One Day with Evo Morales

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I just watched a half-hour program on RT entitled One Day with Evo Morales in which a female reporter spent the day with President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia, starting at 4:30 in the morning and ending at 11 o'clock at night.  At least 25 minutes was worthless, just showing the reporter standing around waiting for him to come out of a meeting, asking him stupid questions like how old he was or getting on and off the presidential aircraft.  

But there was one short episode that was interesting. While onboard, the reporter asked President Morales if they were flying in the same plane that, retruning Morales from a meeting in Moscow back to Bolivia, had been forcibly grounded in Vienna, Austria, on July 1, 2013.  and kept on the ground for nine hours while "they" tried to find out if American whistleblower Edward Snowden was hiding in the toilet or had sneaked into an overhead luggage bin--an unprecedented violation of diplomatic immunity and inviolability. 

Morales was idly thumbing through a newspaper and didn't even bother to look up, replying that yes, it was the same aircraft  in which he had been "kidnapped." Then the reporter asked the only intelligent question of the whole program, inquiring whether he intended to "sue the countries responsible for the incident," presumably the Austrians--not to mention the French, the Spanish and the Italians--all of whom had refused to allow President Morales's plane to cross their airspace.  Still leafing through his newspaper, Morales replied nonchalantly, "They just follow the orders they get from the Empire."

Of course, "the Empire" refers to the United States and "they" refers to all the pipsqueak countries on the planet, that is every country except the United States. 

What this means in practice is that according to the doctrine of "American exceptionalism" the United States government--in reality only the president--can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants and to whomever he wants regardless of international law, American law, the will of the American people as expressed by the Congress or the Constitution of the United States, which he swore to "preserve, protect and defend."

And Morales appeared to be perfectly resigned to being the victim of a realpolitik that he knew he could not fight.

2.

It so happened that yesterday I was invited for lunch at a friend's place.  My friend's daughter, who lives in Vienna, was also there.  I asked the daughter what she thought about the hijacking of President Morales's aircraft.
  

She replied that she had completely forgotten about the incident. I answered, "Of course! They want you to forget about it!"

 

Copy of My Email to Charlie Rose Re: Rafael Correa

Below is a copy of an email sent to television personality Charlie Rose.  It is self-explanatory. Read my email--below-- then watch the program yourself and decide whether you agree with me or or not!

--Jagor

Dear Charlie Rose,

I just watched your half hour with President Rafael Correa of Ecuador.

Calling it an "interview" would be a grave misuse of the term. Instead of a debate, or even a conversation, the half-hour consisted of you asking one "gotcha" question after another whose purpose was to entrap President Correa into agreeing with your stereotypes and prejudices, interspersed with mini-sermons about the greatness of the United States.

Every time President Correa scored a point--despite his less-than-perfect English--you completely ignored him and, instead of following up, you immediately changed the subject to try to trap him with another "gotcha" question.

For example, when you asked President Correa what his greatest influences were--obviously hoping he would fall into your "gotcha" trap and confirm your prejudices by citing Marx or Lenin or some another arch-enemy of the United States such as Fidel Castro.  But no!  President Correa stated that the most important influences in his political thinking were "the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and liberation theology!" 

Now that must have shocked you since it didn't fit your stereotype of President Correa, and it could have led to a fascinating few minutes of dialogue, but no--you didn't even bother to ask a follow-up question.  [Maybe it's because you don't even know what liberation theology is and were not going to reveal your ignorance by asking President Correa to define the term.*]

Although the whole 30 minutes was a sham, perhaps the worst example I noticed was when you trotted out that old nonsense about "millions of people from all over the world yearning to come to America to be free blah blah blah."

Have you or your researchers ever bothered to study the statistics for immigration in other countries around the world? Obviously not!  A United Nations study revealed that Russia has the world's second largest number of immigrants--eleven million.  Yes, that Russia--Vladimir Putin's Russia.

  

I live in France where, just like in every other country in Western Europe, "millions of people from all over the world wanting to be free" have been arriving for droves, especially since the end of World War II.  France has 7.4 million immigrants, and Germany has the world's third largest number of immigrants, 9.8 million.

Canada, too, has a very welcoming immigration policy, that attracts people from all over the world--7.3 million, in fact-- and they have free medical care for all their citizens, too, just like all the other civilized countries in the world--who wouldn't want to live there?

And now there's a new phenomenon: thousands of citizens of the United States are emigrating out of the United States to Mexico because they can get excellent health care for 90% less than what they pay in "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

And I am not even going to elaborate on the countries of the Gulf--Saudi Arabia [9.1 million immigrants], the United Arab Emirates [7.8 million immigrants], Qatar, Bahrain and Oman--were people arrive from all over the world, including the United States, hoping to earn the money to provide a better life for their families and themselves.  I know, because I have worked both in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Now I do not want to deny that millions of immigrants come to the United States; my point is that many more millions of immigrants go to many other countries besides the United States.

