Tag: controversial
Okinawa Approves Relocation Of U.S. Airbase In Japan

Okinawa Approves Relocation Of U.S. Airbase In Japan

Tokyo (AFP) – Japanese officials in Okinawa on Friday approved the long-stalled relocation of a controversial U.S. military base, a breakthrough that could remove a running sore in relations between Tokyo and Washington.

More than 17 years after the two allies agreed to move the U.S. Marines’ Futenma Air Station from a densely populated urban area, the local government has finally consented to a landfill that will enable new facilities to be built on the coast.

The agreement will burnish the credentials of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the U.S., possibly taking some of the sting out of American criticism of his provocative visit Thursday to a war shrine seen by China and Korea as a symbol of Japanese militarism.

The issue has been deadlocked for years, with huge opposition to any new base among Okinawans fed up with playing host to an outsized share of the U.S. military presence in Japan, and who want it moved off the island altogether.

Okinawa’s governor Hirokazu Nakaima, long a thorn in the central government’s side, this week met Abe, who pledged a big cash injection into the island’s economy every year until 2021.

He emerged from the meeting declaring himself impressed with the package on offer, which includes a pledge to work towards the shuttering of Futenma within five years, and on Friday gave it his formal seal of approval.

“The imminent issue for us on Okinawa is to remove the dangerous airbase from the heart of the town as soon as possible,” Nakaima told reporters.

“The prime minister is saying the government will work towards halting the Futenma operation within five years.”

Abe praised Nakaima for making a “courageous decision”, while Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera said the government “will do its utmost to relocate the base to Camp Schwab as quickly as possible”.

But the news provoked anger in Okinawa, where thousands of protesters surrounded the local government office, media reports said, with footage showing demonstrators holding banners reading: “Never bend”.

Several hundred had stormed the lobby of the building and were staging a sit-in protest, a government spokeswoman said.

The deal gives the go-ahead for landfill near Camp Schwab on the east of the island, one of a number of large tracts of land the U.S. military uses. Two runways will be built atop the landfill.

Environmentalists say any development risks seriously damaging the coral reefs in the area as well as the delicate habitat of the dugong, a rare sea mammal.

Nakaima had been a bitter critic of the central government, which he says is unsympathetic to the southern tropical island and still treats it as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of the U.S. military, more than 40 years after it was handed back to Japan.

But at Wednesday’s meeting, the carrot of Abe’s stimulus pledge — at least 300 billion yen ($2.9 billion) every year until fiscal 2021 — proved persuasive for the governor of Japan’s poorest prefecture.

The U.S. agreed to shut Futenma in 1996 partly in response to soaring anti-base feeling after the gang-rape the year before of a 12-year-old girl by three servicemen.

Its position in the middle of a built-up area also makes it less than ideal for the frequent flights by military aircraft.

However, resistance from local communities to any new site left the base in limbo, with Washington’s hopes for a resolution regularly frustrated by weak government in Tokyo.

Relations between the two capitals dropped precipitously after the 2009 election of prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, partly on a promise that he would turf the base out of Okinawa, much to the irritation of Washington policymakers.

His subsequent flip-flop left Okinawans furious and feeling betrayed, and cast a further cloud over the issue.

The deal Abe appears to have struck marks a significant achievement, and one that is expected to smooth relations after years of frustration.

Observers have pointed to the timing and Abe’s controversial visit Thursday to the Yasukuni war shrine, seen as a symbol in northeast Asia of 20th century Japan’s brutal imperialism, and said his negotiating methods owed more to his fondness for splurging money.

“Abe flashed big cash around to get the nod from the governor, which saved him some face in Washington,” said Tetsuro Kato, professor emeritus at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University.

AFP Photo/Toshifumi Kitamura

Will Another Innocent Person Be Executed?

One of the founding principles of the U.S. judicial system is that people are innocent until proven guilty. The controversial Troy Davis case in Georgia, however, has caused many to doubt whether the system is truly fair.

Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering a Savannah police officer in 1989, but the verdict has drawn criticism due to inconsistent testimonies and the lack of physical evidence. On Tuesday, a Chatham County judge signed Davis’ death warrant and scheduled his execution between Sept. 21 and Sept. 28. This marks the fourth time in the past four years that the state has scheduled Davis’ execution. The new execution order is significant, though, because Davis has exhausted his appeals. His only hope of avoiding the death penalty is if the five-member Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles makes the rare move to grant him clemency.

The Davis case has long been a rallying cause for various human rights groups. According to Amnesty International,

The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. Since then, all but two of the state’s non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony.

Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his testimony is Sylvester “Red” Coles — the principle alternative suspect, according to the defense, against whom there is new evidence implicating him as the gunman. Nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles.

Given this information, Amnesty and other groups have launched nationwide petition campaigns against Davis’ execution. But when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Davis the rare chance in 2009 to argue his innocence before a federal judge, there was not enough new information to overturn the original conviction. The judge wrote, “While Mr. Davis’s new evidence casts some additional, minimal doubt on his conviction, it is largely smoke and mirrors.” Others have countered that Davis should still not be executed because the original witnesses have admitted to lying about his guilt, which makes the evidence supporting his conviction murky at best.

