Champion of Liberty & Freedom?

[patriot]

From today's news:

1. The Pentagon reported on Wednesday two new suicide attempts by prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, expressing fresh concern as the total number of suicide tries reached 27.

2. Amnesty International said Wednesday the U.S.-led war against terrorism is sowing fear and danger in the name of security across the globe and denying basic rights to those who have been arrested.

[Black Jack]

Yeah...and so what...prisoners in jail try to off themselves all the time.

[rogue]

Geldof back in Ethiopia
'You'll think I'm off my trolley, but Bush has the most positive approach to Africa since Kennedy' : Geldof, back in Ethiopia, praises Bush

Rory Carroll in Addis Ababa
Wednesday May 28, 2003
The Guardian

Bob Geldof astonished the aid community yesterday by using a return visit to Ethiopia to praise the Bush administration as one of Africa's best friends in its fight against hunger and Aids.

The musician-turned activist said Washington was providing major assistance, in contrast to the European Union's "pathetic and appalling" response to the continent's humanitarian crises.

"You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy," Geldof told the Guardian.

The neo-conservatives and religious rightwingers who surrounded President George Bush were proving unexpectedly receptive to appeals for help, he said. "You can get the weirdest politicians on your side."

Former president Bill Clinton had not helped Africa much, despite his high-profile visits and apparent empathy with the downtrodden, the organiser of Live Aid, claimed. "Clinton was a good guy, but he did **** all."

His comments, made on the first day of a week-long visit intended to put Africa on the agenda of the G8 summit in France at the weekend, caught off-guard some aid organisations that have accused Washington of using its food aid as a covert subsidy for American farmers.

They had also tempered praise for a recent US pledge of $15bn (£9bn) to fight HIV and Aids in poor countries with criticism that too much was tied to campaigns promoting sexual abstinence - in deference to Christian lobbyists who oppose the use of condoms.

The US has also been accused of planning to bury a radical French plan that would help some of the world's poorest farmers by ending the dumping of subsidised western food in Africa.

Geldof, however, lauded the US and Britain for supplying the bulk of the 1.15m tonnes of food aid that has been pledged to Ethiopia to plug a food shortage that threatens 15 million people.

But another 365,000 tonnes of food aid are needed, said the World Food Programme.

Lord Alli, the aid activist who is accompanying Geldof on the trip organised by the UN children's aid agency Unicef, echoed his praise of the Bush administration.

"Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn't talk, but does deliver," Lord Alli said.

This is the Irish musician's first visit to Ethiopia since the 1985 Live Aid concert that raised $60m for famine victims. With his compatriot Bono, of the rock group U2, Geldof has become a leading figure in the campaigns for debt relief and trade reform.

He and Bono met Tony Blair in Downing Street last week to ask the prime minister to put Africa's Aids pandemic on the agenda of the G8 summit.

The non-governmental organisation, ActionAid, expressed surprise at Geldof's comments. "Bush's increased aid comes with harmful loan conditions," its USA policy officer, Rick Rowden, said.

"The US treasury's role in the IMF and the World Bank imposes high interest charges, privatisation and cuts in domestic subsidies which ruin third world companies."

Justin Forsyth, Oxfam's director of campaigns and policy, said Geldof's remarks "shouldn't be taken out of context ... Bob Geldof rightly highlighted that the Bush administration deserve credit for dramatically increasing US aid for HIV programmes in Africa.

However, Bob is also cam paigning to reform the international trade rules where the US administration remains a major impediment to reform. These trade rules disadvantage poor countries by much larger amounts than the US will ever offer in aid."

Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a Washington-based NGO, said Mr Clinton's Africa rhetoric was often hollow, but that he deserved credit for pushing through an African Growth and Opportunity Act, which is supposed to give certain countries access to US markets.

"Clinton began the long overdue process of helping Ameri cans rediscover Africa. He visited twice and was the first to declare HIV/Aids a threat to national security", Mr Booker said.

But Geldof was adamant that the EU was the greater villain for delivering just a small fraction of Ethiopia's staple needs and refusing, unlike the US and Britain, to supply any supplementary foods, such as oil, which give a balanced diet.

"The EU have been pathetic and appalling, and I thought we had dealt with that 20 years ago when the electorate of our countries said never again," he said. Warning that the "horror of the 80s" could return, he added: "The last time I spoke to the EU's aid people, they didn't even know where their own ships were. The food is there, get it here."

The head of Unicef in Ethiopia, Bjorn Ljungqvist, declined to be drawn, saying only that funding and shipments came in cycles.

A swelling population, drought, flooding and a collapse in prices have made millions more Ethiopians dependent on food aid than 1984, but this time a sophisticated relief effort has averted mass starvation. Unicef does not yet use the word famine, but 3.5 million people do risk starving, said Mr Ljungqvist.

After a closed-door meeting from which occasional laughter could be heard, Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, gave a rare press conference alongside Geldof. Mr Meles accepted that his government bore some responsibility for the hunger, but declined to specify policy failures.

