editorial

There are lots of causes for objection in the president's five new “public safety” decrees. That the SENIS secret police can go to the Supreme Court with an application to “cease any of the individual guarantees or freedoms” found in the constitution and may get a warrant to do so from the PRD-controlled court. If, say, if they wanted to torture a labor activist to death and disappear his body under the parking lot of a police station --- just like the president's daddy did --- it would be “legal.”

But what happens if the Torrijos and the Norieguista creeps in his administration are repudiated next May, by an electorate that votes in a different coalition of parties that does not share the current one's militaristic and authoritarian values? What happens if, as is likely, American voters elect a new administration that's not so fond of torture as is the current one?

The next Panamanian administration will be left with a bloated set of law enforcement and national security agencies --- bigger, per capita, than in any of the Central American countries. It will be left with secret police who have a secret budget. It will be left with four cabinet officers in command of various armed forces who will be chosen by the officer corps of those forces (yes, the president gets to pick from a list of three candidates proposed by the SENIS secret police, the National Police and so on).

A military establishment with limited civilian control and blank check budgets?

Set aside the intentions of the politicians and the officer corps, which tend to change with times, personnel rotations and circumstances. But Martín's enhanced and expanded police state would still, even if everyone involved has the best motives, be an extravagance that Panama simply can not afford.

Sometimes people rise above the inadequate education and experience that had prepared them and rise to a challenge. Sometimes they don't.

The US university education is a prized status symbol among Panama's elite families, just like the Disney World visits. Martín Torrijos isn't from one of the rabiblanco families, but he was the dictator's kid and like so many of the children of the Creole aristocracy, he had all the privileges and mostly wasted them. But there can be worse things than being an Aggie frat boy who majored in getting blasted and had as his sole private sector preparation for the presidency some time as a shift manager at McDonald's. One could not only fail to rise to the challenges of the new office, but repeatedly make blunders that anyone who knew the history of the country that one tries to emulate would not make.

Maybe the most far-reaching of the US errors now being transplanted to Panama is the design of cities and regions around automobiles. In most of the USA one can't go anywhere or do anything without a car, and now high fuel prices are choking an American economy based on the assumption of commuting by automobile. And here we have the Torrijos administration blowing a ton of money on designing the Panama City metro area for cars rather than people -and, given that erroneous starting point, even then not doing it well. It's a bit of foolishness that the great majority of US urban design experts wouldn't support.

Now, in the form of a national security decree, we are seeing Torrijos repeat one of the great blunders of US history that he has already repeated with deadly results in his administration. He's given himself and his new SENIS secret police the power to censor any information about “pandemics, illnesses, epidemics [or] food security” that might “alter public order or tranquility.”

You know, just like the Torrijos administration padded the death toll of the people they poisoned with cough syrup laced with diethylene glycol that was mixed in a government lab, but sitting for at least two months on information that there was a strange rash of deaths and illnesses underway. The president and his team delayed the public warnings about the situation, delayed the discovery of the source of the problem, and killed dozens of people by these delays.

You know, just like they suppressed information about a rash of deaths that took the lives of 31 children in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca district of Ñurum. Journalists can't be allowed to cause a panic in the politically volatile comarca over something as trifling as the lives of a few kids when a PRD political campaign is at stake, so it seems.

Now Torrijos wants the force of law and the power of a secret police force to enforce his penchant for suppressing public health information. Just like Woodrow Wilson used World War I censorship and purportedly patriotic goons to suppress information about the 1918 influenza pandemic, which cost millions of live in the United States and worldwide. In the name of preventing panic Wilson, a Democrat, prohibited the dissemination of information that could have saved lives. The abuse of wartime powers didn't end a politically repressive cycle in American politics, but it did put the Republicans back in control of the government during the 1920s.

But ignoring the historic blunders of both his own administration and of the country he likes to emulate, President Torrijos seeks to institutionalize the suppression of public health information. Slapping a “national security” label on this outrage doesn't make it one bit less of an unpatriotic act.

Background notes on a terrorist attack on a house of worship

No, the corporate mainstream media and the Bush administration don't use the word “terrorist” to describe the deadly attack on a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee or its author.

The guy who walked into the church wearing a t-shirt bearing a version of the Tennessee state flag and armed with a shotgun and a pistol was just an unconnected deranged loser, they will argue. No organization, no terror, they will argue. No intention to affect public policy, no terror, they will argue.

