The Photos in this panel begin at Bill Johnson’s home in Hilliard, Ohio, includes a photo of Anna’s long-time friend Sharon and John a good second amendment Democrat. The photos then turn to the back yard of Joe and Debbie Stewart, their pets and Debbie’s floral landscaping.
The Joe and Debbie photos continue highlighted by a shoot-out with a Hummingbird, moving on to a section of Stewart Family Cemetery Grave Markers and Headstones followed by a photo of Anna and Bruce and finishing with some Ohio curiosities and social commentary, topped off with Cumberland and the rain and fog.
Last month, I reportedthat the FBI had served a Cambridge resident with a subpoena compelling his testimony in the active Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and that the subpoena revealed a very broad scope to the criminal investigation. A similar subpoena has now been served on David House -- one of the founders of the Bradley Manning Support Network who helped publicize the oppressive conditions of Manning's detention and who then had his laptop seized by the government without a warrant -- compelling his testimony before the Grand Jury next Wednesday. The subpoena and accompanying documents received by House can be viewed here and here.
This latest subpoena reveals how active the criminal investigation is and how committed the Obama administration is to criminally pursuing the whistleblowing site. Also receiving subpoenas in addition to House and the Cambridge resident have been ex-Manning boyfriend Tyler Watkins, and a cryptography expert at Princeton, Nadia Heninger (whose Princeton photo is credited to Jacob Appelbaum, the persistently harassed American once identified as a WikiLeaks spokesman).
But it also highlights a very important potential controversy: the refusal of numerous witnesses to cooperate in any way with this pernicious investigation. One witness who has appeared before the Grand Jury has already refused to answer any questions beyond the most basic biographical ones (name and address), invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to do so, and other witnesses are highly likely to follow suit.
One option for federal prosecutors when facing a witness who refuses to answer questions on this basis is to offer them immunity, meaning that nothing they say when testifying can be used to prosecute them (they can still be prosecuted, just not with the aid of anything they say while testifying). Such an offer then precludes further invocations of the self-incrimination privilege as grounds for refusing to answer questions, as it means there is no longer any danger that the witness could incriminate themselves by testifying. In the event the government makes such an offer, the court would almost certainly compel the witness to answer questions. But at least some of those witnesses -- ones who have already been subpoenaed or are likely to be -- intend to refuse to answer questions anyway, risking an almost-certain finding of contempt of court, which typically carries jail terms as a means of forcing testimony.
One witness or potential witness who is considering that form of civil disobedience told me they view the attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks as such a profound assault on basic freedoms, including press freedoms -- one motivated by a desire to conceal government wrongdoing and illegality -- that they would rather be imprisoned than cooperate in any way with those efforts. That is the mindset of true principled heroism, and if it actually comes to that, anyone committed to transparency and preservation of press freedoms should do everything possible to support such persons in any way they can (a similar conflict is possible with the Obama DOJ's subpoena served on New York Times reporter James Risen to force him to testify against his alleged source, a subpoena Risen has vowed to fight).
The attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is clearly a leading prong in the Obama administration's truly odious and dangerous war on whistleblowers. Just today, The Washington Postreports that the Obama DOJ's espionage prosecution against Thomas Drake -- who exposed substantial waste, corruption and illegality at the NSA -- is falling apart.
The Nationtoday examines how diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the U.S. worked cooperatively with large American corporations (Fruit of the Loom, Haines, Levi's) to block attempts by the Haitian Parliament to raise the meager minimum wage to $5/day for Haitian workers who labor in factories producing t-shirts and underwear (in the portions of his purported chat log selectively released by Wired, Bradley Manning said that part of his motive was that the diplomatic cables show "how the first world exploits the third"). It is because of revelations like those that the Government is so desperate to punish and deter future disclosures.
It is not hyperbole to say that the Obama administration is waging an all-out war againsttransparency and whistleblowing (and the transparency groups who obsequiously awarded Obama a transparency award [one accepted in secret] are as disgraceful as the five Norwegians who awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize as he continues to do things like this). The persecution of WikiLeaks -- for engaging in the crux of investigative journalism -- along with anyone who supports it is one particularly dangerous weapon in that war. And anyone who defies or resists that war deserves, and will need, ample public support.
