Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

This is a departure from the usual format because The New York Times is commemorating the 40th Anniversary of its Op-Ed with video interviews of some of the authors of its columns. Since this in UN Week and the Iraq War still continues, I find it profoundly appropriate that the NYT’s first video interview is with former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and the lies that led up to that war.

Joseph C. Wilson IV What I Didn’t Find in Africa

Published: July 6, 2003

WASHINGTON — Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa’s suspected link to Iraq’s nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That’s me.

New York Times Editorial: The Wars’ Continuing Toll

The United States military has never been better at helping soldiers survive the battlefield with sophisticated advances in treatment and transportation. Service members who come home with psychic wounds and hidden traumas are still not getting enough support.

Please Help a Veteran, Spread the Word

The “Usual” and “Unusual Suspects” are below the fold

Ben Crair: Witches Blast O’Donnell

Picnics on top of altars? Wiccans say they don’t have them-and they don’t like O’Donnell spreading bunk.

“Witchcraft” video  showing Delaware Tea Party sensation Christine O’Donnell describing a date she once had with a witch dominated the airwaves Monday. “I mean, there’s a little blood and stuff like that,” she told Bill Maher in a late ’90s clip from Politically Incorrect. “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” The footage delighted Democrats looking to embarrass the GOP Senate nominee, frightened Republicans, and alienated another constituency: witches, who say O’Donnell’s 1999 discussion of the subject is bunk-and bad publicity for the coven.

“We don’t have picnics on top of altars,” said Selena Fox, Wiccan high priestess for the Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin. “We are not Satanist. And we have good character, not ‘questionable’ character.” (At a non-Satanic picnic in Delaware on Sunday, O’Donnell brushed aside questions about her comments by asking, “How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?”)

In 2008, 1.2 percent of American adults, nearly 3 million people, declared themselves followers of “New Religious Movements,” the category that includes Wicca and other pagan belief systems. Wicca is a naturalistic religion whose followers generally worship a pantheistic Godhead and practice magic. Its creed, according to Fox, is “harm none, do what you will.” And yet the faith has always been dogged by an association with Satanism, a confusion, Fox said, that goes back to the Middle Ages. “The old nature religions of Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years,” she said, “and part of a tactic for suppressing the pagan practices of old was to label them Satanic or demonic.”

Amy Goodman: Torture in Iraq Continues, Unabated

Combat operations in Iraq are over, if you believe President Barack Obama’s rhetoric. But torture in Iraq’s prisons, first exposed during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is thriving, increasingly distant from any scrutiny or accountability. After arresting tens of thousands of Iraqis, often without charge, and holding many for years without trial, the United States has handed over control of Iraqi prisons, and 10,000 prisoners, to the Iraqi government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

After landing in London late Saturday night, we traveled to the small suburb of Kilburn to speak with Rabiha al-Qassab, an Iraqi refugee who was granted political asylum in Britain after her brother was executed by Saddam Hussein. Her husband, 68-year-old Ramze Shihab Ahmed, was a general in the Iraqi army under Saddam, fought in the Iran-Iraq War and was part of a failed plot to overthrow the Iraqi dictator. The couple was living peacefully for years in London, until September 2009.

It was then that Ramze Ahmed learned his son, Omar, had been arrested in Mosul, Iraq. Ahmed returned to Iraq to find him and was arrested himself.

For months, Rabiha didn’t know what had become of her husband. Then, on March 28, her cell phone rang. “I don’t know the voice,” she told me.

“I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said he is very sick … he said, ‘Me, Ramze, Ramze. Call embassy.’ And they took the mobile, and they stop talking.”

Ramze Ahmed was being held in a secret prison at the old Muthanna Airport in Baghdad. A recent report from Amnesty International, titled “New Order, Same Abuses,” describes Muthanna as “one of the harshest” prisons in Iraq, the scene of extensive torture and under the control of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Scott Ritter: Obama and Iraq: ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’

“The time has come to set aside childish things.” With these words, President Barack Obama, in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, pushed aside “the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas” which he claimed “far too long have strangled our politics.” This passing reference to the Scripture (1 Corinthians 13:11) served as the vehicle with which Obama broke with the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. While the differences in policy between Obama and Bush were many, they were particularly stark on the issue of the war in Iraq. On the surface, Obama’s televised address on Sept. 7, 2010, in which he somberly announced “the end of our combat mission in Iraq,” brought closure to a conflict as unnecessary as it was elective, and fulfilled, however superficially, his pledge to do just that. Unfortunately, Obama has come face to face with the biblical line “But now we see through a glass, darkly,” which immediately follows the Scriptural verse he mentioned in his inaugural address. The president and the American people will all too soon come to recognize that the quagmire in Iraq is far from over. In fact, one might say it has only just begun.

Howard Dean: Health Care Reform Will Succeed Without Individual Mandate

The right wing is attacking health care reform by using the courts to file constitutional challenges to the individual mandate. They assume that if they can convince the courts that the mandate is unconstitutional, they can unravel the changes to our health care system that were enacted into law and signed by the President earlier this year. The Obama administration and those many Americans who will benefit from the bill need not be concerned. A narrow ruling on this ground will have minimal effect. As we were able to demonstrate in Vermont, the expansion of our health care system can work without a mandate.

The academic thinking behind the need for an individual mandate suggests that without one, there will be a certain number of “free riders” — people who will essentially bet that they can go without insurance because if they do get sick they will be taken care of anyway and the costs are passed on to the rest of us. Some argue that the elimination of ” pre-existing condition” loopholes necessitates an individual mandate to prevent large premium increases. While the mandate does increase the number of insured Americans, and it does spread risk among a greater number of insured Americans by requiring them to be in the insurance pool, the expansion of the system envisioned in the bill can work without a mandate.

Gloria Goodale: Stephen Colbert-Jon Stewart Rally: Might TV Duo Affect Election 2010?

If the Jon Stewart rally set for Oct. 30 on the National Mall -“opposed” by Stephen Colbert’s rally – sticks with comedy, young voters might perk up for Election 2010, political scientists say.

Los Angeles –  In a nifty two-for-one parry, fans of Comedy Central’s late night “fake news” block now have both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert headed to Washington – on Halloween weekend, no less.

Colbert Nation enthusiasts had been pushing for their “leader” to host a “Restoring Truthiness” rally as a satirical counterweight to the Aug. 28 Glenn Beck rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But, in a move that political culturalist Jeffrey Jones calls very smart indeed, the duo has opted instead to headline dueling Saturday rallies on the National Mall, Stewart’s to “restore sanity,” and Colbert’s dubbed a “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

In the spirit of the spooky season, the two may be donning the cloak of fun and games, but as Stewart says, he has a grown-up goal: to revive the moderate center of our civic discourse.

The decision to join forces speaks volumes about their underlying motivations, says Mr. Jones, author of “Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement.” “This rally is about the serious side of satire.”

Tianjin, China

To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children – one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian – getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

That is how they see us.