Current Events - Actual things on the News

[RocDoc]

Politics aside, Obama deserves our nation's praise

<sub>John Kass

May 3, 2011

President Barack Obama deserves America's thanks because he made the tough call the other day to get Osama bin Laden, whose terrorists killed thousands of Americans on Sept. 11 almost 10 years ago.

Technically, you might say the CIA got bin Laden, along with the heroic operators of Navy SEAL Team Six who jumped from the helicopters and roped their way down into bin Laden's fortress and pulled the triggers.

But President Obama made the call.

Politics will come back in a day or two. But whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or a libertarian, a dove or a hawk, an Obamanot or a Hopium smoker, can we agree on one thing?

That our president deserves praise.

No, that's not a typo. Obama made the decision to send American troops into Pakistan. He risked inflaming a tenuous relationship with that country.

Bin Laden's fortress was in a neighborhood of senior Pakistan military officers, just 100 yards from a military academy, and the bosses in Pakistan didn't know that bin Laden was their guest?

If Obama had been wrong, if the operation had ended in disaster, he'd be roasted for it.

Even after all the intelligence was weighed, U.S. officials were not 100 percent sure that it really was bin Laden in that fortress compound in the relatively wealthy neighborhood in the suburbs of the Pakistani capital.

There was excellent analysis, yes, years of painstaking and risky brainwork by CIA analysts who worked on a tip squeezed out of another terrorist through "enhanced interrogation," but no real, concrete evidence.

"Still, though, there was nothing that confirmed that bin Laden was at that compound," said Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, a former CIA senior official.

"And therefore, when President Obama was faced with the opportunity to act upon this, the president had to evaluate the strength of that information and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory," Brennan said in a televised White House briefing.

The success of the mission was also a vindication of Brennan, a bin Laden hunter who was once slated to become Obama's director of the CIA. But Brennan had supported a politically incorrect notion and was quoted as saying that sometimes terrorists who kill American civilians could be squeezed for information. And so Obama caved to the political left and withdrew Brennan's name from consideration.

Brennan's sin? He had supported sending some terror suspects to other nations for interrogation. Though he opposed waterboarding, a report in Newsweek on Monday noted that he had been quoted as saying "we do have to take the gloves off in some areas."

This outraged some Democratic senators and representatives who, like Obama, were appalled at the very existence of the U.S. terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and blamed Republicans and then President George W. Bush for daring to support such horror.

I remember Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, loudly comparing Guantanamo to the nightmares of the Nazis and the Soviet gulag.

Durbin was just playing politics. He was the designated political attack dog, tasked with ripping the political skin from President Bush. So he ripped, and Obama benefitted politically, and Durbin later apologized for those remarks.

But now it seems that interrogation of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo — and interrogations at other prisons in other friendly nations — helped crack the bin Laden case.

Now bin Laden is dead, so most of us are quite pleased. I certainly am. And so we'll accommodate any possible moral outrage and exchange it for the security of public vengeance. We're fickle that way, but predictable.

We want guys like bin Laden gone. But many of us don't want to know the details. We want our hands clean. We want a sense of safety. But we want absolution. We want everything.

Another issue is the confirmation of bin Laden's death. Some just don't believe it. But they wouldn't be satisfied if the head were stuck on a pike at ground zero in New York, where thousands of Americans died on Sept. 11, 2001.

A head on a pike would certainly provide absolute closure. But most of us are fine with reports that he was shot and then buried at sea, respectfully, the body wrapped in white linen, the proper prayers said over him.

"They say they buried this monster at sea," Ernest Strada, the father of one of bin Laden's victims, told Fox News. "They could have buried him in the tears of the people that were shed over these 10 years. There would have been enough to bury him."

Brennan said the White House is still debating whether to release photos of bin Laden's body. I figure they'll certainly be gruesome. But I also figure they'll be released, as the gruesome photos of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's death were eventually released.

"We are going to do everything we can to make sure that nobody has any basis to try to deny that we got Osama bin Laden," Brennan said.

You got him, Mr. Brennan. You and the CIA and SEAL Team Six.

And President Barack Obama.

