By Ramzy Baroud

The killing of Palestinian activist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 19, 2010 was clearly a well-planned, violent and sadistic act, committed by Israeli assassins in the supposed safety of a sovereign country.

Yes, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was a Palestinian activist. We have no reason to believe otherwise. He spent years of his life in Israeli prison – and one year in an Egyptian jail – for his political activism. This, however, gives no credibility to Israel’s accusation that al-Mabhouh was a killer of Israelis. This assertion becomes even more problematic when considering that al-Mabhouh’s assassination was, according to British media, ordered by accused Israeli war criminals and rightwing politicians.

According to the Sunday Times, Meir Dagan, the current director of Mossad briefed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the assassination plan during a meeting in early January.  "The people of Israel trust you. Good luck," Netanyahu reportedly said at the end of this meeting.

It is disgraceful enough that the assassins used ‘fraudulent’ European passports, as well as credit cards linked to an American bank to carry out their plans. But more upsetting is the fact that this cruel and calculated action has inspired little more than expressions of ‘outrage’. Have we become this resigned to Israeli impunity?

What about the sanctity of life, the sovereignty of nations and the respect for international law? Are these immediately disposable when the victim is Palestinian and the location of the crime an Arab country?

Al-Mabhouh has also been callously deprived of his own relevance to the story. We don’t really know much about the man aside from what Israeli wants us to know – a senior Hamas operative who was responsible for the abduction and killings of two Israeli soldiers; one of the founders of the militant arm of Hamas, Izz al-Din al-Qassam; the middleman between Hamas in Gaza and al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.

Who has weaved this fascinatingly reductionist account of al-Mabhouh’s life in such a short span of time? His family? Hamas? The Palestinian media? No, none of these. The creator of this biography is Israel, the very country that assassinated him. Now that is truly outrageous: the murderer writes and convinces the world of the story of the murder victim. And the media gladly runs with it.

Expectedly, a Palestinian would tell al-Mabhouh’s story in entirely different terms. He was born in Jabalia, one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded refugee camps. These key words alone – Gaza, poor, crowded, refugee - helps to unravel the real story of al-Mabhouh. It is the story shared by so many people who still live a life of utter anguish, poverty and resistance in the Gaza Strip – and elsewhere - which is under inhumane siege and successive wars by the world’s fourth strongest army. The story is not about abducted occupation soldiers, but about millions of refugees, not about Iran, but about Gaza and Palestine, not about luxury hotels, but about horrifyingly desolate refugee camps.

But Palestinians – like many oppressed peoples around the world – have no right to their own narrative. Their story is negligible, if not wholly irrelevant. Israel commits the murder, Israel offers the explanation, and eventually Israel gets away with both the crime and the lie. Al-Mabhouh’s murder might eventually inspire several documentaries that highlight the murderous nature of Palestinian militants, and the unequalled brilliance of Israeli retaliation. Another Steven Spielberg’s Munich might already be in the making. The first scene of this would not be al-Mabhouh’s family forced to flee their village in Palestinian after untold butchery by Zionist militants in 1948. Instead it might show a dark-skinned, menacing Palestinian slaughtering two helpless Israeli soldiers pleading for their lives.

We are, more or less, told to forget about al-Mabhouh. After all, his name is used along with Hamas and Iran in the same sentence. That should be enough to tell us that his life is dispensable - just like the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. Israel may well be preparing for yet another attack on the impoverished Strip. The tunnels that represent the lifeline for the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are being routinely blown up by Israeli warplanes, detonated by dynamites and blocked by an Egyptian steel wall. Gazans cannot be allowed any weapons to defend themselves either. The ‘international community’ has held many meetings to ensure that no weapons find their way to Gaza. The US in particular is utterly firm regarding this issue - although not at all firm about ensuring that food or medicine reach the Strip. Al-Mabhouh may have been killed due to Israel’s belief he was arming the resistance. This partly explains why the ‘international community’ is not at all moved by the murder. Al-Mabhouh might have been involved in breaking the Western consensus on denying Gaza both food and arms.

The EU is only worried about its link to the story, and not the murder itself. An EU statement issued in Brussels on February 22 condemned the “fact that those involved in this action used fraudulent EU member-states passports.” They didn’t name Israel though. As the Financial Times resolved, “criticism of Israel was as strongly worded as the EU could manage, given that Germany, Italy and several other countries place great emphasis on close relations with Israel.”

One can only imagine what would happen if Hamas decides to strike back, expanding the battleground from Gaza to the rest of the world. Would the EU express disapproval of Hamas’ use of fraudulent passport, but then refrain from actually naming the group - due to a fear, say, of upsetting Muslim countries?

No. But when the victim is a Palestinian and the murderers are Israelis – 27 of them so far – it’s an entirely different story, and an entirely different concept of justice.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

By Robin Yassin-Kassab

(An edited version of this review appeared at the Electronic Intifada.)

‘From afar,’ writes Ramzy Baroud (founder of the indispensable Palestine Chronicle), ‘Gaza’s reality, like that of all of Palestine, is often presented without cohesion, without proper context; accounts of real life in Gaza are marred with tired assumptions and misrepresentations that deprive the depicted humans of their names, identities and very dignity.’

Baroud’s “My Father was a Freedom Fighter” is an antidote to the media’s decontextualisation and dehumanisation of Palestinians. It’s also an instant classic, one of the very best books to have examined the Palestinian tragedy.

As the title suggests, Baroud relates the life of his father, Mohammed Baroud. Each step in the story is located in a larger familial, social, economic and political context, one distinguished by eyewitness accounts and made concrete by an almost encyclopedic wealth of detail. But neither the book’s detail nor its deep reflection conflict with its compulsive readability. It’s quite an achievement.

Sub-headings such as ‘The World from the Train’ point to Baroud’s method. Inside – in this case inside a carriage hurtling through Egypt’s Sinai – are Mohammed’s immediate thoughts and feelings. Outside is a historically pinpointed setting which involves Cairo, Jerusalem and Washington as much as Gaza or the Egyptian desert. And the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds is accomplished to an extent that is rare in fiction, let alone in non-fiction. Ramzy Baroud must have observed and understood this interpenetration first hand. Describing the outbreak of the First Intifada, he writes of, “…a culmination of experiences that unites the individual to the collective: their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed.”