Of course, I was holding my breath, hoping  that President Correa would say all that but, unfortunately, he didn't, so you got away with perpetuating your bogus stereotype.

Charlie, with all due respect, I recommend that you go back and take 30 minutes out of your busy schedule to watch that segment again.  Then write me back if you believe that my observations above are erroneous.

But better than that, please stop peppering your foreign guests with "gotcha" questions and start engaging in actual dialogues with them.  You might actually learn some facts that would dispel your prejudices and misconceptions.

With best regards,

C. Jagor 



* The Wikipedia defines "liberation theology" as: "A political movement in Roman Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jeus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It has been described as "an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor's suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor"

"Complete Breakdown of Constitutional Government"

A friend wrote me recently. "What we are seeing is the "complete breakdown of constitutional government in Obama's America."

Jagor's response:

The "complete breakdown of constitutional government in America" certainly did not begin in Obama's administration. It goes back many decades.  

When I was studying political science as an undergraduate, there was almost no discussion of the legislative branch at all. The only required texts books I can remember using as were about the presidency and the Supreme Court.  It was as if the legislative branch didn't even exist.  

Yet, to the framers of the Constitution, the legislative branch--the Congress--is the People's house and, as such, is the most important branch of the three, the first among equals.  For example, Congress has the power to impeach and convict executive branch officials up to and including the president as well as Federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court, but Congress cannot impeach its own members.  A separate section of the Constitution, Article I, Section 5, Clause 2, describes the procedures for the Senate and the House of Representatives to expell members.

The Supreme Court was virtually powerless, heard few cases and didn't even have a home of its own until Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which improperly implemented the unconstitutional doctrine of judicial review--that a handful of unelected kings--and now queens--of the Supreme Court could overturn the will of the American people as expressed by their elected representatives in Congress.  

Thomas Jefferson expressed his outrage with the decision, writing to Justice Marshall, "You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

The framers of the Constitution didn't even bother to specify the number of justices on the Supreme Court: the number is determined by the People's representatives in the Congress.  Originally, in 1789, there were six justices--one Chief Justice of the United States and five associate justices, but since then the number varied from 5 to 10.  Congress fixed the number at nine in 1869.

As for the president, the framers wanted his job to be as a managing director of a federal bureaucracy and the diplomatic corps and to serve as commander in chief of the Armed Forces, but only obeying the orders of Congress. That's why they specified that only Congress can declare war. 

But the last time Congress declared war was in1941, and presidents now have arrogated to themselves the tyrannical power to send troops or bomb foreign countries as they please, with or without the consent of the People's representatives.  Therefore the case can be made that every war, "police action," invasion, bombardment and drone strike since 1941 has been unconstitutional, if not necessarily illegal.

Senate Report: CIA Misled on Interrogations

An article by Greg Miller published on April 1, 2014, in the Washington Post is entitled "CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says."

Excerpts:

"A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques."

"The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Jagor's Comment::

Now I guess that film director Kathryn Bigelow, Hollywood's reincarnation of  Leni Riefenstahl, will have to remake her pro-torture propaganda film, Zero Dark 30, which showed the torture techniques ["enhanced interrogation," to use the Orwellian Newspeak term] enabled interrogators to obtain information that led to the defeat of Al Qaeda.  

  

The military's trained, professional interrogators knew at the time that torture doesn't work  and that the victims figure out that the only way to make the torture stop is to tell their torturers what they want to hear, not the actual truth. Chapter One of Army Field Manual 34-52 states:

"Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

But the professional military interrogators were either silenced, sidelined or ignored by the civilians in the George W. Bush administration.  And now, at last, the truth comes out in the Washington Post.

5.1 million Americans have security clearances: Why not 320 million?

The Washington Post of March 24, 2014, published an article by Brian Fung entitled "5.1 million Americans have security clearances. That’s more than the entire population of Norway."

Excerpt (Notice the three categories: Government, Contractor and "Other" in Table 1.):

"Critics of the country's national security apparatus say Washington is addicted to secrecy. Judging by the ballooning number of Americans with government security clearances, they might have a point. About 5.1 million people — or more than 1.5 percent of the population — held security clearances last year, up from 4.9 million people with clearances the year before."  




Jagor's Comment: 

There are only 320 million people in the whole country; why not just give everybody--every American man, woman and child--security clearance?  It would save a lot of time and money: after all, we the taxpayers are footing the bill for all this secrecy.  [By the way, just who are those "others?"]

So they allow 5.1 million people to access all the government secrets, and then they're going after Edward Snowden for letting the rest of us know what that 5.1 million already know?  That doesn't make much sense, either.   

To tell the truth, nothing makes much sense in Washington these days.