Geldof, dressed in a white linen suit and desert boots, said the new government was a vast improvement on the "communist-terror" regime it ousted in 1991.

Noting that Addis Ababa had shed its heavy security and North Korean ambience, he called for a Marshall-style plan for Africa. In return, African leaders should be less corrupt. "I'm not a bleeding heart, I'm not an optimist. I'm a pragmatist, this is doable," he said. "So let's do it."

Compassion fatigue was a problem. "Even I'm sick of myself, of looking at this mournful, lugubrious face in the mirror. I'm that quarter-page Oxfam [advertisement] in the Guardian, always asking for money."

To see the link between HIV and hunger and poverty, Geldof visited children orphaned by Aids in the Zenbe wak suburb of Addis Ababa. In a dark hut of mud and sticks, he traded jokes with Sha****u Fikadu, 10, and her brother, Assefa, 13, who respectively want to become a doctor and a mechanic.

"I'm going to come back on my motorbike and you're going to fix it so it'll go very fast, then I'll fall off and you'll fix me," he told them.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Shuul Vis]

What the hell does this have to do with kung fu? I dont come here to listen to people rant about politics, unless its kung fu politics. Especially heartless people like black jack.

[jun_erh]

That's a great article.

[Black Jack]

I save my caring for people I give a flying crap about.

[MasterKiller]

I save my caring for people I give a flying crap about.

Like those poor Iraqi's you were so concerned about before the war, huh?

[Black Jack]

You got it beatnick. Your agenda smells to high heaven buddy, go take a bath, your side lost, get over it.

btw- Their is a big difference between Iraqi serfs molested under Saddam's thumb and our prisoners of war.

[patriot]

Those mistreated in Guantanamo Bay are "illegal combatants" - a term made up by the US government so that the humanitarian and legal rights of Prisoner of War under the Geneva Convention can be bypassed.

[rogue]

Did al Queda and the Taliban sign the Geneva convention?

[patriot]

Did the USA sign the Geneva Convention?

[Water Dragon]

patriot,
After almost every major war, foreign combatants always talk about how well they were treated by the US as POW's. Many times, it was the POW's saying this after they were returned to their countries. The German's after WWII are the 1st that come to mind.

I don't think they should be released either. This may sound selfish to you, but I have two very good reasons they should remain in captivity. One of those reasons is 7 years old, the other is 2.

[Kuen]

your side lost, get over it.

Ah, the facsist supporter Black Jack reveals his true feelings. To Black Jack, just like many extreme right wing reactionaries this illegal war had more to do with the real "enemies" here at home. Those "enemies" like MasterKiller who value life, reason and debate over power, profit and death. Yes, progressives are the true enemy of every fundementalist. Be they an extreme right winger like BJ or the extreme right wing Islamists like bin Laden. There is nothing these people fear more than a free secular society in which all people are truly created equal & in which descions are based on morality not conveniece or power. He thinks his "side" won but what is his "side"? Is it the "side" that's doomed 100's of thousands of Iraqi's to cancer and poverty? Or the one which is leaving our children with the hatred of the world, a $44 trillion deficet, nuclear proliferation and a wrecked environment? So it seems that we have those on the side of humanity and those on BJ's side. I'll take the side which concerns it self with everyone before any group's that soley exist for the accumulation of wealth and power.


"beatnik"-can't believe anyone still uses that term!

[David Jamieson]

Is it just me or is everyone else getting the sense that the neocon monster at the end of W's leash is starting to freak him out a bit?

Wolfowitz has gotta go imo.

As for Al Quaeda and their ilk, well, they gotta go. Plain and simple. Their solutions are not solutions at all. Essentially, the ends to their agenda is to send the world back into the 6th century.

I can't and I won't sympathize with that group or any other like it in any way shape or form. Particulalry when it goes beyond vocal activism and working within and moves into killing for the sake of the agenda.

I also do not agree with the attack on Iraq and it has so many holes in it's ideal, it really isn't a laughing matter. You can't free a people by murdering them and occupying their country. No country has any right to impose it's will on another country in the fashion that this has been carried out. Regardless of membership in this international club or that international club.

It is gonna cost each american and briton a bundle to drag that situation into any shape of normalcy by todays standard. (good thing they control the oil eh?) hmmmmn.

What has this all got to do with Kung Fu? A lot believe it or not. Personal Kungfu is expressed through actions. Deeds of the Kungfu practitioner are the most important showing of humanity they can offer.

To defeat another in battle is strength, to defeat that within yourself which keeps you from the correct path is power.

Power is only temporary when it is gained at the end of a gun.
Power is long term when it is gained through education of an ideal.

cheers

[Christopher M]

So long as we're being silly:

Typical liberal strategy: patently ignore any arguments put forth by conservatives and then try to drown them out proclaiming how morally superior you are.

Somewhat less silly: I find it really hard to take any of these extreme leftist posts seriously when excellent arguments against their position are posted all over this board and completely unanswered. Vitriol is no substitute for debate.