UPDATE: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer echoesThe Washington Postreport linked above in reporting that the Obama DOJ's espionage prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake is "crumbling." Mayer writes that "the government has been scrambling to find a way to avoid the trial now scheduled for next Monday" and that -- after indicting him on 10 felony counts, including espionage -- "the government has offered Drake the possibility of pleading to a misdemeanor, with no jail time," an offer he refuses to accept if it means admitting wrongdoing. But the benefit of prosecuting whistleblowers endures even if the case crumbles because (as is true for the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks) it is legally frivolous: namely, it still serves as a thuggish deterrent to future would-be whistleblowers thinking about exposing government corruption, deceit and illegality. More: Glenn Greenwald
Last month, Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge, came to town to receive the Human Rights Activism award. It is a new annual honor given jointly by the Puffin Foundation, a New Jersey-based arts-oriented non-profit, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, an educational organization devoted to preserving the history of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The award—with a hundred-thousand-dollar prize—comes at a particularly difficult time for Garzón, who has been suspended from his job amid extensive legal troubles of his own.
Garzón is widely known for his pursuit of international human-rights pariahs like Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, but Garzón himself is now on trial in a case that stems from Spain’s own troubled history. In 2008, Garzón issued a judicial edict accusing General Francisco Franco and thirty-four accomplices of the disappearance and systematic killing of more than a hundred and fourteen thousand people during the Spanish Civil War and in the decade that followed. Many of the victims were buried infosas comunes, or mass graves. As part of the ruling, Garzón ordered the exhumation of nineteen graves, including one believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote about the dispute over Lorca’s graveinThe New Yorker.)
A week after Garzón issued his order, Spain’s chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, challenged it, partly on the grounds that it violated a series of amnesty laws passed in the late nineteen-seventies as part of the process of restoring democracy to Spain. This agreement to not examine the past later became known as thepacto del olvido(pact of forgetting).
In November, 2008, the country’s highest court of appeals ruled 14-3 against Garzón. The matter appeared to be settled, but two months later a far-right organization filed a criminal suit against Garzón, accusing him of “judicial prevarication,” knowingly overstepping his authority, and violating thepacto del olvido. Garzón’s defense is that crimes against humanity cannot be absolved by a self-given, retroactive immunity. Garzón is now on trial in the Spanish Supreme Court. He faces disbarment for twenty years if convicted.
The day before he accepted the award in New York, Garzón spoke about his legal problems over a lunch of tapas and paella at La Nacional, one of the last remnants of “Little Spain,” a tiny stretch of West Fourteenth Street that was once filled with refugees from the Spanish Civil War. That war’s long shadow also helped shape Garzón’s judicial worldview.
“My family on my father’s side was more progressive, while on my mother’s side they were more conservative,” Garzón said. His mother’s brother, Gabriel, was politically conservative and an observant Catholic, but “maintained that under the law, the Republic was the legally elected government.” Gabriel fought for the Republican side in several battles, including Teruel, one of the Republic’s last stands and one of the bloodiest encounters of the war, with some hundred thousand casualties on both sides. After the war he was given three death sentences; those were later commuted, but he served eight years in prison and faced continued persecution.
“In a town of fifteen hundred people, in the course of forty years, my uncle was unable to see his friend Juan, who lived on the next street over. Not even to speak to him, because they had both been in the Republican army,” Garzón said. When Gabriel visited Garzón and his family, the Guardia Civil would show up. “I remember seeing the guards and thinking, ‘There they are, my uncle must be coming,’ ” Garzón said. “That’s how it was for many years.”
“My wife’s family has a totally different story,” Garzón continued. Her grandfather and her great-uncle were conservatives who lived in a small town. “They were pulled out of their home in the middle of the night and killed by the Republicans,” Garzón said. “They were buried and just left there.” When Garzón pursued his case, “the extreme right would say, ‘Garzón investigates Franco’s crimes because his uncle was a Republican and was persecuted.’ Of course, that didn’t quite line up with the story of my wife’s family, so they would say, ‘How dare he do this when his wife’s grandfather was assassinated by the Reds?’ They even made leaflets that they would send to my wife and to my mother-in-law, to say: ‘This is what your son-in-law is doing.’ ”
In Spain, investigative magistrates like Garzón act as a combination of prosecutor and judge. To pursue extraterritorial cases like Pinochet’s, Garzón mainly relied on Spain’s liberal acceptance of a legal doctrine called universal jurisdiction, which asserts that courts in any country can—and should—prosecute cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, and terrorism, if prosecution is not possible in the home country. In 2003, Garzón invoked universal jurisdiction to indict Osama bin Laden and dozens of Al Qaeda members; in 2009, he launched an investigation into torture at Guantánamo Bay.