Mohammed Baroud was born during British mandatory rule in the village of Beit Daras in south west Palestine. The Mandate was supposed to guard Palestine’s territorial integrity while tutoring the people for independence. Instead Britain promised Palestine to Zionism without proposing – in Balfour’s words – “even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” When the natives rioted, British forces bombarded their homes, detained them en masse, and demolished much of Jaffa’s old city. Britain also organized and armed the joint British-Zionist Special Night Squad as well as the Jewish Settlement Police, which had a base in the settlement of Tabbiya, which neighbored Beit Daras. For Mohammed Baroud’s village – near the airport through which the notorious Czech arms consignment was delivered – had great strategic importance. On May 21st 1948, Zionist forces from Tabbiya (who had been taught to farm by their Palestinian hosts) and elsewhere bombed women and children fleeing the besieged village, killing 265. But Beit Daras held out until July, when its remaining inhabitants fled to Gaza and Hebron, clutching property deeds, keys, and clothfuls of earth.

Baroud’s account of the Nakba is brilliant and painful. He describes the chaos on the strafed and shelled roads, “some people carrying on with a great sense of urgency, others wandering aimlessly, in a daze,” bloated or blown-up corpses littering the way, and shoeless feet bleeding, mothers screaming for lost children.

In what would become the Gaza Strip’s Nuseirat camp, the Quakers provided bread and water. Later UNRWA brought tents. Later still the refugees built mud and straw shelters. Mohammed, overshadowed at home by his elder brother and uncomfortable in the poverty-stricken and claustrophobic conditions of the camp, now jumps a train to Egypt. In the first of a series of attempts to find strength and fortune outside, he spends a year teaching the Qur’an to Beduin children.

Back in Gaza he joins the Egyptian army, writes to and receives a reply from the idolized President Nasser, perches in a tree to read Russian novels, and falls in love with Zarefah, an illiterate refugee who’s worked in a textile factory from the age of eight. It takes Mohammed some years as an ointment seller and quack healer in Mecca to earn the dowry.

He survives Israel’s massacre of 1200 Gazans during the Suez war. He survives the 1967 war, in which discarded Soviet rifles confronted “American hawk missiles, West German Patton battle tanks and French Mirage fighter jets.” He survives Ariel ‘the bulldozer’ Sharon’s ‘pacification’ of Gaza by ‘shock therapy’, which executed and deported young men and destroyed 2000 houses in August 1970 alone. Mohammed joins the Palestine Liberation Army, because after two decades in camps the refugees have come to believe in independent, armed action. In 1978 he joins the National Leadership Committee to call for civil disobedience, and he and Zarefah supply hunted fighters with cigarettes, food and blankets.

His life is unrelentingly harsh. Pregnant Zarefah must live on weak tea and garlic soup. Their first son dies of a high fever, of poverty really. Later Mohammed sells carpets in Ramallah and buys scrap metal in Israel, but the siege imposed during the First Intifada, as well as Mohammed’s unusual decision to send his daughter to study in Syria, plunge the family back into penury. Zarefah dies aged 42.

Ramzy is first named George, in honor of PFLP-founder George Habash, and also as a statement against Muslim-Christian division. In his boyhood our author collects used bullet cartridges and tear gas canisters, all marked ‘USA’. He experiences the thirsty boredom of curfews and runs with the boys who fire marbles by slingshot at helicopter gunships. One day he and his brothers are lined up, as were so many, to have their limbs broken. The Israelis get as far as asking, “which hand do you write with?” before they are seen off by the screaming, fighting women of Nuseirat.

Then comes Oslo, “the best-timed disaster that had ever befallen Gaza.” Rabin and Peres share the Nobel peace prize with Arafat. The PLO dies so the elitist, collaborationist Palestinian Authority can be born. PA police forces persecute the resistance and fire on unarmed anti-Oslo demonstrators. Mohammed, now separated from his children by checkpoints and oceans, digests news of “a Palestinian massacre committed by Palestinian police,” and understands that he will die a refugee. He “both feared death and wished for it often, contradictions that were not unique to him, but shared by most Gazans.”

Mohammed is proud of the partial victory that removes Israeli colonies from the Gaza Strip, and despite his “fragile religious beliefs,” he votes enthusiastically (in January 2006) for Hamas and its “culture of resistance.” When the Hamas government clamps down on an attempted Fatah coup, the siege of Gaza is made absolute. Aged 70 and dangerously asthmatic, Mohammed has no power for his oxygen pump, no clean drinking water, and no medicine. Israel refuses him permission to visit the West Bank for medical care and to see his sons.

Mohammed’s death, though related without any sentimentality, made me weep. The good news is that, even separated from his family, he didn’t die alone. Thousands of people attended his funeral, “oppressed people, who shared his plight, hopes and struggles.” This solidarity echoes that of Beit Daras during the series of assaults in 1948, when the village “lived its most communal time. Men shared all, and women cooked for all.” The hero of the book, before Mohammed, is the Palestinian people.

“My Father was a Freedom Fighter” is an invaluable social history of this people. It charts the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on Gaza from the 1930s, the ferment of new ideologies in the 60s, the rise of a class society and also of Palestinian-led nationalism, and then the reawakening of the Islamic movement in the 70s with its planned evolution to armed struggle in the 80s. The book examines the continual struggle between Palestinian masses and co-opted elites as well as between Palestinians and Israel. It recounts endlessly repeated assassinations, demolitions, expulsions and massacres, but the overall picture is one of a people growing stronger, or at least less fearful, because Mohammed Baroud’s was the generation which moved from being intimidated and idealistic to being clear-sighted and self-assured.

