Friday, July 31, 2009
Cartoon for August 1, 2009
Will we ever see a moment like this again? It's the second that changed everything.
New Graphic Novel Out in October
After a three-year hiatus, I have a new book coming out!
"The Year of Loving Dangerously" is a graphic novel memoir written by me and drawn by Pablo G. Callejo, who drew "Bluesman" for NBM. It takes us back to 1984 New York, the time and place where I lost my spot in college, my job, my girlfriend, and a place to live. What I did to survive the next year is the subject of this book.
I will soon begin offering pre-orders for this book, which will entitle you to receiving the book prior to its arrival in stores, with a personalized drawing and signature. Watch this space!
"Boiling Point" and Cartoonists with Attitude artist Mikhaela Reid is doing the oh-so-cool cover.
"The Year of Loving Dangerously" is a graphic novel memoir written by me and drawn by Pablo G. Callejo, who drew "Bluesman" for NBM. It takes us back to 1984 New York, the time and place where I lost my spot in college, my job, my girlfriend, and a place to live. What I did to survive the next year is the subject of this book.
I will soon begin offering pre-orders for this book, which will entitle you to receiving the book prior to its arrival in stores, with a personalized drawing and signature. Watch this space!
"Boiling Point" and Cartoonists with Attitude artist Mikhaela Reid is doing the oh-so-cool cover.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Everyone Hates the Cops
After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?
The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.
"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.
"Three, maybe four days," he said.
"What happened to him?"
"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."
I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.
With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.
Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.
Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"
Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike—but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.
Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.
No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure—basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.
And lots and lots of negative ones.
Where to begin?
I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.
Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious—the fine would have been $400—that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.
When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)
An LAPD cop—it bears mentioning that he was black—arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.
And so on.
I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.
Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.
Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.
"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.
"Three, maybe four days," he said.
"What happened to him?"
"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."
I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.
With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.
Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.
Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"
Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike—but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.
Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.
No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure—basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.
And lots and lots of negative ones.
Where to begin?
I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.
Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious—the fine would have been $400—that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.
When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)
An LAPD cop—it bears mentioning that he was black—arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.
And so on.
I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.
Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.
Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
New Animated Cartoon: Googling While America Burns"
Treasury Czar Lawrence Summers told Congress he could tell America was recovering because Google searches for terms like "total economic collapse" had fallen in number. I couldn't resist doing an animated cartoon about this. So here's the latest from me and David Essman.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Cartoon for July 27, 2009
If you know about furries, you'll get this one. If not, skip to the next cartoon.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Cartoon Round-Up
I'm the editor of The Daily Beast's new weekly cartoon round-up. Each Saturday, eight editorial cartoons by the nation's graphic satirists chosen by yours truly.
Coming Soon: Bleed All You Can Bleed
A new animated editorial cartoon from David Essman and I is due out early next week. It's an army recruiting video for Obama's glorious war against Afghanistan!
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Cartoon for July 23, 2009
This one was inspired by a conversation with Matt Bors. We were wondering aloud why Obama was in such a rush to pass the bailout bills, only to drag his ass in actually distributing the money. It's not like they can't do things quickly.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Heckuva Job, Barry
Obama, Losing Jobs, Soon to Be Shovel-Ready
Pro-Obama political cartoonists have drawn variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of badgered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled "The Economy." The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
With official unemployment approaching 10 percent and underemployment at 16.5 percent, Americans are running out of money—and patience. Obama's approval ratings are down between 15 and 20 points, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness: the economy.
"I think the public knows three things: We inherited a total mess; we're working hard on it; and we're not going to get out of it overnight," says Chief White House propagandist Rahm Emanuel. That part is true.
The trouble for Obama is that people don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. "The key to what this year is about is rescuing the economy from falling off the cliff and trying to put in place the building blocks of recovery"—i.e., bailing out the banks, insurers and automakers, says Emanuel. That's what 2009 has been about for Obama. But for ordinary Americans, 2009 is about keeping or finding a job.
Creating jobs, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be an Obama Administration priority.
Were the bailouts necessary? Economists won't know for years. What we do know is that the Administration's approach won't give the American people what they want and need more than anything else: jobs.