(Later that year, the Spanish legislature made the conditions for such cases more stringent, requiring, among other things, a Spanish victim.) He also took up a complaint accusing six senior Bush Administration officials of authorizing torture.
A December, 2007, diplomatic cable, obtained by WikiLeaks, from the American Ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Aguirre, Jr., describes a private meeting with Garzón. “He clearly has an anti-American streak,” the Ambassador wrote.
He added, however, that “Garzón has also doggedly pursued many important terrorist cases and there have been and will continue to be numerous areas where our interests overlap.”
I asked Garzón about the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan by a Navy Seal team. “From my perspective, it doesn’t fit well with international law,” he said. “There is not a right to kill. It can be the consequence of a military action but not the purpose,” he said. “As a judge, if there is not some hidden reason that has yet to be revealed to me, I don’t understand why they would give up the information that bin Laden potentially had.”
Garzón is now working temporarily at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Last Tuesday, the alleged Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic was extradited to the Hague to stand trial for orchestrating the 1995 mass murder of more than seven thousand Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. The day before, a colleague of Garzón’s invoked universal jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants for several El Salvadorian military leaders accused of killing six Jesuit priests in 1989.
BERLIN — The man who typed up Oskar Schindler's list which helped save more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis, Mietek Pemper, has died in Germany aged 91, the Bavarian city where he lived said Thursday.
Pemper died Tuesday in Augsburg, southern Germany, and is to be buried in the city's Jewish cemetery Friday, when municipal authorities will order flags to be lowered to half-mast in his honour.
Born Mieczyslaw Pemper in 1920 in the Polish city of Krakow to a Jewish family, he was imprisoned at the Nazi concentration camp of Plaszow, where he worked as the personal typist for its feared commandant Amon Goeth from March 1943 to September 1944.
It was there that he linked up with German industrialist Schindler.
Pemper secretly read in Goeth's mail from Berlin that all factories that were not producing goods for the Nazi effort should be shuttered.
He convinced Schindler, an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia and a member of the Nazi party who first sought to profit from Germany's invasion of Poland, to abandon enamel production at his plant and make anti-tank grenade rifles.
Then Pemper, at great risk to his own life, supplied Schindler with a typed list of the names of more than 1,000 fellow prisoners to be recruited for work.
Schindler is credited with saving the lives of some 1,200 Jews through such work schemes as well as bribes paid to German officers.
Pemper later testified against Goeth and other war criminals in trials in Poland after the war. Goeth was hanged in 1946.
Schindler died in anonymity in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66, although he and Pemper remained close friends, but his story was later unearthed by Australian writer Thomas Keneally.
US director Steven Spielberg adapted the book into the 1993 film "Schindler's List" which won seven Oscars. Pemper served as an advisor on the picture.
In 2005, Pemper published his memoirs under the title "The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List".
"After being forced to work for Amon Goeth and after having had the privilege to work for Oskar Schindler, I've often wondered what would have happened had there been no war and no Nazi ideology with its racist mania," he wrote.
"Goeth would probably not have been a mass murderer, nor Schindler a saver of lives. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of war and the immense power granted to individual men that revealed the nature of these men to such an impressive and terrifying degree.
"Fate had placed me between the two of them and it was like having an angel on one side and a demon on the other."
Pemper moved with his father after his mother's death in 1958 to Augsburg, where his brother had settled immediately after the war. He became a German citizen and worked as a management consultant.
Gernot Roemer, a longtime friend of Pemper's and the author of several books on Jewish life in Augsburg, described him as aN "unusually modest man" who broke his silence years after the war to relate his experiences to university, school and adult audiences.
"I am sure he never wanted to become famous or be celebrated," he wrote in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper Thursday. "He never married and was a very lonely person."
Roemer noted that Pemper had years ago sought out Goeth's daughter, who he said never came to terms with the legacy of her sadistic father.
