Crooks&Liars just put up a clip ofJudy-Judy Miller lecturing the Pentagon and Obama about how the news organizations are now being ‘frozen out’ of reporting on Guantanamo.

(Scroll down the C&L page for a report from Sy Hersh on the Pentagon putting the squeeze on BO, which would also mean by association Biden, Kerry, and the Senate).

Interesting that some Generals have a new ad out regarding the urgency of closing Guantanamo for larger, strategic reasons and Judy-Judy shows up on FauxNews to lecture the Obama administration on its underhandedness.

Yeesh.

what the generals are doing is making a public fuss, and their “clout” (due to their status) is crucial here.

i did not say anti-torture activists have not done anything.

what i said was that folks with clout regarding the “gitmo issue” are demonstrating the courage to publicly use their clout on that issue (as opposed to our “liberal” democratic senators, for example).

an analogy would be,

what are folks with clout who oppose the bush admin’s politically expedient position on torture (the more the better) doing to counter that position?

well, actually, a group of generals, again generals, recently spoke out against torture.

there are going to have to be highly visible public campaigns, mini-wars actually, before the public mindset is sufficiently unsettled about torture.

anti-torture activists, to the best of my knowledge have not managed to bring the issue strongly before the public, i.e., why haven’t i heard about it from the media?

when that latter does happen, we will have switched from tsk-tsking to effective activism, aka, driving the agenda.

Because God knows, the Obama administration hasn’t done anything to stoke fear-mongering by accepting the Cheney framing and putting it out to the public in his first television interview as president.

Look, I accept the political responsibility to go out and make anti-torture and anti-indefinite-detention arguments and win the battle of political opinion (which is what letters to the editor are all about, by the way). But it’s not all on us; when someone runs on an anti-torture platform, and makes closing Guantanamo and ending torture among his first official declarations, it’s not unreasonable to expect him to do a little bit of the lifting. Or, at a minimum, not to use his powerful platform to start immediately undermining his apparent commitments by reinforcing the fiction that virtually all the prisoners in Guantanamo are too dangerous to release.

Right. Because all anti-torture activists have ever done is tsk-tsk with like-minded folk. With all due respect, GFY.

perris @ 15; yeah, I know…. s Was his next war going to be a ‘War on Anger’? or a ‘War on Bliss’? Sheesh…!

(Another segment on this show today covers strategy of the Taliban against the US in Afghanistan; get US troops hooked on heroin. After all, it was an effective strategy against the Soviets in the 1980s…)

the strategy of bin laden against the soviets, that strategy which bankrupted them, that strategy was being used against bush and is now being used against obama

they LOVE our “war on terrorism” since there is no such thing as a war on a strategy, there is no way we can win, when we exhaust resources trying to win against a strategy rather then an enemy, they win, we lose…simple stuff

conucting a “war on terrorism” is the same thing as conducting a “war on retreat”, “a war on attack”, “a war on defense” “a war on offence”, “a war on deception”

can’t happen, can’t win but you can (and will) lose

I’ll have more on this campaign going forward. But it’s good to see someone pushing back against the Cheneys and their friends on torture and Gitmo.

will “the liberal media” run with this?

of course not, will anyone challenge dick and dickless “you’ve always claimed you want to listen to the generals”

I can’t wait to see where this goes but it probably goes nowhere, just like the generals who said cheney’s programs of torture created more harm then good, hardly a word from the press

Bob in AZ