Obama Administration Silencing Pakistani Drone-Strike Lawyer

--- by Medea Benjamin

When is the last time you heard from a civilian victim of the CIA’s secret drone strikes? Sure, most of them can’t speak because they’re deceased. But many leave behind bereaved and angry family members ready to proclaim their innocence and denounce the absence of due process, the lack of accountability, and the utter impunity with which the U.S. government decides who will live and die.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has increasingly deployed unmanned drones in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. While drones were initially used for surveillance, these remotely controlled aerial vehicles are now routinely used to launch missiles against human targets in countries where the United States is not at war, including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. As many as 3,000 people, including hundreds of civilians and even American citizens, have been killed in such covert missions.

The U.S. government will not even acknowledge the existence of the covert drone program, much less account for those who are killed and maimed. And you don’t hear their stories on Fox News or even MSNBC. The U.S. media has little interest in airing the stories of dirt poor people in faraway lands who contradict the convenient narrative that drone strikes kill only “militants.”

But in Pakistan, where most strikes have occurred, the victims do have someone speaking out on their behalf. Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who co-founded the human rights organization Foundation for Fundamental Rights, filed the first case in Pakistan on behalf of family members of civilian victims and has become a critical force in litigating and advocating for drone victims.

Akbar is by no means anti-American. He has traveled to the United States in the past and has even worked for the U.S. government. He was a consultant with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and he helped the FBI investigate a terrorism case involving a Pakistani diplomat.

But his relationship with the U.S. government changed in 2010 when he took on the case of Karim Khan, a resident of a small town in North Waziristan who claimed that his 18-year-old son and 35-year-old brother were killed when a CIA-operated drone struck his family home.

“Khan could have responded by taking up arms and joining the Taliban. Instead, he put his trust in the legal system,” Akbar told me in an interview from Islamabad. Akbar helped Khan sue the CIA and the U.S. secretary of defense for the wrongful deaths of his relatives. Since then, dozens of families have come forward and joined the legal proceedings.

According to the New America Foundation, from 2004 to 2011, between 1,717 and 2,680 individuals were killed in Pakistan by drone strikes, and of those, between 293 and 471 were civilians. The U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts those figures higher, saying that some 3,000 have been killed, including between 391 and 780 civilians.

Akbar disputes even the Bureau’s figures, claiming that the vast majority of those killed are ordinary civilians. “Most of the victims who are labeled militants might be Taliban sympathizers but they are not involved in any criminal or terrorist acts,” Akbar said. “The Americans often use the fact that someone carries a weapon as proof they’re a combatant. If that’s the criteria, then the U.S. will have to commit genocide, because all men in that area carry AK-47s. It’s part of their culture.”

Now that Akbar has become the voice of drone victims, it appears that the Obama administration is trying to silence him.

He was invited to speak at a human rights symposium at Columbia University’s law school in May 2011, but he never received a visa. Despite repeated inquiries, he was merely told there was “a problem” with his application. Now he has been invited to speak at the first ever Drone Summit on April 28-29 in Washington, D.C., organized by the peace group CODEPINK and the legal advocacy organizations Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Once again, his visa remains stuck in the never-never land of “administrative review.”

The summit’s organizers have appealed for help from the State Department, key members of Congress, and the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. After looking into the case, U.S. Deputy Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland responded: “Whether we like it or not, the current U.S. visa system faces significant constraints within the Homeland Security structure.” Insisting that the issuance of visas was not used as an ideological tool but was a reflection of “complicated and even byzantine laws and regulations,” Hoagland concluded, “I fully sympathize, but I cannot change law and regulation.” His recommendation? “Continued patience.”

“The Obama administration has already launched six times as many drone strikes as the Bush administration in Pakistan alone, killing hundreds of innocent people and devastating families,” said Leili Kashani, advocacy program manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the summit’s sponsors. “By refusing to grant Shahzad Akbar a visa to speak at the Summit, the Obama administration is further silencing discussion about the impact of its targeted killing program on people in Pakistan and around the world.”

The Drone Summit’s organizers vow to keep pressuring the U.S. government to grant Akbar a visa, and they are encouraging their supporters to contact Consul General Steve Maloney in Pakistan. If all else fails, they will have Akbar speak, via satellite, at a press conference at the National Press Club on Thursday, April 26, just before the summit begins.

“Our legal challenges disrupt the narrative of ‘precision strikes’ against ‘high-value targets’ as an unqualified success against terrorism, at minimal cost to civilian life,” said Akbar. “The CIA does not want anyone challenging their killing spree, but the American people should have the right to know.”

Dangerous Radioactive Wave To Hit US Food Supply By Next Year

Tomato and Cucumber Transplants in the Greenhouse

I transplanted 36 tomato and four cucumber starters into much larger pots today.  With the sunshine these past days, things are growing rapidly.  If it stays like this, we'll be making arugula and beet leaf salads in ten days.

Mike Wallace Passes - The Frank Lloyd Wright Interviews

I'm not a big Mike Wallace fan.

When I was a kid, my parents watched his ABC interview show every week.  I remember watching both interviews Wallace conducted in September 1957 with the great architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.  Wright inspired me enough at that time to begin thinking of someday becoming an architect.

Here's a long excerpt from the September 28, 1957:


The University of Texas has archived the entire interview, along with the other Wallace-Wright interview from September 1, 1957 HERE.

Günter Grass Declared Persona non Grata in Israel for a Poem

Gunter Grass (at right) during WWII service

Nobel Prize for Literature recipient and leading German novelist Günter Grass' new poem, What Must Be Said, has quickly become the most talked-about poem in recent memory. The reactions of militant expansionist Zionists have been all too predictable. The most recent reaction by the Israeli government to his critique of Israeli government policies may have gone far enough to elicit a strong reaction from the German people, though:

Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Sunday that German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass is a persona non grata in Israel, after Grass published a poem last week which was highly critical of Israel and its policies.

Yishai harshly condemned Grass' poem, and said that he is declared a persona non grata in Israel for wearing SS uniform in the past.

A poll taken at the end of the week by The Financial Times Deutschland finds the reaction by Germans who have read the poem in its original language feel this way (at 9700 respondents):

“The statements by Grass are …


- insane 8%
- dangerous 4%
- antisemitic 4%
- worth discussing/arguable 27%
- correct 57% ”

As Mondoweiss commenter Klaus Bloemker observes from Germany, "The respondents who see Grass’ statements as correct or at least arguable: 84%.  I think in the general German public the approval of Grass is even higher than this poll reflects. This will have political consequences in the longer term."

Up until this event, Germany has been Israel's most staunch European ally in the quest to increase pressures upon Iran.  With a poll showing 84% of a segment of readers of a fairly conservative German financial newspaper backing Grass, this support on Iran sanctions may be something far more representative of the Merkel administration than of the educated population at large.  Bloemker observes further, "As for now, the establishment is overwhelmingly distancing itself from Grass."

There is more to be gleaned from the Haaretz article on Grass' banning, beginning with this:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman also issued a harsh condemnation of Grass' poem on Sunday, during a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti.

Lieberman said that Grass' poem is the expression of “egoism of so-called Western intellectuals, who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition.” [emphasis added]

So the racist foreign minister tries to pull in the Prime Minister of Italy in linkage to his strange words.  Not only that, with the Italian PM sitting there, Lieberman made demands:

Speaking during a meeting with the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, Lieberman demanded condemnation from European leaders. "We have witnessed in the past how small seeds of antisemitic hate can turn into a large fire that harms all of humanity."

Further on in the Haaretz article, written by Ophir Bar-Zohar and Barak Ravid, there is this:

In his poem, which was published in several European newspapers last week, the 85-year-old author claims that Israel’s nuclear reactor – and not Iran’s – presents a threat to world peace. [emphasis added]

In the translations I’ve read – four of them – the words “nuclear reactor” do not appear. Such terms as these do, in order of appearance:

first strike
a bomb is being built
growing nuclear potential
no testing is available
concealment of these facts
all-destroying warheads
a single atomic bomb
the nuclear power of Israel
an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites


(from Heather Horn’s translation for The Atlantic)

Were the Haaretz authors, Ophir Bar-Zohar and Barak Ravid, legally constrained from mentioning Israeli nuclear weapons in the article, thus forcing the inaccurate term, “nuclear reactor”?

If you are familiar with Grass' important novels and enjoyed them for their deep antiwar sentiments and scenarios, but are unfamiliar with Grass'  2007 New Yorker article, How I Spent the War, you should read the article.  Here some relevant sections:

His initial service at age 15:

In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.


It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary—a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front.