Augsburg Mayor Kurt Gribl said Pemper was a tireless advocate of intercultural understanding.
"With Mietek Pemper, the city has lost an important builder of bridges between the Jewish and Christian religions and a contributor to reconciliation," Gribl said in a statement.
Augsburg awarded Pemper a civic medal in 2003 and made him an honorary citizen in 2007.
Back in April, the ACLU FOIAed a bunch of State Department cables that had been released via WikiLeaks. The State Department made no response. So now the ACLU issuingto get the cables. The suit is interesting for several reasons. First, check out which cables ACLU has FOIAed: The requested cables relate to the United States’ diplomatic response to foreign investigations of United States abduction, interrogation, detention, and rendition practices; efforts by the Federal government to prosecute or release former and current Guantanamo detainees; the United States’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles; and the diplomatic efforts surrounding President Obama’s decision to oppose the release of photographs depicting U.S. interrogations of persons suspected of terrorism. The ACLU is focusing on cables that cut to the heart of America’s hypocrisy on human rights and international law. As the suit suggests, it wants the government to have to confirm or deny whether the discussions depicted in the cables actually happened. In spite of the urgent national interest and extensive media coverage surrounding the alleged diplomatic cables, at the time this FOIA request was made, DOS had not yet informed the American people whether the disclosed documents referred to actual federal government activity. Nor has it done so to date. Mind you, we know they really happened–but by releasing the cables through FOIA, the State Department will have to admit it. And if they have to admit it, it will become harder to keep quashing these investigations. (As luck would have it, the European Parliament yesterday justpassed a resolutionthat “Calls on the EU and Member States authorities, as well as the US authorities, to ensure that full, fair, effective, independent and impartial inquiries and investigations are carried out into human rights violations and crimes under international, European and national law, and to bring to justice those responsible, including in the framework of the CIA extraordinary renditions and secret prisons programme;”) Plus, this suit will be an interesting parallel proceeding to the government’splodding formulationof guidelines that will allow Gitmo defense lawyers some access to the Gitmo Documents that describe their clients. Finally, there’s one other interesting wrinkle here. Many of these documents seemingly should have been turned over in the ACLU’s (and CCR’s) previous FOIAs on torture and rendition. So will this FOIA suit force the State Department to admit whether it was blowing off a FOIA in the past? Here’s theactual requestfrom April. The cables they’ve requested are below:
ACLU Sues The State Department To Declassify WikiLeaks’ Already-Published Cables
The American Civil Liberties Union just filed an unusual lawsuit: One that aims to make publicly published documents public.
On Thursday the ACLU sued the State Department [read a PDF of its complaint here] for failing to respond for the last two months to its Freedom of Information Act request for 23 memos that have already been released by WikiLeaks. Despite having been published last year by the secret-spilling group, those documents remain classified.
The State Department cables expose, for instance, secret drone strikes by U.S. forces in Yemen, and American pressure on Spain and German tocomply with CIA extraordinary renditionof terrorist suspects. The ACLU says it selected the 23 cables out of the thousands already published because they were kept secret to avoid government embarrassment rather classified for purposes of national security, and because they show human rights violations.
Given that all those memos have already been covered by the news media, why bother to declassify them anyway? “The point is to expose the legal fiction that the secrecy system rests on,” says Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU. “The government uses this formality of secrecy to avoid having to answer for real violations of the law.”
Wizner says that keeping the documents classified makes them much more difficult to use in courts, for instance, and allows the government to avoid confirming their authenticity.
Thefilesthat WikiLeaks released on Guantanamo detainees in April, for example, can’t be used by the defense lawyers for those prisoners unless they’re viewed in a secure government facility. “Government employees can’t read theNew York Times. When I go to court in a real lawsuit seeking to get compensation for a victim’s ordeal and hold people liable, I can’t use this information,” Wizner says. “The information in those cables isn’t just information we ought to know, it’s information we ought to be able to use.”
I contacted the State Department for comment on the lawsuit, but didn’t immediately receive a response.
The ACLU’s legal maneuver comes at a clever moment: Next Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the initial release of the Pentagon Papers by theNew York Times. And 40 years after they became public, the Pentagon is only now declassifying those documents.
Daniel Ellsberg, the source of those top secret documents,wrote on TwitterThursday, “Pentagon Papers declassified–40 years late. Their lessons are more timely than ever.”