[e-mail]

www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0503-20110503,0,3562998.column</sub>

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If Obama had been wrong, if the operation had ended in disaster, he'd be roasted for it.

this was AS big a gamble as george bush's.
AND likewise apparently based on less than certain intel.

yeah 'roasted' kinda the way bush was when convoy upon convoy of trucks had enough time to move ALL their materiel (while france and russia dawdled endlessly at the UN) past the syrian border before the iraq invasion began...

[RocDoc]

oh i LOVE the way this guy puts perspective on this:

Welcome to Paybackistan

<sub>Clarence Page

May 4, 2011

It was a bit startling to watch crowds of mostly college-age youths raucously celebrating in front of the White House after President Barack Obama reported the death of Osama bin Laden.

I was watching the celebration on TV with amusement until my own unamused collegiate son came along to kill my buzz.

"They're celebrating a man's death?" he exclaimed with all of the wisdom of an undergraduate philosophy major. "Has there ever been a time in history when Americans celebrated an individual's death?"

Without much thought, I responded, "Hitler?" It worked. Although some people unintentionally trivialize Hitler's unspeakable horrors through overuse of his name, in this instance I felt as though I was standing on sturdy ground.

As I told my kid, I was not celebrating "death"; I was celebrating justice.

Justice in my view is basically the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When others commit wrongs against me, as bin Laden did in launching al-Qaida terrorist attacks against America, I can go Old Testament, as in "an eye for an eye," or I can go New Testament, as in "turn the other cheek." (I don't know all that happened between the Old and New Testaments but I am endlessly fascinated by how much God seemed to have mellowed out with a new team of writers.)

So when I heard that a Navy SEAL team had turned Pakistan into "Paybackistan," as "The Daily Show" called it, I felt an Old Testament moment. I was hardly alone. The surge of celebration that followed bin Laden's death displayed a decade of pent-up eye-for-an-eye rage and resentment at how tightly the bearded fanatic has held us hostage to his villainy.

I was ready for payback. Every time I have looked twice at a strange package over the past decade or faced a groping at an airport security checkpoint, I felt like I was riding with bin Laden, smiling through his beard on my shoulder like a big bird dropping of unfinished business.

But I don't celebrate death. That would lower me to the level of the bin Laden that the world saw in a tape supplied to Al Jazeera in October 2004. In that tape he boldly admitted to orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks and warned that we could face more. I don't celebrate his death, although it is tempting.

Instead I celebrate the justice, however belated, that his death brings to his victims. It honors their memories for us to know that bin Laden could run, but not hide forever.

Yet, after bin Laden is gone, al-Qaida remains. We must brace ourselves for more of its murderous mischief. As emotionally satisfying as it might be for us to have cut off the head of the organization's snake, al-Qaida is notoriously decentralized. As its leaders compete for bin Laden's inspirational and organizational pre-eminence, they may pose a bigger threat to each other than they do to the rest of us. We can only hope.

Fortunately, bin Laden's death comes at a time when his brand of violent religious extremism is losing its grip. In the hearts and minds of a rising Middle East generation, al-Qaida competes with "Arab Spring," an unexpected and hard-to-predict surge toward pluralism, self-expression and freedom from autocratic overlords. The United States must find ways to encourage those principles without appearing to be meddling in the movement.

We also must find ways to pursue justice without committing injustice. That's not always easy. New details about the bin Laden raid already have reignited the debate over waterboarding, an "enhanced interrogation" technique, also known as torture, that simulates drowning.

Some defenders of the Bush administration's policies claim that enhanced interrogations extracted critical clues that led to bin Laden's hideout. However, others, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a Monday interview with the conservative Newsmax magazine, flatly deny that harsh interrogation techniques led to bin Laden's house.

The debate goes on. It's not always easy to play by humanitarian rules in the fog of war and counterterrorism. But it leads to victories that are worth celebrating.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage, or via Twitter @cptime.

[e-mail]</sub>

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I was ready for payback. Every time I have looked twice at a strange package over the past decade or faced a groping at an airport security checkpoint, I felt like I was riding with bin Laden, smiling through his beard on my shoulder like a big bird dropping of unfinished business.

an intruder of mammoth proportion in our lives...

