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...................................By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?' the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."
The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two acts of Congress that codified it.
One former administration official said the White House's initial policy and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ... My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don't apply ... certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off, this isn't a Geneva world anymore."
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," the statement said.
LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.
The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.
"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.
He didn't want his name used, partly because he didn't want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.
"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the Americans were taking action without checking this information."
Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.
By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who'd had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.
Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.
Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
"Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban," he said in a phone interview.
Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.
"It's all about developing the mosaic ... there's value to both ends of the spectrum," he said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.
Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command "rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement," said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO."
'WAR COUNCIL' REWRITES DETAINEE LAW
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
"He said that we're not getting anything, and his thought was that we're not getting anything because there might not be anything to get," said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps at the time.
Many detainees were "swept up in the pot" by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who's now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.
One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.
Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."
"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired."
A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.
" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said. "Are you kidding me?"
"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said. "That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.
In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered "high value" for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department's head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005.
"Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated," said Waxman, who's now a law professor at Columbia University.
At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question after the high court's ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are."
HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
Yeah, and thank the Supreme Court for also making the jobs of the military harder.
What the Supreme Court has effectively done is not only open the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits in Gitmo, but they've also made it incresingly difficult for the military to capture POWs in general.
You may take comfort in that. But our nation's a little bit weaker today. And rest assured-our soliders, if captured, won't be extended the same courtesy the Supreme Court just gave away to our enemies.
As for Condi Rice, I don't know that much about her, but it seems she never lived up to her potential.
Republican AA's may be re-thinking their legacy in light of Barack sticking his neck out and getting such a positive response. Barack shows that if you're an AA pol, you don't have to reject liberalism or beat up on the less fortunate to be taken seriously.
Colin Powell & Condi Rice didn't risk anything, which is disappointing. They could have been beacons of light in the Bush Administration, instead of being part of the pathology of it.
In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.
It will be interesting to hear other blogs such as Jack and Jill, perspective on this.
-Brown girl in the ring
::
Damn. You're good.
One of my biggest political ' What IFS' of this decade is..
' WHAT IF Colin Powell had resigned rather than lie at The UN?'
http://www.al.com/huntsvilletimes/stories/index.ssf?/base/living/1212743755265540.xml&coll;=1
The Numbers: Obama vs McCain on Taxes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNyNv_UfFUo
Learning to be Michelle Obama: At Princeton, she came to terms with being a black achiever in a white world
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/15/learning_to_be_michelle_obama/
In April, Michelle Obama’s white roommate and her mother gave their perspective in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April:
Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama
http://www.ajc.com/search/content/news/stories/2008/04/12/roommate_0413.html
"As for Condi Rice, I don't know that much about her, but it seems she never lived up to her potential. "
Condi's expertise is Russia, so if we were dealing with them she probably would've been an asset.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/16/AR2008061600661_3.html
Your link's bad.....
I always had a problem with the statement that that girl had 'parents'. She had an egg donor and a sperm donor- parasites both. PARENTS would be IN JAIL for what they did to R.Kelly after finding out what he had done to their child.
R.Kelly is the most famous of a situation that has proliferated during my adult lifetime. When I was growing up, if you saw a teenaged mother, when pointing the finger to the father, you found yourself pointing to a teenaged boy - someone of her peer group.
No longer. With no alarm being sounded by our community, these teenaged girls are more than often pointing to GROWN MEN. Grown men who have preyed upon these young girls. What would make these GIRLS think that it's ok to be with these GROWN MEN? The hunger inside of them that they're trying to fill due to a MISSING FATHER.
surprise, surprise..LOL
I think Faux News will be chock full of Hillpatine followers....they are ' Democrats', so when they slam Obama, it will seem ' authentic'.
Organizer of McCain meeting to woo Clinton supporters is infamous for trying to keep blacks out of Thomas Jefferson family reunions
John Aravosis (DC) · 6/16/2008
From Ben Smith:
A key organizer of John McCain's meeting Saturday with former supporters of Hillary Clinton is best known for her role in another bitter American fight: The effort by some white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to keep his possible African-American descendants out of family gatherings....
Abeles first made the news in 2003, when she and her husband, then-Monticello Association President Nat Abeles, led the fight to keep members of the Hemings family -- descendants of Jefferson slave and, some historians believe, mistress Sally Hemmings -- out of a gathering of the Monticello Association, which is made up of lineal descendants of the third president.