The United Nations counts internet access as a basic human right in a report that bears implications both to on-going events in the Arab Spring and to the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers. Acting as special rapporteur, a human rights watchdog role appointed by the UN Secretary General, Frank La Rue takes a hard line on the importance of the internet as "an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress."
Presented to the General Assembly on Friday, La Rue's report comes as the capstone of a year's worth of meetings held between La Rue and local human rights organizations around the world, from Cairo to Bangkok. The report's introduction points to the impact of online collaboration in the Arab Spring and says that "facilitating access to the Internet for all individuals, with as little restriction to online content as possible, should be a priority for all States."
The UN report overwhelmingly supports the internet as a communication platform, a boon to all democratic societies, but it also warns how the internet's unique architecture threatens power brokers in those societies:
The vast potential and benefits of the Internet are rooted in its unique characteristics, such as its speed, worldwide reach and relative anonymity. At the same time, these distinctive features of the Internet that enable individuals to disseminate information in "real time" and to mobilize people has also created fear amongst Governments and the powerful. This has led to increased restrictions on the Internet through the use of increasingly sophisticated technologies to block content, monitor and identify activists and critics, criminalization of legitimate expression, and adoption of restrictive legislation to justify such measures.
La Rue's mention of reach and anonymity celebrates Twitter and Facebook role in Egypt as much as it validates WikiLeaks in the United States. The Electronic Freedom Foundation says that the UN's support for anonymous expression and the protection it affords should inform how governments regulate security and surveillance.
Forms of online surveillance--be it Facebook's privacy policy or the United States government's expanding treason law to document leaks--"often [take] place for political, rather than security reasons in an arbitrary and covert manner," La Rue argues. In short, broad surveillance powers or the erosion of privacy online endanger anonymity's ability to protect dissenters and journalists alike when they speak out.
Stacked against the administration's assault on whistleblowers, La Rue's warnings are condemning:
The Special Rapporteur remains concerned that legitimate online expression is being criminalized in contravention of States' international human rights obligations, whether it is through the application of existing criminal laws to online expression, or through the creation of new laws specifically designed to criminalize expression on the Internet. Such laws are often justified as being necessary to protect individuals' reputation, national security or to counter terrorism. However, in practice, they are frequently used to censor content that the Government and other powerful entities do not like or agree with.
La Rue acknowledges the logistical barriers that some nations face when it comes to delivering internet service. Without the proper infrastructure, some nations simply can't engage the internet as the "revolutionary" and "interactive medium" it's proven itself to be. However, all nations should make plans to offer universal access and also maintain policy that won't limit access for political purposes. In doing so, La Rue calls on governments to decriminalize defamation, do away with real-name registration systems--including the parameters in Facebook's terms and conditions that allows governments to collect users' names and passwords--and restrict rights only in the face of an imminent threat.
The United Nations' strong position on anonymity online reads like a hat tip to WikiLeaks and its campaign for transparency, but it also sounds scolding towards governments like the United States' that have waged wars against transparency. Likening the Obama administration's increasing number of convictions using old treason laws against information leakers is censorship in no uncertain terms, the UN seems to say. And the government's bad track record of protecting this type of free expression is ideologically just as bad as shutting the internet down altogether.
LONDON — It is the nation that once ran the largest empire the world has ever known, a country so powerful that it claimed to "rule the waves" in a patriotic anthem.
But last month a "political tsunami" struck the United Kingdom and this once-mighty state faces being broken up.
Polls currently suggest only a third of Scots back independence, but the unionist campaign is in disarray and the nationalists boast a leader who even his opponents admit is a highly skilled political operator.
Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister and leader of the SNP, is the man plotting the demise of the 304-year-old union of the two countries. He hopes his fellow citizens will heed the message of another tune, "Flower of Scotland," the unofficial national anthem which urges Scots to "rise now and be a nation again."
While the U.K. has been one of America's staunchest allies — often concerned with the state of the so-called "special relationship" between the two countries — an independent Scotland would likely be at odds with the U.S. on many issues.
