Day: August 7, 2002

One-Fifth of the Prisoners Are Witches

The Daily Telegraph (London) has an odd story about how the legal code of the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo (which is anything but a democracy) is one of the few left in the world that both a) formally defines witchcraft as a crime and b) regularly enforces that legal ban on sorcery.

The Daily Telegraph reporter notes that the DRC is planning to open a new national prison, and about 20 percent of the prisoners there will be people imprisoned for violating the country’s anti-witchcraft laws. According to the story,

At Bangui police station, a team of detectives specialises in sorcery. To make the investigators immune to the spells of their suspects, they are routinely injected with “vaccinations” of herbs by witchdoctors. They say that this is necessary because the number of those practising witchcraft is rising. Hundreds of women, men and children are charged every year with witchcraft offences, and if found guilty are punished by imprisonment and even execution.

One explanation for the increase is the spread of Aids. More than 17 per cent of the population is HIV positive, and deaths from Aids are often attributed to sorcery rather than from unprotected sex or infected blood transfusions.

How long do we have to wait for Law & Order: Sorcery Division?

Seriously, isn’t it weird to live in a world where some people use PDAs with more computing power than supercomputers used to have while other parts of the world are still imprisoning people for being witches?

Cato Institute Reprints Leftist Nonsense

Like the Left, the Right — including the libertarian right — sometimes puts its desire to make ideological points above even minimal fact checking. Such is the case with a recent Cato Institute article by Ted Galen Carpenter which does little more than rewrite a long-debunked column by Robert Scheer.

Carpenter’s column, How Washington Funded the Taliban is largely a rewrite of a column originally written by Leftist Robert Scheer and published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2001. Scheer claimed that the Bush administration decided to reward the Taliban with a $43 million grant after the Taliban cracked down on opium production. This claim is nonsense, but apparently Carpenter was so taken by the chance to make a point against the drug war that he ditched all his critical thinking skills out the window.

Lets look at some of the lowlights of Carpenter’s article,

When the Taliban implemented a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001, U.S. officials were most complimentary. James P. Callahan, director of Asian Affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, uncritically relayed the alleged accounts of Afghan farmers that “the Taliban used a system of consensus-building” to develop and carry out the edict. That characterization was more than a little suspect because the Taliban was not known for pursuing consensus in other aspects of its rule. Columnist Robert Scheer was justifiably scathing in his criticism of the U.S. response. “That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising,” Sheer noted, but he considered it “grotesque” for a U.S. official to describe the drug-crop crackdown in such benign terms.

Yes, Callahan was impressed by the almost immediate cessation, but this is selective quoting. Callahan made it clear that the poppy ban succeeded partially due to the fervor of extremist Islamic ideals and partially due to the threat of prison for people who violated the ban. But in Carpenter and Scheer’s worlds it is a lot easier to use selective quotes.

Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban’s proclaimed ban of opium cultivation. In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. Given Callahan’s comment, there was little doubt that the new stipend was a reward for Kabul’s anti-drug efforts. That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan’s estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan’s theocratic masters.

This is simply factually erroneous. The $43 million grant was, in fact, humanitarian aid. At the time, Afghanistan was yet again experiencing drought and hunger. Beginning in the late 1990s, the United States was the primary donor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan related-relief, and the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, authorized relief aid that the World Food Program requested.

Moreover, despite the impression given by Carpenter, the $43 million didn’t go directly to the Taliban nor was it in the form of cash. In reality, the United States authorized the shipment of $43 million in food and other supplies to United Nations famine relief efforts that were based in Pakistan at the time. In fact, at the time Colin Powell was explicit in saying that the relief aid would “bypass the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it.”

(I suppose that Carpenter thinks the United Nations and World Food Program just trumped up their estimates of hundreds of thousands of famine deaths in the Spring of 2001 in order to provide cover for the Bush administration to reward the Taliban with surplus corn).

A Glaring Lack of Responsibility

Dave Winer writes,

See, sometimes when writing in this mode, something that’s not politically correct, or inadvertently not politically correct, sneaks out. Shit happens. Before I can correct it, some blogger somewhere has launched a holy jihad and is experiencing the rush of body chemistry that comes from it. And then I spot the bit of vulnerability (sometimes it’s just a spelling or grammatical mistake or an awkward wording) and make the change and save it, and oops, the flamer has nothing to flame about. There’s a bit of a fallacy in their ire, because they don’t have to give back the endorphins, but maybe they’re hoping for a double-dip. I have many new assholes cut in this manner. Yet I still persist in real-time writing, when the spirit strikes me, as it does today.