It's a set of standards that they won't apply if some lone Arab goes on a rampage in Tel Aviv, or if some FBI agent provocateur singles out some weak-minded American Muslim and gets him to talk about mindless violence into the hidden microphone. However, to point that out is to risk being labeled a traitor or a Saddam Hussein loyalist or some such.

And isn't that the whole point? Isn't the vilification and dehumanization of large sectors of humanity the central theme of this right-wing period through which US society has been living? Don't the Republicans hold a senate seat from Georgia because they morphed the image of Max Cleland with that of Osama bin Laden? Didn't they win the 2004 elections by campaigns in several states aimed at stripping rights away from homosexuals? Haven't the Bush administration's supporters tried to deflect attention from the administration's terrible performance in response to Hurricane Katrina by spreading false and racist stereotypes about the black residents of New Orleans? Didn't Mr. Scaife and the Swiftboaters falsely impugn Senator Kerry's military record and his patriotism?

For years, there has been a steady right-wing drumbeat that sometimes explicitly advocates violence, and always has as its written or unwritten bottom line that certain groups of people should be stripped of their rights and dignity.

No right to freely exercise religion for congregations that don't pass muster before the far right's modern Inquisition. No right to freedom of the press for anyone to the left of Fox News. No right to say what you believe, or believe what you believe. No right to privacy and dignity for homosexuals. No right to due process of law for those rightly or wrongly accused of crimes. No right to question the right-wing caricature of American history, which transforms the principal founders of the United States from the free thinkers that they were into narrow-minded sectarian Christian bigots that they weren't. No right to advocate a different economic arrangement than that which preserves and extends the power of the presently dominant multinational corporations. No right to American citizenship for the children of immigrants, and no rights at all for foreign citizens. No right not to be tortured. No right to work in teaching or the learned professions for anyone with views unapproved by the radical right. No right to join a union and bargain collectively with one's colleagues to promote common economic interests. No right to support the Democratic Party or promote liberal or leftist causes.

But when a couple of hoodlum ideologues, Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Nichols, acted out a fantasy from a racist novel that was popular in far right circles, the “t-word” was generally rejected as inappropriate because the criminals were white pseudo-Christians. When abortion clinics were bombed and the people who worked at them shot, no terrorism there, just the acts of lone fanatics. When homosexuals are assaulted or killed because of their sexual orientation, the right wing will argue about whether it's a hate crime --- because some of them believe that hatred is a fundamental human right, or because they believe that in any case it's proper to hate queers, or on the basis of some  pseudo-legal sophistry or another --- but never will any of them admit that it's terrorism.

And now this pathetic creep with explicit political motives acted out the hatred and violent fantasies promoted by a vast right-wing industry --- a constellation that includes media large and small, highly profitable religious fund raising operations, paramilitary groups, all sorts of hucksters and charlatans, think tanks, issue-oriented groups and influential factions of the Republican Party. And hear the squeals of protest from the right-wing hate merchants when it is pointed out --- but not by many of the corporate mainstream media, most of which have this felt need to remain on good terms with the radical right --- that this guy steeped himself in widely sold right-wing hatred and just acted on reprehensible ideas that are some of the hottest merchandise for the Rupert Murdochs of this world.

And will the right-wing activists have to take time out from resending their 'Barack Obama is a Muslim' and 'Michelle Obama is unpatriotic' emails to defend their hate industry? They ought to be forced onto the defensive. They ought to be forced to the most disreputable margins of public discourse. Most of all, the politicians whom they promote should be run out of office in November.

We should also notice that this right-wing hate machine has its branch offices in Panama: that we have people advocating abuse of the criminal law to imprison those who don't adhere to the right wing of US politics; that we have had people from right-wing US "patriot" militia and "Christian anti-tax" movements setting up shop here and others pretending to be spokespeople and opinion leaders touting such individuals as leaders of or financial advisors for the "expat community;" that the Republican part of the local American community contains all the strains of hatred that are found in its counterparts in US venues.

Although we don't elect our leaders as such, in many respects Panama's American community has to make it known who does and who does not represent us. There may have been a time when far-right Zonians shoved everyone else aside and pretended to be the sole voice of the community. There may have been a time when the American community in Panama was Republican by a comfortable margin. Those times are over: we are a community with plural viewpoints and the radical right is just a minor fringe.