The SNP would rid Scotland of nuclear weapons on moral grounds; it would also take Scotland — which lies in a strategically important position in the North Atlantic — out of NATO. And despite being a significant oil producer, the SNP has already introduced what it describes as "world-beating" climate change legislation with a target to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
'Illegal, Immoral Conflict'
Moreover, the Iraq War was "an illegal, immoral conflict," Salmond told reporters at the Foreign Press Association in London last month, and something that an independent Scotland would never have become involved in.
Leaving the U.K. would give Scotland the chance to create "a socially just, economically prosperous society," Salmond added, and not be "a country that excels in nuclear weapons and dominating others."
"Being a big country is not a question of size and scale, but of the size of your ideas, the scale of your contribution to humanity," he said.
Speaking to msnbc.com, Salmond dismissed suggestions an independent Scotland might have a poor relationship with the U.S., pointing to the mutual warmth between America and the Republic of Ireland, which is not a NATO member.
"We'd be in exactly the same position as Ireland is at the present moment," he said.
"There's a lot of goodwill towards Scotland from people in America," Salmond added, noting Scots had made a "fairly substantial contribution to the intellectual backbone of the American Revolution."
Scotland and the U.S., he said, had "a positive relationship" and that would improve after independence.
Salmond told reporters that separation from the U.K. was an idea "whose time has come."
'Psychological battle'
Asked about the poll ratings, he admitted there was a "psychological battle" to be won to persuade Scots to vote for change in the face of a "scare-mongering campaign" by unionist parties.
But Salmond said the SNP's victory in the May election showed that Scots were gaining in confidence and had rejected the "mendacious message" that Scotland was "too small and too poor to look after its own affairs."
"It was a political tsunami that occurred in Scotland," he said, days after announcing a referendum on independence would be held within the next five years.
But tsunami warnings can come to nothing.
John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University and an expert pollster, said the SNP victory appeared to be partly because of dissatisfaction with the other political parties, particularly left-of-center Labour.
Surveys had consistently showed support for independence at between a quarter and a third of voters, he said.
However, Curtice said Salmond had a "remarkable ability to spin a positive case for his party and his country."
And the unionists, Curtice argued, needed to find "a positive argument for staying in the union," rather than rely on negative campaigning, as well as a leader to sell that message.
"Who is going to lead the campaign? Who is there who has the ability to campaign effectively? It's not entirely obvious," Curtice said. "The SNP starts from behind, but you can see the structural weaknesses of the the unionist camp."
One possible candidate, Annabel Goldie, currently leader of the staunchly unionist Scottish Conservative Party, has effectively stepped out of contention, saying after her party came third in the elections that she plans to resign.
She insisted that "overwhelmingly, people do not want independence, whatever AlexSalmond may claim," while admitting he was a "very astute politician" with "a very formidable political presence."
"We are at ease with being part of the U.K.," Goldie said. "It is a relationship that many people acknowledge has served people well, not least in the recent recession and banking crisis."
Traditional goodwill
She feared an independent country might lose some of the traditional goodwill Americans have toward Scotland if it was "constantly trying to make grandstanding gestures on the world stage."
Goldie said it "undoubtedly would be a left-of-center, socialist administration with already well articulated views on issues like nuclear — Trident (nuclear missiles) or nuclear energy — and very strong views on social issues ... all sorts of views which are somewhat alien to the American ethos."
One decision that was entirely alien to U.S. traditions was the early release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi— the only person convicted in the bombing attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie — on compassionate grounds in 2009, just eight years after he was found guilty of the mass murder of 270 people.
SNP Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill made the decision after doctors reportedly told him that al-Megrahi, suffering from cancer, likely had three months to live. Nearly two years after his release, al-Megrahi remains alive.
The SNP's stance on NATO is another possible source of friction.
The naval base at Faslane on the west coast of Scotland — home to the U.K.'s nuclearsubmarine fleet — and the safe harbor at Scapa Flow off the country's northern coast are strategically important locations.
Cold War Tracking Stations
Scotland is also part of a network of sonar monitoring stations — built during the Cold War to track Russian submarines moving into the North Atlantic — that could become important should the old tensions flare up again.
A senior SNP source admitted there was a difference of opinion within the party about NATO membership, with some members so strongly opposed to nuclear weapons on moral grounds that they did not want to be under NATO's "nuclear umbrella."
Defense commentator Stuart Crawford, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.K.'s Royal Tank Regiment and later became the SNP's junior defense spokesman, said senior party figures had long wanted to get rid of the party's "bonkers" opposition to NATO.