Ben then quotes AP:
The wife of a Thomas Jefferson family association official said Friday that she masqueraded as a 67-year-old black woman on an Internet chat room in a bid to keep descendants of a reputed Jefferson mistress out of this weekend's family reunion.
"It might have been somewhat unethical," said Paulie Abeles of Washington, D.C., who participated for eight months in the Yahoo! message board created for relatives of Jefferson slave Sally Hemings.
"It might have been childish, but I really think I was working in the best interest of the majority of the family members to make the reunion a calm and civilized gathering," she said.
The language of faith isn’t a foreign tongue to the senator of Illinois. He talks the talk and easily engages believers. In fact, Obama has a better footing with the religious-minded than competitor John McCain.
By Daniel Gilgoff
On paper, the Democrats' nomination of Barack Obama is a gift to the Christian right.
Obama's liberal record on gay rights and abortion — he opposes the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal "partial-birth abortion" ban and, as a state senator in Illinois, opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which attempted to protect unsuccessfully aborted fetuses — should make him easy enough for "values voters" to oppose.
(Illustration by Web Bryant, USA TODAY)
And Obama has struggled among religious voters in this year's Democratic primaries. In Ohio, his 2-to-1 loss among white Catholics and a 20-point loss among white evangelicals gave Hillary Clinton's campaign a second wind that kept her in the race these last three months.
That same faith-based divide undergirded Obama's losses in Pennsylvania — where Clinton took nearly 60% of weekly churchgoers — and Indiana. Heavily religious West Virginia and Kentucky, meanwhile, handed Obama his biggest defeats of this campaign, even though he appeared to have the nomination sealed up by the time voters in those states cast their ballots.
Yet for months, the Christian right had been more worried about the prospect of Obama's nomination than Clinton's. The evangelical Family Research Council's frequent e-mail alerts to supporters laid into Obama while largely laying off of Clinton. One of Focus on the Family Action's recent "Action Update" explained why the Illinois senator is as "extreme as they come on family issues" — using 26 footnotes to make its case — but barely mentions his Democratic opponent.
The conservative Catholic League For Religious and Civil Rights, for its part, had gone so far as to call Obama's position on abortion "Hitlerian," even though it was virtually indistinguishable from Clinton's.
Of course, part of the reason for the Christian right's focus on Obama is his emergence months ago as the Democratic front-runner. But the movement's leaders also fear him because, despite his weak showing among religious Democrats, he has shown unusual potential for appealing to the rank-and-file evangelicals and other religious voters who usually back the Christian right's Republican allies.
Openly faithful
That's largely because Obama isn't afraid to discuss faith's role in his life, including his come-to-Jesus experience. Speaking of the influence that the now well-known Rev. Jeremiah Wright had on him, Obama told a church audience last year: "He introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him."
Such talk is more reminiscent of George W. Bush than of recent Democratic presidential nominees. "To a lot of people, Sen. Obama is an unknown suit that talks the 'evangelical talk' without actually saying anything on his opinions or his track record," says Tom McClusky, the Family Research Council's chief lobbyist. "In the general election, Sen. Obama speaking 'religion' is going to sound more familiar and natural than Sen. (John) McCain."
And — to evangelicals, at least — more familiar than Hillary Clinton, whose mainline Methodist background helps explain her preference for discussing the importance of doing good works over her personal relationship with Jesus. "Clinton does not compete with the religious right because her message is one not of hope and of healing, but of meeting the pragmatic concerns of economic advantage," says Douglas Kmiec, a conservative Catholic legal scholar and former adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (Kmiec has since endorsed Obama.)
"Obama has the capacity to win the soul of the working person," Kmiec says, "whereas Mrs. Clinton speaks to the pocketbook and the here and now."
Another asset for Obama among religious conservatives is his past expressions of admiration for the Christian right and its positions, unusual for a liberal Democrat. In The Audacity of Hope — whose title, taken from one of Wright's sermons, is itself a testament to the influence of religion in his life — Obama writes of tinkering with his website's indelicate language on his pro-choice position after receiving a letter from an anti-abortion doctor.
