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When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King’s cadence. “A time comes,” declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, “when silence is betrayal.” The congregation answers with whoops and calls of “That’s right!” King was talking about America’s war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government’s war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.

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9/11 Truth

As chairman of the national 9/11 commission, former Gov. Thomas Kean has gone before the president, Congress and other powerful dignitaries with lessons of Sept. 11.

Yesterday, Kean spoke to an ar guably more-influential audience when he shared many of those same lessons with educators crafting a curriculum for teaching New Jersey’s children about the attacks.

“You have an enormous responsibility,” Kean told the group gathered at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. “How to teach this terrible event and get across these things to our children, you are vested with that incredible responsibility. But if I have faith in anything, I have faith in teachers.”

The setting was a conference kicking off a yearlong effort to develop curriculum and resources for teachers faced with a dual chal lenge of teaching the history and context of the terrorist attacks in communities that witnessed them.

And with about 100 educators in attendance yesterday, it was clear the hurdles don’t stop there. There are rising demands on teachers throughout the year, scant resources in textbooks and elsewhere and even the timing difficulty of an niversaries that come only days after schools open.

“We need to be dealing with this in totality … more than a simple commemoration,” said Robert Barnshaw, a Gloucester Township teacher. “And in the pattern of the year, Sept. 11 is probably not the best time to be doing that.”

To hear Kean and others speak, Sept. 11 could easily be its own course, although most agreed it’s a topic better infused across different subjects and even into nurses’ and counselors’ offices.

“It’s an event that’s absolutely unique in the history of this coun try and needs to be treated as such,” said Kean.

The former governor’s national commission in 2004 penned a scathing report on the lead-up to the attacks, with widespread blame meted out for security lapses and policy failures. While mincing few words yesterday in sharing those lessons with teachers, Kean also implored them to tell students about the courage and action that arose from the attacks, from the heroism on Flight 93 to the activism of survivors’ families.

“Tell the story in the classroom about those who suffered losses simply unimaginable, but also about what came out of that loss that was absolutely amazing,” said Kean, a former teacher. “As part of 9/11, you have to tell that story.”

The ultimate report will be modeled off New Jersey’s successful Holocaust curriculum, which is not specifically mandated by the state but has provided background and lesson plans for teachers.

Most at the conference agreed there’s a need for such guidance, but they also said the task of teaching the many facets of Sept. 11 will only begin there.

“It’s not a cut-and-dry issue,” said Vincent Soccodato, social studies supervisor in Woodbridge. “And not something that will be going away anytime soon.”

Star-Ledger |  JOHN MOONEY | Wednesday, July 02, 2008

N.A.U.

Journalists hate quoting journalists. It seems so déclassé. But a fellow scribe recently helped crystallize the biggest problem I have with Barack Obama’s foreign policy ideas. So a tip of the hat to Fidel Castro of Havana’s Granma newspaper.

The problem: Obama has offered a bold and penetrating diagnosis of the global mess the Bush administration will leave behind. But the candidate’s prescriptions do not match his diagnosis in their scope or daring. Either Obama is, for vote-gathering purposes, holding back his true thoughts, or he is bluffing on how severe the need for fundamental change really is.

Castro spotlighted that dichotomy in his column last week. The semi-retired dictator praised Obama as “the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency,” but he immediately balanced that potentially lethal compliment by attacking the Illinois senator’s vow to continue the obsolete, counterproductive U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

The modest, sensible easing of restrictions on travel and currency transfers that Obama did promise in an appearance before the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami this month would produce only “hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable handouts and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism,” Castro claimed.

As usual, Castro’s point is overdrawn. But it does underline the widening gap between Obama’s repeated attacks on “Washington’s conventional thinking” as the root of all evil and his reliance on established consensus when he is questioned in detail on Middle East peace, Iran, the U.S. position in its own hemisphere and other key issues.

My point here is not to accuse Obama of more-than-standard political tailoring of positions or to urge him to commit hara-kiri by needlessly taking unpopular stands. The point is that he is largely right in arguing that new thinking is desperately needed in U.S. foreign policy — but he is failing to show how an Obama presidency would produce and apply such thinking to the policy disasters he decries.

This means he is not using the campaign to gather public support for the specific steps that he will need to take if he is to be a “transformational” president.

The Cuba embargo is an obvious case in point. Is Obama, in what he describes as this “urgent and pivotal moment” in history, seeking a broad mandate for . . . incrementalism? Does he propose to dismantle the embargo invisibly, step by step? Or will he in his first 100 days introduce a bold new hemispheric approach that would help produce the kind of change in Cuba that is long overdue?

Here’s one example of new thinking he should pursue: The United States should apply to relations with hemispheric neighbors many of the lessons of the European Union and its half-century of economic and political integration. A functioning American Union that pools sovereignty is a goal worth introducing now. But that quest cannot start by tearing down the North American Free Trade Agreement and other hemispheric trade accords. A President Obama has to be willing to sit down with the prime minister of Canada and the president of Mexico without preconditions, such as demands for treaty renegotiations.

On the Middle East, Obama puts Israel first and foremost in U.S. policy and encourages the Palestinians to adopt the two-state solution that was first officially proposed by, well, President Bush. He rules out all contact with Hamas as does, well, President Bush.

On Iran, Obama would let direct negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government begin without Tehran first suspending uranium enrichment. That would be a procedural change in U.S. policy, but probably not a productive one. In any event, the incentives and sanctions that Obama would use to get Iran to abandon nuclear power are largely the same ones now on offer by the Europeans and, well, President Bush.

The lack of new, specific and substantive foreign policy changes offered by either Obama or by John McCain — the subject of a future column — accounts for the two campaigns spinning their wheels so furiously over whether a president should talk directly to dictators. This is a duel of symbols, meant by Obama’s supporters to show how stuck McCain is to Bush’s “disdain for diplomacy” and by McCain’s forces to show how naive Obama is, and details be damned.

Both candidates deserve better than this as a foreign policy “debate.” After drawing sharply contrasting positions on Iraq, Obama and McCain have shaded the rest of the world in the hues of Washington orthodoxies. That may be a ticket to winning. But it is also a ticket to ineffective governance.

Washington Post | Jim Hoagland | Sunday, June 1, 2008

Big Brother

Two civil liberties groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government yesterday, seeking records related to the government’s use of cellphones as tracking devices.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government in federal court in Washington under the Freedom of Information Act. Last November, the ACLU had filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department for documents, memos and guides regarding the policies for tracking people through the use of their cellphones.

The groups also want to know how many times the government sought location information without first establishing probable cause that a crime was taking place.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment on the suit. But with respect to cell-tracking data in general, he said, “It is important to remember that the courts determine whether or not cell-site data or more precise cell location data can be turned over to law enforcement in a particular case.”

Boyd added that “law enforcement has absolutely no interest in tracking the locations of law-abiding citizens. Instead, law enforcement goes through the courts to lawfully obtain data to help locate criminal suspects, sometimes in cases where lives are literally hanging in the balance, such as a child abduction case or a serial murderer on the loose.”

The ACLU’s FOIA request was made after an article in The Washington Post last fall revealed that federal officials were routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data on individuals and that courts sometimes have ordered the data released without first requiring a showing of probable cause.

Washington Post | Ellen Nakashima | Wednesday, July 2, 2008