Remembering Col. Austin Bay spoke to veterans gathered at the Travis County International Cemetery
A group of Hispanic vets tends the graves of indigent American veterans buried in the cemetery. The place is one of those plots of ground with a decidedly checkered past. In the 19th century it was a “paupers graveyard.” The county buried small pox victims at the site, and –according to one of the officers in Tejanos in Action– victims of a plague that struck in the early 20th century were buried there as well. I suspect the land served as “a Negro cemetery” and “a Mexican cemetery.”
Approximately twenty years ago Tejanos in Action started fixing up the cemetery and handling the burials of indigent veterans.
The mother of Lance-Corporal Nicholas S. Perez was in attendance.
An honor guard from Tejanos in Action conducted the flag ceremony. A bugler played taps and the honor guard fired a 21-gun salute. Tejanos in Action commander Jose Montoya introduced me.
Read his speech.
What hath she wrought Back in February, Italian journalist and terrorist sympathizer Giuliana Sgrena was abducted by terrorists in Iraq. After a while, the Italian government decided to pay a ransom to effect her release, during which one of her rescuers was killed. She blamed everyone but herself for what happened, including American soldiers. It is clear that she lied about most of what happened during her escape, but we don't know what her involvement with the terrorists was during her captivity. We do know she spoke well of her captors, which is more than can be said about her feelings for Americans in uniform.
Upon her release, Al Jazeera broadcast a video in which Sgrena thanked her captors for having treated her well, and in which she stated that she was taken hostage because her kidnappers are determined to free their country from occupation.
The Italian government, after the affair was over, while never admitting to paying a ransom for her release nevertheless promised that they would never pay to ransom someone again.
THE Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has promised President George W Bush that he will not pay more ransoms to free hostages in Iraq.
The Italian government has denied newspaper reports that $6m (£3.1m) was paid for the release of Giuliana Sgrena, who worked for the Communist daily Il Manifesto. But senior officials and intelligence sources have confirmed that money did change hands.
Not that Ms Sgrena cares, she's free, the terrorists have their million bucks, and it doesn't matter to her how many people were killed or sullied during the event.
Now the question is what will happen to Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni who was abducted in Afghanistan two weeks ago by terrorists. Yesterday, a video of her was released by her captors. They showed her in good health, except for the guns being pointed at her head.
"Although we are encouraged to see that Clementina is alive and in relatively good health, we are deeply concerned about her safety and her well-being," he said. "Once again, we join the people of Afghanistan in calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Clementina."
There can be only one reason for abducting her, keeping her in good health, and releasing a video of her: they want to ransom her.
And Italy has a history of paying ransom thanks to Giuliana.
What are the chances that Ms Sgrena will offer to exchange herself for Clementina? After all, it seems she has good relations with terrorists. And it would give her a chance to redeem herself.
Amnesty Required The "Human Rights" watchdog group Amnesty International has declared the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay the Gulag of our time.
The 308-page report accused the United States of shirking its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections and said Washington has instead created a new lexicon for abuse and torture.
The US is held to higher standard as we should be. We as citizens demand it, and our self-respect requires it. But Amnesty International obviously has no standards by which to judge us or our actions.
We have created a new lexicon for abuse and torture? Gee, I thought Hitler's planned extermiations of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and others would have set the standard for evil. But perhaps the Left, whose staple of stereotypes of "conservatives" includes that of holocaust deniers, are the deniers themselves.
Or perhaps Amnesty International is composed of people who are not literate enough to have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 and are unaware of Stalin's legacy of death and cruelty. Of course, any historian could inform them, but these folks probably get their history from Stalinist folk-lore, not from actual books.
One would think that what the Khymer Rouge did would be above anything Americans have ever conceived of doing, or Mao's cultural Revolution, but no, Gitmo sets the standard according to AI, which I note is also an acronym for Artificial Intelligence.
David Rivkin and Lee Casey writing for the National Review point out:
First and foremost, Amnesty’s report is emphatically not an honest assessment of American compliance with international law. Rather, it is an assessment of how well the United States complies with Amnesty International’s political and ideological agenda — equivalent to the grading of individual members of Congress by domestic advocacy groups. This is obvious from the report’s three fundamental measures of a good human-rights record, which are applied to every included state: (1) whether the death penalty has been retained; (2) whether the International Criminal Court treaty has been ratified; and (3) whether the U.N. Women’s Convention, and its Optional Protocol, has been ratified. All of these criteria involve controversial political issues where there is fundamental disagreement between right and left and — from Amnesty’s perspective — George Bush’s America fails on all counts. This, of course, is what you would expect, since the president is a conservative, elected by increasingly conservative American voters.
With respect to the war on terror, Amnesty’s principal complaint is that “[h]undreds of detainees continue to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” This, of course, is the installation that Amnesty’s secretary general, Irene Khan, characterized as “the gulag of our times.” Khan is either profoundly ignorant of the actual gulag, where Communist regimes “re-educated” political dissidents through murderous hard labor, starvation diets, and exposure to the elements, or engaging in highly improvident hyperbole. It is most likely the latter. (As the Washington Post editorialized, the “modern equivalent” of the gulag can be found not at Guantanamo Bay, but in Castro’s Cuba, North Korea, China and, until recently, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.) In a calmer moment, Khan might reflect that comparing American policies with which she disagrees to genuine atrocities committed by some of the most vicious and repressive regimes in history effectively trivializes the actions of those regimes.
While Cassandra of the Villianous Company blog (recently returned from a blog-vacation with renewed vigor) notices
-- According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, "victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."
-- Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered.
-- Allegations of prostitution used to intimidate opponents of the regime, have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women.
-- Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
-- Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds.
-- The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths.
-- 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
-- Iraq's 13 million Shi'a Muslims, the majority of Iraq's population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.
-- According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south."
Perhaps Amnesty International doesn't read their own reports.
It is simply another example of how the extreme, dare I say Stalinist, Left discredits itself and thereby makes itself irrelevent. No wonder that Democrats who want to be successful running for public office try to distance themselves from people like this.
Unfortunately, many people who will buy into such absurdities make up a significant part of the Democratic Party. So much so that Democrats have selected one of these as their National Chairman to appeal to that constituency.
So long as Democrats refuse to purge their ranks of such people, as was done in the 50's, they can expect to lose more political power, to the point where they become irrelevent.
If such is not the case already.
