DemocracyNow Interviews know-nothing Arundhati Roy..AGAIN!

Amy Goodman, fawns Arundhati Roy over know nothing, attention seeker from India. This woman, who's only claim to fame is having written one measly book is a darling of the western left and an "authentic" source when they want a comment on India. What qualifies this woman to address, economic, social, cultural issues is anyone's guess, but she's brown, looks good and allows the left to bash India without seeming racist.

While this interview was being recorded, These "Maoist rebels" killed eight people in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. Four killings, including that of a woman, were reported from West Midnapore district in Bengal, where Maoists ‘punished’ people for defying their 24-hour shutdown against US President Barack Obama's visit. The woman Sandhya Mahato, was killed because her son was in the police and she had been warned that he should give up his job. Her husband was also missing.

In Jharkhand, Maoists blew up Sadbahani railway station in Palamau district and two government buildings. In Bihar they blew up railway track near Kurhani railway station in the Hajipur-Muzaffarpur section resulting in 10 wagons of a goods train derailing. Maoists also torched trucks and mobile phone towers.

In Orissa, about 60 rebels stormed into the Gamphakunda school premises under Kalimela police station and blew up a newly-constructed two-story school building that to benefit children from to the lowest castes..

All this to protest US President Obama's visit. In a written statement, they call him "the gang leader of US imperialism" and the world's "Enemy Number One," and urge people to use the slogan "Go back Obama."

Arundhati has been a vocal supporter for these murders. She also recently vocally supported an Islamic fundamentalist who wants Kashmir to become an Islamic state and separate from secular India because he claims, Islam does not allow Muslims to live under non-Islamic conditions.

The only thing connecting these two violent movements, one Islamic fundamentalist and the other communist, with are both causes supported ardently by Arundhati Roy are their anti-India stance.

How can the secular Western Left support and cheer this woman?

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Acclaimed Indian Author Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, Poverty and India’s Maoist Rebel

AMY GOODMAN: We move now to Arundhati Roy. Maoist rebels in India called for a strike Monday to protest President Obama’s visit. The Indian media reports, according to the police, Maoists blew up a new school building this morning and killed four people in the eastern Indian states or Orissa and Bihar.

Well, last month, I had the chance to sit down with author Arundhati Roy in London about the Maoists in India. But first I began by asking her for her assessment of President Obama.

ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, I think the big lesson today is that—look at the richest country in the world, America, having attacked and made war on the poorest countries but not being able to win those wars. You know, they have not been able to win. And here’s the lesson. You know, you couldn’t win Vietnam, you couldn’t win Afghanistan, couldn’t win Iraq, cannot win Kashmir. You know, there has to be—Obama, I mean, he’s involved in all these war crimes. It’s not as though—you know, he has expanded the war in Afghanistan, moved it into Pakistan. You know, Pakistan is a country that is in such a lot of trouble because of this. You know, right when 9/11 happened, I remember writing saying you forced them to raise the Taliban in their midst, and now you want them to garret the pit that they grew in their own backyard. It’s going to lead to civil war. You know, you didn’t need to be a genius to figure that out. And that has happened, you know? America has interfered with Pakistan from the beginning, and Pakistan now paying a terrible price for that. I mean, I don’t know if it had a choice, when—you know, when America wants to interfere, it doesn’t give anyone a choice. So it’s destroyed Afghanistan, it’s destroyed Pakistan, it’s destroyed Iraq. And it will destroy India, if—because India doesn’t have the spine. The Indian government is just willingly allowing this to happen, the U.S. to dictate everything. So, today, Obama, I mean, whatever he’s doing in America is a separate thing. But certainly outside, he’s no less of—I mean, his foreign policy is not all that different from George Bush, you know? And if they start a war in Iran, they won’t win it. You know, I mean, it’s not possible. These wars cannot be won. So it’s about time somebody realized that and decided to change the way the world thinks about war and thinks about weapons and thinks about putting soldiers on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, since we last spoke, assassination has taken place—well, at least one—in India. Can you talk about what happened?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* It was—I mean, as you know now, there’s an almost full-fledged war going on. Actually, there are several wars are going on in India. There’s Kashmir, which is up in flames now, and there’s what’s happening in the northeast. But what I’ve been writing about recently is the war on tribal people in the tribal heartland of India, where something like 200,000 paramilitary troops have been called out to really push through about, I don’t know, 200 or more memorandums of understandings with mining companies and infrastructure companies. And there’s—it’s all being fought in the name of clearing the forests of the Maoist guerrillas.

And as the war escalates, there have been, you know, attacks and counterattacks, but really people, the poorest people in the world, are in a lot of trouble now. And there was a lot of pressure to ask for peace talks, you know, because these poor people in the villages, the tribal people, are kind of under siege—no medicines, no food, no ability to come out of the forest. And so, the government actually has been—you know, because it needs to keep on this mask of being a great democracy, it sort of offers peace talks, on the one hand, and then undermines them, on the other.

