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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (91123)	4/8/2003 7:06:07 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Human Rights Watch That is one pacifist oriented org that I have a helluva lot of respect for. Though not perfect...They do report the facts pretty well. Ignoring danger, they go into the field for research...while there, they help thousands of people everyday.

To: LindyBill who wrote (91123)	4/8/2003 8:53:15 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Regarding Richard Cohen and Michael Kelly. Bill, Someone smarter than me needs to examine the anti american attitudes described in this article. Those of us on the right are not permitted to use the un-politically correct term, anti american. But what else can you call the supporters of Castro? Naive, misguided? But it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it is based on guilt many Americans feel about their life style? The Hollywood types have no grounding in capitalism. Many come from modest backgrounds. They get oodles of money and lead opulent lives and hang out with Fidel and badmouth US policy at every turn. In my opinion, they would do a lot better to give away their money than to hang out with rogue leaders. I wrote much the same thing back in the mid sixties on a paper i wrote. Wish I had kept it. I got a D. Professor may have recognized himself in the group i decscribed or perhaps it was only worth a D. Mike

To: LindyBill who wrote (91123)	4/8/2003 11:41:58 AM
From: Rascal	Respond to of 281500

Just recently the government of Fidel Castro arrested about 80 dissidents and almost instantly brought them to trial -- if it can be called that. Foreign journalists and diplomats were excluded from the proceedings, in which 12 of the accused face life sentences. All of them are undoubtedly guilty of seeking greater freedom and on occasion meeting with visiting human rights activists. In Cuba, those are crimes.. Maybe they are just following the Ashcroft model for civil rights. No information, no problem. Rascal@ Ashcroftwsbeatenbyadeadguyinhisownstate.com :V)

To: LindyBill who wrote (91123)	4/9/2003 12:10:06 PM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Activists: 74 Cuban Dissidents Convicted story.news.yahoo.com By ANITA SNOW, Associated Press Writer HAVANA - Cuban courts have convicted at least 74 government opponents in lightning-fast trials aimed at quashing dissent on the communist island, human rights activists said Wednesday. The known sentences for 57 of those tried reportedly ranged from 6 to 28 years. The remaining sentences were expected by week's end. None of the trials has lasted more than one day, activists said, and there were no reports of acquittals. The government published a brief statement on Wednesday's front page of the Communist Party daily newspaper Granma saying the defendants were tried "for their known participation in mercenary activities and other acts against the independence or the territorial integrity of the Cuban state." The statement, the government's first public comment on the trials, confirmed that the trials began Thursday and sentences varied between 6 and 28 years. It did say how many people were tried. The crackdown, which ended several years of relative tolerance during President Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s rule, began when Cuban officials accused the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, of actively supporting the island's opposition. The government said independent journalists — along with pro-democracy activists, opposition party leaders and other dissidents — collaborated with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state. Without precise information from the government, human rights activists lowered the number of defendants Wednesday from 75 to 74. Four of those arrested in the crackdown were prosecuted on lesser crimes and received sentences measured in months rather than years, veteran activist Elizardo Sanchez said Tuesday. He was among the few leading government opponents not arrested last month. International condemnation of the trials continued, with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the governments of Mexico, Canada and Sweden voicing protest Tuesday. The crackdown is "the natural expression of a dictatorship that has been oppressing human rights for years," Vargas Llosa said. Some of the longest sentences were reserved for independent journalists, including 27 years for reporter and photographer Omar Rodriguez Saludes and 20 years each for poet and writer Raul Rivero, magazine editor Ricardo Gonzalez and economics writer Oscar Espinosa Chepe. A lawsuit on behalf of Rodriguez Saludes was filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Monday, accusing Castro and other Cuban leaders of torture and unfairly convicting him in a closed-door trial. The lawsuit is based partly on the Alien Tort Claims Act, which lets foreign residents sue in U.S. courts those who break "the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." There was no immediate reaction to the lawsuit from Cuban officials in Havana. The Cuban Interests Section in Washington did not return a call Tuesday seeking comment. The trials also were condemned by international rights and press groups, who said they violated universal norms. "They were carried out in flagrant contradiction of international treaties that protect the right to free expression and legal process," the PEN International writers group said in a letter sent Tuesday to Castro. Cason has denied accusations that the U.S. mission had local dissidents on its payroll, saying the mission operates no differently than American embassies in other countries.

