Last week, Coulter expressed support for torture. On a September 20th broadcast of The Jon Caldara Show, Coulter said:
I'm for torture… We need a referendum in America on whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11… I want a referendum among Americans on whether or not he should be tortured. I think he should be given waterboarding on days that he's good. And I think Americans would agree with me.
Coulter apparently feels qualified to not just rewrite the Geneva Convention but — even worse — ignore it completely so she can exact a revenge that establishes her as the kind of person who made the Convention necessary in the first place.
The depth of what Coulter said may not be immediately clear. Consider that this week, Congress and the White House are trying to work out an agreement on rules for what "harsh interrogation methods" the CIA can use when questioning captives. Whether these harsh methods constitute torture or not is part of the debate. Coulter seems to think that these methods, at least waterboarding, does constitute torture. In this exchange with Caldara, she supports its use.
But what the torture bill covers is whether the CIA can use these methods to interrogate prisoners, to force them to give up (and even fabricate) information to make the pain stop. Coulter is talking about using it as a form of punishment. That's where the true moral depravity of what she is suggesting lies.
Although no less deplorable for it, using torture to extract information for the sake of a "greater good" is understandable. Using torture just to make someone scream is sadism.
Source:
September 28th, 2006
Posted by
Eric |
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It's difficult to respond to Coulter's column this week (September 20, 2006) because, well, she doesn't say much of substance, just makes slurs and throws insults.
This week's big news is the give-and-take between the White House and Republicans on the legalization of “harsh interrogation techniques†what some call torture. Coulter describes the desire to avoid inhumane treatment and assure justice as "[being] treated like Martha Stewart facing an insider trading charge."
The three Republican Senators currently fighting the White House receive this treatment:
McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John Warner — or, as the Times now calls him, the "courtly Virginian" ("fag-hag by proxy to Elizabeth Taylor" being beneath his dignity these days) — want terrorists treated like Americans accused of crimes, with full access to classified information against them and a list of the undercover agents involved in their capture.
Senator John Warner is a World War II veteran and a former Secretary of the Navy. Coulter referred to him, instead, as a "fag-hag."
The Graham/Warner/McCain bill does not ask that prisoners be given "a list of the undercover agents involved in their capture." Even so, is it so reprehensible to allow someone -– who is innocent until proven guilty, as Coulter ought to know — access to the evidence being used against them? As consitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald put it: (emphasis added)
Advocating minimal due process protections for military commissions before people are executed for being "terrorists" cannot honestly be described as "giving rights to terrorists" because they are not terrorists solely by being accused — and anyone who describes it as such is engaged in deceit and distortion, not "framing" techniques or political spin.
Coulter continues by saying:
There hasn't been this much railing about the mistreatment of a hostage since Monica Lewinsky was served canapes at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton Hotel while being detained by the FBI.
This reference to Lewinsky has absolutely nothing to do with this issue. Does Coulter have some sort of contractual obligation to mention Clinton's affair once in every column? We suspect it is mentioned because it is an emotional hot button for her mostly-Republican audience.
The ultimate failure of her argument can be seen here:
But being nice to enemies is an idea that has never worked, no matter how many times liberals make us do it. It didn't work with the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, Hitler or the North Vietnamese — enemies notable for being more civilized than the Islamic savages we are at war with today…
If the Democrats and the four pathetic Republicans angling to be called "mavericks" by The New York Times really believe we need to treat captured terrorists nicely in order to ensure that the next American they capture will be well-treated, then why stop at 600-thread-count sheets for the Guantanamo detainees?
This is what's knows as a straw man argument, in which Coulter deliberately misrepresents her opponent's position to make it easy to refute. Far from suggesting that we "be nice" to terrorists the real issue is: if we want to be considered a civilized society, there are things that we must refuse to do, no matter how angry we are and no matter how badly we wish revenge. To do otherwise is to lose our soul as a nation.
Coulter says she is a devout Christian. One can only wonder how she would react if some bearded hippie told her that we should not only be nice to our enemies, but love them as well.
September 24th, 2006
Posted by
Eric |
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In Chapter 1 of Godless, Coulter lays out many of the themes she will repeatedly hammer throughout the book, one of which is the evils of environmentalism and that worrying about how humans affect our planet is inconvenient for conservatives. "The various weeds and vermin liberals are always trying to save are no more distinguishable than individual styles of rap music."
While mocking conservationists' efforts to keep our planet healthy by incongruously equating its importance to that of rap music — both of which apparently annoy her — we find Godless' first instance of possible plagiarism… and we're only on page 5.