But the assassination was the assassination of a man who is known as Azad. His real name was Cherukuri Rajkumar, and he is a sort of senior leader in the politburo of the Maoist party, appointed by the party to be the negotiator in the peace talks. And somehow, you know, the carrying back and forth of these documents pulled him up to the surface. And while he was traveling on a train with a young journalist, he was caught by the police and taken to the remote forests of North Telangana, a place called Adilabad, and shot. Of course, they said, you know, he was killed in an armed encounter and so on, which they always say, but post-mortem report says that he was killed at point-blank range, along with this young journalist. So, you know, my point has always been that the government needs this war. To clear the land, it needs this war. And in a situation like this, you know, just at the beginning of peace talks, if one side kills the envoy of the other side, it’s sort of reasonable to assume that that side does not want peace.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the Maoists—what it represents?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* See, the Communist Party of India, of course, is an old party, which has splintered into the Communist Party-Marxist. And then in 1969, there was something called the Naxalite Uprising, with the sort of precursors of what is today the Maoist party. And, you know, there’s a huge debate, of course, between the orthodox left and the Maoists, because the orthodox left more or less functions in the cities and is more or less a bourgeois party now, you know, whereas the Maoists have operated—they believe in the sort of militant armed overthrow of the Indian state. But for years, they’ve been working among the tribal people in the forests, and they do have a sort of people’s liberation guerrilla army now.

AMY GOODMAN: Of how many?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* Thousands. One doesn’t know. I mean, I don’t really know the exact figure. But right now, the Maoists are just the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements who are fighting the onslaught of this kind of "India shining" India, which is really about grabbing land from the poor, you know, and turning them either into mines or into special economic zones. I mean, when I wrote about dams ten years ago, I was talking about the fact that just dams alone had displaced 33 million people. Today, with the reforms and the structural adjustment that the IMF demanded of our country, India, which you know—you know, in America and in Europe is known as the country with the second-highest growth rate in the world, but today, you know, we have more poor people in India than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together. You have—

AMY GOODMAN: More poor people in India than 26 African countries?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* Africa’s poorest countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Poorest countries.

ARUNDHATI ROY:* Put together.

AMY GOODMAN: How many poor people is that that you have in India?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* That’s—you know, for example, you have 830 million people living on less than 20 rupees a day. That’s less than half a dollar a day, 830 million people, you know? So, that is where the struggle is now. You know, you have the guerrillas in the forest, you have the militants in the villages, you have the Gandhians on the street, but on the whole, they’re all fighting the same battle right now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think needs to happen? What are you calling for?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* At the moment—I think, at the moment, there needs to be a ceasefire, and I need—from both sides. And I think that the government should come clean on all these contracts and MOUs that it’s signed. And everybody should know exactly what is on the cards, what local people want. You know, all these public hearings and all the sort of rituals of democracy have just been marginalized, you know? But we really need to know what the plans are. Why should it be secret? Why should it be a secret what’s happening to the forests and the rivers and the people and the mountains and the mines?

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel threatened? I mean, a number of critics have said you are now the most prominent spokesperson for a violent revolution in India. What is your response to that?

ARUNDHATI ROY:* No, I am not a spokesperson for the Maoists. But the government wants everybody who doesn’t agree with it—they want to call all of us Maoists, you know? I have never, ever said that I’m a spokesperson for the Maoists. I have—you know, I have my own views on them, which I have written about. You know, I admire some things; I criticize other things, and so on.

But, you know, I mean, Azad was murdered. Many—this is the government’s way of dealing with dissent. They have—you know, one of the things that they’re very, very upset about is that it had sort of thought that the Maoists are in the forest, we’ll just encircle them, demonize them, and finish them off, you know? And when people in urban areas started to complicate the whole debate and say it’s not that simple, you know, this is not acceptable to us, these policies and so on, they started to target those people, who they seem to be almost more annoyed with, because they don’t know what to do with many of us.

AMY GOODMAN: You have an interesting quote in your piece in Outlook: "When the government uses the ploy of peace talks to draw [the] deep-swimming fish up to the surface and then kill them, do peace talks have a future? Does either side want peace or justice? Perhaps our Preamble should read, 'We, the upper castes and classes of India, [having] secretly resolved to constitute India into a Corporate, Hindu, Satellite State...'”

ARUNDHATI ROY:* Well, you know, this was—I’ve written a lot in this piece about what happens when a government, you know, institutes a constitution or its—a democracy only functions with a constitution as its legal and moral base. So, when that government is vandalizing the constitution, and in fact, whether it’s the Maoists or whether it’s any of the other resistance movements, if you listen to what they’re saying right now, they’re only people demanding their constitutional rights. So the government is vandalizing the constitution. The "terrorists," in quote-unquote, are demanding their constitutional rights. So I said, look, if the government is not going to respect the constitution, then maybe we should change the constitution, whose preamble, the Indian constitution, says we are a secular, democratic, socialist republic. So change it and say we are a corporate, Hindu, satellite state.