By putting his father at the centre of his narrative Ramzy Baroud takes us a step into novel territory. The reader can not only understand Mohammed’s position cerebrally, but can fully identify with the resistance choices (sometimes inevitabilities rather than choices) which Mohammed makes. This is because the character, though attractive, is an unidealized and entirely solid human being. For instance, Baroud doesn’t shy away from showing Mohammed’s violence unleashed against Zarefah during a Camp David-induced depression. The same Mohammed refuses to move from his damaged and dangerous Nuseirat home because from its window he can see his beautiful wife’s grave.

Mohammed, like his people, is both flawed and heroic. Both Mohammed and his people know this: “The simple refusal to surrender (is) the most poignant form of resistance of all.”

(My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story is available at Amazon, Amazon UK, Pluto Press. Click here to learn more. Watch short video in English and Arabic.)

- Robin Yassin-Kassab has been a journalist in Pakistan and an English teacher around the Arab world. His first novel, The Road from Damascus, is published by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin. He blogs on politics, culture, religion and books at qunfuz.com.

The great pianist and songwriter Billy Preston once sang, “nothing from nothing leaves nothing.” Although as 15 to 16 months, I’ve seen the promise of health care reform start with single-payer then morph into some sort of public option which, if it is robust should be able to contain health-care costs. This is kind of what they House passed. The Senate, on the other hand, is one confusing mess. Senator Max Baucus was given the keys to the city. I’m not sure what he came up with. As chairman of the finance committee, he was in charge of coming up with a health care bill that was attractive to at least a couple of Republicans. Olympia Snowe and others were courted with sweeteners which seem to eat away at the core of health care reform. Senator Kent Conrad decided that he would introduce his own health-care legislation which was some sort of co-op. Although he sold this idea on the Sunday talk shows and pushed it hard for 6-8 weeks, thankfully (hopefully), it is died a quick death.

The public option is been tossed around like a medicine ball. In Junior high school we were asked to throw a medicine ball in order to build up muscle strength and coordination. Every other throw, the ball was dropped, kicked and then picked up and thrown again. This is exactly what has happened with the public option. What was once a robust counterweight to private health insurance has turned into something that states can opt in or opt out depending upon the whims of their legislature. Oh, and it seems that opposing healthcare is a great way to get on TV and increase your image/status like Bart Stupak.

I have stated both on my radio show and on this blog that health-care reform must include something that is cost-effective, portable and increases access to healthcare. Currently, we are looking at a health-care bill that seems to do none of this. Many progressives have decided that they cannot support this bill. They want something else done. I understand the sentiment. I find this whole process extremely frustrating. Democrats seem to be completely unable to stick to their principles and stand up for the middle class. It seems like the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats know what is right but can’t do it. Republicans have no idea what is right and won’t do it. BTW, President Barack Obama is leader come lately. Look I love this man but I’m telling the truth. Where was he in the middle of the heat of the summer when healthcare was taking the big hits? He needed to be out of front stating that we HAD to have a robust public option but alias, he wasn’t out there.

Here’s my problem. Washington seems to be controlled by big business. Lobbyists from K St. seem to surround the Capital like locusts. If we scrapped the health-care bill and start all over, how are we going to come up with a different outcome? We’re going to have the same politicians, the same White House and the same lobbyists. As a matter of fact, the lobbyists will be better armed to combat arguments they’ve already heard. They will probably be armed with more money. I’m afraid that starting over will leave us with a bill that’s even worse than what we’re looking at now — if that is possible.

We’re spending $2.4 trillion on health care every year (we spent that much in 2008). Isn’t that enough money? Why do we need to pay any more? Everyone agrees that insurance does not add any value to healthcare. Why is Washington cobbling the insurance companies? Their whole reason for their existence is not to improve health care or help doctors deliver better care or help increase access to doctors by patients. Instead, their whole deal is to simply make money. They make money by not paying claims.

$2.4 trillion is enough money to take care of all 300 million Americans. Combine Medicare and Medicaid and SCHiP and all of the state run programs into one program. Medicare for All! The government will set up a system to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and medical device/product manufacturers. Premiums are paid out of our taxes in a graduated fashion. The more you make, the more you pay. Let’s extend patent protection for pharmaceutical companies by 2-5 years. Since the government is negotiating drug prices, pharmaceutical companies can recoup some of their losses through this mechanism. Doctors will be awarded for opening early and staying open late and on the weekends. This way, Americans can go to their physicians without having to take off from work. This increases access. Anyway, Medicare for All, at least for now, is a pipe dream. Right now, I’m good to try to work with my congressional representatives to try to get the best bill possible.

Billy Preston was right. Nothing from Nothing leaves nothing. The Senate is trying to sell us nothing and tell us it is something. They need to do better.

The Census is a popular topic of right-wing conspiracy theories and Fox News host Glenn Beck spent a good portion of his radio show today fear-mongering about it. Going through the form, he determined that the government doesn’t have the right to ask any of the questions — except for the first one inquiring about many people live in your home.

He took particular issue with a question asking for the respondent’s race. But after Beck’s co-host pointed out that the question has been part of the Census since the Founding Fathers’ time, Beck twisted the three-fifths law to claim that the Census is now breeding slavery:

BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?

CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.

BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.

Listen here:

Beck seems to be arguing that because a handful of federal programs provide funding to help minority communities, minorities are “worth more” than white people. Of course, the Census actually counts everyone equally, as the Constitution requires, so Beck’s complaints seem aimed more at civil rights programs than at the Census.

Moreover, there is a big “difference” between a law that counted people as less than human and a question that helps minority communities get needed aid. The Census’ race question is “critical” to enforcing civil rights policies and is used to “promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks.” So by urging his listeners to not complete this question, he’s potentially damaging these important efforts.

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, the three-fifths law was not an abolitionist provision designed to “slow the South down on slavery,” as Beck claims. Many of the Founders were from the South and owned slaves, and there were other pro-slavery clasuses in the Constitution that Beck’s revisionist history can’t explain.

So does Beck think the Census has a “deep seated hatred of white people or white culture”?