Obama's gestures to the faithful come at a moment when evangelicals, nearly 80% of whom supported President Bush in 2004, are showing less allegiance to the GOP than perhaps at any time since Jerry Falwell launched the modern Christian right three decades ago. A report last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 40% of white evangelicals ages 18 to 29 identified themselves as Republicans. That's down from 55% two years earlier. With more evangelicals taking up traditionally progressive causes such as the environment and international human rights, challenging the hot-button agenda of the old line Christian right, Obama's pledge to work across the partisan divide might have special resonance with them.
To be sure, Obama still has his work cut out. After all, evangelicals and other religious conservatives have heavily supported Republicans for decades. Even so, Democrats need to make only small inroads among values voters to change the outcome of a close election. For instance, had John Kerry won half of Ohio's weekly churchgoers in 2004 — as current Democratic Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland managed to do in his 2006 race — he would be in the White House today. Building such inroads has been made easier by McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
McCain's challenge
Though McCain has vowed to improve his famously strained relations with the Christian right — remember his 2006 commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University? — he still lacks a full-time religious outreach director. Obama's campaign hired such an operative well over a year ago and has expanded its faith outreach staff since then.
In the past month alone, McCain has outraged many in the Christian right by publicly rejecting Texas evangelist John Hagee and Ohio pastor Rod Parsley, two of his few major Christian right backers. He also had a relatively measured response to the California Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage, an issue that galvanizes social conservatives.
And though his solidly anti-abortion voting record could be a big selling point to religious conservatives, McCain has done little to advertise it on the campaign trail. "A number of us have met with his people to let him know that our base is going to be dramatically lacking energy unless he really makes their hearts beat on an issue like life," says Texas-based Christian activist Kelly Shackelford, who runs an advocacy group associated with Focus on the Family. "The candidate has to speak on those issues in a way that people believe him."
So far, McCain has demurred. Obama, though not telling values voters what they want to hear on issues such as abortion, is nonetheless speaking to them. And the Christian right's heart is beating faster.
Dan Gilgoff is politics editor at Beliefnet.com and author of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War. His God-o-Meter blog on religion in the presidential race is at www.beliefnet.com/godometer.</br>
By S.A. REID
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/15/08
please drop the link to your story at What About Our Daughters.
Just the kind of story Gina M would love to publicize.
That wasn't my link.
"From Jeffersons vs. Hemingses to McCain vs. Obama"
This is interesting, it's about the woman who helped organized the Clinton supporters for McCain meeting on Saturday.
"She and her husband led the fight to keep members of the Hemings family--descendants of Jefferson slave and, some historians believe, mistress Sally Hemmings--out of a gathering of the Monticello Association"
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/From_Jeffersons_vs_Hemingses_to_McCain_vs_Obama.html
Rikyrah,
Are you talking about somebody who tried to perform it on his ex-girlfriend in college? hehhee
Gwen Ifill on Russert
Over at The Root (via commenter AaronBBrown):
Tim remained a friend to the end. Even when we disagreed – as happened during the infamous Don Imus episode last year – he never stopped wanting to hear what I thought. Imus was his friend, and he had appeared on the radio show many, many times. So when Meet the Press producer Betsy Fischer called to invite me to participate in a Sunday roundtable focused on the controversy, I at first refused.
I felt compelled to call Tim and explain. If I come on your show, I told him, I will be forced to criticize the journalists who had enabled Imus over the years, leading up to his stunning insult of the Rutgers basketball team. Tim knew – and I knew – that Imus had insulted me too, years before. When I told Tim I didn't feel I could come to his house and insult him, he quickly assured me that he wanted me to come and say what I had to say. People needed to hear it, he told me.
So I went, and I told him to his face that I found his defense of Imus disappointing. I got a lot of kudos for speaking truth to power that day, but the real news was that Tim allowed me to say what I had to say, knowing it would not make him look good. That does not happen a lot – in life or politics.
*******************************
In a way, that nicely summarizes Russert: Cozy with his fellow establishmentarians, yes, but also open-minded and willing to be pushed and prodded.
--Noam Scheiber
I'm just a-sayin'....
I do believe any mention of them being on a Presidential ticket would be OVER.
double standard indeed, but I don't think this guy (Jindal) will make it to the final list.
I misread your post - I understand now.
Thank you kindly.
Rikyrah,
Isn't it funny they're still fairly well regarded despite all that? I just wish they'd been bolder.
Sepia,
That's pretty funny.
http://www.al.com/huntsvilletimes/stories/index.ssf?/base/living/1212743755265540.xml&coll;=1
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/former-clinton-campaign-manager-joins-obama-team
"Could it be that this scrutiny of Obama's influences springs from the anxiety white people have that black people will remember how awful we've been to them and start treating us the way we've treated them? Both McCain and Clinton have been linked to ministers and ministries as outrageous as Wright and Pfleger. Why are Obama's links being obsessed over and theirs barely mentioned?
It seems that the fear coursing behind reaction to Rev. Wright has not much to do with politics, or even theology, and everything to do with the living pain still surrounding race in our land."
http://www.al.com/huntsvilletimes/stories/index.ssf?/base/living/1212743755265540.xml&coll;=1
You link still doesn't work.
Mayber there's nothing for neocons like myself to be scared of after all. :)
I see that...in Michigan tonight.
This will be another way to imprint the idea "Obama is young and energetic; fit for the office"; McCain is too old and not up to the task.
Of course, McCain cannot lift shovels of dirt because of the injuries he was subjected to during his captivity in North Vietnam.
That will not be told.
"Could it be that this scrutiny of Obama's influences springs from the anxiety white people have that black people will remember how awful we've been to them and start treating us the way we've treated them?
BAM is right. Of course it is.
Mine collapse in Pennsylvania.
d., the links work for me. Basically the writer is saying neocons are afraid black folks are going to remember how bad they were treated by white folks and seek some kind of revenge if Obama is President. You may not be copying the whole link that is why you may not be able to get it to work for you.
That doesn't concern me. I seriously doubt I'm going to see many of my people going on lynching parties just 'cause Obama's in the White House.
But speaking of Iraq.....anyone know where else Obama's supposed overseas trip is taking him besides the UK? Seems to me, to quell the fires, he'd go to Iraq first.....
Hillary's Martyrdom Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be
I'm all for counterintuitive articles, and John Heilemann's big New York story making the case that Hillary has emerged from her defeat a "more resonant, consequential, and potent figure than she has ever been before" is a good one. But I'd like to take exception to one point Heilemann makes. He writes:
It was only after Bill Clinton’s impeachment ordeal that he became a beloved figure on the traditional left, which had long regarded him warily before his persecution by the special prosecutor and the congressional Republicans. WJC, in other words, was fortunate in his enemies. Now HRC finds herself similarly blessed; in Chris Matthews she appears to have found her own version of Ken Starr. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating once again. Whatever else one thinks about the Clintons, there’s no denying that martyrdom has been very, very good to them.
This is true up to a point, but Hillary's martyrdom differs from Bill's in one key detail: he survived impeachment; she didn't survive the Democratic primary. Heilemann makes it clear that Hillary still wants to be president, but it's really hard to see how she'll ever accomplish that. If Obama wins, she won't be able to run until 2016, when she'll be 69 and as fresh as Hubert Humphrey was in 1968. And if Obama loses, a decent segment of black and activist liberal voters will probably hold Hillary at least partly responsible for his defeat, no matter how hard (and how disingenuously) she campaigns for him this fall. And as Hillary learned in '08, you can't win a Democratic primary without those voters. In other words, Hillary's martyrdom might have made her more resonant, consequential, and potent, but I don't think it's made her more presidential.
--Jason Zengerle
I think she will be back at Stanford eventually returning to her role as Provost or lobbying for her dream job as NFL commissioner.
A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama's selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign's eventual vice presidential nominee is the biggest fuck you I have ever seen in politics.
think positive thoughts.
And he said IF HE HAS TIME.
I say, he should have no time.
Re-Heat Offender: Cindy Bakes Another Whopper
Michelle's cookie:
Michelle Obama's Shortbread Cookies
Why do you have that picture of an African American man standing next to a protrait of George Washington on your post? Surely you aren't trying to give the impression that you are an African American male.
That's me.
And Obama can shovel dirt, he's got time to go to Iraq;
Hell, he should go out on patrol there.
I would love to see Rachel M. take MTP.
D. said...
Anon 1:10,
That doesn't concern me. I seriously doubt I'm going to see many of my people going on lynching parties just 'cause Obama's in the White House.
Who are "my people"?
If Barack does go to Iraq I hope he brings every last one of our troops home with him. Bring our troops home.
Did you guys see this cartoon