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Democracy now should know better, they did an earlier interview with her after the Mumbai Terrorist attacks. Here is Arundhati after that heinous crime, criticizing India and Indians. Yes, here is a supposed leftist, blaming the victims!!



In contrast here is Salman Rushdie taking a principled stand on this matter: Asked to comment on Arundhati Roy's remarks disparaging the "iconic" status accorded to the Taj in the context of 26/11, he said: "I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting. The idea that 12 members of the Taj staff who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests are to be discounted because they are, presumably, lackeys of the rich—this is nauseating. This is amoral. She should be ashamed of herself."

Obama Gets It Wrong on Churchill & Torture

May 1, 2009
Real Clear Politics
By Jonah Goldberg

In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on "shortcuts."

Asked about his decision to release the "torture memos" and ban waterboarding, Obama said: "I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don't torture,' when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."

It's a nice, honorable statement. But there's not much evidence it's true.

It's unconfirmed, but the article Obama referred to is probably a combination of a 2006 op-ed by Ben Macintyre in the Times of London and a recent blog post about it by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Macintyre focused on British Col. Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, the wartime commander of Camp 020 whose motto was "never strike a man," a code he didn't always succeed in enforcing. But even many of Stephens's preferred techniques - sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, etc. - are routinely denounced as "torture" by Bush administration critics like Sullivan.

Macintyre doesn't mention Churchill. That's all Sullivan, who writes: "Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting."

Typically, Sullivan's emotions are getting ahead of his facts. Churchill's preference for humane treatment of German POWs under the Geneva Conventions had more to do with ensuring reciprocity from enemy armies. Al-Qaeda isn't a signatory and isn't interested in such reciprocity.

One reason Churchill might have eschewed putting the screws to detainees in 1942 is that he already knew what they could tell him about the bombings. The Allies knew where the airbases were and had cracked German codes years before.

Regardless, Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against "torture" that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, "the Cage," in one of London's fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Stephens was court-martialed, and cleared, for some of the alleged atrocities.

Of course, none of this remotely made Britain "equivalent" to Nazi Germany.

Regardless of the debatable facts, the real problem is this idea that "taking shortcuts" erodes the character of a people. One hears this constantly, but it is almost invariably asserted rather than demonstrated.

First, this argument assumes society knows about the shortcuts. After all, if the shortcut in question is kept a secret, then it's hard to see how the "character of a people" will be corroded (or that such methods will be used as a "recruiting tool"). Alas, the idea that the government should be able to do things in secret to fight a war is out of vogue today.

The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can't ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that - or stop the Holocaust - would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Did these shortcuts erode the character of the American and British people? If so, how? And what does it say about the "greatest generation" Barack Obama invokes relentlessly? And, again, what of the shortcuts we don't know about?

Churchill was a heroic leader. He did right as best he could in a bloody mess of a war. But he made countless horrible-but-correct decisions in the process. For instance, he refused to warn residents of Coventry that the Nazis were going to bomb, lest he betray the secret that he was listening to Nazi cable traffic. After the war, he advocated the shortcut of summary executions of Nazi officials.

It might seem otherwise, but I'm not making the case for what some people see as torture. I'm simply noting that war is always about shortcuts - all are horrible; some are necessary. If Obama doesn't understand that, let's hope he never has to learn it.

21,000 protest okinawa base

Nov 8, 2009
USMVAW

Around 21,000 people protested against the planned relocation of a U.S. military airfield within Okinawa Prefecture on Sunday ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Japan, in a sign of growing local frustration over the new Japanese government’s vague stance in reviewing the transfer plan.

Obama Is Right About Fox News

Obama Is Right About Fox News

Wall Street Journal
By THOMAS FRANK
OCTOBER 27, 2009


Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes.

But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format."

The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."

They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president—and probably just about every politician—has criticized the press at some point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."

It is interesting to note that Mr. Liddy, that friend of the First Amendment, appeared frequently in 2006 on none other than the Fox News network. In fact, the network sometimes seems like a grand electronic homage to the Nixonian spirit: Its constant attacks on the "elite media," for example, might well have been inspired by the famous pronouncements on TV news's liberal bias made by Mr. Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew.

And, of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting.

Although they cry persecution today, the network and its leading lights have not really distinguished themselves on the issues surrounding clashes between the government and the press. When Mr. Ailes was on the other side of the politician/press divide, making ads for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Washington Post once found out in advance where one of the commercials was going to be filmed. According to an article that appeared in that paper in 1988, Mr. Ailes was moved to comment thusly on the situation: " 'These leakers!' he told an inquiring reporter the night before the planned event. 'I think they should all be executed and tortured.'"

Mr. Ailes was joking on that occasion. But faced with one of the biggest First Amendment cases of our own time—the New York Times's 2005 story on the George W. Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program—how did Fox News react? By impugning the motives of the Times, of course, with different Fox personalities speculating that the Times deliberately published the story when it did in order to dissuade the U. S. Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.

To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears.

Still, one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy, plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories—and a nice bump in its ratings.