By Sukant Chandan

(Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled and Palestinian Gaza resident and revolutionary Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010)

The Palestinian people’s oppression continues primarily due to the financial, diplomatic and military support that the Zionist state receives from the USA, and secondly the acquiescence of pro-Western states in the region. After the fall of the Zionists state’s long lost brother – the Apartheid state of South Africa – the Palestinian struggle remains perhaps the leading and most potent anti-imperialist struggle in the world. Unsurprisingly therefore Palestinian women are a central example of what role women can play in the struggle to free themselves, their families, communities and their nation against imperialism and Zionism.

Leila Khaled brought the Palestinian struggle to the world’s attention by means of two dramatic plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970 in which no-one but one of her own comrades was killed, the person killed was American-Nicaraguan Patrick Arguello.Kahled retells her account of this hijacking in her autobiography ‘My People Shall Live’ (1973) in which she writes: “Patrick Arguello, age twenty-seven, father of three children, a Nicaraguan citizen of the world, born in. San Francisco, USA, was pronounced dead. What had prompted someone half-way across the world from Palestine to undertake this dangerous mission? Patrick was a revolutionary Communist. His gallant action was a gesture of international solidarity. A flame of life was extinguished; it lit the world for a moment; it blazed a trail on the road back to Palestine. Arguello lives, so do my people, so does the revolution!”

Khaled remains one of the most inspirational and influential leftist anti-imperialist women in the post-Second World War period. Leila Khaled remains active today in the leadership of the Palestinian revolution, as she is one of the central committee members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as well as a representative of the Palestinian National Council.

The rise of the Islamists Hamas in the Palestinian revolution since the mid 1990s has meant that many people associate the Palestinian struggle with the Islamism of Hamas rather than that of Leila Khaled and other Palestinian and Arab revolutionaries such as the Lebanese communist resistance fighter Souha Bechara. But the recent 42nd anniversary rally of the PFLP in Gaza that attracted some 70,000 people raised the profile of the Palestinian revolutionary left and also of the role of women when one young woman called Shireen Said of the PFLP stood on stage giving a salute in military fatigues and was co-chair of the rally alongside her male comrade and co-chair of the PFLP rally. In an interview with the writer Said explained a little about her background, stating that she was born in 1985 Jabalya refugee camp, from which the ‘children of the stones’ started the first Intifada, “my childhood memories are mostly of the first Intifada” she explains. In her early teens she became involved in one of the student movements associated with the PFLP.

Said explains further about herself, “I studied my Bachelor in Sport at Al-Aqsa University. I worked at Progressive Student Labour Front with lots of comrades until I got the position of secretary at the students union. I was the first young woman in Gaza to get this position via democratic elections at the university. After my graduation I worked in the committees of the Union of Palestinian Women which is part of a progressive feminist struggle for women’s liberation and to bring them together and on an equal footing with men in all fields of national and democratic reform. Along with my professional work in many non-governmental organizations as an activist in youth issues, I am now a board member of the Palestinian Progressive Youth Union and I study my Masters in Education at Al-Azhar University.”
 
Like many young women around the world, Shireen Said was inspired by the example of Leila Khaled: “Ofcourse comrade Leila Khaled as a national and international struggler inspires all women who seek freedom, social justice and an independent prosperous homeland for themselves and for the coming generations.”

When asked to react to what Said said about her, Khaled explained to the writer: “I am proud if anyone sees me as a symbol of resistance; it gives me more strength for the struggle. To see a woman anywhere struggling for a just cause gives me hope and courage for my people. Women give their life for the struggle in Palestine and elsewhere.”

Leila Khaled is a symbol for many Palestinian young women including Said of commitment and sacrifice to their peoples struggle: “My story with comrade Leila started in kindergarten when we learnt the national songs about the Intifada, martyrs and our heroes like Leila, Ghassan Kanfani and Wadi Haddad. As I was growing up my interest and love towards Leila grew inside me, I wanted to know everything about her. Although I had not had the chance to meet her she inspired me and I felt proud of her. As a woman she argued that no-one could prevent her from participating with men in the hardest parts of the struggle, so comrade Leila is an example for me and for many women.”

In the historical moment in which the Palestinians are living today many of the Palestinian revolutionary left’s principles and morals are seen by many in this traditional largely Muslim and Arab society as being alien or an unnecessary importation of Western ideals and standards, therefore Said’s participation in the PFLP rally was no easy choice: “Due to our conservative and traditional society I was afraid to face such a big audience but also because it is the first time a young Palestinian woman wears military fatigues at such a rally, but nevertheless I insisted to go through with the experience.”

Said explained how her decision was largely defined by the defiance and steadfastness of the masses in Gaza during the barbaric Zionist onslaught early last year: “The Zionists massacres of in Gaza in January 2009 were still memories raw in the hearts and minds of the people, so I wanted to present a message that despite all the killing, destruction and terror of the Zionist war we will assert that our men and women will stand side-by-side in the resistance which is our path to liberation and freedom. At the rally itself I was pleased that my personality could convey these messages to millions through television and the internet across the world. My family were also very proud of me.”

Khaled emphasised the importance of defending the hundreds of Palestinian women prisoners: “I especially think of the women in Israeli jails, the women there are evidence to the torture and oppression of the occupation, and also at the same time are examples of courage and strength.”

When asked what her message would be to women across the world on International Women’s Day, Said answered: “Firstly I would like to send greetings to all women who hold the banner of struggle against capitalism and imperialism and to say to them that our path is very long and hard and necessitates well thought out strategies. We shouldn’t forget that the capitalist system oppresses and exploits women and takes away their human dignity. Therefore we must adhere to our values of humanity and progressive politics as well as remaining united and strong in the revolutionary left as the best means to achieve our ends. This is the only path to attain freedom, equality and social justice for us, our families and our children.”