Translation: Dave is unwilling to take responsibility for the things that he posts on Scripting.Com. Things that might be too hard to justify simply go into the memory hole.

This is one of the differences between him and “bigpub” journalists — the journalists may get things very wrong, but at least they are accountable.

Winer tries to have it both ways — he wants to write the first thing that comes to mind no matter how politically incorrect or downright rude it might be, but on the other hand he wants to shirk responsibility for the words he writes.

Cynthia McKinney Is Robert Mugabe’s No. 1 Fan

Zimbabwe, as regular readers of this site are aware, is in the midst of famine due to the corrupt leadership of Robert Mugabe who has done everything from seizing land from white farmers, instituting strict censorship, fixing elections, etc.

Indepundit has a brief snippet from a speech from Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) defending this despot, but here is the full text of McKinney’s statements in opposition to a bill that imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe,

SPEECH OF HON.
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY OF GEORGIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Tuesday, December 4, 2001

* Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, at the international Relations Committee meeting of November 28, 2001, which considered the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, I asked a question of my colleagues who were vociferously supporting this misdirected piece of legislation: “Can anyone explain how the people in question who now have the land in question in Zimbabwe got title to the land?”

* My query was met with a deafening silence. Those who knew did not want to admit the truth and those who didn’t know should have known–that the land was stolen from its indigenous peoples through the British South Africa Company and any “titles” to it were illegal and invalid. Whatever the reason for their silence, the answer to this question is the unspoken but real reason for why the United States Congress is now concentrating its time and resources on squeezing an economically-devastated African state under the hypocritical guise of providing a “transition to democracy.”

* Zimbabwe is Africa’s second-longest stable democracy. It is multi-party. It had elections last year where the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, won over 50 seats in the parliament. It has an opposition press which vigorously criticizes the government and governing party. It has an independent judiciary which issues decisions contrary to the wishes of the governing party. Zimbabwe is not without troubles, but neither is the United States. I have not heard anyone proposing a United States Democracy Act following last year’s Presidential electoral debacle. And if a foreign country were to pass legislation calling for a United States Democracy Act which provided funding for United States opposition parties under the fig leaf of “Voter Education,” this body and this country would not stand for it.

* There are many de jure and de facto one-party states in the world which are the recipients of support of the United States government. They are not the subject of Congressional legislative sanctions. To any honest observer, Zimbabwe’s sin is that it has taken the position to right a wrong, whose resolution has been too long overdue–to return its land to its people. The Zimbabwean government has said that a situation where 2 percent of the population owns 85 percent of the best land is untenable. Those who presently own more than one farm will no longer be able to do so.

* When we get right down to it, this legislation is nothing more than a formal declaration of United States complicity in a program to maintain white-skin privilege. We can call it an “incentives” bill, but that does not change its essential “sanctions” nature. It is racist and against the interests of the masses of Zimbabweans. In the long-run the Zimbabwe Democracy Act will work against the United States having a mutually beneficial relationship with Africa.

That’s really amazing. Politicians in South Africa understand that Mugabe is a despot — the African National Congress actually went to the trouble of explicitly saying it would never try to enforce the sort of theft of land from white farmers that Mugabe has forced on Zimbabwe.

But McKinney has no problem at all defending one of the worst contemporary African dictators. Her paragraph about the elections and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change are laugh out loud hilarious and could have easily come from Mugabe-controlled newspapers.

It is ironic that McKinney gave her remarks about Zimbabwe’s laudable democracy on Dec. 5, 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, in Dec. 2001 in Zimbabwe there were 7 politically motivated murders, 22 kidnappings/disappearances, 14 unlawful arrests/detentions and 119 cases of torture carried about by the government or government supporters.

It’s hard to believe a woman this ignorant and oblivious can hold a national office.

Source:

ZIMBABWE DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY ACT
OF 2001 (Extensions of Remarks – December 05, 2001. Cynthia McKinney, December 5, 2001.