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 The Dowbrigade loves using the daily newspaper (usually
the Boston Globe) with his foreign students, be they lawyers or business
students or reprobate party animals. What a wonderful repository
of language and cultural information! What a great guide to a world-class
city, which is a much more effective language laboratory than any classroom.
When we go through the paper for the first time, identifying
its sections and their functions, we always ask the question, "What news
gets on the front page?"
"The most important news!" they invariably chorus.
"And who decides what is the most important news? What
criteria do they use?"
This leads to a long and interesting (hopefully) discussion
which usually arrives at the conclusion that the news on the front page
is filtered by a combination of what the owners think will have the most
impact on New Englander’s (the readers) and what they think will sell
more papers (because it is a business, after all).
Of course, the Dowbrigade usually disagrees with the decision-makers on all counts,
and today was no exception. Both of the following stories were buried
deep within the New York Times, the first
one in the New
York Region section, and the
other on page 8 of the front section.
Foreign citizens who change planes at airports in
the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges,
deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic
necessities
like
food, lawyers for the government said in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
The assertion came in oral arguments over a federal lawsuit by Maher Arar,
a naturalized Canadian citizen who charges that United States officials
plucked him from Kennedy International Airport when he was on the way home
on Sept. 26, 2002, held him in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention
center and then shipped him to his native Syria to be interrogated under
torture because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda.
Syrian and Canadian officials have cleared Mr. Arar, 35, of any terrorist
connections.
New York Times
What! These subjects haven’t even shown their passports
and legally entered the United States yet! Because of the vagaries of their itinerary they are herded into a transit
lounge in JFK for a few minutes and then right back on a plane to their destination. And
this gives us the right to detain them without charges, and deny them food and sleep?
For what? For how long? Forever? Jeez, that’s gonna do wonders for tourism
and US airlines…..
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 10 – Armed men entered Baghdad’s
municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the
city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.
Mr. Tamimi, the deposed mayor, was appointed by the
central government and held ministerial rank. He was originally put in
place by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in the country
until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
New York Times
We really think this scandalous news should have been
on the front page, and are still trying to figure out in whose interest
it is to keep it buried. According to our reading of history, this isn’t
how things are supposed to be. We thought that invading and occupying
a country, for all its messy complications, at
least brought
certain
perks,
like putting
your cronies into the mayor’s office!
When the Caesar occupied Great Britain,
he didn’t have to put up with bullshit like this! When the British
occupied India, weren’t all the top civil administrators like Governors
and Mayors
and Sahibs all Brits? And now, the country that has produced Mayors
like Richard Daley, Fiorello Laguardia and Marion Barry can’t keep their
man in City
Hall despite having the iron fist of the American military backing them
up?
What kind occupation is this, if the occupied don’t even listen to us. The
world’s sole remaining superpower just can’t get any respect. Where is the quaint colonial luxury of past occupations? Maybe we
should pick up our toys and go home. It
would serve them right.
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