His attempt to join the submarine service:

It must have been possible for a Luftwaffe auxiliary to trade a weekend leave for a Wednesday or Thursday off. In any case, one thing is clear: after one long day’s march, I took the tram from Heubude to the Central Station, and from there the train via Langfuhr and Zoppot to Gotenhafen, where Navy recruits were trained to handle submarines. It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism. I found the recruitment office in a low, Polish-period building where, behind a row of doors with signs, bureaucratic rigmarole was processed, passed on, filed. After signing in, I was told to wait for my name to be called. There were two or three older boys ahead of me. I did not have much to say to them.


The sergeant and the seaman first class I spoke to rejected me out of hand: I was too young; my age group hadn’t come up yet; it would soon enough; no reason for excessive haste.


They were smoking and drinking coffee with milk out of big, bulbous cups. One of these—from my perspective—elderly gentlemen (the sergeant?) was sharpening a supply of pencils while I spoke. Or did I pick up this dramatic detail from some movie or other?


I must have stood my ground even as I was told that there was no need for submarine volunteers at present: they had stopped accepting applications. And then they reminded me that the war was not being fought entirely underwater, and said that they would make a note of my name and pass it on to other branches of the military. Provisions were being made for new panzer divisions. “Patience, young man, patience. We’ll come and get you soon enough. ”

His induction through draft into the Waffen SS:

It took less than two months for my induction letter to arrive, black and white on the kitchen table, signed, dated, and stamped. In September, 1944, my train pulled out of Danzig Central Station, headed for Berlin.


Mother had refused to accompany son to the station. She was smaller than I was, and when she hugged me in the living room she seemed to dissolve into tears between the piano and the grandfather clock. “All I ask is that you come back in one piece,” she said.


Father accompanied me. We didn’t say a word to each other on the tram. Then he had to buy a platform ticket. His velvet hat gave him a soigné, bourgeois look: a man in his mid-forties who had managed to stay a civilian and stay alive.

The 17-year old's assignment:

My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training: on a drill ground of the Waffen S.S., as a panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods.

His feelings about the Waffen SS at the time:

The question is: Was I frightened by what was obvious then in the recruitment office, as I am terrified now by the double “S,” even as I write this more than sixty years later?


There is nothing carved into the onion skin of my memory that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror. I most likely viewed the Waffen S.S. as an élite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up. I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent. The boy, who saw himself as a man, was probably more concerned with the branch of the service: if he was not destined for the submarines, then he would be a tank gunner in a division that was named in honor of Jörg von Frundsberg, whom I knew as the leader of the Swabian League during the sixteenth-century Peasant Wars and the “father of the Landsknechts”—crack infantry mercenaries. Someone who stood for freedom, liberation. Besides, the Waffen S.S. had a European aura to it: it included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch, and Belgian, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers; there were even said to be neutral Swedes on the Eastern Front in the defensive battle, as the rhetoric went, to save the West from the Bolshevik flood.

His explanation of later doubts and concealment:

So there were plenty of excuses. Yet for decades I refused to admit to the word, to the double letters. What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.


True, during the tank-gunner training, which kept me numb throughout the autumn and winter, there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light. But the ignorance I claim cannot blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.

Grass is now being hauled over the coals for his forced service in what was the largest draft of very young people into military service in the history of the Third Reich.  Had he refused to serve, he probably would have been imprisoned, hung or shot.

Grass writes compellingly of the end of that 1,000-year reich, as military units crumbled around him; as he abandoned his fuel-less tank, abandoned his weapon (which, apparently, he never shot at a Soviet soldier); as he shuffled by the bodies of other young men his age, hanging from trees, with placards around their necks.  Here's one of his descriptions of the environment:

In the chaos of retreat, I sought to join up with scattered soldiers who were likewise trying to find their units. Even though I had had no direct contact with the enemy, I was scared to death. The soldiers hanging from the trees along the road were a constant warning of the risk run by every one of us who could not prove that he belonged to a company or was on his way to this or that unit with signed and sealed travel orders.


The central section of the Eastern Front, now retreating inexorably west, was under the command of the infamous General Schörner. According to “Schörner’s orders,” military police—bloodhounds, the lot of them—were to go after soldiers without marching papers and haul them, no matter what their rank, before mobile courts-martial as malingerers, cowards, and deserters. They would then be summarily and conspicuously hanged. Schörner and his orders were more to be feared than the enemy.

Well, the war was soon over and Schörner and his ilk are long gone.

Soon afterward, however, many of Israel's early leaders were planning the killings of hundreds of British Army soldiers and thousands of Palestinians, as they sought to terrorize the local governing authorities and local indigenous population into blunt acceptance of a new kind of  racially pure society.