The sentence Coulter uses to follow the one quoted above is remarkably similar to an item contained in a January 1, 2000 article that appeared at MaineToday.com. The article, "Maine stories of the century: The results," contains the results of a poll to determine which events in Maine's history readers felt were the most important. Number 38 reads:
38. 1976: The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct.
On page 5 of Godless, Coulter writes:
"The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."
By inserting "in Maine," changing "is" to "was," and adding "previously," Coulter apparently feels she changed the MaineToday.com item sufficiently that it no longer warrants credit or attribution in the book's footnotes. In the context of the paragraph, she presents this example of conservationists intervening on behalf of nature as her own, but it's clearly material copyrighted six years earlier by Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Source:
MaineToday.com, "Maine stories of the century: The results"
September 23rd, 2006
Posted by
David |
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Chapter 7 of Godless tries to make a case against "the left's war on science." Coulter endeavors to counter the claim that there have been no successes in treating diseases with adult stem cell (as opposed to embryonic stem cells).
She writes, "In the August 24, 2004, New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata claimed that no one had succeeded in using adult stem cells 'to treat diseases.'" Coulter says Kolata is wrong, and lists what she says are sixteen "successful treatments achieved by adult stem cell research." It's interesting how similar (read: almost identical) Coulter's list is to a list of sixteen items that appeared on the Illinois Right to Life's website in 2003 (Godless was published in 2006).
Coulter gives no credit to the Illinois Right to Life's website for providing either the information or the wording for "her" list. Even the order of the items is remarkably similar, differing only in the first items listed. Here are the items in Coulter's list, and the comparable Illinois Right to Life website's item. Notice how, with only minor spelling or punctuation changes, Coulter makes the information her own:
Illinois Right To Life: Spinal cord injury repair (using stem cells from nasal and sinus regions)
Coulter: Repairing spinal cord injuries by using stem cells from nasal and sinus regions.
Illinois Right To Life: Complete reversal of juvenile diabetes in mice using adult spleen cells
Coulter: Completely reversing Type 1 diabetes in mice using adult spleen cells
Illinois Right To Life: Crohn’s Disease put into remission (using patient’s blood stem cells)
Coulter: Putting Crohn's disease into remission with the patient's own blood stem cells
Illinois Right To Life: Lupus put into remission (using stem cells from patient’s bloodstream)
Coulter: Putting lupus into remission using stem cells from the patient's bloodstream
Illinois Right To Life: Repair heart muscle in cases of congestive heart failure (using stem cells from bone marrow)
Coulter: Repairing the heart muscles in patients with congestive heart failure using adult stem cells from bone marrow.
Illinois Right To Life: Repair heart attack damage (using the patient’s own blood stem cells)
Coulter: Repairing heart attack damage with the patient’s own blood stem cells
Illinois Right To Life: Restore bone marrow in cancer patients (using stem cells from umbilical cord blood)
Coulter: Restoring bone marrow in cancer patients using stem cells from umbilical cord blood.
Illinois Right To Life: Restore weak heart muscles (using immature skeletal muscle cells)
Coulter: Restoring weak heart muscles using immature skeletal muscle cells
Illinois Right To Life: Put leukemia into remission (using umbilical cord blood)
Coulter: Putting leukemia into remission using umbilical cord blood
Illinois Right To Life: Heal bone fractures (using bone marrow cells)
Coulter: Healing bone fractures with bone marrow cells.
Illinois Right To Life: Restore a blind man’s sight (using an ocular surface stem-cell transplant & a cornea transplant)
Coulter: Restoring sight in blind people using an ocular surface stem-cell transplant and a cornea transplant
Illinois Right To Life: Treat urinary incontinence (using under arm muscle stem cells)
Coulter: Treating urinary incontinence using stem cells from underarm muscle
Illinois Right To Life: Reverse severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) (using genetically modified adult stem cells)
Coulter: Reversing severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) with genetically modified adult cells.
Illinois Right To Life: Restore blood circulation in legs (using bone marrow stem cells)
Coulter: Restoring blood circulation in legs with bone marrow stem cells.
Illinois Right To Life: Treat sickle-cell anemia (using stem cells from unbilical cord blood)
Coulter: Treating sickle-cell anemia using stem cells from umbilical cord blood.
"Plagiarism" is addressed and defined on the websites for both of Coulter's alma maters, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Cornell University's definition, for example, is as follows:
Plagiarism is misrepresenting somebody else's intellectual work - ideas, information, writing, thinking - as your own. In other words, it is a misuse of source material. Whether intentional or unintentional, plagiarism is a serious violation of Cornell's Code of Academic Integrity.
Even if one could somehow manage to overlook the obvious lifting of material (we wonder if Cornell would), one would have to admit that at the very least the repetition and order of items in both lists makes it clear Coulter used the Illinois Right to Life list as a reference, one she somehow forgot to credit properly in her voluminous footnotes.
