Yearly Archives: 2004

Humiliation, Revisited

6/17/2004 – 8:30 pm

In 1995, I was among a number of Greenpeace activists arrested in a non-violent protest at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC. We’d embarrassed the Secret Service, so when we got to jail, they gave us the treatment. We were strip-searched, placed in handcuffs with restraining belts and leg shackles. We were rousted from […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

Reagan Lives

6/10/2004 – 9:33 am

George W. Bush recently told Bob Woodward that history’s judgement of his presidency doesn’t matter to him, because he’ll be dead. If he’s right, history can commence judgement of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but Mr. Bush is wrong, at least in Mr. Reagan’s case. He may be dead, but it’s too soon to draw a complete […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

Fool Sovereignty

6/3/2004 – 10:40 am

Sometime between now and the June 30th deadline for handing over “full sovereignty” to the new Iraqi government, some American representative will have to walk into the Iraqi desert and count the grains of sand, to make sure they’re all handed over. The unlucky bureaucrat assigned to this task can use neither supercomputer nor statistical […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

If I Had a Million Dollars

5/27/2004 – 6:32 pm

Ads for the New York State lottery, beamed across Lake Champlain, feature groups of people singing, “If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a house.” The idea, of course, is to convince several million people to buy a lottery ticket. The odds of winning a million-dollar lottery are something on the order […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

How Far Up? For How Long?

5/20/2004 – 2:33 pm

The two questions that most urgently need answers in the Iraq torture scandal are: How far up and for how long? How far up the chain of command did authorization of torture go and how long has this been sanctioned practice? The trickle of testimony on this subject has become a stream; next week it […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

The Fuse is Burning

5/13/2004 – 9:55 am

Last year, George W. Bush told us the U.S. had to invade Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction. Later we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration had twisted facts to make it seem as if there were. This year, Mr. Bush told us […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)

Hard to Believe

5/6/2004 – 8:44 am

When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)