Nick Turse Quotes
U.S. failures when it comes to the Gulf of Guinea are many: a failure to address the longstanding concerns of a government watchdog agency, a failure to effectively combat piracy despite an outlay of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and a failure to confront corrupt African leaders who enable piracy in the first place.
Turse, Nick. Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. Haymarket Books, 2015.
Rendition is the process whereby one country sends a prisoner to another country for interrogation under the theory that the second country can use methods that would be illegal in the first country. Usually torture is involved.
Hollings who was one of the senior experienced senators was offended by the degree to which the George W. Bush Administration and the Republican leadership had turned to lobbyists to draft legislation and amendments to pending legislation. Lobbyists often have specialized information that members of Congress do not have, so there has been in modern times communications between lobbyists and members of Congress and their staffs. However, during the Bush Presidency the practice reached an extreme where lobbyists would even write the legislative language and give it to the members in whom they had invested by giving them large campaign contributions and many perks. K Street is the fanciest street in Washington DC with some of the most expensive office space. A substantial proportion of the lobbyists have K Street offices, hence the metaphor.
Criticism of the prison system comes from the right as well as the left.
The party was in great disarray as the Tea Party Republicans a movement new to politics tended to be very obstructionist against any proposals or legislation that did not conform to their ideology. They had very little legislative experience and viewed any compromise as an immoral abandonment of principles and ideology. The other republicans were conservative, experienced pragmatists, who were not into continuous confrontation with the Democrats. If the Tea Party did not believe a Republican was ideologically pure enough, they would often run a candidate against the Republican in the next primary election. Often the tea party insurgent would win by taking extreme positions and appealing to the rabid right wing of the party who tend to vote in primaries. But more often than not, the extreme positions the Tea Party candidates took would not appeal to the general electorate, and the Republicans would lose the seat in the general elections. Even if the regular Republican would win in the primary, he/she would have had to take such conservative positions that they were weakened in the general election and their judgment and discretion was limited to the primary election commitments they had made. Ever since the Tea Party elected some members of Congress, that body became more and more ineffective legislatively and passed the fewest laws in the history of Congress. This was fine for the Tea Party ideologues, but harmed the national brand of the Republican party with many different voter constituencies including Blacks, Hispanics, women, young people, intellectuals, and others. At the same time the White males—the backbone of the Republican Party—were demographically becoming a minority of males. The Republicans had not won the popular vote in 27 years, and the elder statesmen of the Republican party strongly urged that the Republican Party stop digging in the hole they had made and step back and reassess the party, its principles, policies and tactics.
This is one of the best statements on one of the major reason that terrible leaders stay in power in much of the world but especially Africa. In Uganda, they got rid of the maniacal dictator, Idi Amin, by allowing him to keep some of the money he stole and giving him asylum from world prosecution in Saudi Arabia. It was an unjust and unfair solution as he was never accountable for his crimes against humanity, and he lived well on the money he stole, but thousands of lives were saved and Uganda then was able to grow and develop. It is a Hobsen’s choice for Africa and the World. Both solutions are terrible, and few have ever been able to choose the pragmatic route that was taken in Uganda.
Nick Turse (born 1975) is an American investigative journalist, historian, and author. He is the associate editor and research director of the blog TomDispatch and a fellow at The Nation Institute.