What's the point of being patient? Even Obama admits help isn't on the way.
Obama's plan is Reaganomics redux. Give trillions of dollars to big corporations, he argues, and they'll use it to capitalize new ventures, hire workers, and unclog the credit markets. Eventually. "We must let it work the way it's supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity," he says.
But even Obama admits it won't unfold "the way it's supposed to."
Obama says his plan "was not designed to work in four months. It was designed to work over two years." But if current trends continue, if everything goes the way he hopes, it will never work. We will have lost 14 million jobs by 2010. That would leave us up 4 million at most—a net loss of 10 million. That's a disaster.
And that's why Joe Public is so antsy. "Are we there yet?" isn't the right question. People think: "We can see how this is going to end: we'll be upside down in a ditch, plucking safety glass from our scalps."
Obama's approach won't work economically, and it won't work politically. Setting bailouts aside, what the United States needs right now—what it needed over a year ago—was a ginormous federal jobs program.
What happened to the infrastructure construction projects, like high-speed rail, that attracted so much enthusiasm during the campaign? Right-wing economic czar Lawrence Summers and a bunch of wimpy Democrats trashed them. "Transportation spending was gutted by Republicans who insisted on more tax cuts—none of whom voted for the measure anyway—and by Obama advisers who shifted priorities to advance policy goals," reported the AP.
Earlier this year the American Society of Civil Engineers said the nation's long-neglected highways, bridges and tunnels require $2,200 billion in repairs just to get them up to basic safety code—not including high-speed rail. Obama's stimulus plan included a mere $42 billion (less than two percent). Rail got $2 billion out of a needed $25 billion. Unless Obama does something soon, nothing is going to get built and unemployment will continue to soar.
Now that Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are reporting record profits, it's time to "claw back" the bailouts, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and direct federal dollars where we need them most: jobs. Give tax breaks to employers who add new workers, direct federal agencies to grow in size, and create zero-interest lending programs to laid-off would-be entrepreneurs. And let's build some friggin' infrastructure. Every $1 spent on infrastructure generates a $1.59 payback in the form of increased tax revenues—and creates a lasting legacy.
Speaking of cartoons, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt recently came under fire for trying to hire a cartoonist to "discuss the power of humor in the workplace [and] the close relationship between humor and stress." A Democratic Senator nixed the idea.
Too bad: at least Obama could have taken credit for creating one job.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Pro-Obama political cartoonists have drawn variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of badgered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled "The Economy." The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
With official unemployment approaching 10 percent and underemployment at 16.5 percent, Americans are running out of money—and patience. Obama's approval ratings are down between 15 and 20 points, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness: the economy.
"I think the public knows three things: We inherited a total mess; we're working hard on it; and we're not going to get out of it overnight," says Chief White House propagandist Rahm Emanuel. That part is true.
The trouble for Obama is that people don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. "The key to what this year is about is rescuing the economy from falling off the cliff and trying to put in place the building blocks of recovery"—i.e., bailing out the banks, insurers and automakers, says Emanuel. That's what 2009 has been about for Obama. But for ordinary Americans, 2009 is about keeping or finding a job.
Creating jobs, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be an Obama Administration priority.
Were the bailouts necessary? Economists won't know for years. What we do know is that the Administration's approach won't give the American people what they want and need more than anything else: jobs.
What's the point of being patient? Even Obama admits help isn't on the way.
Obama's plan is Reaganomics redux. Give trillions of dollars to big corporations, he argues, and they'll use it to capitalize new ventures, hire workers, and unclog the credit markets. Eventually. "We must let it work the way it's supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity," he says.
But even Obama admits it won't unfold "the way it's supposed to."
Obama says his plan "was not designed to work in four months. It was designed to work over two years." But if current trends continue, if everything goes the way he hopes, it will never work. We will have lost 14 million jobs by 2010. That would leave us up 4 million at most—a net loss of 10 million. That's a disaster.
And that's why Joe Public is so antsy. "Are we there yet?" isn't the right question. People think: "We can see how this is going to end: we'll be upside down in a ditch, plucking safety glass from our scalps."
