Not Enough for Me

So North Korea is tearing down a prominent part of one of its nuclear plants and is forking over a lot of old nuclear program documents to the international community.

Not surprisingly, President Bush, eager to look like he can understand and react to complex international events, decided that this was a good time to lift economic sanctions on North Korea. But not just sanctions, Bush decided it was worth removing North Korea from the list of states sponsoring terrorism. That's the move I just don't get.

Korea's shift towards greater transparency in its state-run nuclear program should be applauded, and it makes the world today slightly safer than it was yesterday. But if there's one thing we learned on September 11th it was that terrorists tend to work under the radar — it's not like a government gave them four airplanes to crash — and just because North Korea may be less of a threat publicly, who knows what they're doing behind close doors. Do we know how secure the stockpiles of nuclear materials North Korea possesses are? What about the stockpiles we don't know about? Can we account for all of the uranium that has passed through North Korea in the past decade? Do we trust the North Korean government to tell us everything it's been up to?

I didn't grow up in the age of nuclear panic, so it's difficult for me to put North Korea's potential nuclear threat in perspective. But I am growing up in an age of terrorism, and it seems pretty clear to me that simply dismantling certain parts of an above-ground nuclear facility isn't enough to let North Korea off the hook as a potential sponsor of terror.

Anyone agree?

A Powerful Prologue

Thomas Jefferson once said, "Whenever you are to do a thing, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly."

In his book, "Letters from Nuremberg: My Father's Narrative of a Quest for Justice," Senator Dodd introduces the letters of his father with over sixty pages of his own commentary. His long remarks eloquently capture the importance of his father's work at Nuremberg, as well as the United States' decision to put Nazi officials on trial in a world still devastated by their crimes:

"By trying those who carried out a criminal war, a complete record of their actions could be shown to the world, therefore announcing once and for all that such behavior would not be tolerated by the community of civilized nations. And, in giving the defendants a chance to hear the evidence against them and to defend themselves, the Allies would take the moral and legal high ground."

In our era of the Military Commissions Act (of 2006) the precedent set at Nuremberg seems long forgotten. The Military Commissions Act states:

"No alien enemy unlawful combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights as his trial by military commission."

Undoubtedly, among the prisoners we're holding at Guantanamo are those who seek to kill Americans and destroy our way of life. However, for the reasons that Senator Dodd cites, Guantanamo's "enemy combatants" should be given the opportunity to "hear the evidence against them and defend themselves" just like those who were responsible for the deaths of over 6 million Jews.

Under the imprudence of the Bush administration we have become a nation that no longer abides by the enlightened hand of justice, and have instead fallen under the control of fear—the same fear and anger that prompted the British and Russians to call for the swift execution of those at Nuremberg, not the fair, albeit arduous, trial that they were given.

I read on....

Awful PR

Ignoring the specifics of the article, this kind of headline never looks good.

RE: Yesterday's Post

...connecting with (not deporting) America's Latino community is also a skill of increased importance and benefit in the American political world:



There's got to be a better video out there, but none showed up on YouTube:



Amen.