Expats Against Bush

Happy New Year

Just wanted to say a quick Happy New Year to you and yours from Expats Against Bush. I hope you have all had a great Christmas break and will return refreshed and ready for more activism and informed debate :).

Sincerely,
-Luke Robinson

Executive Order: Torture

Never mind a few bad apples, as we all suspected the order to use inhumane interrogation on prisoners from Iraq to Guantanamo came from a presidential Executive Order straight from the Oval Office, according to the ACLU, who forced the release of the documents:

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

Gosh, it sure feels good to be the pillar of freedom and justice in the world, eh?

TIME's Person of the Year

I'm hoping that they're giving this to Bush on a "most talked about person of the year" basis rather than a "most deserving of celebration" basis. Ugh.

We deserve a better man

For once, I wholeheartedly agree with Bill Kristol: Donald Rumsfeld is a national embarrassment and his (mooted) departure can't come too soon. I am hoping that, as suggested, he is just hanging around long enough not to muck with the Iraq election (such as it is), and that he will then gracefully bow out. However, it is only a faint hope. After all, he's been loyal to Bush, and as it's painfully obvious that loyalty counts far more than competence in this administration, who's to say if Rummy will ever be held to account for his gross negligence?

"Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe -- it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip."

So the Army is in charge. "They" are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the same building: "I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. . . . And that is what the Army has been working on." Not "that is what we have been working on." Rather, "that is what the Army has been working on." The buck stops with the Army.

At least the topic of those conversations in the Pentagon isn't boring. Indeed, Rumsfeld assured the troops who have been cobbling together their own armor, "It's interesting." In fact, "if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up." Good point. Why have armor at all? Incidentally, can you imagine if John Kerry had made such a statement a couple of months ago? It would have been (rightly) a topic of scorn and derision among my fellow conservatives, and not just among conservatives.

Kristol's not the only one angry at Rummy. In fact, someone who was once rather heavily involved in Iraq has weighed in. Stormin' Norman is not a happy man:

“I was very, very disappointed — no, let me put it stronger — I was angry by the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army, as if he, as the secretary of defense, didn’t have anything to do with the Army and the Army was over there doing it themselves, screwing up,” Schwarzkopf said.

John McCain also has the knives out for him:

Asked about his confidence in the secretary’s leadership, McCain recalled fielding a similar question a couple weeks ago. “I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence,” McCain said.

He estimated that 80,000 more Army personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines would be needed to secure Iraq.

“I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops — linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc.,” McCain said. “There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld on that issue.”

By the way, If you want an on-the-ground perspective on the soldiers' view of armor on Humvees, check out this shouldn't-be-funny-but-is home video from Baghdad.

Buy Blue

You may or may not have seen it, but in case you or your relatives back home want to make sure you support companies that support your party, check out BuyBlue.com's Christmas shopping guide. It goes without saying, of course, that this site is just as handy for our Republican readers wishing to shore up their Red companies....

Dollar going the way of the Dodo?

(apologies for the lack of posting; I've been absolutely slammed this week)

I'm sure most of you expats have noticed the precipitous decline in the dollar ($1.95 to £1 earlier this week) - well it looks like other countries are really starting to take notice now, and The Economist thinks that it will get worse before it gets better:

Many American policymakers talk as though it is better to rely entirely on a falling dollar to solve, somehow, all their problems. Conceivably, it could happen—but such a one-sided remedy would most likely be far more painful than they imagine. America's challenge is not just to reduce its current-account deficit to a level which foreigners are happy to finance by buying more dollar assets, but also to persuade existing foreign creditors to hang on to their vast stock of dollar assets, estimated at almost $11 trillion. A fall in the dollar sufficient to close the current-account deficit might destroy its safe-haven status. If the dollar falls by another 30%, as some predict, it would amount to the biggest default in history: not a conventional default on debt service, but default by stealth, wiping trillions off the value of foreigners' dollar assets.

The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.

Democrats Abroad UK

Like some of our readers, I attended the Dems Abroad-UK annual general meeting in London on Saturday, and gave 5 hours of my day to the glory that is parliamentary procedural debate. There was so much debate, in fact, that even factoring in the late start, we still didn't even cast the first vote (and that was on a proposed amendment to a proposed amendment to the by-laws) until 11AM, by which point people were applauding the fact that something had actually been achieved.

All in all, it could have been worse.

The fact of the matter is that when you have 98 opinionated people in one room, you're going to hear at least 98 opinions on any given topic. If you're lucky.

Things moved on a bit more quickly after the initial hullaballoo over expanding the size of the council and the Executive Committee, and soon we were even able to vote for actual people as opposed to by-laws. I would like to extend a heartfelt congratulations to the new officers, especially Margo Miller as the new Chair, who you may remember worked so hard on the Get Out The Vote effort leading up to the election.

Some of you know I was standing for Executive Committee - it turns out (I only found out last night) that I, along with several other new faces, was elected to the Committee and I would like to extend my congratulations to my fellow Committee members, both the old faces and the new. We have a lot of work to do in advance of the 2006 midterm elections.

I stood for the Committee on the basis of improving the communications side of DA-UK, and possibly of Dems Abroad as a parent organisation, both online and offline (obviously leaning towards the former). In the short term that means an urgent review of the DA-UK website and its strategic strengths and weaknesses.

What, you may ask, is the impact on this website? The short answer is, I don't know yet. Since I am now part of the management of Dems Abroad UK, will the tone of this website change at all? I would venture to say no. However, it is too soon to tell. The bigger issue is, I think, that if we are successful at reengineering the DA-UK and even the DA parent websites, we may come to a point where this website is redundant. I don't think that will be the case for some time yet (if at all) but it's a possibility. Don't start counting those chickens yet :)

In any case, I should be able to offer a fresh perspective on expat political life now that I have re-committed myself to the fight. I hope all of you are similarly inclined to keep up the good work.

Alabama: Leading the way once again

I think this one speaks for itself:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

A spokesman for the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center called the bill censorship.

"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me," said SPLC spokesman Mark Potok.

Indeed.

If I had my way, I'd ban novels featuring illiterate, knuckle-dragging Alabama state legislators. Because, after all, our culture, as we know it, is under attack from every angle.

Recruiting in schools

Motherjones has a piece up about a Vermont headmaster who received a rude shock when she refused to give over contact details for her students to some Army recruiters:

The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

Huh?

I suppose that's one way to stave off a draft. Still, it concerns me that built into an education bill is a guaranteed right-of-entry to any public school for military personnel - not only that, but a guaranteed right of those same personnel to all of the school's student records.