Sources:
The Raw Story
Illinois Right to Life
University of Michigan
Cornell University
September 20th, 2006
Posted by
David |
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This week's column (September 13, 2006), coming on the week of the fifth anniversarry of the 9/11 attacks explains how they were all really Bill Clinton's fault. This comes the same week ABC broadcast the "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, or as Coulter described it:
…an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 Commission Report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton's cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.
The objections to The Path to 9/11, did not come entirely from "Clinton fanatics" as Ann says, but also from conservatives including Bill Bennett, and even Harvey Keitel, the film's main actor. [1] Those objections were not about a "whitewashing" but about fictional scenes and outright fabrications in the movie, which consistently misstated the facts of the matter. These included scenes showing Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser refusing an opportunity to assasinate Osama bin Laden, and showing Bush more concerned with the infamous "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US" PDB that he actually was. Oddly all the fabricated scenes either make Clinton look worse than in reality, or make Bush look better. [2,3] These events are portrayed, even though they are contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report the movie was supposedly based on.
Perhaps that has something to do with its conservative writer/producer Cyrus Nowrasteh. Or possibly due to the fact that it was also partly based on a book co-written by John Miller, currently the Assistant Director of Public Affairs for the FBI, even though most of the ABC promotional material only mentions the 9/11 Commission's Report.
Coulter goes on to complain that Clinton did not act to stop terrorism, and begins with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center:
The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.
For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)
What Ann means by "the first time ever" and by "simple criminal offense" isn't clear. Terrorist incidents in this country are generally handled by the FBI. In 1980, a bomb was detonated at Statue of Liberty. [4] That incident was investigated by the FBI, but has never been solved. In 1983, a bomb detonated caused a quarter of a million dollars in damage (but fortunately killed no one) at the US Capitol building. That was also investigated by the FBI, and led to six arrests. [5]
Ann glosses over the fact that the "simple criminal" investigation of this bombing was largely successful. Ann is also mistaken when she says "the one plotter who got away fled to Iraq," as several of the terrorists initially fled overseas: mastermind Ramzi Yousef to Pakistan and Eyad Ismoil to Jordan. Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Jordan, and later to Iraq. Yasin (oddly, born in Bloomington, Indiana) may have been in prison in Iraq since 1994. He was interviewed by CBS News in 2002, but his current whereabouts are unknown. The conspirators and co-conspirators are each serving prison sentences of 240 years. [6,7,8]
Although Clinton made the criminal justice system the entire U.S. counterterrorism strategy, there was not even an indictment filed after the bombing of either Khobar Towers (1996) or the USS Cole (2000). Indictments were not filed until after Bush/Ashcroft came into office.
Again, this is incorrect. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, bin Laden was indicted by a grand jury in 1998. The sealed idictment was handed down in June, and was publically revealed in November. [9]
After ignoring the capture and imprisonment of the perpetrators of World Trade Center bombing and the bin Laden indictment, Coulter continues her incorrect claims that Clinton was ineffective:
…Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996.
The problem with her claim — and she's made it several times in various media — is that it didn't happen. It's a claim that's commongly repeated in right-wing media outlets, but according to the 9/11 Commission:
President Clinton, in a February 2002 speech to the Long Island Association, said that the United States did not accept a Sudanese offer and take Bin Ladin because there was no indictment. President Clinton speech to the Long Island Association, Feb. 15, 2002 (videotape of speech). But the President told us that he had "misspoken" and was, wrongly, recounting a number of press stories he had read. After reviewing this matter in preparation for his Commission meeting, President Clinton told us that Sudan never offered to turn Bin Ladin over to the United States. President Clinton meeting (Apr. 8, 2004). Berger told us that he saw no chance that Sudan would have handed Bin Ladin over and also noted that in 1996, the U.S. government still did not know of any al Qaeda attacks on U.S. citizens.
About the claim that the Sudanese offered to turn bin Laden over to the U.S., the 9/11 Commision said: [9]
Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.
Coulter never passes up a chance to bring up the Lewinsky scandal when discussing Clinton, no matter how unrelated to the topic at hand:
In August 1998, three days after Clinton admitted to the nation that he did in fact have "sex with that woman," he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, doing about as much damage as another Clinton fusillade did to a blue Gap dress.
The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq. This accomplished two things: (1) It delayed his impeachment for one day, and (2) it got a lot of Democrats on record about the monumental danger of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
So don't tell me impeachment "distracted" Clinton from his aggressive pursuit of terrorists. He never would have bombed anyone if it weren't for the Clinton-haters.