Finally, Khaled’s message focused her message on the women of Palestine, particularly those in the West Bank and Gaza in their role in unifying the factions, especially Hamas and Fatah, a process of reconciliation and unity in which the PFLP has been playing a central role: “In this political moment the most important issue is that of unifying our people to face the terrors of the occupation, and the main basis of unity must be fighting the occupation. Fighting the occupation demands that Palestinian factions are united. It is important to understand the role of the Palestinian masses in achieving this unity by putting pressure through democratic and civil means on the Palestinian factions focusing on Hamas and Fatah. Palestinian women are adversely affected by these divisions as many of their families are divided, which is why I am adamant that Palestinian women recognise the importance of the unity in the Palestinian struggle and their role in achieving this unity.”

- Sukant Chandan is a London-based political analyst and filmmaker and runs the Sons of Malcolm blog. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: sukant.chandan@gmail.com.

On February 25, 2010, the intrepid researchers at Jurist noted in Documents reveal CIA briefed lawmakers on enhanced interrogation techniques that 68 members of Congress in the period from 2001 to 2007 were briefed on the specifics of enhanced interrogation techniques. Some who have read my earlier piece about my exchange with Rep. Jane Harman at Duke in April 2005 (Congress, Torture and Romain Gary’s ‘Chien Blanc” December 10, 2007) will remember that in April 2005 in a public forum she left the distinct impression that she had not been briefed (read about it in the newspapers). We now have the beginning of the list and one can see that prior to April 2005 she had been briefed as had many many other members of the Legislative Branch in our separation of powers of the federal government.

But let us not focus on one member, let’s think of all 68. We are learning interesting things in the documents revealed. At page 32 of the documents one sees a nifty little quote from a Memorandum for the Record of Stan Moskowitz of the Directorate of Counter Intelligence/Office of Congressional Affairs of a Member Briefing of July 13, 2004 (Harman was there) in which then CIA General Counsel, Scott Muller – lays out the legal analysis in a no longer Top Secret document:

“The GC (note: CIA General Counsel Scott Muller) laid out the legal analysis. The Attorney General (note: John Ashcroft) has consistently advised the NSC Principals (note: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Powell, Rice and Ashcroft – Bush of course is on record as approving: see – “Bush Aware of Advisors Interrogation Talks,” April 11, 2008) that the CIA techniques did not violate US statutes, met all obligations under the treaties, including Article 16 of the Torture Convention, and would not violate U.S. constitution standards were those standards to apply to aliens overseas. But the AG’s willingness to stand behind these prior statement changed after DoJ’s (note: Yoo/Bybee memo of August 1, 2002 it appears) the (sic) lengthy unclassified legal memo on interrogations leaked and after the Abu Gurayrabib scandal. CIA is now seeking to have DOJ reaffirm its prior written opinion that CIA’s techniques do not violate the torture statute, and to issue a new written opinion on Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture and U.S. constitutional standards. At the same time, CIA is seeking renewed policy approval from the NSC Principals to continue using the enhanced interrogation techniques.” (Emphasis added).

What a nifty memo – torture memo has leaked and Abu Ghraib has broken as a story and the CIA, the NSC Principals, and the AG are all in what is called in government parlance “CYA mode” but – do not worry – no “pressure” here. Or maybe they were just “freaking out” as we learned about our government leaders in the Yoo/Bybee Report released February 19, 2010. We can now understand why Dan Levin in his December 2005 memo to replace the Yoo/Bybee 2002 memo was “contexted” by then Alberto Gonzales to add a footnote that assured that anything in the new memo did not change the views on the advice in earlier memos on the techniques.

In working through the memos one comes across another gem, in a memo of Stephen Bradbury on the “black sites.” First, the parsing is to distinguish “conditions of confinement” (how one keeps a detainee) with “enhanced interrogation techniques” (how one interrogates a detainee). Of course, the two things work together in tandem to amount to treatment and punishment – but the memo parses this way with a predictable result. The memo focuses on post Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 conditions of confinement at the black sites and, of course, says everything is fine (A french policeman would say, “Circulez! Il n’y a rien a voir! Keep moving – nothing to look act). Applying a 5th Amendment balancing test standard based on Supreme Court pre-trial detention cases he finds nothing wrong.

There is a wonderful discussion of “white noise” with a quote that levels of white noise in the hallways are in the 68-72 decibel range and in the 56-58 decibel range in the detainee’s cells. It notes that the white noise is kept under 79 decibels. It says, “Indeed, normal conversation typically registers at approximately 60 decibels.” And, of course, there are the CIA assurances that the noise has had no effect on the detainees ability to sleep (any one note anything over the years on the use of sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique?).

Over at the American Tinnitus Association website there are a series of examples of what different decibel levels are. Note the 55-80 decibel range on the scale and think of trying to sleep with a sewing machine running next to you (60 decibels), a washing machine running (rinse cycle, anyone? 70 decibels), or an alarm clock (two feet away) 80 decibels.

Of course this is only one of several techniques that are put under the rubric of conditions of confinement (blocking detainees vision, shaving of head and facial hair, solitary confinement, white noise in the walkways, 24 hour cell illumination, shackling for hours related to dangerousness). None of these are enhanced interrogation techniques (that’s another memo), but merely conditions of confinement. If you were in that cell, would you make that distinction? But you can trust the DOJ lawyer working with the CIA lawyer to slice the apple that way.

And former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s letter of January 19, 2009 to the OPR objecting to their report pushes hard for us to evaluate these memos in their “context”.

On context, one other nifty gem in this set of documents is at page 73 in an April 12, 2007 Classified Statement for the Record to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by then General Michael V. Hayden, Director, Central Intelligence Agency where it is stated that:

“At the entrance to an office in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is a sign and a reminder: “Today’s date is September 12th, 2001.” We make no apologies for this attitude or for the lawful and legitimate actions we have taken to counter al-Qaida.”

I remember September 12, 2001 and the pressure in that environment. The OPR report tells us that DOJ lawyers were freaking out. And we see above that once the August 2002 memos and Abu Ghraib get out people go into CYA mode. At the same time, the memo writers all assure us that they were not pressured to come to a specific result. Guess it comes down to whether you define “pressure” as “context.”