Obama's approach won't work economically, and it won't work politically. Setting bailouts aside, what the United States needs right now—what it needed over a year ago—was a ginormous federal jobs program.
What happened to the infrastructure construction projects, like high-speed rail, that attracted so much enthusiasm during the campaign? Right-wing economic czar Lawrence Summers and a bunch of wimpy Democrats trashed them. "Transportation spending was gutted by Republicans who insisted on more tax cuts—none of whom voted for the measure anyway—and by Obama advisers who shifted priorities to advance policy goals," reported the AP.
Earlier this year the American Society of Civil Engineers said the nation's long-neglected highways, bridges and tunnels require $2,200 billion in repairs just to get them up to basic safety code—not including high-speed rail. Obama's stimulus plan included a mere $42 billion (less than two percent). Rail got $2 billion out of a needed $25 billion. Unless Obama does something soon, nothing is going to get built and unemployment will continue to soar.
Now that Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are reporting record profits, it's time to "claw back" the bailouts, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and direct federal dollars where we need them most: jobs. Give tax breaks to employers who add new workers, direct federal agencies to grow in size, and create zero-interest lending programs to laid-off would-be entrepreneurs. And let's build some friggin' infrastructure. Every $1 spent on infrastructure generates a $1.59 payback in the form of increased tax revenues—and creates a lasting legacy.
Speaking of cartoons, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt recently came under fire for trying to hire a cartoonist to "discuss the power of humor in the workplace [and] the close relationship between humor and stress." A Democratic Senator nixed the idea.
Too bad: at least Obama could have taken credit for creating one job.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Monday, July 20, 2009
New Animation: You Can Make a Difference
The earth is doomed, and recycling isn't going to help! Check out my new animated political cartoon with David Essman. If you like these, please tell your local newspaper and magazine editors to pick them up and put them on their websites...or we won't be able to keep doing them! Thanks!
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
New Animation Coming Monday
Monday, David Essman and I will release our latest animated editorial cartoon, mocking those "lifestyle environmentalists" who think recycling and driving a hybrid car makes a difference. Stay tuned.
The Week in Political Cartoons
I'm the editor of a new feature on The Daily Beast: The Week in Political Cartoons. If it does well, it will become a regular thing, so please check it out!
Friday, July 17, 2009
Cartoon for July 18, 2009
Bank of America, which received oodles of TARP money, recently cut my credit limit. Who the fuck are these people?
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Covers Up a Dozen My Lais
Were 3,000 Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By?
"I've asked my national security team to...collect the facts," President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, "we'll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together."
Probably.
Such was Obama's tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged "mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan."
Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn't he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime.
There are two things Obama doesn't want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved 12 times as many murders as My Lai.
The last major battle for northern Afghanistan took place in the city of Kunduz. After a weeks-long siege marked by treachery—at one point, the Taliban pretended to surrender, then turned their weapons on advancing Northern Alliance solders—at least 8,000 Taliban POWs fell under the control of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord with a long record of exceptional brutality.
I described what happened next in my column dated January 28, 2003:
"Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pick-up trucks...They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. 'It was awful,' Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England's Guardian newspaper. 'They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only ten of us were alive.'
"One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says that the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders 'told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside.' Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container."
According to Scottish filmmaker Jamie Doran, the butchery continued for three days.
Doran's documentary about these events, "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death," was shown in 50 countries but couldn't get a U.S. release by a media wallowing in the amped-up pseudo-patriotism that marked 2002. Doran's film broke the story. (You can watch it online at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493.) My column brought it to a mainstream American audience:
"When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan," I wrote in 2003, "the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison's front gates...' Everything was under the control of the American commanders,' a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, 'Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot' while 'maybe 30 or 40' American soldiers watched."
The Northern Alliance witness told Doran that American commanders advised him to "get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken." Indeed, satellite photos reveal that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government dispatched bulldozers to the mass grave site in 2006 and removed most of the bodies.
