Sunday Links

The fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination is also the fortieth anniversary of the Washington DC riots, which happened in angry response to news of MLK's death. The riots affected the city of DC for decades to come, leading first to a "white flight" abandonment of not only some of the city's more dynamic and interesting neighborhoods but also an abandonment of city politics and management. Over the 1990s and thus far into the 2000s, the demographics shifted again towards rapacious real estate investments (or "recovery") driving up prices wildly and ultimately leading to black flight out of the District proper for more affordable housing. There are very few neighborhoods in DC today that are mixed race and mixed income. What remains is just that - what remains in the face of inevitability. Most of the US and world thinks of Washington DC in terms of its federal institutions, the city's terrific museums, and the gigantic mausoleum known as the National Mall. But it has a fascinating history apart from its marble and granite facade, and the riots are the axis upon which the city's recent history still turns. Today, another axis of that history is the continuing appeal to white fears.

And... a song from WFMU.
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Forever Guantanamo: Raymond Bonner adds more in the NY Review of Books to the unfolding story of politicized legal limbo for the Guantanamo detainees.

It is unclear why the Bush administration chose to file the charges against the six [high-value prisoners] now. But some have suggested that the timing relates to the fact that the provision of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that denies detainees the right to file habeas petitions is currently before the Supreme Court—in Boumediene v. Bush—and a decision is expected before the Court's term ends in June. "It's all about politics, not justice," a senior law enforcement official told me. Nothing has changed in the last three years, he said; there is nothing we know now that we didn't know then. The official predicted that the Supreme Court will rule against the administration in the Boumediene case, because at least one of the Court's conservatives will join the liberals in upholding the principle of habeas corpus. Bush will then blame the liberals on the Court for obstructing the prosecution of dangerous men, whose habeas petitions will slowly wind through the courts. Democrats, and the Democratic presidential candidate especially, will then be put on the spot to defend, or reject, what the Court did, he argued, and it is not hard to imagine the attack ads on anyone who does not support whatever legislation the Bush administration proposes to cure the defects.

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Lewis Alsamari in Guernica on the pre-US history of Abu Ghraib:

The four AIDS-stricken women were dealt with in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the prison. Stripped of their clothes, they were placed, alive and screaming, into an incinerator so that they and their “vile disease” could be utterly destroyed. In this way Saddam “delivered” our country from the horrific infections of the West and from the inequities of the “evil Zionist state.” I kept quiet about my maternal grandmother’s Jewish heritage. She was one of only a handful of Jews who remained in Iraq during the great exodus of 1950. Before that time there were about 150,000 Jews living in Iraq; now there were fewer than a hundred, and it would have done me no favors if anyone suspected that I might embrace Zionism.

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Jeremy Waldron on Cass Sunstein's new book and one-percent risk-assessment:

Here’s another example of the way the One Per Cent Doctrine affects real-world decision-making. After we invaded Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction in his possession and did not seem to have been working on a WMD programme for a considerable time. Some American officials and politicians had lied when they said, before the war, that they were convinced he had weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to make a case for war, and they thought this argument (far-fetched as it was) would work with the public; they believed the public would find it harder to understand or accept the geopolitical premise on which the war was really based: to teach the world a lesson, to show what happens when a regime in an area of economic or strategic interest defies the United States. Others, however, sincerely believed it was possible that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, though they were by no means certain. Of those who believed it was possible, very few would have estimated the probability as low as one per cent. They might have said that in at least one in three cases like this (think about Iraq, Iran and North Korea), or one in five, it will turn out that the rogue regime in question really does have or is developing weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, there was a not insignificant probability. And that, for the Cheney doctrine, is enough. Even if the probability of Iraq’s developing nuclear weapons or the capability to weaponise chemical or biological agents that could be unleashed in a crowded Western city is as low as one per cent, the event in question promises catastrophe, and we have no choice – so the doctrine runs – but to act to avert that worst-case scenario.

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Tony Karon on a pattern further revealed by the recent Basra assault:

The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular “enemy” group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as “clarifying” matters, demonstrating “resolve”, or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the “birth pangs” of a brave new world. Each time, the “enemy” proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary’s power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.

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Jim Johnson discusses Amnesty International protest posters directed at the Beijing Olympics.

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Dennis Perrin on the cold dead hands of Charlton Heston:

As president of the NRA, perhaps his greatest acting role, Heston made a big fuss about "fascist" gun control laws, pretending that the countless millions of American gun owners are somehow a besieged minority, like Jews in Nazi Germany. It was an asinine, ahistorical stance, but it played big with his core audience: white guys who whine about being "second-class" citizens in a world dominated by effeminate white liberals, black gangstas, militant fags and lesbians, and assorted multiculturalists who make decent white people feel ashamed of their heritage. Heston pushed for an America where one could "be white without feeling guilty," clearly a pressing problem where whites dominate and own every major power outlet.

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Scott Horton on the rating of George W. Bush as president.

And... handing off his problems.
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* The coming water wars in Central Asia.
* Private equity firm buys rights to ecosystem services of Guyana rainforest.
* Plastics in the oceans.
* Finally, getting at coal power policies.
* Nope, the sun is not responsible for climate change.
* Dance in a Brooklyn swamp.
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And a Spanish cherry: