One T-shirt from the gift shop is decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."
Another praises "the proud protectors of freedom". A third displays a garish picture of an iguana and states: "Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun."
A child-sized shirt says: "Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
The Littoral Combat Ship is a key element of the Navy’s plan to address asymmetric threats. Intended to operate in coastal areas of the globe, the ship will be fast, highly maneuverable and geared to supporting mine detection/elimination, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare, particularly against small surface craft.
As for de-Nazification, it sounded good, and indeed was morally and politically necessary. But distinguishing between real and nominal Nazis often proved extremely difficult. Small officials who'd joined the party out of necessity were thrown out of office, while big businessmen who'd profited under Hitler were left alone. The policy generated growing hostility to the occupiers, and its implementation was soon handed over to the Germans themselves. This caused its own bitterness as the Germans were often seen as being too lenient.
Even so, despite this willingness to rethink and adjust, occupation policy floundered. Two years after Allied victory, Germany was in desperate straits, facing an economic crisis that threatened to nip democracy in the bud. Only the Marshall Plan, with its massive program of financial aid, saved the country from disaster. Self-government did not come until 1949, and Allied troops remained in West Germany as occupiers until 1955, a full decade after the defeat of the Third Reich. Unrepentant Nazis stayed active on the extreme fringes of West German politics for years, and a few ex-Nazis held high positions even in mainstream politics until the 1960s. The Christian Democratic politician Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was chancellor of the Federal Republic from 1966 to 1969.
Rebuilding a nation is possible. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes effort, time, patience and pragmatism. As 1945 confirms, liberation from a dictator in itself offers no easy path to peace or democracy. Battlefield victory is the easy bit. Building peace is a constant struggle -- and it's a matter of years, not weeks.
"There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence," Ban said in a statement. "The right of free expression is not at stake here."
"Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility," Ban said.
"We must also recognize that the real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict," Ban said.
On the morning of September 11, I was on floor 105, tower 1. I had an 8 a.m. meeting set up with a client. He was bringing by some tech people to do some due diligence on our technology company called E-Speed. I get to work usually around seven, seven-fifteen. At eight, the client called to tell me they were running late. And I said fine. But I reminded him to bring photo ID downstairs. Ever since the last terrorist attack in '93, the building requires photo ID downstairs. He's been there before, so he knew the drill. He said, "Fine. No problem."
At 8:40, I get a phone call from the security desk downstairs, asking me if I'm expecting visitors. I said yes. "Well, they're here," they said. "But one of them forgot their ID."
I'm 105 flights up. The commute to get downstairs takes about five minutes, especially around that time. So I'm annoyed, obviously, because I have to go down now to sign these people in after I just told them to bring ID. I look at this desk assistant across from me, thinking maybe she'll help out and go down, but she's on the phone. She's also about eight months pregnant. She's a few weeks from maternity leave and she's on the phone talking to a friend and she's on a website looking at bassinets and cribs. A very nice girl expecting her first child. So how lazy am I? I decide to go myself. ...
... I take these two elevator rides down. I take the elevator from 105 to 78, change, and take the express down to the ground. I got down to the lobby. Our elevator banks actually face the visitors' gallery. And I started walking over to the visitors' gallery, I'd say it's about thirty yards, and they're standing there waiting for me. And I remember yelling, "Which one of you knuckleheads forgot your ID?"
And as I say this, you hear this really loud screeching sound. I turn around and it's kind of coming from the elevators. So I run away from it, like ten steps, and look back. And the elevators are free-falling. Then, from the middle elevator bank, not the one I came down on, but from the middle one, a huge fireball explodes in the lobby. This huge fireball is coming right toward me. People got incinerated. And I remember just looking at this thing, not feeling scared, but just sad because I knew I was going to die. But as quickly as it came toward me, it actually sucked back in on itself, and it was gone. It left a lot of smoke and everything was blown out, all the glass and revolving doors leading into the shopping area. All I felt was a big wave of heat come over me, like when you put your face too close to a fireplace. My customer and my general counsel and I just ran out. The three of us ran over the overpass to where the Financial Center is. We went down to where the marina is, where the yachts are. And that's when we found out what happened, that a plane had hit the building.
I looked up and saw this big gaping hole. I said, "What's that falling out of the window?"
My general counsel looks at me like I'm nuts. And he says, "That's people jumping out." ...
Cantor Fitzgerald had four floors in the North Tower -- 101, 103, 104, and 105. Nobody got out on those floors. Everyone who was upstairs perished. There were a lot of phone calls to wives and husbands at around nine o'clock saying good-bye, as though they knew they were going to die.
But as to the humiliation, imho the UK was humiliated, first, because the fairly pathetic Iranian navy managed to capture members of Britain’s senior service while they were in Iraqi waters, and without firing a shot, because the British Rules of Engagement apparently don’t allow for proactive self-defense. The UK was humiliated second in its sailors’ and Marines’ apparent haste to offer up confessions and apologies to their captors. The third humiliation came at the end of the standoff, when the sailors and Marines gave Mahmoud a big thumbs up on their way out. Throw in the headscarf, the partying, the goodie bags etc while we’re at it. Iran also got to distract the world from the continuing standoff over its nuclear weapons program for a while, and may have won access to its officers currently held by the US in Iraq.
I’m still persuadable that the Royal Navy is more to blame for the hostages’ behavior than the hostages themselves, first because of the Rules of Engagement and second in the code of conduct for captured British military personnel. I just don’t know what the British code is and to what extent it reinforces loyalty, duty, honor and the idea of resistance to one’s captors. After this incident, I suspect that the British code isn’t much like the US code of conduct. If that’s the case, it’s harder to blame the hostages then the Royal Navy itself for the way they behaved, since the Royal Navy apparently doesn’t do much to prepare and harden its personnel against the tactics captors may use.
In the final analysis of this crisis, it’s possible that both Iran and the UK blinked. The UK didn’t want a fight, and Iran may have gotten a little nervous with so much attention focused on them. It’s possible. It’s also possible that the combination of a carrot–access to the Iranians held in Iraq–and a stick–the presence of two US aircraft carriers lurking in the Gulf with a third on the way–got the sticky situation unstuck. It’s not possible that the threat of UK military action made any difference, since no such threat was ever offered. It’s also not likely that UK diplomacy did much good, since the mullahcracy tends to react to normal European diplomacy with scorn. It’s very possible that Hezbollah’s known presence in the UK stayed Blair’s hand. At this point it seems likely that the US played a major though mostly silent role in freeing those hostages, probably to keep Tony Blair from going under for good. If that’s true, then the UK was essentially bailed out by the US against ambitious rogue state Iran.
Humiliating? I think so.
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malionette
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