The New York Times, self-proclaimed "paper of record," failed to record that General Vang Pao, who died Thursday, January 6, was a wretched drug dealer who targeted U.S. troops in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines for drug sales.

Let's go over the bizarre, Soviet-style, Times obit entitled "Gen. Vang Pao, Laotion Who Aided U.S., Dies at 81." In their ideological analysis, Pao was a "...charismatic Laotian general who commanded a secret army of his mountain people in a long, losing campaign against Communist insurgents." The Times goes on to say he had "almost kinglike status."

They quote a Hmong refugee in California saying "He is like the earth and the sky." They throw in the following quote of the general to his Hmong troops: "If we die, we die together. Nobody will be left behind."

In the New York Times fantasyland, Vang Pao was a patriot and an anti-communist hero. The Times glosses over the fact that Vang Pao was discredited in Laos because he was perceived as a lackey and a tool of French imperialism. He was a sergeant in the French colonial army, the Times tells us, and then he went on to work directly for the CIA.

The Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio is seeking emergency support in these cold winter months. The Free Press has partnered with the Native American Center for many years for our awards dinner. Your quick donation is needed to keep their much-needed services going for the Native American community and other needy people on the south side, such as: the community food pantry, clothing pantry, the White Bison AA meetings, and health screenings. A couple of hundred dollars would be very helpful to the NAICCO center at this time.

You can send a contribution or become a member of the Native American Indian Center through Paypal from this site:

NAICCO Donate

or send a check to:

NAICCO
P.O. Box 07705
Columbus Ohio 43207

Thank you so much!
Bob Fitrakis
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived till he was just 39. He has been dead now longer than he lived.

Sadly, too many who never worked with, or even supported, Dr. King while he was alive and in the middle of the struggle, now engage in rhetorical gymnastics, manipulating Dr. King’s words to conform to their own world view and justify their own ideological and political--even military--agendas.

We would all do well to ignore recent perverse misappropriations of Dr. King’s words with regard to our current wars. If he were alive today, Dr. King would, in my opinion, decry the diversion of resources to unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Not just in words, but in deeds, Dr. King never wavered in his commitment to peace and non-violence.

Will there be copycats?

Will parents let their children attend political rallies anymore? Will Congress ever come to our corner again?

We witness another impromptu festival of American violence, this one in front of a Tucson Safeway. One more place that used to be safe and ordinary, suitable for children, is suddenly, for one random moment, a free-fire zone. A 9-year-old girl who wanted to learn how government works is among the half dozen dead. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head, fights for her life.

What do we do now, other than shrug, shudder, grieve?

A few days later, one priority — one — remains standing in the wreckage. How in God’s name do we disarm?

How do we disarm our impulses, our fears, our fantasies, our miscalculations? How do we disarm our language, which has us going to war with virtually every problem we face?

Fifty years ago this Monday, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell address in which he famously warned of the dangers of influence on our government by the "military industrial complex." Our current Secretary of War, Robert Gates, has proposed to retire this year and has recommended that his successors stop increasing the military budget. But Eisenhower didn't just bring this up on his way out the door. It was seven years earlier that he had remarked:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people."

The case of Private Bradley Manning raises legal issues about his pre-trial detention, freedom of speech and the press, as well as proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Putting aside Manning’s guilt or innocence, if Bradley Manning saw the Afghan and Iraq war diaries as well as the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks what should he have done? And, what should be the proper response of government to their publication?

A high point in the application of the rule of law to war came in the Nuremberg trials where leaders in Germany were held accountable for World War II atrocities. Justice Robert Jackson, who served as the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials while on leave from the U.S. Supreme Court, said “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

The Second Amendment supports those of us who would CONTROL guns---and thus prevent the insane slaughter that compromises our security.

James Madison and the Founders of this nation would be enraged to see the Second Amendment being used to put guns in the hands of the Tucson shooter and so many others like him.

The debate over the violent hatespeak of Sarah "Lock & Load" Palin and her Foxist ilk is long overdue.

But so is a careful national reawakening to what the Second Amendment actually says:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Of the first Ten Amendments, this is the only one that contains a rationale for what it requires.

The Bill of Rights is the law of the land, clearly stated. Guarantees of religion, speech, assembly, the press, freedom from torture and so much more are natural rights, inherent to the human condition.

But the right to bear arms is granted only in the context of a well-regulated militia and thus the security of a free state.

This year the list of atrocities committed under the guise of representative democracy is extensive, as anyone concerned in analyzing the actions of governments in the West can ascertain. If it was our wish, we could bombard the airwaves with images of suffering people from around the world, and swiftly link their pain to the corrupt institutions of government we have accepted as legitimate. With similar ease, we could trace the wealth accumulated by a small minority of ruthless economic elites, to their governmental bonds. But I see little need in contributing to this exercise considering the amount of relevant information already available. Instead, I find it more useful to speculate about what happens next. I am fairly confident that is what those bearing the brunt of our inhumanity must wonder. Will we end the bombs? Will we stop the banks? Will we transform our democracies?

When late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat read the Declaration of the Palestinian Independence just over 22 years ago, Palestinians everywhere were enthralled. They held onto his every word during the Palestinian National Council (PNC) session in Algeria on November 15, 1988. The council members incessantly applauded and chanted in the name of Palestine, freedom, the people and much more.

Back in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in Gaza, a large crowd of neighbors and friends watched the event on a small black and white television.

The Declaration of Independence read, in part: "On this day unlike all others…as we stand at the threshold of a new dawn, in all honor and modesty we humbly bow to the sacred spirits of our fallen ones, Palestinian and Arab, by the purity of whose sacrifice for the homeland our sky has been illuminated and our Land given life."

Many tears were shed, as those watching the historic event recalled the innumerable "spirits of the fallen ones". The Nuseirat refugee camp alone had buried scores of its finest men, women and children the previous year.

Pages

Subscribe to ColumbusFreePress.com  RSS