[JACkory]

Good call, Doc. I agree 100%. I'll give George Bush credit where it is due him, and it is considerable. But Obama was the man with the plan. At one point Bush even said that he wasn't worried about Bin Laden anymore. A lot of people are saying "Well, Bush got Saddam Hussein and he never got the kind of praise Obama is getting for taking down Bin Laden". To which I reply, oh poopoo. The world is a better place without Hussein, that's a given. But it wasn't really our JOB to get rid of him, meaning that we had a much better reason to get Bin Laden, as he had been the one to take his "jihad" onto our shores. We wanted Bin Laden, and no one but Bin Laden would do, no matter how heinous. So it's only reasonable that Obama get the glory. 100 years from now he will be remembered as the one who avenged the 9/11 attacks. With the events of 9/112 seared into the US consciousness, even then that will swing more weight than anything George W. Bush ever did in his two terms of office.

I'm very interested to know what John McCain & Palin would have done in the same position (if their team could have brought them to this position in the first place).

It will also be interesting to see how President Obama would, God forbid, handle any retalliation that might come our way from Al Queda or other Islamic extremists, from within or without.

[RocDoc]

thanks for the not disrespectful comments, jac.

~

THIS is fascinating in the face of SO many cheap shots bush took in MANY liberals' absolute rush to cheaply judge this circumstance:

The Students with Bush on 9/11: The Interrupted Reading

<sub>By TIM PADGETT

Wed May 4, 12:15 pm ET

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla.

Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is wrong - and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush's expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq's heart started racing because he assumed they were all in trouble - with no less than the Commander in Chief - but he wasn't sure why. "In a heartbeat, he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified," recalls Dubrocq, now 17. "I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?"

Similar fears started running through Mariah Williams' head. "I don't remember the story we were reading - was it about pigs?" says Williams, 16. "But I'll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just 7. I'm just glad he didn't get up and leave, because then I would have been more scared and confused." Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees. Even today, she's grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. "I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out," says Guerrero, "so we all wouldn't freak out."

Even if that didn't happen, it's apparent that the sharing of that terrifying Tuesday with Bush has affected those students in the decade since - and, they say, it made the news of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's killing by U.S. commandos on May 1 all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts that he would be a student in the rigorous international-baccalaureate program if he hadn't been with the President as one of history's most infamous global events unfolded. "Because of that," he says, "I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good."

Guerrero, today a junior at the Sarasota Military Academy, believes the experience "has since given us all a better understanding of the situation, sort of made us take it all more seriously. At that age, I couldn't understand how anyone could take innocent lives that way. And I still of course can't. But today I can problem-solve it all a lot better, maybe better than other kids because I was kind of part of it." Williams, also a junior at the military academy, says those moments spent with Bush conferred on the kids a sort of historical authority as they grew up. "Today, when we talk about 9/11 in class and you hear kids make mistakes about what happened with the President that day, I can tell them they're wrong," she says, "because I was there."

One thing the students would like to tell Bush's critics - like liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 911 disparaged Bush for lingering almost 10 minutes with the students after getting word that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center - is that they think the President did the right thing. "I think he was trying to keep everybody calm, starting with us," says Guerrero. Dubrocq agrees: "I think he was trying to protect us." Booker Principal Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, who died in 2007, later insisted, "I don't think anyone could have handled it better. What would it have served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?"

When the children's story was done, Bush left for the school's library, where he discussed the New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania nightmare with aides, reporters and another group of students waiting for him. Back in the classroom, Daniels brought in a television and turned on the first bewildering images of the Twin Towers in flames and smoke. At that point the kids started connecting the dots. "It was pretty scary," says Williams, "and I remember thinking, So that's why the President looked so mad." (See pictures of the evolution of Ground Zero.)

Dubrocq got mad himself. "But I had to wait a few years before I could digest what had really happened and why they attacked us," he says. "I of course grew up to have nothing but contempt for Osama bin Laden." Yet he adds the episode "motivated me to get a better handle on the world and to want to help improve the world." It also made Dubrocq, who wants to study international business, more aware of his own multinational roots - he's French and Cuban on his father's side and Spanish and Mexican on his mother's. Not surprisingly, he also wants to learn other languages, like Chinese and, in an echo of his 9/11 memories, perhaps even Arabic.