Crawford, who has since left the SNP but still supports independence, said the idea of a complete disassociation from nuclear weapons had taken hold among grassroots supporters and the party was "painfully democratic."
He said Scotland might have limited significance to the U.S. now, but suggested a possible scenario that would radically change that.
"In 2030, the expanding power that is China says, 'Can we lease a naval base from you Scotland?" ... We'll pay you billions of dollars for the privilege' — then I suggest Scotland becomes very important to the U.S.," he said.
Crawford compared such a move to the Cuban missile crisis, but added: "China is a friendly country, so what could the objection be?"
'Good for the country's psyche'
Crawford said he doubted Scotland would vote for independence in the planned referendum, but said he expected it would happen within 10 to 20 years.
"I'm an emotional nationalist and I think it would be good for the country's psyche and soul as a whole," he said.
For Alan Roden, an Englishman who covers Scottish politics for the Daily Mail newspaper, that would be a shame.
A photo on his Facebook page shows him wearing a traditional Scottish kilt, but makes clear his passion forEnglish football team York City. Many on either side of the border have similar ties and feelings toward the two countries.
One of his "favorite quotes" listed on Facebook makes his opinion clear, paraphrasing a line from the 1707 Act of Union that "England and Scotland shall forever after be united into one Kingdom."
"People want their MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) to stand up for Scotland, but Scotland within the union," he said, noting the same polls highlighted by Curtice.
However, Roden admitted that "you can never underestimate Alex Salmond," saying he was "incredibly popular" and left other Scottish politicians "in the shade."
"This is a man who at the start of the Holyrood election campaign was significantly trailing the Labour Party in the opinion polls but who turned that round … and ended up with the first majority in the Scottish parliament's history," Roden said.
Partly because of the proportional voting system, previous Scottish administrations have been coalitions or have governed with only a minority of the lawmakers, relying on ad hoc support from other parties.
Echoing other commentators, Roden said the unionists needed to unite and "put forward a positive message about why Scotland and England are better together" as well as find a Scot good enough to stand up to Salmond to lead the campaign.
A claim made by some in the unionist camp is that businesses, people generally and English people in particular would leave if Scotland became independent.
'Scotland is my home'
But Roden plans to stay. "Scotland is my home and I do believe the people of Scotland have a right to choose their own future," he said.
Another foreign-born resident of Scotland with a keen interest in the debate is Dr. Mark Aspinwall, head of politics and international relations at Scotland's Edinburgh University.
A native of Massachusetts, Aspinwall said he was "very neutral" about the idea when talking with students, but had been "sort of opposed to it" because Scotland and England "are so linked economically."
But Aspinwall, who has dual citizenship, showed signs of wavering. "I'm not sure how I would vote to be honest," he said of the referendum.
He told msnbc.com that independence was "conceivable," but rated the chances as "less than 50-50."
Scotland "would certainly have a future as an independent country," he said, comparing it to Norway.
"There's something that is Scottish, there is an identity, a pride, a history that's a bit different," Aspinwall said.
"I love Scotland ... It's clean and fresh, open and green. It has the same topography as northern New England, the same mountains, not the same trees ... it's a great place, friendly people, and Edinburgh is a wonderful city, a really cosmopolitan place. It's great here."
There might have been a difference of opinion between the classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus and British romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley regarding the circumstances of the release of the Titan god Prometheus from captivity: whether it followed reconciliation with Jupiter, as the classicist thought, or a rebellion, as the romantic insisted. In either case, Prometheus was "unbound".
The exact circumstances of the endgame in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain a moot point, but the outcome is certain to be that the United States, which like Prometheus was chained to a mountain where he was daily punished by Jupiter's eagle and underwent immense suffering, is being "released" to normal life.
For Prometheus, it came as an existential moment and when Hercules came to unbind him, he was so relieved at the freedom "long desired/And long delayed" that he pledged to his love that they "will sit and talk of time and change/As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged".
