Cameroon: Where Saying “I love you” Can Put You in Prison

I magine an existence where just texting a message to your lover could destroy your life and condemn you to a prison sentence of up to five years. 

As dystopian and far-fetched as it might sound, there are still places in the world where this can and does occur. 

Take the Mbede case in the West African nation of Cameroon.

Roger Mbede’s Story

Reporter Joe Mirabella in an article for the Huffington Post, highlights the plight of Jean-Paul Roger Mbede:

Roger was arrested last year for sending another man a text message that said, "I'm very much in love w/u." He was charged and convicted under Cameroon's law that criminalizes "homosexual behavior" and sentenced to three years in prison. He's spent more than a year in jail, while being subjected to abuse in custody, but is now finally appealing his conviction. Roger's hearing is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 17.

The One Percent would rather..

The Smirk That May Have Cost Romney the Election

by Nomad

F

or quite some time, political observers have been declaring that Mitt Romney's greatest weakness (outside of the fact that he simply cannot be honest) is his complete detachment, his lack of empathy and his inability to hit the right emotional tone. In the early hours of September 12, Mitt Romney exposed his character flaws for all the world to see.

As embassy staff in Benghazi, Libya were fighting for their lives against a band of armed attackers, Romney was attempting to portray- without any justification whatsoever- that Obama had expressed sympathy for the attackers.

The statement he has used as evidence had actually been written prior to the attack and had come not from the White House but from the Egyptian embassy. That statement had been an attempt to quell protests there.

It stated that the US embassy “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims…as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

The Romney campaign reaction? Romney stated "that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." 

The following day, Wednesday, while the grim news from Libya- the brutal murder of the ambassador along with four other embassy staff- was stilling filtering in, Romney held a press conference to restate his views. It might have been an opportunity to reconsider his hasty words. Alas, Romney pressed on, with what reporters described as a smirk.  Before the reporters, he said:

"... (T)he administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt, instead of condemning their actions. It's never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values."

According to a CBS article, when asked what exactly did he had objected to, Romney went on to say:

"Their administration spoke. The president takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also from the words that come from his ambassadors from his administration, from his embassies, from his State Department...They clearly sent mixed messages to the world and the statement that came from the administration and the embassy is the administration. The statement that came from the administration was -- was a statement which is akin to apology and I think was a -- a severe miscalculation."

It soon became apparent that the miscalculation was not the president's, but the candidate's. 
Romney's clear expression of glee was repulsive in light of the national tragedy. Making use of the event to score political points seemed to prove what most people had felt about this candidate. Romney has no sense of empathy and, for Romney, satisfying his ambition supersedes all other considerations.

Musical Sanity Break- Judy Collins-Tomorrow Is A Long Time

"Tomorrow Is a Long Time" is a song written and recorded by Bob Dylan in 1963. (I really thought it was much later than that.)  In this version is sung by Judy Collins who, I think, does it justice. 

Why The GOP Can't Be Trusted with Foreign Policy 3/3

by Nomad

Part One- McCain's Speech
Part Two- Reagan and the Iran-Iraq War

Part 3- Reagan: Between Iran and Iraq

I will now conclude this examination of Reagan’s foreign policy, specifically his handling of two Middle-Eastern nations, Iran and Iraq, and the bloody war between them. 

In this post, we shall see how Reagan’s diplomacy failures and hypocrisies would take a disastrous turn and lead to scandal.

Crossing the Line
Let's begin with a quote:

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.-- Ronald Reagan

The executive decision to begin arming and providing military intelligence to Saddam Hussein, despite an American pretense of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war, had, by 1983, become more complicated when reports confirmed Hussein’s use of outlawed chemical weapons(CW) on the battlefield.

As early as November 1983, US officials were aware that top secret memos confirmed that Hussein had been using CW. Furthermore, they suspected the source of those weapons to be a US foreign subsidiary

But even then, it wasn’t so much of a moral question or even a legal one. It was a matter of public relations. 

According to a New York Times article in August, 2002, Col. Walter P. Lang, a senior defense intelligence officer at the time, explained that D.I.A. and C.I.A. officials “were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose” to Iran. “The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern,” he said. One veteran said, that the Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas.” “It was just another way of killing people _ whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.” 

(Compare that with the mock outrage against WMD that helped launch the Iraq Invasion and occupation.)