Where were the cool heads in Congressional oversight or in these various Executive meetings who spoke with the virulent skepticism of an Alberto Mora or a William Taft IV of the risk of crimes of state? Were all these people to whom we give the public trust “freaking out?”

Might I suggest that the CIA put “Today’s date is September 10, 2001.” on its Counterterrorism center door as opposed to September 12, 2001. That is before the horrible attack has happened and the period in which connecting the dots was far more important in averting such a disaster. That period of uncertainty about the next attack is where we are at and is where we stand now. And, we ask them not to apologize for lawful and legitimate actions. We ask that they be prosecuted for the unlawful and illegitimate actions – crimes of state – including the lawyers. Maybe some meaningful Congressional oversight can also be part of that process – oversight that is not freaking out but takes a view that is consistent with the values America espouses to itself and the world.

The Oklahoma legislature is currently locked in a dispute over whether to tackle the state’s divorce rate, the third-highest in the nation. Although some Republicans are pushing the legislation, other conservatives are outraged at the “government intrusion” into their private lives:

Republican members proposed three pieces of legislation imposing new regulations on marriage and divorce in Oklahoma. Two of the measures were defeated, but another — requiring counseling for those planning to wed, and therapy sessions for couples considering divorce — is awaiting action.

The issue has produced sharp clashes among conservative colleagues who normally find themselves in agreement. The debates have featured charges of hypocrisy and of betraying Republican principles against government intrusion into private lives. [...]

“How far do I want government to come into my home and your home about private personal matters?” asked Rep. Leslie Osborn, a Republican from Tuttle, in a debate. She referred to state government as a “huge monster.”

ThinkProgress spoke with state Rep. Jeannie McDaniel (D), who opposes the divorce bills because one hour of counseling — as proposed by one of the measures — won’t make a major difference in people’s marriages:

We know that one hour of counseling doesn’t do anything. We have counseling programs, especially in Family and Children Services…for families that are going through divorce who have children…and those have proven to be very effective. And they’re paid for by our Department of Human Services; they have grants available. They’ve been in place for over 14 years. They have a very high success rate of good outcomes. … They [participants in the programs] sort of laughed at this and said, “One hour, you’ve got to be kidding?” And it can be by anybody — it can be by your priest, it can be by a faith-based counselor.

McDaniel noted that some of the strongest debates on the divorce measures are coming from within the Republican Party, many of whom are against the government intervention. However, some of their concern rings a bit hollow; some of these same lawmakers — including Osborn — have had no problem imposing “government intrusion” into women’s “private lives.” Last fall, the Oklahoma passed a law that would have collected personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and posted them on a public website. (The Oklahoma County District Court struck down the law last month because it covered too many topics for one piece of legislation.)

McDaniel noted that Republican lawmakers are now putting forth several anti-choice measures once again, as single bills. Just last week, for example, the state House passed a measure “that would require a woman be given a description of ultrasound images of her unborn child and be offered those images before getting an abortion.” Rep. Dan Sullivan (R), the sponsor of the abortion website legislation, opposed the divorce counseling bill in a Feb. 22 vote.

Oklahoma also bans same-sex couples from marrying — a clear “government intrusion” into private life that many Republican lawmakers seem to find perfectly acceptable.

Tony Perkins, president of the far-right Family Research Council, said that he endorses efforts to lower the divorce rate, as long as the government does not “mandate” them. “I prefer the carrot versus the stick,” said Perkins, who opposes marriage equality.

By M. Shahid Alam

More than eight years after dismantling the Taliban, the United States is still mired in Afghanistan. Indeed, last October it launched a much-hyped ‘surge’ to prevent a second Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, not imminent yet, but eminently possible.

The first dismantling of the Taliban was a cakewalk.

In 2001, the United States quickly and decisively defeated the Taliban, killed, captured or scattered their fighters, and handed over the running of Afghanistan to their rivals, mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks from the Northern Alliance.

Unaware of Pashtoon history, American commentators were pleased at the smashing victory of their military, convinced that they had consigned the Taliban to history’s graveyard.

Instead, the Taliban came back from the dead. Within months of their near-total destruction, they had regained morale, regrouped, organized, trained, and returned to fight what they saw as a foreign occupation of their country. Slowly, tenaciously they continued to build on their gains, and by 2008 they were dreaming of taking back the country they had lost in 2001.

Could this really happen? That only time will tell, but prospects for the Taliban today look better than at any time since November 2001.

In 2001, the United States had captured Afghanistan with the loss of only twelve of its own troops. Last year it lost 316 soldiers, and the British lost another 108. The numbers speak for themselves.

The United States had occupied Afghanistan with 9000 troops. When Obama took office in January 2009, these numbers had climbed to 30,000. In October, US troop strength in Afghanistan had more than doubled. This does not include tens of thousands of foreign contractors and some 200,000 Afghan troops armed and trained by the Americans.

Yet, NATO could not deter the Taliban advance.

That is when President Obama ordered a troop surge. US troop strength will soon reach 100,000. At the same time, the United States is inviting Taliban fighters to defect in return for bribes. In tandem, President Karzai – for the umpteenth time – is offering amnesty to defecting Taliban fighters. So far, there have been no high-ranking defections.

Can the United States defeat these men - returned from the dead - it calls terrorists? It is a vital question. It should be, since the United States claims that if the Taliban come back, Afghanistan will again become a haven for Al-Qaida, their training ground and launching pad for future attacks against Western targets.

How did the Taliban stage this comeback?

Simply, the answer is: by finding strength in their handicaps. If you had compared the defeated Taliban in December 2001 to the Mujahidin in 1980, you would conclude that history had closed its books on them irrevocably.

The Mujahedeen brought several advantages to their fight. All Afghan ethnicities opposed the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. They had financial, military and political support from all the Western powers. President Reagan honored them as freedom-fighters. They also had support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign fighters would join the Afghan mujahidin.

In comparison, Taliban prospects looked quite dismal after their rout in November 2001. Nearly all the factors that favored the Mujahidin worked against the Taliban. Taliban support was confined mostly to one Afghan ethnicity, the Pashtoons. In the United States and its European allies, they faced a more formidable opponent than the Mujahidin did in the Soviet Union.

