With friends like these | 8.03.05

According to the Democrat Party website, US Ambassador Ralph Boyce met with former Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai today. There’s no word on the substance of what a Democrat MP calls “a chat between old friends”, but if I were Mr. Boyce, I’d have courteously requested an explanation for this:

2. Maintain neutrality on the world stage and cooperate only under [the authority of] United Nations resolutions.

3. Foster sovereignty [by] letting no country lease an airport or a strategic location.

Old friends don’t try to capitalize on public prejudice against one another, do they? And surely they’re not neutral toward each other.

This being the Democrats, their putatively internationalist “policy” no. 2, if taken literally, would indeed have the opposite meaning to the one intended. It would’ve ruled in participation in Iraq under UNSC Resolution 1511, while ruling out most other international cooperations (ASEAN, APEC, ASEM, you name it) as they’re not mandated by the UN.

But who cares about such a trifle, as long as the dem-agoguery can carry the South?

Note to the Democrats: Ambassador Boyce’s middle initial is L, not S. Such educated, worldly people as you are can distinguish between a nickname and a middle name, no?

Update More Democrats’ anti-Americanism (even cruder!).

Update II See my definitive post: “Populism and nationalism in Thailand”.

21:38 ▪ politics

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1

Zato 9.03.05

When exactly did Thai Democrats adopt the same contrarian instincts of their American namesake? Or have they always been this way? While I strongly believe that a minimum of two parties are necessary for a well functioning democracy, I also feel that until or unless each of these Democrat parties gets serious and drop their transnationalist agendas, one party rule by those currently in power is far preferable.

2

Tom Vamvanij 9.03.05

Most Thai politicians have always been demagogic and opportunistic. Anti-American instincts, regrettably, are more mainstream than contrarian in this country (at least among self-appointed opinion-makers such as journalists and “academics”) and that’s precisely why the Democrats adopted them. I’ve always been disappointed by PM Thaksin’s sheepish, almost half-hearted, support for the War on Terrorism and our alliance with America, but that’s a whole lot better than the Democrats’ chauvinistic and xenophobic populism. (Note that last word for I use it very purposefully.)

3

Zato 10.03.05

Regarding Thaksin’s policies vis-a-vis the WOT and U.S.-Thai bi-lateral relations I have every reason to believe that there has been a great deal of cooperation that goes underreported if for no other reason than it’s done quietly rather than openly. While it would be nice if the support were more explicit it doesn’t matter if the end result is the same. As far as the academics and journalists go they all seem to suffer from the same derangement regardless of nationality. Which is just icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned with the electoral victories of Bush, Thaksin, and Howard in Australia.

4

piyabutr 3.11.05

Dear Democrats.

Learn how your Namesake Party in the US forces a Secret Senate session by invoking Rule 21 of the year1795 to dramatize their assertions that the Bush administration misused intelligence in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Another development of equally importance is an AP News report only hours ago claiming that
QUOTE FROM AP NEWS“the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement, the Washington Post reported.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand”

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country, it said.
UNQUOTE
This latest important information can be verified from YAHOO site of AP News of at 02:55 dated 3/11/05 Bangkok time.

If that is the case, then the Democrats must force the Thai PM Thaksin to divulge where is this BLACK SITE of the CIA in Thailand as reported. This is extremely important as it might lead to vital evidence about the disappearance of Muslim Lawyer SOMCHAI NILPAICHITR.

If SOMCHAI is alive and being held in one of these CIA BLACK SITE in Thailand, then his safety would depend on how fast the Democrats in Thailand can pursue this matter of prime importance.

It is now known that aside from the US run Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq, Guantanemo prison in Cuba, prisoners of conscience are being held without trial for over 3 years and are subjected to abuse and tortures by US Intelligence leading to many deaths.

Can PM Thaksin deny that he is not aware of the existence of such facility in our Country; where people who are against American Imperialism and George Bush are imprisoned with out trial, and their families do not even have knowledge of their loved ones whereabout. I have copies your Party mission statement per below to test your integrity to your policy.

“Maintain neutrality on the world stage and cooperate only under [the authority of] United Nations resolutions.

3. Foster sovereignty [by] letting no country lease an airport or a strategic location.”

Act fast before our Country are led into a BLIND and ONEWAY alley PLEASE!!

5

Tom Vamvanij 3.11.05

Piyabutr:

You call al-Qaeda captives “prisoners of conscience”? I’d say they’re more prisoners of their own unconscionability, who are never free whether they’re plotting new outrages in a cave, flying a civilian plane into an office tower, or showcasing their twisted minds on the internet like you are.

And before you get excited about the CIA “black site” in Thailand, please read this excerpt from that Washington Post article that is the basis of the AP report you cite:

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda’s operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites — which sources said they believed to be the CIA’s biggest facility now — became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

The facility was closed before Khun Somchai’s disappearance, okay? Sorry, but you’ll have to go look for “evidence” of your conspiracy theories elsewhere.

If your pursuit ever takes you near Guantanamo Bay, do keep at least one eye open and you’ll see that the “enemy combatants” held there do have a different status from the CIA’s top-secret al-Qaeda captives. Their families do know their whereabouts. Some of them have campaigned actively for their releases and succeeded. Some, however, have pleaded for their loved ones to remain there:

Russian mothers plead for sons to stay in Guantanamo

The mothers of the eight Russians held with other prisoners from Afghanistan at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay have begged Washington not to extradite their sons to answer terror charges in Russia, fearing that conditions in their jails and judicial system are even worse than those at Camp Delta.

“In Guantanamo they treat him humanely and the conditions are fine,” Amina Khasanova, the mother of Andrei Bakhitov, told the newspaper Gazeta. “I am terribly scared for my son in a Russian prison or court system.”

She said her son wrote to her that conditions were so good in Camp Delta in Cuba that “there is no health resort in Russia that can compare”.

Lastly, the Democrat document excerpted in my post isn’t a “mission statement”. It’s supposed to be a policy platform, but never managed to rise above the level of populist anti-American demagoguery. Of course, with the Democrat Party continuing to charter new depths of the populist pit, this sort of pandering may one day be enshrined as its missions.