This news struck me as I recall when investigative journalist Allan Nairn shared some recent history with the audience of Democracy Now! about how the Clinton administration continued George H. W. Bush’s policies and backed a CIA effort that supported the military junta there (see some of his reporting from then). These were thugs and rapists (those were Clinton’s own accurate labels for them) which Clinton ironically now takes some credit for opposing — but only after years of paying them, and perhaps with much more effort than was necessary, if he hadn’t supported them to begin with.

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the founder of a paramilitary group that came be known as FRAPH, and whose activities were supported by Bush and Clinton administration officials, is now in jail in the US. He’s spent the better part of the last decade living in New York City, where the US once tried to deport him on immigration charges — except to let off the hook by Clinton while he was still president. Later, when Haiti requested his extradition, the US, under George W. Bush, refused to comply. Constant has threatened to expose his CIA connections. He’s in jail not for human rights violations, but for being recently convicted in a fraud scheme.

Noam Chomsky recounted some of the same history at the same time, during the 2004 coup, and drew a comparison between the history of US involvement in Haiti with the US occupation of Iraq that was taking just taking hold then.

This is history Bill Clinton is entwined with, of which I’ve seen no refutation that extracts him. It should put into question the credibility of putting him in this position, however you weigh his current efforts of doing good — efforts which are now politically convenient. Their efficacy and their function, latent or otherwise, to whitewash this past need to be considered.

Updated: Jeremy Scahill has compiled his own sense of this history and accounts of first-hand reactions from journalists and activists working in Haiti during the Clinton era.

How could this be?

The article describes Schumer offering a limit to the proposed public national health insurance plan so that it can’t compete with private health insurance companies to the best of its ability. The effort for national health insurance is ostensibly beneficial because it could compete with private insurance plans, but would still be an insurance effort that wouldn’t promise complete coverage. Senator Schumer’s idea is not a “middle ground,” it is a move to defend an industry most are discontent with. It is a further push right of an already compromised position from the point of view of public interest.

Today doctors with PNHP and other activists were arrested in a coordinated protest that disrupted the start of a Senate Finance Committee hearing that further demonstrated the degree to which serious consideration of single-payer health care has been and is being avoided by politicians. Democratic Senator and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus both declared “we need more police” and that he respected the views of all Americans — but apparently not enough to include the options quite possibly preferred by a majority of them in his committee hearing. Senator Schumer also sits on this committee.

Single-payer health care, a concept that excludes the middle-man layer of insurance entirely, which Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) says polls show most Americans want, and which most of the western industrialized world has successfully adopted, is seemingly excluded from both political debate and factual scrutiny and reporting by commercial media.

There has been no exhaustive political or media effort to reconcile what most of the western world has done to provide far more health care per dollar to its citizens than the United States has via its private system with the veracity of the positions favoring maintaining an insurance-based system that has failed Americans through under-coverage and complete lack of coverage for 40 million or more Americans. Surely foes of such a system who feel they’re in the right could provide a thorough debunking of PNHP’s resources, including highlighting polls that seem to demonstrate political viability? 

I admit heavily linking to them here without providing much balance, as PNHP does a convincing job of demonstrating both support of practicing doctors and aggregating the spare reports of widespread small-d democratic support for their views. In my spare time, I’ve yet to see any criticisms that reconsile their assertions and evidence or thoroughly debunk them. Please share any such challenges you find so well formed.

In related news, my friend Sam Husseini was the originator and a writer in the creation of ads starring Mike Farrell (of M*A*S*H fame) advocating such a plan. That disclosure no doubt indicates a bias on my part to many, but such associations are not the real root of my bias. Rather, it is the acceptance of the stance that health care is a human right. From that position comes my skepticism regarding most political and commercial offerings on the issue (and to me there is no such thing as no bias or individual objectivity for anyone in matters of such broad potential effect). This shouldn’t weaken the observations with regards to apparently non-existent, or at best — disingenuous and weak, public debate on the issue in the Congress.

So it was today when we stumbled upon the 100 Days Campaign’s civil disobedience in front of the White House with only our iPhone.

Reportedly 60 people were arrested (this reporter witnessed what he can most precisely say was many or several tens of people, so that jives). As Obama gave remarks in the main foyer of the White House about the Chrysler bankruptcy, just yards away dozens were being arrested in the midst of a peaceful protest of conscience on a matter of human rights.

Members of this group have been holding vigil outside the White House every day for the past many days, presumably all of the previous 100 days of Obama’s term. They’ve highlighted the plight of Uighers and others who have been held without charge or cleared for release, or both — and those who have died in custody.

While Obama has promised to close the detention facility, the group takes issue with all such facilities (including Bagram, Afghanistan) and joined literally behind the banner “justice delayed is justice denied”; they do not believe action is being taken fast enough.

Hundreds of tourists and local office workers, many likely administration employees, gathered around or witnessed the proceeding as they passed by.