There was not a single Muslim country that could support the return of the Taliban: the US forbad it. Worst of all, the Pakistani military, partly for lucre and partly under US pressure, threw its forces against the Taliban. Under the circumstances, few Muslim fighters from outside Pakistan have joined the Taliban.

Their goose was cooked: or so it seemed.

Nevertheless, the Taliban defied these odds, and now, some eight years later, they have taken positions in nearly every Afghan province, with shadow governments in most of them. Is it possible to reverse the gains that Taliban have made in the face of nearly impossible odds?

What can the US do to weaken the Taliban? They have few vulnerabilities because the United States has been so effective in denying them any help from external sources. They have built their gains almost exclusively on their own strengths: and these are harder to take away.

What then are some of these strengths? Unlike the Mujahidin, the Afghan resistance against the United States is less fractious. The Taliban make up the bulk of the resistance. Other groups – led by Haqqani and Hekmatyaar – are much smaller. The Afghan resistance has a central leadership that the Mujahidin never had.

Unlike the Mujahidin, the Taliban do not have the technology to knock out the helicopters, drones or jets that attack them from the air. On the ground, however, they have technology the Mujahidin did not have. They have acquired suicide vests and, more importantly, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) developed by the resistance in Iraq. Indeed, the Taliban claim to have improved upon the IEDs they acquired from Iraq.

Notwithstanding their apparent lack of sophistication, the Taliban leadership have proved to be savvy in their use of videos, CDs, FM radio stations, and the internet to publicize their gains, build morale, and mobilize recruits.

Despite the satellites, drones, spies on the ground, and prize money for their capture, much of the Taliban leadership has evaded capture. In particular, Mulla Omar remains a ghost. He has not been seen or interviewed since 2001. Yet he remains in touch with his commanders through human couriers.

Afghanistan’s corrupt government is another Taliban asset. They have spawned a tiny class of Afghan nouveau riche battened by drug money, government contracts and cronyism. President Karzai implicates the US occupation in the blatant corruption of his own government.

It appears that there is little that the United States can do to neutralize these elusive advantages. Instead, it tries to blame and shift the burden of the war on Pakistan. It continues to pressure and bribe Pakistan’s rulers to mount full-scale military operations against the Taliban support network in Pakistan.

More and more, Pakistan’s military leaders have been caving under these pressures, escalating their wars against their own population. This has provoked a backlash. A new faction of the Taliban has emerged to launch deadly attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan. These attacks are destabilizing Pakistan. In turn, the US uses these attacks to push Pakistani rulers into greater capitulation to its demands.

In addition, President Obama has dramatically escalated drone attacks against the Taliban support network in Pakistan. In tandem, Pakistan too has been launching more massive air and ground attacks against their hideouts. However, none of this has deterred the escalating Taliban attacks against NATO and Afghan forces.

No one suggests that the Taliban can match the credentials of America’s freedom fighters in the late eighteenth century. The latter were committed to the proposition that all men are created equal, barring a few rarely mentioned exceptions. The Taliban are zealots and misogynists, but only a tad more so than the Mujahidin whom the West embraced as freedom fighters.

The West celebrated the Mujahidin’s victory over the Soviets. The same people, fighting under a different name, have now pushed the United States into a costly stalemate. Will the US prolong this stalemate, and push Pakistan too over the brink? Or will it accept the fait accompli the Taliban have created for them, accept its losses, and save itself from greater embarrassment in the future?

Once or twice, the United States has retreated from unwinnable wars and survived. It is likely that the ‘surge’ is primarily a political move to try to pass off the retreat from Afghanistan as another ‘mission accomplished.’ Let’s hope that this stratagem works somehow, because the alternative is likely to be much worse for all parties involved in this unwinnable war.

- M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston. He is author of Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave: 2009). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

With President Obama endorsing the use of the budget reconciliation process in the Senate to finish health care reform, Republicans have flown into overdrive to discredit the simple majority procedural tool. Use of reconciliation would be “ripping a piece of the fabric of America off,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) on Saturday.

On CBS News’ Face The Nation today, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) declared that use of reconciliation “would be catastrophic.” Sensitive to charges of hypocrisy over the fact that Republicans have pushed legislation through the reconciliation process more often than Democrats have, Graham claimed that every time the GOP used reconciliation the bills “received bipartisan support”:

GRAHAM: Well, reconciliation will be used to clean up the Senate bill to make House members happy. House members are going to vote for the Senate bill and they hate it. And the Senate and the president saying, OK, we’re going to change what you don’t like.

And when it comes to the Republicans, you all don’t matter anymore. You just need a simple majority. So reconciliation will empower a bill that was very partisan. We’ve had reconciliation votes, but all of them had received bipartisan support. The least was 12 when we did reconciliation with tax cuts.

Watch it:

Graham’s claim that “the least” amount of Democratic votes a GOP reconciliation bill received “was 12″ is flat out false. As The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has detailed, during the Bush presidency, the Republican-controlled Senate passed three reconciliation bills with three or less Democratic votes. The 2003 Bush tax cuts were supported by only two Democrats and needed Vice President Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote to pass:

In 2005, Graham voted for two of the reconciliation bills that passed with three or fewer Democratic votes, the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 and the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

Transcript:

BAYH: But I do think that — a couple of things. And Lindsey will probably have a difference of opinion on this one. The bill that’s going to come before the Senate is not the large omnibus health care bill. It is instead a corrections bill that gets out the Cornhusker Kickback nobody liked, the special arrangement for Florida that many states objected. It treats middle class families a little bit better on the tax side of things. So it is a — it’s not one-sixth of the American economy. It’s a much smaller piece of legislation.

And secondly, my guess is that, you know, a lot of your viewers and Americans are looking at this, thinking, I don’t understand all of this procedural stuff. Let’s focus on the substance. And if you think that it’s actually going to be better for the American people, vote for it. And if you think it’s going to be harmful, don’t vote for it.