Williams says she also hated Bin Laden more as she grew up and gained a better appreciation of how fanatics had changed her world on 9/11. "All that just because he wanted to control everybody in the world, control how we think and what we do," she says. Williams doesn't plan to pursue a military career - she wants to be a veterinarian - but the military academy student was impressed by the Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that killed Bin Laden: "I was shocked - I thought after 10 years they'd never find him. But what the SEALs did, it, like, gives me even more respect for that kind of training."

Guerrero, in fact, may as well be part of that training. She also plans a civilian life - she hopes to study art and musical theater - but she's a Junior ROTC member and part of her school's state champion Raiders team, which competes against other academies in contests like rope bridge races, map navigation and marksmanship. In other words, the same sort of skills the SEAL commandos have to master. She admits to feeling an added rush when she woke up to Monday morning's news: the SEALs operation, she says, "was very, very cool."

More than cool, Guerrero says, it was also "so reassuring, after a whole decade of being scared about these things." Most of all, it "brought back a flood of memories" of their tragic morning with a President - memories that prove kids can carry a lot heavier stuff in those plastic backpacks than adults often realize.

View this article on Time.com

news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110504/us_time/08599206932700</sub>

what a great bunch of empathetic and understanding kids/young adults...

[Galactus]

So, I happen to come by and see that Doc is not a birther or something. I'm not really sure I followed what he was saying but I was hoping he could provide a logical explanation for doubting Obama's citizenship.

[RocDoc]

no logic beyond the fact thAT it was alzzzzo the most elementary LOGIC which pointed me in the direction that he had ZERO qualifications to be the p.o.t.u.s., was inexperienced and simply a 'go-along' guy ALL of his academic/political career...why NOT question deeper whether he was born 'here'?
~
jac!
nice to see this ^ time article above having made an impression on you....and i'm saying, a good one.
this underlined the sense in GWB's behavior that insane day, at that school,
believeably.
where everyone, every 'intelligent' liberal, damned him to hell.

[Galactus]

So then it's not that you believe it per say, but that really any reason to suspect the guy is a fraud is good enough for you. I ask because that seems to be the norm really, I don't think many people honestly believe it. It seems a completely illogical theory to me as most conspiracy theories tend to be, I mean the idea itself is simple enough but when you start getting into the how and why required to pull it off it becomes mind numbingly stupid. The underlying attack is brilliantly simple, he's different and however it is you decide it is that he isn't "one of us" is cool.

[RocDoc]

all obama needed to do was to trot out what he had WHEN it was brought up... this 'expanded' birth affidavit, whatever it was he answered trump with and apparently stopped whatever 'story' there was.
it's as though he wanted this 'opposition' to build into this overblown movement....part of his 'community organizing' background ala axelrod via bill ayers?
the handbook, page 6 - 'create a visible (and ridicule-able) opponent for your people to seize on as an enemy'?

and i likewise thank YOU for a not disrespectful comment ded...

~

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110511/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_demjanjuk

^ the article...and this was in the comments section:

<sub>Joe B Thu Feb 24, 2011 06:06 am PST Report Abuse Full statement of John Demjanjuk below:
Third Statement of John Demjanjuk in Germany

As a child, Stalin condemned me to die through Holodomor, the forced famine. As a Soviet Ukrainian POW of the Germans, they tried to kill me through starvation and slave labor. The USA and Israel fraudulently accused me of being Ivan the Terrible. As a result, I spent 8.5 years in prison and 5 years in the death cell. Though innocent, on each of those 1,800 days in a death cell, I feared I was going to die due to the reckless fraud and political motives of corrupt prosecutors and judges who were not seeking justice.

Now, nearing the end of my life, Germany, the nation which murdered with merciless cruelty millions of innocent people, attempts to extinguish my dignity, my soul, my spirit, and indeed my life with a political show trial seeking to blame me, a Ukrainian peasant, for the crimes committed by Germans in WWII. They chose me for prosecution - a foreign POW in the brutal hands of Germany – rather than any of the truly guilty Germans and Ethnic Germans. Germany’s weapons of torture in this trial include, suppression of exculpatory evidence, falsification of history, introduction of so-called legal principles which never existed in Germany previously, conspiring with fraudulent prosecutors of the USA and Israel, and a reckless refusal of each argument, motion and exculpatory piece of evidence my defense has submitted which should have already resulted in my acquittal and freedom.

