who pride themselves on being the leading voice of liberty in the world. This status, however, is less unquestionable as it is unquestioned. A review of administration policies at the beginning of 2003 raises serious questions about the character of the government formed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
What would happen if you woke up living in a quasi-police state? It is a question that seems entirely academic — if not absurd — to Americans who pride themselves on being the leading voice of liberty in the world. This status, however, is less unquestionable as it is unquestioned. A review of administration policies at the beginning of 2003 raises serious questions about the character of the government formed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Major changes have come in small, incremental steps, with each privacy right or civil liability concern balanced in isolation against the potential of a massive attack.
In a sense, the Bush administration is a study in public policy pointillism, the Impressionist technique of French painter Georges-Pierre Seurat in which innumerable small dots of color are largely meaningless until the viewer stands at a distance.
Jonathan Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School.
To read more Turley click here
Foreign Policy Loses Its Logic
It doesn’t make sense to target Iraq when N. Korea poses a greater threat
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
December 31 2002Darn, but those weapons of mass destruction keep turning up in the wrong places.
Forward air bases, Army infantry units, a hospital ship and docile yet combat-trained reporters are all being readied for a “regime change” war against Iraq promoted as a way to rid the world of an arsenal Saddam Hussein doesn’t seem to have.
That United Nations inspectors, even after American intelligence briefings, are coming up empty-handed is embarrassing enough, but then North Korea had to steal the show by taking the wraps off its far more advanced nuclear weapons program.
That’s pretty scary because American intelligence agencies believe that bizarre, unpredictable North Korea already has enough plutonium and tested bomb technology for one or two functioning nuclear warheads that can easily be lobbed at our ally South Korea, home base of 37,000 U.S. soldiers.