Yet, again, the 9/11 Commission disagrees with Coulter:
Everyone involved in the decision [to bomb Sudan] had, of course, been aware of President Clinton's problems. He told them to ignore them. Berger recalled the President saying to him "that they were going to get crap either way, so they should do the right thing."51 All his aides testified to us that they based their advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no reason to question their statements. [10]
President Clinton told us that he had directed his national security team to focus exclusively on responding to the embassy bombings. President Clinton meeting (Apr. 8, 2004). See also William Cohen testimony, Mar. 23, 2004.When "wag the dog" allegations were again raised during the December 1998 Desert Fox campaign over Iraq, Defense Secretary Cohen, formerly a Republican senator, told members of Congress that he would have resigned if he believed the President was using the military for any purpose other than national security.
Sources:
September 20th, 2006
Posted by
Eric |
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In this week's column (August 31, 2006), Coulter calls yet again for the assasination of a public figure, and that's even before we get to the body of the text! She attacks Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island, calling him, among other things: a "half-wit;" kicked in the head by a horse, and a "silver spoon moron." She says he can't read books, but gets his information from reading Doonesbury and watching The West Wing. Chafee's crime that made him the target for such abuse was simply not voting along the Republican party line.
She also grossly distorts history to make her point:
After Chafee's family money got him into Andover and Brown, he made his living shoeing horses for seven years… When the farrier business proved too taxing for Chafee's intellect, he went into the family business — politics. His father died in office, and Lincoln was appointed by the governor to serve out the remainder of Pop's term in the U.S. Senate… In terms of qualifications for the job, Chafee makes Michael Brown look like Donald Rumsfeld.
To listen to Coulter, Chafee was an unqualified blacksmith who was chosen out of the blue to fill his father's seat in the Senate. Shoeing horses one day; off to Washington, D.C. the next. While it is true that Chafee worked as a blacksmith after graduating from Brown University, Coulter doesn't mention that he also worked in manufacturing management.
Most telling is her complete omission of his entire pre-Senate political career. After working for a few years after college, Chafee became a delegate to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention. He then served six years on the Warwick City Council, and seven years as mayor of Warwick. Warwick is the second-largest city in Rhode Island. In 1999 he was appointed to the Senate seat after his father's sudden and unexpected death, but ran for election the following year and won with a sixteen percentage point margin of victory. Coulter omits all these facts from her column, but does make a point of the fact that the Republican currently challenging Chafee for the Republican nomination is the mayor of Cranston, the next smaller town in Rhode Island.
Writing for The Providence Journal, Shiela Lennon says of the title of Coulter's column:
Wishing death on those she disagrees with is despicable and brings no honor to those she supports.
We couldn't agree more.
Sources:
September 13th, 2006
Posted by
Eric |
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We didn't lose anyone close on 9/11; thousands of others were not so lucky. Even more still struggle with very real pain, trauma, and illnesses from that fateful day. We feel belittling that pain is dishonorable, and actually mocking it is inexcusable.
In her latest book, Godless Coulter writes:
These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.
And of their husbands she says:
How do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?
She dubbed these widows "harpies" and "The Witches of East Brunswick."
This past week, Kristen Breitweiser, one of the "Witches" responded with "A Letter to Ann Coulter" at the Huffington Post. It's eloquent, level-headed, and worth reading.
Coulter accuses liberals of hating America and rooting for terrorists, so Brietweiser explains her motivation in fighting for the 9/11 Commission:
We wanted the 9/11 attacks investigated thoroughly and competently so that fewer terrorist attacks would succeed in the future and more lives would be saved on the day of the next attack. … We wanted to hold the government accountable so that, going forward, our nation would be better prepared for future attacks and disasters.
Brietweiser closes with this:
Ann, I don't want to get into a debate with you. It's not because I am afraid of you or your nasty bullying tactics. I'm not going to debate you because we have many, many more important issues to deal with in our country right now.
But I will leave you with this: We live in America, the world's oldest democracy. Democracy can prevail (is that what you and your friends really fear?), but that requires hard work, as President Bush might say. Every citizen in this country is entitled to his or her beliefs, and every citizen is entitled to participate. We still have the right to speak our minds to effect change (within the parameters of the law, of course). So don't try to silence the voices of victims or anyone else, merely because you disagree with them or feel threatened by their political choices. In my opinion, your method of using intimidation and insults to "win" a debate is truly unpatriotic.
Actually, I expect that you will continue to scream and shout and smear as nastily as you want, so long as you think that that kind of behavior sells books. But we have tackled bigger bullies than you and lived through far worse circumstances than your book tour. We're not intimidated by you. We're not running away.
September 11th, 2006
Posted by
Eric |
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