It's time to apply single standards, time to hold the right-wing hate mongers accountable for the effects of the venom that they spread, time to roll back the power, influence and “respectability” that their movement and its spokespeople have amassed over the years.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080729/ap_on_re_us/church_shooting

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jul/28/church-shooting-police-find-manifesto-suspects-car/

Let's look at some of the people who have been inciting hatred, for many years:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Anne Coulter

"Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it."

Glenn Beck

"I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag."

Ralph Reed

"I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver."

Rush Limbaugh

"Unitarians... don't have a "religious ethic" as much as an ideological ethic. They seem more organized for liberal activism than for worshiping God."

Tim Graham

"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative life style, the ACLU, the People for the American Way --- all of them who have tried to secularize America --- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Jerry Falwell, about 9/11

The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.... In order to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.

Dinesh D’Souza

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

Anne Coulter

"The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation."

Pat Robertson

"Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

Jesse Helms

"Personally, I can't stand Hillary Clinton and I'm grateful to the Democratic Party for finally making a decision resulting in getting that bitch off of my television screen."

Don Winner

"I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out, and I wouldn't have rescued them."

Bill O'Reilly

"Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig."

Michael Savage

"This was a nationwide movement at the time and was ultimately crushed through pure force, intimidation and tyranny and nothing more."

Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman
on the "Patriot" militias

"Concentrated Return Fire: One of the quirks about the Panamanian justice system with regards to these kinds of criminal slander complaints is that if a guy like Eric Jackson has five or six or seven criminal complaints against him, then he will most likely be seen by the same criminal prosecutor and judges who have been specially trained to deal with these kinds of criminal complaints."

Don Winner

"But these things speak evil of those things, verse 10 [reading from Jude] which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Look at the Metropolitan Community Church today, the gay church, almost accepted into the World Council of Churches. Almost, the vote was against them. But they will try again and again until they get in, and the tragedy is that they would get one vote. Because they are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally, and so Jude describes this as apostasy. But thank God this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there'll be a celebration in heaven."

Jerry Falwell

"Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals --- the two things seem to go together."

Pat Robertson

"You got a lot of Jewish liberals, a lot of Jewish far-left people, who basically feel that, you know, you don't have a right to go after terrorists because it's our fault, the United States' fault."

Bill O'Reilly

"Susan Guberman-Garcia is Jewish: So what, right? She also tends to be a know-it-all loudmouthed bitch."

Don Winner
(this is his “toned-down”
version after he called her
a “Jewish bitch” and there
were various complaints)

"[Liberals] teach our children multiculturalism rather than American culture, revisionist history rather than American history, the thinly disguised religion of secular humanism and extreme environmentalism rather than capitalism. They train our young to criticize America, not celebrate it. They welcome condoms into the classroom but ban God and the Ten Commandments. They encourage tolerance for the teachings of the Koran but not for the teachings of Jesus Christ. They oppose the Pledge of Allegiance, tell us that ‘God is dead,’ that ‘Christianity is for losers,’ and that evangelical and Catholic conservatives are more dangerous than radical Islamic militants. They tell us that fuel-burning SUVs are bad for America, but flag-burning SOBs aren’t. But they are wrong. And it is time to ask: Why, particularly in time of war, should we entrust the education of our children to people who loathe and ravage so many of our core values and traditions?"

Sean Hannity

Bear in mind...

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

Luis Buñuel

The politics of fear is fueling a downward spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no person is safe. Governments are undermining the rule of law and human rights with short-sighted fear-mongering and divisive policies.

Irene Khan

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

George Washington

Also in this section:
Editorial: The  Torrijos security decrees
Leis, In order to talk about security
Bernal, Spies and borders
Jackson, The Torrijos administration's silence at and about the Doha Round
Center for Economic and Policy Research, The Doha Round's collapse
Smaller, We need a new multilateralism now that the old scheme has died
Ardesher & Wayne, Was there ever a future for bananas?
Obama, Energy policy
McCain, Remarks to the Americans With Disabilities Conference
Weisbrot, Offshore drilling won't help but a "green stimulus" can
Airriess, Where is Obama really at on NAFTA?
Change To Win, The American Dream Platform
Trujillo, Uribe vs. Colombia's institutions
Dunn, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's setbacks
Pilgrim, More about the anatomy of Caribbean unity
Reporters Without Borders, China restricts Internet access for Olympic athletes
Letters to the editor

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