World's Most Dangerous Places writer Robert Young Pelton, a colleague who (like me) was in and around Kunduz in November 2001, denies that Dostum's men or U.S. Special Forces killed more than a few hundred Taliban prisoners. However, the U.S. government started receiving firsthand accounts of the events at Dasht-i-Leili in early 2002. According to the Times "Dell Spry, the FBI's senior representative at...Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been 'stacked like cordwood' in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled."
"At the very least," Doran says now, "American forces and CIA personnel stood by and did nothing...But if numerous witnesses are to be believed, their involvement went much further than that." Will Obama hold them accountable? Not unless we insist.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
"I've asked my national security team to...collect the facts," President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, "we'll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together."
Probably.
Such was Obama's tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged "mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan."
Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn't he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime.
There are two things Obama doesn't want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved 12 times as many murders as My Lai.
The last major battle for northern Afghanistan took place in the city of Kunduz. After a weeks-long siege marked by treachery—at one point, the Taliban pretended to surrender, then turned their weapons on advancing Northern Alliance solders—at least 8,000 Taliban POWs fell under the control of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord with a long record of exceptional brutality.
I described what happened next in my column dated January 28, 2003:
"Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pick-up trucks...They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. 'It was awful,' Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England's Guardian newspaper. 'They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only ten of us were alive.'
"One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says that the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders 'told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside.' Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container."
According to Scottish filmmaker Jamie Doran, the butchery continued for three days.
Doran's documentary about these events, "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death," was shown in 50 countries but couldn't get a U.S. release by a media wallowing in the amped-up pseudo-patriotism that marked 2002. Doran's film broke the story. (You can watch it online at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493.) My column brought it to a mainstream American audience:
"When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan," I wrote in 2003, "the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison's front gates...' Everything was under the control of the American commanders,' a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, 'Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot' while 'maybe 30 or 40' American soldiers watched."
The Northern Alliance witness told Doran that American commanders advised him to "get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken." Indeed, satellite photos reveal that Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government dispatched bulldozers to the mass grave site in 2006 and removed most of the bodies.
World's Most Dangerous Places writer Robert Young Pelton, a colleague who (like me) was in and around Kunduz in November 2001, denies that Dostum's men or U.S. Special Forces killed more than a few hundred Taliban prisoners. However, the U.S. government started receiving firsthand accounts of the events at Dasht-i-Leili in early 2002. According to the Times "Dell Spry, the FBI's senior representative at...Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been 'stacked like cordwood' in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled."
"At the very least," Doran says now, "American forces and CIA personnel stood by and did nothing...But if numerous witnesses are to be believed, their involvement went much further than that." Will Obama hold them accountable? Not unless we insist.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Publisher's Weekly: Ted Rall's Next Books
I'd hate to have you read it in Publisher's Weekly first. So here it is:
Rall's Two-fer
Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House has closed two graphic novel deals for Pulitzer finalist political cartoonist Ted Rall (who's also president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists). The first, for two projects, is with Terry Nantier of NBM. Nantier took world rights to Rall's trilogy, the first of which is called The Year of Loving Dangerously, the cartoonist's memoir about being a Columbia dropout in 1980s New York City. Nantier also nabbed world rights to Rall's The Die is Cast, his comics adaptation of John-Paul Sartre's existential work about two star-crossed lovers in Paris who don't meet until the afterlife, Les Jeux Sont Faits. The second deal, with Dan Simon at Seven Stories, is for The Post-American Manifesto, Rall's updated take on Marx's Communist Manifesto, in which he, per Heifetz, offers a “call to action for Americans ready to move toward a new system where the average person is society's top priority.”
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Cartoon for July 13, 2009
Where's the glory in fighting a war using drone planes? Wonder why Pakistanis have so much contempt for us?
Majorities: The New Minority
Yesterday's New York Times illustrated its coverage of the Uyghur uprising in western China with a map titled "Minorities in China". The print edition had a similar map.
Move the dial up to 50 percent and you'll notice a funny thing: according to the Times, Uyghurs are actually a majority in Xinjiang (or, as they call it, East Turkestan). Same thing with Tibet: Tibetans are a majority in Tibet.
(Actually, neither of these statements are probably true. The Chinese government has sent so many Han Chinese colonists to the West that Uyghurs and Tibetans may have already lost their majority status. But I digress.)
