End of Silence

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the first day that same-sex marriages were legal in Massachussetts. I hate to resort to clichés, but this picture will save me 1,000 words.

I found this story on BoingBoing earlier today. It refers to a documentary by a BBC filmmaker about alleged U.S. complicity in a Northern Alliance massacre of Taliban prisoners shortly after the Mazar-e-Sharif prison uprising in late 2001. The documentary is a little heavy handed and clearly anti-U.S., but, if it’s true, should be investigated and reported. It has aired in Canada and other european nations, but not here. This article alleges a quote from a state department official to the filmmaker that the they would never allow the U.S. press to run the story. I find this difficult to believe, but I also can’t seem to find any mention of the incident by any of the major U.S. news organizations myself. In light of the prison abuses that have come out over the past few weeks, I’m guessing this might get a little more consideration?

The whole situation underscores a couple of things to me:

• It’s becoming increasingly more difficult for any government to cover up incidents like this, even with a complicit media. This is one of the great things about the Internet. I doubt very many Americans would have heard the story otherwise.
• I’m more than a little concerned that we haven’t heard about it. Clearly, it’s news in other parts of the world and, even if it were false, it still shapes the perception of America in other countries.
• If there were a “liberal media bias”, I’d think that they’d be all over this story, especially now.
• The comments that the U.N. and others want to conduct an investigation, but can’t because of security issues further underscores to me that we’ve dropped the ball there and moved on to other things (*cough* Iraq *cough*) before finishing the job.

EDIT: Apparently, the August 26th, 2002 edition of Newsweek did a cover story on this, but I can’t seem to find a free version online. The CBC page linked earlier also points to a couple of Salon articles. I’m still surprised that I haven’t seen a connection with the events at Abu Ghraib.

The Boston Globe ran a profile of John Kerry last summer. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, but it mentions his only arrest of his life during a protest on Memorial Day in 1971. They also link to an old Doonesbury which takes a jab at Kerry for his relentless self-promotion. By contrast, G.W. has been arrested three times: once for stealing a wreath intended for his frat house, once for disorderly conduct at a Princeton-Yale football game for some sort of involvement in tearing down a goal post and finally his 1976 DUI arrest. There’s also speculation that he was arrested for cocaine possession in 1972 and subsequently had the record expunged, but the reports are conflicting. There’s also the old story that Bush originally lied about the 1976 DUI arrest and subsequently acknowledged it.

If we’re going to nitpick about past actions (even though we don’t have first hand knowledge), let’s talk about arrest records and what they mean for a current president or presidential candidate.

EDIT:More from DailyKos on the Karen Hughes comment.

I watched a fair amount of it last night before heading upstairs in disgust to help The Wife with bath/bedtime.

I linked them earlier this week, but Pandagon is my new favorite blog. They’ve got a couple of posts on the press conference including a running commentary between the two of them. There’s a also an interesting analysis in the NY Times with some commentary from Daily Kos. It’s a good thing there’re all these people to express my feelings so I have more time to write code and change diapers.

The first photo is an AP Photo from cnn.com today and the second is a downloadable ROTK promo poster from lordoftherings.net. Does anyone else think that there’s more than a passing resemblence?