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Times Watch for
November 18, 2003
Syria's Torture, America's Shame
A prominently placed report from Clifford Krauss on Saturday tells of Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, a Canadian arrested while changing planes at JFK airport in 2002, and two weeks later deported to his native Syria. In "Qaeda Pawn, U.S. Calls Him. Victim, He Calls Himself," Arar alleges being tortured in Syria before finally being released a year later. Krauss fixes the blame on America, and Arar's torture in Syria as a sign of due process being trampled in the United States: "His story has proved deeply embarrassing to American officials, even if they continue to insist, privately, that Mr. Arar is not just the mild-mannered computer consultant he seems, but a man with ties to a probable cell of Al Qaeda in Canada, though he has never been charged with a thing. Whatever the truth, Mr. Arar's soft, steady voice has touched the conscience of Canada and raised disturbing questions about whether Washington's pursuit of terror suspects has trampled judicial due process, or swept up guiltless bystanders."
Krauss notes: "Today Mr. Arar appears a determined but shattered man. He says his limp comes from almost a year of beatings and sleeping on a cold tile floor. Though he lost 40 pounds, he has little appetite. He still paces his living room, a habit he picked up in his tiny cell. At night, he wakes from nightmares in which a guard slaps him and tells him he must return to Syria. In the day, his mind wanders to a world so distant he does not hear his wife, Monia, pleading for him to return. Bush administration officials concede that the entire episode has been a public relations disaster. 'The damage has been done,' one official said. 'We need to say something because 'Arar' is going to become shorthand for excess in the name of security, running roughshod over the rule of law.'"
Krauss finally adds a possible explanation for the U.S. action: "While the administration has yet to make its case publicly, American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the evidence was strong that Mr. Arar had associated with suspected Islamic militants over a long period in Canada."
What Krauss doesn't talk about (provided Arar is telling the truth) is Syria's responsibility in the matter: The only person who musters any criticism of authoritarian Syria's torture regime is Arar himself.
For more on Maher Arar, click here.
• Maher Arar | Canada | Clifford Krauss | Syria | Terrorism
Uchitelle Hits Damaging U.S. "Allegiance to Deregulation"
In a review for the liberal
American Prospect magazine, Times economic reporter Louis Uchitelle praises "The Roaring Nineties," a new book by Clinton administration economist Joseph Stiglitz, particularly for its bashing of Clinton's policies from the left. Uchitelle writes: "Stiglitz offers a different and more illuminating sequence of events, one that helps to free us from blind faith in deficit reduction and the endless pressure from investors and executives for deregulation and unfettered markets....Along the way, the overenthusiasm for deficit reduction and budget balancing damaged the economy, mainly through underinvestment in the public sector. In other words, while deficits on a scale wrought by Reagan or either Bush are damaging, there was plenty of room for moderate deficits and more social outlay, which might have helped productivity. The allegiance to deregulation turned out to be even more damaging, but the financial markets insisted and the Clinton administration complied. Stiglitz is particularly good at describing the failure to strengthen government's hand in a market economy."
• Books | Deficits | Joseph Stiglitz | Regulation | Louis Uchitelle
A Press Release for Left-Wing Disruptors
Left-wing anti-globalization activists in 1999 wrecked the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Now they're gearing up for a repeat in Miami (site of the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting) and the Times helps by running "Them Against the World, Part 2," a glowing profile of anti-globalization activist Lisa Fithian by sympathetic contributing writer Austin Bunn.
Bunn writes: "When, like Fithian, you have been arrested some 30 times, the police become less of a fearful authority than antagonists in a battle you just can't wait to begin....Her intention is to scout the city--to understand the layout, to meet with every local activist group willing to meet with her and to plan how to 'derail' the negotiations....Fithian will join them, but she doesn't care too much about the march. It doesn't need her. It needs numbers. Direct action--to physically 'shut it down'--is her calling. Blocking the Miami airport, preventing delegates from getting inside the conference center, ripping a hole in the protective fence--these things need her. Anticorporate globalization protests like this one will attract everyone from agitprop puppeteers to Quakers to rowdy anarchists who would love to see a Starbucks on fire. Fithian stands in a willful, but not reckless, middle ground. She is peace-oriented but not passive. Destruction of 'illegitimate' barriers is fine with her as long as it's nonviolent (a line that can be hazy) and not a senseless publicity stunt (also hazy). So you don't go to Fithian when you want to carry a placard. You go to her when you want to make sure there are enough bolt cutters to go around."
Bunn has the nerve to compare this kind of violence-inducing and violence-accepting behavior to the civil rights movement: "The tradition of direct action is civil disobedience staged at the 'point of power': civil rights era sit-ins on segregated Woolworth's stools or Act Up 'die-ins' during speeches by Food and Drug Administration officials."
It's sadly no surprise the Times gives such a positive portrayal of this sort of left-wing disruption. In the past the Times has gone even further, most notoriously in "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives," a fond look at Bill Ayers of the U.S. terrorist group the Weathermen, which appeared in the papers Arts section the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 (though hardly anyone in Manhattan got to the Arts page that day).
For more on Lisa Fithian, anti-globalization activist and left-wing heroine, click here.
• Austin Bunn | Lisa Fithian | Globalization | Protests | Terrorism | Trade
As George Bush prepares to go to London, Sunday's report by Alan Cowell ("Bush Visit Spurts Protests Against U.S. In Europe") describes in loving detail the European anti-war laundry list of anti-Bush particulars, and even gets Vietnam into the mix: "Mr. Bush is preparing to fly to London for a three-day visit, starting Tuesday night, that has stirred deep and hostile passions here and plans for anti-Bush street protests. Some of that anger has turned to schadenfreude as American forces seem ever more bogged down in a morass that is compared, if only by association, with Vietnam....Mr. Bush will find it hard to shake the perception among European critics that he is anything more than a tool of oil interests and a coterie of close, neoconservative advisers and an implacable opponent of many cherished European ideas on the environment, the Middle East and other issues. His frequent allusions to his own Christian faith may not have won friends, either."
For the rest of Alan Cowell's piece, click here.
• Britain | George W. Bush | Alan Cowell | Iraq War | Protests
Sanger Sings the Blues over Bush in Iraq
Trust reporter David Sanger to paint Bush's actions in Iraq in the most cynical and negative colors available. His Sunday news analysis, "America's Gamble: Faster Power Shift in Iraq," brings up hubris, electoral cynicism and floundering in three neat sentences: "But the combination of an intensifying insurgency and rapidly eroding Iraqi support for the American occupation left President Bush few options but to loosen his grip over the nation that he had conquered and is now trying to rebuild. So in the past week, an administration that is loath to admit any doubts about the wisdom of its judgments basically rewrote its strategy. Administration officials have dismissed critics who suggest that the process might be driven by Mr. Bush's electoral needs, taking pains to portray the new approach as Iraqi-born, initiated by Iraqi leaders out of what Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, called a 'clamor' for a faster turnover of power."
For more of Sanger's take on the insurgency in Iraq, click here.
• George W. Bush | Iraq War | David Sanger
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org