The point is: Where they live, Uyghurs are a majority. Yet they're dubbed--in the title--minorities.
Imagine a state that was 55% African-American. When discussing the regional struggle for control WITHIN that state, would it be accurate to call African-Americans a minority? A national minority, sure. But not just a plain old minority.
Move the dial up to 50 percent and you'll notice a funny thing: according to the Times, Uyghurs are actually a majority in Xinjiang (or, as they call it, East Turkestan). Same thing with Tibet: Tibetans are a majority in Tibet.
(Actually, neither of these statements are probably true. The Chinese government has sent so many Han Chinese colonists to the West that Uyghurs and Tibetans may have already lost their majority status. But I digress.)
The point is: Where they live, Uyghurs are a majority. Yet they're dubbed--in the title--minorities.
Imagine a state that was 55% African-American. When discussing the regional struggle for control WITHIN that state, would it be accurate to call African-Americans a minority? A national minority, sure. But not just a plain old minority.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Cartoon for July 9, 2009
Obama invited gays to the White House, but still treats them like second-class citizens.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Fog of Obama
Why Can't Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?
Robert McNamara, one of the "best and the brightest" technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary "The Fog of War," were greeted with derision.
"Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen," editorialized The New York Times in 1995. "Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."
McNamara's change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn't you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn't you listen to the millions of experts, journalists and ordinary Americans who knew that death and defeat would be the only outcome?
Though Errol Morris' film served as ipso facto indictment, its title was yet a kind of justification. There is no "fog of war." There is only hubris, stubbornness, and the psychological compartmentalization that allows a man to sign papers that will lead others to die before going home to play with his children.
McNamara is dead. Barack Obama is his successor.
Some call McNamara's life tragic. Tragedy-inducing is closer to the truth. Yes, he suffered guilt in his later years. "He wore the expression of a haunted man," wrote the author of his Times obit. "He could be seen in the streets of Washington—stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind—walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare." But the men and women and boys and girls blown up by bombs and mines and impaled by bullets and maimed in countless ways deserve more vengeance than a pair of ratty Nikes. Neither McNamara nor LBJ nor the millions of Americans who were for the war merit understanding, much less sympathy.
Now Obama is following the same doomed journey.
"We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes," McNamara warned long after the fact, speaking of "America's enemies" but really just about people—people who live in other countries. People whose countries possess reserves of natural gas (Vietnam) or oil (Iraq) or are situated between energy reserves and deep-sea ports where oil tankers dock (Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Why can't President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can't he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm's way?
"We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women and children," McNamara said. "LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He—and I'd say I—were behaving as war criminals." 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all.
At least Japan started the war. What of Afghanistan and Iraq, where approximately 2,000,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. forces? Neither country attacked us. Shouldn't Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest be prosecuted as war criminals? Why not Obama? After all, Obama is leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq after the war there is supposedly coming to an end. He's escalating the unjustifiable, unwinnable tragedy in Afghanistan—there are 68,000 U.S. troops there now, probably going up to 100,000 by next year—while spreading the conflict into Pakistan.
"Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan," concluded the Atlantic Council in 2008. Things have only gotten worse as U.S. troop presence has increased: more violence, more drugs, less reconstruction.
Like McNamara, Obama doesn't understand a basic truth: you can't successfully manage an inherently doomed premise. Colonialism is dead. Occupiers will never enjoy peace. Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Pakistanis will rest until we withdraw our forces. The only success we will find is in accepting defeat sooner rather than later.
"What went wrong [in Vietnam] was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese," McNamara said in his Berkeley oral history." Today's domino theory is Bush's (now Obama's) clash of civilizations, the argument that unless we fight them "there" we will have to fight them here. Afghanistan and Iraq don't present security threats to the United States. The presence of U.S. troops and drone planes, on the other hand…
In fairness to McNamara, it only took two years for him to call to an end of the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1966 he was advising LBJ to start pulling back. But, like a gambler trying to recoup and justify his losses, the president kept doubling down. "We didn't know our opposition," concluded McNamara. "So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today."
