Is the “New York Times“ drunk?

Storm in a shot glass

With US credibility seemingly flushed down the drain of civilisation, the world having lost its beacon of hope in the sewers of Baghdad, images of torture and sexual humiliation repeatedly played across our screens, a knife-operated beheading in the name of Allah broadcast on the internet, President Bush declaring his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is doing “a superb job”, the Diary – sickened, disillusioned and desperate for hope – asks the one question crying out for an answer: is Brazilian President Lula a flip-flop-clad drunk?

That’s right – there’s talk amongst globally concerned citizens that the spiritual leader of the developing world is, in fact, a spirit-soaked lush.

The Diary has no source for this sauce-ridden allegation. No-one in the Court of Lula will confirm or deny these unproven 40%-proof rumours.

All we have to go on is a report by Larry Rohter in the New York Times last weekend, which claimed that “some of [Lula’s] countrymen have begun wondering if their president’s predilection for strong drink is affecting his performance in office.”

It never did Churchill any harm!

Rohter suggested that Lula’s absence from increasingly embarrassing episodes surrounding his government “may somehow be related to his appetite for alcohol.” In other words, Lula is home nursing a permanent hangover.

The article quoted Leonel Brizola, leader of the Democratic Labor Party, who ran with Lula in the 1998 election, but is now a political rival to the president. Brizola claims to be worried that Lula is “destroying the neurons in his brain.”

Perhaps he’s a pretzel addict too.

In one of the lamest and most sanctimonious digs of the year, Brizola is quoted as saying, “I alerted [Lula] that distilled beverages are dangerous. But he didn’t listen to me.”

“If I drank like him, I’d be fried,” Brizola added, clearly not trying to score any political points.

Rohter’s article kicked off a spate of recrimination and counter-recrimination. An apoplectic Lula (displaying a Stalinist contempt for the freedom of the press) decided to expel Rohter from Brazil for offending “the honour of the president”. Unfortunately, Brazil’s supreme justice tribunal didn’t sympathise with Lula’s decision and ordered a temporary halt on the expulsion (the case is still pending). In the words of the Financial Times, Lula “could not have shot himself more resoundingly in the foot.”

The president’s reaction, judged the FT, “recalled the dark days of Brazil’s dictatorship.” Not convinced? Then check out Comrade Lula’s explanation: “If no steps had been taken, any journalist from any country could do the same thing without worrying about the consequences. This case serves as an example.”

Dark days indeed.

But what of the New York Times? The Diary is no starry-eyed lover of Lula’s (the Castro alliance for one, is a little sickening), but clearly the NYT is also playing politics, and punching below the belt. When Lula was elected, the Times appeared not overly enthused. It is hard not to see an agenda behind sentences such as: “With a mixture of sympathy and amusement, Brazilians have watched [Lula’s] efforts to try not to smoke in public, his flirtations at public events with attractive actresses and his continuing battle to avoid the fatty foods that made his weight balloon shortly after he took office in January 2003.”

The Diary, torch-holder of ethical journalism, would never sink so low!

Except to say this: is it true that Lula wears flip-flops in public? The Diary’s best Brazilian sources say so, with a grimace on their faces. Can this possibly count as appropriate footwear for a global leader? Whatever happened to standards? You’ll be able to see the bullet hole in his foot!

Tropical gulag?

And so to Cuba, land of Lula’s pal and fellow beard, Fidel Castro.

This week, Elizardo Sanchez of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation presented a study of the evolution of Cuba’s prison system since Castro seized power in 1959.

In 1956, Sanchez said, Cuba had 4,000 prisoners in 14 prisons. Today, there are 100,000 prisoners in 200 prisons that constitute what Sanchez called “a tropical gulag”.

Sanchez urged the Cuban government to make public its exact figures of how many Cubans were being held in detention. Around 300 are thought to be political prisoners and about 80 are considered “prisoners of conscience”. Some are held for the crime of “dangerousness”.