Fearing the truth, the German Court and Prosecutors continue to turn a blind eye to justice by refusing the following:

1. To request from Russia and Ukraine, File 1627, the 1400 page Soviet MGB/KGB investigative file on my case.
2. To request from Russia and Ukraine, File 15457, the investigative file of Ignat Danilchenko, specifically to include the report of interview conducted with him about me at the request of the US authorities in 1983/1984.
3. To request a qualified expert to examine the high quality photos available of the signature on the 1393 Trawniki document which has been falsely attributed to me.
4. To accept as historical fact that the Nazis tortured Ukrainian POWs like me with starvation so that 3.5 million were murdered.
5. To accept as historical fact, based upon overwhelming evidence from multiple countries and dozens of witnesses that POW Trawnikis were coerced under a real threat of death and were executed for attempting desertion.
6. To accept as historical fact, based upon the entire record of the US and Israel proceedings, that I have previously been indicted and tried for the crimes now alleged here which resulted in my acquittal and release from Israel.

I have survived the brutality of Stalin and Nazi Germany and the wrongful conviction and death sentence of the Israelis and Americans. I have lived through unimaginable horrors from Stalin and death by starvation, to Nazi Germany and death by starvation and cannibalism as a POW, to Israel and death by hanging. This trial is now nothing more than the execution of these three unjust and horrific death sentences. There remains no other way for me to show the world what a mockery of justice this trial represents. Unless the Court accepts the historical facts, uses it’s authority to obtain the critical defense evidence not yet before the court and shows the world that it fully accepts its duty to seek justice rather than just conduct a political show trial, I will within 2 weeks begin a hunger strike.
Signed,
John Demjanjuk</sub>

unimagineable....like a VERY bad novel.

[JACkory]

Get with the program, folks. You wanted a birth certificate, you got it. Now move on and find some other inconsequential nonsense to jab him with. You can bet that Obama had his reasons for not releasing the long form any sooner. You can also bet that the right wing mudslingers could never comprehend them. One day they will look back and have to admit that he bested them. One can only hope they'll have to wait until at least 2018 before they get that chance.

[Galactus]

I really don't understand the attempt to blame Obama because some people bought into a conspiracy theory. He had already released his birth certificate, one that would and has held up in any court in the country. I think he, rightly, assumed that until a few months ago it was only the fringe that believed it and there was really nothing he could do to convince them anyway so why worry about it? The idea that his ignoring it in hopes it would go away created the monster instead of say all of the right wing pundits treating as though it was a valid thing despite being thoroughly debunked and illogical. Obama was completely right, it was built up because it served the republicans in the short term. I think he was completely willing to sit back and let them make fools of themselves, to a point, why not? But he did not create the issue, nor he did make anyone believe it.

[RocDoc]

i agree it was blown completely out of proportion, but when you're convinced the guy's intent is to irreversibly change course on so MANY fronts, then the desperation shows.
of course obama reneging on so many campaign pledges on which he based his begging pleading style of campaign (hope! believe!) ain't helping either...

~

VERY interesting and intelligently written adjacent op-ed pieces in last sunday's chicago tribune, NOT written by staff writers:

Number 1:

Bringing Pakistan back from the brink

<sub>Bringing Pakistan back from the brink: Why it's everyone's business

Rob Asghar

May 8, 2011

They loved us back in the day. When my family visited my mother's Pakistani hometown of Lahore in 1974, our relatives gazed upon us as that rarest of breeds — those who had found success in America. They would whisper about us in awed tones.

My mother said we were treated as though we'd been to the moon and back.

Mass migrations by Pakistanis to the West weren't on the horizon then.

Jimmy Carter On that same trip, we spent time in nearby Tehran, that rapidly modernizing, pro-American capital of Iran. That region of the world was more Old World than America, but it was not of a different substance.

My family would later spend 1979 and 1980 in Pakistan, when everything began to change. Pakistanis by then felt compelled to address rival India's nuclear weapon efforts. Then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (whose daughter Benazir would later become prime minister) said Pakistanis would match rival India's nuclear capabilities even if Pakistanis had to eat grass. The Carter administration seemed determined that Pakistanis eat grass, and President Jimmy Carter's anti-authoritarian tendencies kept him from supporting Pakistan's new military leader, Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

Pakistanis increasingly felt unrewarded for allying with Washington, even as India was becoming friendly with the communist bloc.