Actually, it's worse than that. Then, like now, we don't have opponents. We create them.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Robert McNamara, one of the "best and the brightest" technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary "The Fog of War," were greeted with derision.
"Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen," editorialized The New York Times in 1995. "Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."
McNamara's change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn't you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn't you listen to the millions of experts, journalists and ordinary Americans who knew that death and defeat would be the only outcome?
Though Errol Morris' film served as ipso facto indictment, its title was yet a kind of justification. There is no "fog of war." There is only hubris, stubbornness, and the psychological compartmentalization that allows a man to sign papers that will lead others to die before going home to play with his children.
McNamara is dead. Barack Obama is his successor.
Some call McNamara's life tragic. Tragedy-inducing is closer to the truth. Yes, he suffered guilt in his later years. "He wore the expression of a haunted man," wrote the author of his Times obit. "He could be seen in the streets of Washington—stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind—walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare." But the men and women and boys and girls blown up by bombs and mines and impaled by bullets and maimed in countless ways deserve more vengeance than a pair of ratty Nikes. Neither McNamara nor LBJ nor the millions of Americans who were for the war merit understanding, much less sympathy.
Now Obama is following the same doomed journey.
"We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes," McNamara warned long after the fact, speaking of "America's enemies" but really just about people—people who live in other countries. People whose countries possess reserves of natural gas (Vietnam) or oil (Iraq) or are situated between energy reserves and deep-sea ports where oil tankers dock (Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Why can't President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can't he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm's way?
"We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women and children," McNamara said. "LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He—and I'd say I—were behaving as war criminals." 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all.
At least Japan started the war. What of Afghanistan and Iraq, where approximately 2,000,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. forces? Neither country attacked us. Shouldn't Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest be prosecuted as war criminals? Why not Obama? After all, Obama is leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq after the war there is supposedly coming to an end. He's escalating the unjustifiable, unwinnable tragedy in Afghanistan—there are 68,000 U.S. troops there now, probably going up to 100,000 by next year—while spreading the conflict into Pakistan.
"Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan," concluded the Atlantic Council in 2008. Things have only gotten worse as U.S. troop presence has increased: more violence, more drugs, less reconstruction.
Like McNamara, Obama doesn't understand a basic truth: you can't successfully manage an inherently doomed premise. Colonialism is dead. Occupiers will never enjoy peace. Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Pakistanis will rest until we withdraw our forces. The only success we will find is in accepting defeat sooner rather than later.
"What went wrong [in Vietnam] was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese," McNamara said in his Berkeley oral history." Today's domino theory is Bush's (now Obama's) clash of civilizations, the argument that unless we fight them "there" we will have to fight them here. Afghanistan and Iraq don't present security threats to the United States. The presence of U.S. troops and drone planes, on the other hand…
In fairness to McNamara, it only took two years for him to call to an end of the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1966 he was advising LBJ to start pulling back. But, like a gambler trying to recoup and justify his losses, the president kept doubling down. "We didn't know our opposition," concluded McNamara. "So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today."
Actually, it's worse than that. Then, like now, we don't have opponents. We create them.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
Coming Shortly: What If Americans Were Like Iranians?
What if Americans responded to election theft like the Iranians? My next animation answers that question. Comes out later today.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Cartoon for July 2, 2009
I'm starting to wonder: will Americans know how to mourn if someone worthwhile ever dies?
Financial Times Plagiarizes Ted Rall
You don't have to be a regular reader to know that I've been depicting Barack Obama in Hello Kitty regalia for about one year: flags, banners, you name it. Most recently, I did an Obamaman cartoon that depicts our lame superhero president wearing a Hello Kitty logo on his chest.
Now a sharp-eyed FOR points out that an illustrator for the Financial Times has rather brazenly ripped off my meme.
Usually, these things are less than cut and dry. But it's pretty hard to believe that any illustrator could be unaware of my use of the Hello Kitty imagery to define Obama--it ain't as branded as Generalissimo El Busho yet, but come on. This one fails the smell test.
Suffice it to say that, if this sort of thing annoys you, it is possible to email the Financial Times a letter to the editor.
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