You might also want to see Jeremy Scahill’s post of material he aggregated about and related to this demonstration.

Protest season has started in Washington. Earlier this week, in addition to the 100 Days Campaign’s vigils, one could witness other protests:

• ADAPT set upon the White House, in what sounded like an angry challenge or rebuke to Obama regarding his support (ABC News)
• Some members of the House of Representatives joined Darfur activists in what seemd to be a scripted civil-disobedience action at the Sudanese Embassy to protest human rights violations (Huffington Post)
• Greenpeace scaled a crane near the Department of State, dropping a banner with an image of the earth and the words “Too big to fail.” (Washington Post)
• SEIU’s nationwide protest against Bank of America included a picket line at the BoA branch just down the block from the White House.

I’m looking at a copy of the Senate Armed Services Committee report entitled “Inquiry Into the Treatment Of Detainees In U.S. Custody, November 20, 2008 (Released, April 22, 2009).

I’ve read some passages near the end about Captain Donovan’s protests within the chain of command, it seems, against the justifications and just of certain tactics. It was his opinion that it would threaten the very programs seemingly used to justify the tactics. The implication as I read it, is that these tactics threatened the safety of U.S. troops in more than one way: by invalidating the programs the tactics evolved out of, which were meant to protect U.S. personnel, and by threatening U.S. personnel in that such tactics might be more likely to be used against now that the U.S. was applying them to perceived and alleged enemies.

This was in 2003.

Now, others have read much more of this report and are doing much more thorough reporting. This is where the New York Times shines, relatively, and the sort of subject McClatchy (and the spirit of Knight-Ridder) does well. Salon is on it… it’s all over. Go read.

• McClatchy: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link — a link that did not exist until after we showed up.
• NYT: Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques
• NYT: In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use
• Salon: Rumsfeld: Architect of torture

A lot of it seems to be tied to Rumsfeld in ways some might not have imagined, unless you were saved from typical American amnesia and recall Rumsfeld’s writing in the margins on directives regarding Abu Ghraib.

I’m stretched a bit thin with interests and obligations, otherwise I’d be digging into this. But others certainly seem to be on the ball. Looking at the time stamps on the RSS feeds that pushed some of these articles to me and at the embargo time on the paper copy of the report in front of me, I would say that these articles have been waiting in the wings and their authors have been reading this report all day.

The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.

I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.

I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.

I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:

The articles I’ve seen in the New York Times, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, and elsewhere have not given much space to the broader context of the Students for a Free Tibet actions, or other protests, and have not bothered to acknowledge the different roles of some of those detained. Not all were participants in the protest. Brian, Jeffrey Rae, and others are asserted to have had a purely documentary role (and my personal knowledge inclines me to believe this). No evidence has been presented to the contrary and yet they’re all implied to be people who knowingly broke the law (however unjust it may be). That may be true for some of them, but some were not even breaking the law as best we can tell.

While what these detainees have suffered is far less than what Chinese dissidents have suffered, the “Beijing 6″ and a couple others have received special treatment with respect to the precedent set in handling previous alleged disruptions during the Olympics.

The former has only been glazed over throughout the Olympic coverage and the latter only mentioned in passing in a couple of reports so far. The facts are lightly reported and the context only exists for those of us who read voraciously and cull as much we can. The papers and the wires have done the public no favors in understanding this situation.

Eowyn, Brian’s wife, shared this thought with many of us overnight:

I’ve spent a lot of today pondering a question that came to me sometime last night — If this is how the Chinese government treats US citizens when the eyes of the world are focused on China, what do they do to Tibetan and Chinese activists, who have no real rights, when no one is watching? I can’t even imagine.

Update: This evening I heard of a report on NPR yesterday, and heard another for myself today that actually distinguished the two different groups of detainees related to the Students for a Free Tibet incident — using the terms “activists” and “citizen journalists.” An improvement in accuracy.

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

I think the term was coined with positive intent. It is part of the vernacular of an ebullient forward-looking analysis of new media and the power of the Internet to democratize. I get it, but I do think that general usage has possibly confused things for some, diluting a sense of what journalism is and giving an impression of a sort of false dichotomy within journalism (not that there aren’t any others).

This is a roundabout reaction to the news that my friend, Brian Conley, founder of Alive in Baghdad, and a ‘”citizen journalist”‘ says the press release, is being held in a Chinese jail. I wonder if this citizen journalist component will be played-up somehow (by all sides?), and I fear this could cloud fundamental issues of human rights. Extra labels do not always help. I hope for the best, we were to collaborate soon in another effort.

He appears to have coordinated with some Tibet activists to document some of their protest. Just because NBC news (to pick one) probably wouldn’t do this (they’re busy giving us objective analysis of the Olympics with their China-hired Kissinger associate) and because he chose to show an interest in the Tibet cause does not make this not journalism.

In fact, with the associations being no secret (as opposed to the false projection of untouchable so-called objectivity) and his work as verifiable as anyone else’s, it makes it even more real journalism.