And for me, it was a close call in my mind on this bill. This is not the way I would have written it. But for me it eventually came down, we need to try something. It may not be perfect, but we need to try something. If it doesn’t work exactly the way we would hope, let’s come back and correct it.

But to just sit here year after year letting things fester, that’s not the right way to go.

GRAHAM: Well, reconciliation will be used to clean up the Senate bill to make House members happy. House members are going to vote for the Senate bill and they hate it. And the Senate and the president saying, OK, we’re going to change what you don’t like.

And when it comes to the Republicans, you all don’t matter anymore. You just need a simple majority. So reconciliation will empower a bill that was very partisan. We’ve had reconciliation votes, but all of them had received bipartisan support. The least was 12 when we did reconciliation with tax cuts.

So it is taking a partisan product and making it law. And I was in the Gang of 14. Remember the nuclear option with judges when we almost changed the rules? I was one of seven Democrats — seven Republicans, seven Democrats who said, don’t do that. Don’t pull the nuclear trigger. I’m glad I was in that gang. I got the heck beat out of me. We didn’t change the rules. This will be the same effect as if you had changed the rules for judges. It would be catastrophic.

It can be argued that when Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol accused nine lawyers in Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” working in the “Department of Jihad,” they were simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that would get them on a talk show. This is, after all, America. The right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution.

You would think, however, that when Cheney and Kristol launched their execrable “Keep America Safe” Web ad, they would have been very, very careful with their words. In the ad they accuse seven Justice Department lawyers and two colleagues—all of whom had represented Guantanamo detainees—of being members of the Department of Jihad. A screen shot of Osama Bin Laden and a creepy voice-over asks of these attorneys, “Whose values do they share?” Thanks to people like Kristol and Cheney, people take accusations of this sort very seriously. The Justice Department reports being swamped with panicked phone calls since the ad started running this week. In 2010, calling someone a Bin Laden-loving jihadist isn’t just meaningless partisan hackery.

Ten years ago, these were just words. Ten years ago, someone accused of being a terrorist had recourse to the same panoply of rights as everyone else. Ten years ago, an accused terrorist still had the right to a trial, for instance. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and her dad, the Sixth Amendment right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” is gone, once you’ve been branded a terrorist. Just ask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After 9/11, once you’re branded an enemy combatant, you can be held for years without any of your constitutionally protected rights, including the right to be told of the charges against you or to confront the witnesses against you. Thanks to people like Cheney, those alleged to be members of al-Qaida are stripped of their Sixth Amendment right to prove they are not.

But that’s not all. Ten years ago, if you labeled someone a terrorist, he had an Eighth Amendment right to be free from torture, since the very idea of “cruel and unusual punishment” was anathema, even for our enemies. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and the brave souls at the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, it’s OK to torture terrorists these days. As long as you’re pretty sure they’re terrorists. This is good news for the Cheney way of thinking, because it means that you can abuse a possible terrorist into admitting that he actually is a terrorist without all that fact-finding necessitated by a criminal trial.

But there’s even more. Ten years ago, if some paranoid hysteric accused you of being an al-Qaida sympathizer or a jihadist, you could find a lawyer to help you make the case that you were not. But in the ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights being waged by Liz Cheney, once you’re designated a terrorist, you lose your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Because just by representing you—even if you’re acquitted—your lawyers become terrorists, too!

Given that the Bill of Rights pretty much evaporates once you’ve been deemed a jihadi lover of Bin Laden, you might think Liz Cheney would be super-careful tossing around such words They have very serious legal implications. Not to mention that some of her dad’s favorite people, from Alberto Gonzales to Ted Olson, scolded the then-top Pentagon official for detainees, Charles “Cully” Stimson, for suggesting on a talk radio show in 2007 that American corporations should boycott law firms that provided pro bono assistance to detainees. Stimson was forced to apologize and resign for his comments. Lucky for Cheney, she doesn’t work for the Pentagon, so she doesn’t have to resign. She merely has to be ridiculed by Bill O’Reilly.

Liz Cheney isn’t careful about the words she throws around. She uses terrorist and killer the way normal people use words like salt and pepper. To her, they are just words. That’s probably the scariest part of all.

When the “al-Qaida Seven” and their two DoJ colleagues fought to defend alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, they weren’t fighting to protect jihadist murderers. They were defending the U.S. Constitution—the great whomping chunks of the Bill of Rights that Cheney and her friends are so eager to write out of existence. They did it because that’s what lawyers are ethically obligated to do. They did it because—as Spencer Ackerman points out—the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expressly provided that detainees get defense lawyers. And they did it, as Jay Bookman notes, for the same reason John Adams agreed to represent British soldiers charged with killing civilians during the Boston Massacre in 1770. Because long before Liz Cheney was born and long after she’s gone, the Bill of Rights requires serious people to take it seriously.

I should probably disclose at this juncture that I know several members of the nefarious “al-Qaida Nine.” If I ever get to meet the rest of them, I will buy them a beer. Which, through the magic of Liz Cheney’s transitive guilt property, doubtless makes me a jihadist as well.

Liz Cheney will weasel her way out of this week’s hyperbole. She’s already trying to parse her way out of the embarrassing fact that the Bush Department of Justice and Rudy Giuliani’s law firm also housed traitorous Gitmo lawyers. Now, Keep America Safe says its problem is only with pro bono Gitmo lawyers. Yesterday, Cheney told Washington Times radio she “doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty.” She just objects to the criminal justice model of dealing with terror. Those words jihad and al- Qaida? Having helped make them the foulest words in America, she wants you to think they’re mere words.

Too late. Wednesday night, Liz Cheney told Bill O’Reilly that Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr “killed Americans.” His trial doesn’t start until July. So before you call the Justice Department to question the loyalty of the “al-Qaida Nine,” ask yourself whether you really want to take the Bill of Rights out of the hands of the lawyers, courts, and officials sworn to defend it. Having worked for years to ensure that the word jihadist is legally synonymous with guilty, Cheney cannot be allowed to use it casually to describe anyone she simply doesn’t like.