“The whole country is an enormous prison,” Sanchez added.

The International Red Cross had not inspected Cuban prisons since 1989.

Meanwhile, a huge march is planned in Havana against what Castro is calling America’s “fascist policies”.

(Sources: AP, AFP, Voice of America)

Shielding the facts

Now, once upon a time, back in the day when your enemy had an ideology and a uniform, Cuba was home to missiles that were going to end civilisation as we know it (if, indeed, we do know it).

Then along came President George W. Bush and missiles were set to become a thing of the past. Fire a missile at the US, Dubya said, excitedly, and our “missile shield” will intercept it and we can all carry on having a nice day.

America was to be impenetrable, immunised against enemy attack.

Then along came four commuter jets with nihilists in the cockpits. Two slammed into the twin towers, one into a field in Pennsylvania, another into the Pentagon.

The “missile shield”, an invention of the cold war, was now obsolete – surely. Today’s enemies were terrorists. The ultimate nightmare: an individual with a suitcase. Why spend multibillion dollars (currently $70billion plus) on a useless toy for the Military Industrial Complex?

Get real.

9/11 only strengthened Dubya’s determination to waste money on this relic. At the end of last year, Japan and Australia also bought into the idea and have expressed desire for their own shields.

Then, this week, the project descended into even greater farce. A team of top-notch physicists from the superbly-named Union of Concerned Scientists accused the Bush administration of being “false and irresponsible” in its claims that the missile shield will even work in practice. The flight tests for the system were described as “highly scripted”.

A bunch of crazy scientists? Not at all. Thomas Christie, former chief weapons tester for the US Defense Department, admitted the existing tests provided “no basis to judge that the system has any capability.”

Still, as with Iraq, the philosophy of this administration is unwavering: once you start something, you stick with it, whatever the cost.

The system becomes operational on 30 September.

Disagreeing on agreements

And to wrap things up, with missiles on the mind, the final preparatory meeting of parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) before next year’s review conference collapsed this week.

According to U.N. Wire “delegates failed to resolve differences on numerous political and procedural issues, notably how to refer to their own consensus decisions of 2000.”

There’s nothing so moving as solidarity!

“Breaking its own rules of procedure,” the UN Wire report said, “the meeting did not even resume in open session to formally close its proceedings.”

The major sticking point? Simple. The demand for “an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

Wake up and smell the radiation.

Quotes of the week

“My party and alliance may have lost, but India has won.”
Atal Behari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, accepting a surprise defeat in this week’s elections.

“If somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilisations, this is how they’d do it.”
US Senator Dianne Feinstein on 1,800 images of torture of Iraqis by the US military that she viewed at a private screening for lawmakers. (Feinstein was talking to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times).

“One basic difference between democracies and dictatorships is that free countries confront such abuses openly and directly.”
President George W. Bush defending Defense Secretary Rumsfeld over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“I don’t care if he goes and stands on his head in the corner. It’s less important what happens to him than that we demonstrate to the world that we understand the gravity of this and move on.”
US Senator Jospeh Biden, Democrat of Delaware, on US Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.

“The purpose of America, our motivations, cannot be questioned … We have a large, large agenda of great international challenges out there that only America can lead with.”
US Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska.

“I’ve stopped reading newspapers. It’s a fact: I’m a survivor.”
US Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld addressing US troops in Baghdad.

“What are you going to do about scandl?” “Why are we here?” “Most of us are inocents.”
Some of the (misspelled) signs being held by prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison as US Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was driven past in an Israeli-made armoured bus. (Source: New York Times)

“It speaks for the strength of American democracy how they have immediately started getting to the bottom of this. That deserves a place in how we judge America if we are fair, which we should be.”
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

“Dangerous.”
The description by Francois Loos, the French trade minister, of a European Commission initiative to reduce subsidies of farm exports by billions of euros.

Contact the Diary: dominic.hilton@openDemocracy.net