Meanwhile, a popular uprising was under way in Iran against the despotic Shah. Washington decided to stop propping up the dictator, hoping for the best — but then Ayatollah Khomeini designated America the Great Satan.

Back then, I was attending the American-run International School of Islamabad. On Nov. 21, 1979, the Ayatollah incited Muslims with radio broadcasts accusing the U.S. of seizing the Kaaba, Islam's holiest shrine in Mecca (it was actually Saudi fanatics who seized it, but who's keeping score?).

In Islamabad, outraged protesters promptly burned down the American Embassy, then moved across town to attack my school. (This incident represents the first chapter of Steve Coll's book "Ghost Wars," the most authoritative analysis of how there are no heroes, only varying degrees of fools, in the tending of affairs between the U.S., Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

Pakistan was on the fast track to becoming an American enemy — until Soviet tanks rolled into nearby Kabul. Detesting Zia but dreading communism more, the Carter and Reagan administrations would ally closely with Zia to fight the Soviets. Into a Pakistan that was widely marked by a tolerant Sufi-Sunni hybrid of Islam, Zia and the Americans would import a grim, intolerant strain of Saudi jihadism.

Meanwhile, Pakistan continued its nuclear weapons program, led by A.Q. Khan, whose snobbish daughters attended my school.

Once the Soviets were defeated, America was shocked again by Pakistan's nuclear program. And with the ending of the Cold War, Islamabad could sense that Washington preferred India's Abel to Pakistan's Cain.

If you break it, you buy it, Colin Powell once said. Yet Pakistan's northwest frontier was overrun by millions of Afghan refugees, and its economy was strangled, all while Washington moved on to other issues.

Thus, when President George W. Bush asked Pakistan to ally itself again with America after 9/11, few Pakistani military leaders and even fewer citizens believed the alliance could be trusted. The much-discussed "Pakistani double game" ensued, in which agents within the military and the spy agency secretly supported jihadists as a buffer against India.

When I last visited Pakistan with my family in 2008, we were no longer admired for our American-ness. Polls showed most Pakistanis viewed America as an enemy.

Yet much of Pakistan's problems can be traced back to its fear of India, which Washington has failed to address. The paranoia is not all unjustified. Former Financial Times South Asia correspondent Edward Luce has observed that India has never come to terms with Pakistan's existence. Some high-minded Indians speak of collaboration, but Indian native Salman Rushdie captured the zeitgeist better last week when he called for Pakistan to be branded a terrorist state.

Pakistan is now in a de facto civil war, a house divided. Washington has to decide if it can summon the political will and skill to win over that house.

A good starting point would be to be less in awe of India and a willingness to nudge India past its quiet desire for Pakistan to disappear. It won't disappear: When Pakistan implodes, it will suck half the world into a black hole. Rebuilding Pakistan should be the world's No. 1 priority. Yes, rebuilding. Today, Pakistan is a war zone. It has lost 30 years to the misfortune of having its neighbor invaded by the USSR and to having allied with fickle Washington policymakers.

Rob Asghar is a fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy and the author of "Lessons From the Holy Wars: A Pakistani-American Odyssey."

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-0508-brink-20110508,0,2005143.story</sub>

~

Number 2:

Pakistan must be held accountable

<sub>By Kapil Komireddi

May 9, 2011

The killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces debunks the most profane myth in the war inaugurated by al-Qaida's attacks on 9/11: the myth of Pakistan as an ally in the war against terrorism.

Abbottabad, the garrison town where bin Laden had taken up residence, is about 75 miles north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The custom-built compound that served as the late leader's billet is less than a mile from the elite Pakistan Military Academy, the Islamic republic's equivalent of West Point. Yet Islamabad now claims it was unaware of bin Laden's presence in one of Pakistan's most conspicuously military towns. The audacious part, of course, is that Pakistan expects the world to believe it.