The United States, too, is re-emerging "unchanged". There is a flurry of activity as if making up for lost time - "unilateralist" military intervention in Libya; deployment of a F-16 squadron in Poland; establishment of military bases in Romania; resuscitation of the George W Bush era plans for deployment of a US missile defense system in Central Europe; revival of the entente cordiale among "new Europeans"; threatened "humanitarian intervention" in Syria; renewed talk of military action against Iran; a push for a long-term military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan; revving up of the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into Central Asia; violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan; the threat of "regime change" in Sri Lanka; and last weekend the announcement of the deployment of light combat ships in Singapore. (More…)
Before he was an internet punchline, Rick Santorum was the baby face of compassionate conservatism. Remember that?
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is ardently anti-gay and has an acute talent for tapping into the homophobic imagination of social conservatives. “Man on child,” “man on dog,” incest, “priests with 3-year-olds,” polygamy, the welfare of children, the decline of Western civilization—if it’s in the vocabulary of anti-gay hysteria,Santorum has been there, done that.
As a result, he’s become the target of a Google bomb, led by gay columnist Dan Savage, that successfullyredefined “santorum”as a substance most straight people probably didn’t know existed and most gay men never thought to name, especially not in honor of a Republican US senator. But hey, shit happens—and now Santorum is widely considered a joke. The launch of his presidential campaign today was greeted with a chorus of knowing sneers.
No, not just because of the internet prank, but for all that lies behind its mockery: a generational shift away from right-wing sanctimony and its preoccupation with the decline of the traditional family towards are more mass-mediated, liberal, tolerant, laissez-faire approach to sexuality. Santorum seems dated. In addition to mean and bigoted, his views appear nonsensical and unserious. The great cultural bellwether known asMiley Cyrus’s twitter accounthas come out against him, and even his remaining die-hard supporters, likeNational Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, struggled to answer the question: “Why would he bother?”
Laugh away—for now he has the support of just two percent of Republican voters—but remember, Santorum wasn’t always just for shits and giggles. Before he crashed and burned in his race for a third Senate term, Santorum was considered a golden boy of the GOP. He had won four elections in a row in a swing state against well-financed Democrats. He was the youngest member of the GOP Senate leadership and, for much of the early 2000s, one of its most frequent TV spokesmen.
Most importantly, Santorum was the baby face of compassionate conservatism and an important architect of its signature pieces of legislation. As head of the House GOP Task Force on Welfare Reform, Santorum wrote key parts of what became the landmark 1996 welfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton. He championed No Child Left Behind and proposed the Santorum Amendment to it, which attempted to insert teaching on the theory of intelligent design. Along with Democrat Dick Durbin, Santorum crusaded for increasing US spending on the global fight against HIV/AIDS, especially if it went to church groups and controversial abstinence-only programs. He considered enlarging the US role in fighting AIDS integral to "American exceptionalism," and he earned the praise of Bono, among others, for his advocacy. Throughout it all, he worked behind the scenes to increase government funding for faith-based social services.
Asconservative pundit Kathleen Parkerlamented in September 2006, when it was clear that Santorum would go down to Bob Casey, “Santorum has been the conservatives’ point man for the world’s disenfranchised—the poor, the sick and the meek. If he loses, the face of compassionate conservatism will be gone.”
Parker was right. Nobody on the right talks of compassionate conservatism anymore, especially now that the Tea Party is running the show. In part that’s because it collapsed on its own internal contradictions. As an ideology, compassionate conservatism championed state support for social justice —to fight poverty, illiteracy or disease, for example—but it opposed the state doing that work itself. In practice, that meant turning the state into a giant, heavily politicized pass-through mechanism that redistributed tax-payer dollars to private charities and corporations without meaningful accountability. Because compassionate conservatism is rooted in Christian missionary zealotry, it inevitably engaged in social engineering—abstinence-only sex education and discrimination against gays and lesbians, for example. And most importantly for the Tea Party right, it ran up the deficit. Along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for Tea Party conservatives, it is the most visible symbol of how Bush went wrong, corrupting real conservatism with profligate cronyism.
That’s the real reason why Santorum’s candidacy seems so laughable now. He’s a relic from another time, one marked by plentitude and optimism, when conservatives embraced a global role for the United States, attempted to hijack American progressivism and above all, needed a new brand to bring them back from the mean years of straight-up bashing welfare queens and fags with AIDS (see Jesse Helms). Santorum fulfilled that role, speaking of America’s great and charitable mission to aid the poor while retaining enough smiling hatred to stoke the old base. It didn’t really make sense then. It really doesn’t make sense now.