To: LindyBill who wrote (91123)	4/10/2003 11:47:29 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I see you posted a column about Michael Kelly. I've been reading a good many tributes to him over the past several days. Seems to have been a wonderful guy who wrote vicious columns. Go figure. Here's Maureen Dowd's tribute. It's probably already been posted but well worth a repeat read. She genuinely liked the guy. And talk about good writing. She can write. period. April 6, 2003 'The Best Possible Life' By MAUREEN DOWD nytimes.com WASHINGTON — Michael Kelly was a lucky guy. When he stumbled upon a column of Iraqi troops during Desert Storm, they surrendered to him, piling into his car with their white flags. He was the only reporter to find passion in the Dukakis campaign; he met his future wife, Max Greenberg, a beguiling CBS producer, on the bus. Michael always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to get the best quote and the best story, the best jobs and the best life. "I've had one good break after another," he told The Boston Globe, in an interview last year about how he'd revived The Atlantic Monthly in just two years as its editor. Cruising in his 1966 baby blue Mustang convertible, he said he'd had "a long series of lucky breaks and good jobs and stories and a life I like living." He did many things well enough to provoke envy: he was a dazzling writer, editor, dancer, cook. Except he wasn't the sort you'd envy; he was too generous. He'd had his share of donnybrooks, in print and out, but he was, to use one of his own terms of endearment, a "lambikins." When I had boyfriend troubles or work troubles, I would show up at his house in Washington. He would always be sprawling on the chaise longue I gave him as a wedding present, reading Orwell or A. J. Liebling or John O'Hara. And he would always get up and make a gourmet meal, with wine he'd chosen and herbs he'd grown, for Max and me. He liked to say he'd had "an unusually seamless life." He was crazy about his parents, Tom and Marguerite, and wanted to become a reporter because his dad had been a reporter at The Washington Daily News. "My father would bring me in on Saturdays to the newsroom — an old-fashioned one with the bookie in the corner, reporters bringing in beer — and I would hang out," he told our friend, Diana McLellan. Even at 46, the father of two little boys, Michael never lost the raffish air of an altar boy who'd just talked a nun into letting him smoke a cigar in the sacristy. He looked like a Dead End Kid, an Irish imp with blue eyes, pug nose, round face and round glasses. He was wickedly funny, a great mimic who made people laugh so hard that the section where we worked at The Times was dubbed "Happy Valley." He had many important jobs but no phony airs. He went to parties at his local firehouse way before 9/11. He was deeply sentimental about ordinary working-class people — and maintained an angry outsider posture in his column even as he was embraced by the conservative mandarins of Washington. "He had enviable eyes," said Leon Wieseltier, his colleague at The New Republic. "He observed more in a glance than other reporters did in a week." The boy could write. On the decline of liberalism: "Its animating impulse is . . . to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue." On Ross Perot: "H. Ross Perot made his way onto the national stage, barking like a dog and occasionally biting off small pieces of himself." On the first gulf war's bombing of Baghdad: "The tracer rounds made lines of incandescent beauty, lovely arcing curves and slow S's and parabolas of light." He said war reporters were people "who did not want to get in harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did." But he put himself in harm's way because he wanted to go back to Baghdad and see America kick out Saddam. "Tyranny truly is a horror. . . . It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face." Michael was the first American reporter to die in Iraq, when the Army Humvee he was riding in came under Iraqi fire and rolled into a canal south of Baghdad airport. At an impromptu wake at his parents' house on Capitol Hill Friday, Marguerite Kelly, who writes a Washington Post column about raising children, put out her usual spread of food. And Tom told friends his son was lucky: He had had the best possible life for a journalist and died well, better than full of tubes in a hospital somewhere. Michael died for two things he believed in: Journalism and ridding the world of jackboots. And as Pat Moynihan said when he learned J.F.K. was dead: "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."