Armed Forces By enlisting Pakistan as an ally, Washington for almost a decade pursued its war on terror in Afghanistan with a partner that, since 1989, has been the Taliban's principal patron and guardian. Contrary to what is now received wisdom in the West, the Taliban, in its current incarnation, is not a creation of America: It is a creature of Pakistan, foisted upon the people of Afghanistan by the late Benazir Bhutto in order to gain "strategic depth" against India. Washington's subsidies to Pakistan were, in effect, being channeled to sponsor the slaughter of American soldiers and threaten Indian interests.

For all its momentousness, the death of bin Laden serves a largely symbolic purpose. But the threat posed by his ideological cohorts — fragmented but determined — remains undiminished. Those who doubt the destructive potential of bin Laden's legacy by citing the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East for secular democracy ignore the fact that Pakistan has displaced Arabia as the world's reigning rialto of religious radicalism.

According to a 2010 global survey of attitudes by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a staggering 82 percent of all Pakistanis favor stoning adulterers, and the same number would like to see whipping and cutting off of hands introduced as punishments for theft and robbery. The chilling possibilities implied by these numbers assumed life earlier this year when Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's most powerful province, Punjab, was murdered by his own security guard for campaigning against the country's anti-blasphemy laws. His killer, Mumtaz Qadri, was instantly deified as a hero: lawyers scrambled to defend him, enthusiastic crowds garlanded him, and a major film producer consecrated Qadri's jihad to celluloid. An overwhelmingly substantial cross-section of all the segments that make up what is known as a nation's "civil society" was rooting for the "holy warrior." Liberal politicians went into hiding. Two months later Shahbaz Bhatti, another prominent proponent of minority rights and Pakistan's only non-Muslim lawmaker, was shot dead.

The threat of imminent collapse has not, however, deterred Pakistan's tiny ruling elite from continuing with its policy of nurturing and offering sanctuary to terrorists. Sirajuddin Haqqani, a bin Laden disciple who is considered the single-biggest threat to American troops in Afghanistan, operates out of North Waziristan in Pakistan's mountainous north. Groups devoted to the destruction of India are permitted to function even more freely. Lashkar-e-Toiba, responsible for the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, has offices in and around Lahore; its leader, Hafeez Saeed, moves about in chauffeured cars. Dawood Ibrahim, a gangster-turned-terrorist wanted by New Delhi for the 1993 Mumbai bombings, which killed more than 250 people in the worst terrorist atrocity in India's history, lives in a palatial mansion in Karachi's exclusive Clifton neighborhood.

Far from being an obstacle to terrorism, Pakistan — fractured between the competing interests of its military, intelligence and political outfits — is one of its chief global facilitators. Perversely, the best guarantor of the Pakistani ruling elite's hold on power are the extremists they patronize: So long as they exist, Washington, fearful of the alternative in the world's sole Islamic nuclear state, will continue to back the status quo in Pakistan.

The discovery of bin Laden in Abbottabad proves that impunity from international policing, far from yielding any positive change, merely bolstered Pakistan's brazenness. President Barack Obama's decision to send ground troops into Pakistan to capture bin Laden is a refreshingly bold reaffirmation of the central premise of the war on terrorism: States that offer territory to international terrorists forfeit their sovereignty over that land. If Pakistan does not act against the terrorists in its midst, then those likely to be affected by their actions have the right to intervene in self-defense.

Washington must now impose accountability on Pakistan. First, Washington must identify and pursue Pakistan's military and intelligence leaders who collude with extremists of any stripe. Second, it must impose severe travel restrictions on senior officers of the Pakistan army, and their personal assets in the West must be identified and frozen. Third, Washington should make it clear to Islamabad that the U.S. will no longer play the role of Pakistan's pleader with India. Finally, Pakistan must be told in no uncertain terms that if it does not act against the terrorists in its midst, then those likely to be affected by their actions have the right to intervene in self-defense.

The era of bottomless bribes and easy exonerations has come to an end.

Kapil Komireddi is an Indian journalist stationed in London.

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-0508-pakistan-20110509,0,7500960.story</sub>

[RocDoc]

...and demjanjuk was found guilty.
'beyond a reasonable doubt'?
horseshit.

[JACkory]

Of course he's guilty. He done it.

[RocDoc]

... a statement which of course makes you smarter and fairer than the judicial system of israel.

[JACkory]

Thank you!