Georgia is one of 34 states with the death penalty, and about 42 percent of death row inmates nationwide are black, like Davis. Public opinion on the death penalty varies, but Gallup data has found that a majority of Americans support capital punishment for convicted murderers. However, most people surveyed also said they thought innocent people had been executed in the past five years.

In a time when presidential hopefuls like Rick Perry are unapologetic about sentencing likely innocent men to death, the chances of Davis avoiding execution seem slim despite the numerous problems with his conviction. Even so, rights groups will be intensifying their efforts in the next few weeks to save another possibly innocent man from the death penalty.

Perry Doubles Down On Social Security Attack

Rick Perry is at it again. Just one week after Perry’s Communications Director Ray Sullivan told the Wall Street Journal that Perry’s anti-Washington book Fed Up! does not reflect the Texas governor’s current views on Social Security, the Texas governor reiterated the his controversial position on the program.

On Saturday Perry told an Iowa crowd that

“[Social Security] is a Ponzi scheme for these young people. The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie,” Perry said. “It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.”

Perry went on to declare that “I haven’t backed off anything in my book. So read the book again and get it right.”

Considering that Fed Up! argues that Social Security, federal education policy, consumer financial protection, and bank regulation are all unconstitutional — among other controversial claims — it’s hard to disagree with Perry’s declaration. Voters should definitely read Perry’s book and get his policies right, because otherwise they might find themselves unwittingly voting for one of the most extreme conservative presidential candidates in memory.

Michele Bachmann’s Greatest Hits

Two recent profiles of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann — one from Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker and another from The Daily Beast’s Lois Romano — shed some light on the contradictory nature of her campaign: She’s used the rock-solid support of the far-right to build a serious campaign, but she has only maintained their loyalty by spouting beliefs (see: calling Democratic members of Congress “un-American,” dire warnings about the homosexual agenda) that make her seem like a visitor from the political fringe.

Bachmann sent a strong message that she must be reckoned with during the June 13 presidential debate in New Hampshire, impressing the political chattering class with a mix of certainty — she was willing to openly say that she would not vote for the debt ceiling — and made-for-TV polish . Lizza argues that Bachmann’s success there “was mainly the result of her clear enunciation of Tea Party talking points,” and Romano agrees that “when others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington’s dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites.”

Bachmann’s statements often cross the line from understandable to deeply puzzling, however. Lizza’s profile picks out some of her greatest hits:

In the spring of 2009, during what appeared to be the beginnings of a swine-flu epidemic, Bachmann said, “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is “personal enslavement,” and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, “It is our children that is the prize for this community.”

In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with [John Eidsmoe,] her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

Extremely controversial statements such as these have helped Bachmann’s campaign capture countless headlines and many fanatical followers within the Tea Party movement. In a Republican primary where a sizable percentage of the electorate at least until recently didn’t believe that Barack Obama is a legitimate American citizen, much less a legitimate president, Bachmann’s willingness to play to the far-right wing has positioned her as the chief challenger to Mitt Romney’s more conventional bid for the nomination.

But while playing to the Tea Party has made Bachmann a player in the race for the GOP nomination, it may end up killing her chances of actually reaching the White House. In a recently released New York Times/CBS News poll, 40 percent of those polled characterized their view of the Tea Party as “not favorable;” that number is a sharp increase from the 18 percent “not favorable” respondents indicated in an April poll. This is an obvious hurdle for the woman who many have dubbed as the “Tea Party Queen.”

Furthermore, some on the right are beginning to question whether or not Bachmann’s record matches her rhetoric. Romano writes:

Democrats—and some of Bachmann’s Republican opponents—have noted the gulf between her rhetoric and record. She earned a federal salary as a lawyer for the IRS (an agency despised by the Tea Party), for example. Pressed on whether she took Americans to court to force them to pay back taxes, she answers carefully. “Our employer was the United States Department of Treasury. That’s who paid my salary,” she says. “And the client that we represented was the IRS.” She also says that the job opened her eyes to the “huge bureaucracy and how devastating high taxes are on almost every sector of the economy… farmers and families and small businesses and individuals.Bachmann owned a stake in her father-in-law’s farm that received more than $250,000 in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2008. She says that money all stayed with her in-laws. In Congress, she tried to secure more than $3.7 million in federal earmarks for her district–the kind of pet projects she has blamed for excessive spending. And she railed against Obama’s $800 billion–plus Recovery Act as wasteful, then signed a half-dozen letters seeking stimulus funds for local projects. Her requests in 2009 echoed the arguments Republicans lampooned Obama for using. A bridge project could create nearly 3,000 jobs a year, Bachmann wrote, while a highway project would “promote economic prosperity.”

As Bachmann deploys hard-right rhetoric to bring her closer to the nomination, moderate and independent voters will become more nervous about the prospect of her in the White House, and Republicans, known for settling on establishment-approved picks who have earned their party’s nod, may reject her, too.