The hypocrisy of current top Israeli officials needs to be called out.  Günter Grass has clearly done this.  Hopefully, he will be able to withstand increasing pressure to recant, and hopefully, more people - including commenters and diarists here - will come to his defense.

It must be said.

From my point of view, what must be further said is that Israel is not our ally.  The government of Israel is not a friend of U.S. long-term interests.  Rather, they have become the most dangerous adversary we have faced since before the implosion of the USSR.  Unlike the USSR, however, the Israeli government and its prime functionaries are deeply embedded into our political and military machinery.

Winter's Last Hurrah?

I got up at 7:30 this morning and waas greeted by the last strands of a sunrise with clear skies and what may be the last thick coating of snow on the trees.

Looking out over Neklason Lake toward the Talkeetnas and Hatcher Pass:

 

With sunshine and warmth into the high 40s predicted for the coming week, this new snow is ephemeral.

Winter Tries to Hold Its Grip

Anchorage broke its all-time record for snowfall earlier Saturday.  I don't know if we've done that out here in the Valley yet, but it has been the most snowfall I can remember since leaving Whittier in 1983.

Here's looking at the TDI at about 7:30 this evening:

And here's looking south out of the greenhouse, where the heater is on:

What a Letdown! Guess I'm Just Wasilla Trash...

Right after donating $75.00 to the Ron Devon for Alaska Senate Campaign, I read this at Ron's wife's blog:

There appears to be a deliberate and concerted effort underway to prove that everyone from Wasilla is, for lack of a better term… a raging idiot. Let’s examine but a small part of the growing body of evidence...

Jeanne Devon, writing as AK Muckraker, goes on to make some good observations about pathetic State Representative Wes Keller's bizarre statements before the legislature regarding the Girl Scouts, an organization my wife and daughter were parts of - in Wasilla.  Along with a lot of other people from Wasilla who are NOT "raging idiots," thank you.

Anchorage bloggers sometimes get as careless as former Alaska Senator Ben Stevens, when he wrote to a local resident "Your [sic] just more valley trash."

This happens a lot.  Some Anchorage people look down on just about everyone else in the state in one way or another.  People who don't live in Anchorage probably notice it more than those who live in that city.

A while back, I was upset enough by this statement by Jesse Griffin at The Immoral Minority, that I wrote a column about it.  Here's the inimitable Gryph:

 What? You would like to see more of Sutton? Well you my friend are out of luck because, besides the fire station where we were standing when we took this picture, this IS Sutton, Alaska.

You see in Alaska the difference between "town" and "smattering of buildings built fairly close together" is virtually non-existent.

I do believe the founding of most towns goes something like this:

"Hey Frank, did you notice that somebody went and built a bait shop next to the gas station/house of ill repute?"

"Yeah I did."

"Well daggumit, I think we got ourselves a town here Frank!  Whatchyou wanna call it?"

"Hell, let's name it something purdy, like Chlamydia."

"Nah, don't be ignorant, that sounds too French!  Let's call it something that will always demand respect, like Wasilla!"

"Perfect!"

 At the time, I wrote:

Both The Immoral Minority and Politicalgates have tried to keep readership up by covering the marriage of one of Sarah Palin's kids to the daughter of a longtime friend of mine in ways that I find disgusting.  Though both blogs pretended to only publish stuff like what they put up today as "newsworthy," the comment streams accompanying the articles could have only brought heartbreak to the family of the young woman whose picture they published.  The blog administrators should have known that before they put up the posts.  

In the case of The Immoral Minority, last week Jesse compared the town that was most instrumental in defeating the coal bed methane scam in the Valley seven years ago to a sexually transmitted disease.

If that isn't tacky, I don't know what is.  Sutton is a real town, with an intensely interesting history.  [Jesse Griffin] lives in a subdivision where every fucking house could be mistaken for the one next to it, like in Las Vegas or Phoenix.

I was fortunate that my first fulltime employer in the real Alaska - the Cordova fishing fleet - was Pete Isleib.  He was south central Alaska's pre-eminent ornithologist, a big-game hunting guide, commercial fisher and serious ecologist.

One theme he reiterated to me and others was that the most unfortunate thing to have happened to Alaska had been that Anchorage was too big.  He felt it was big enough to be the kingpin in statewide decisions made through the legislature and through business lobbyists.  Pete felt that Anchorage's dominance of so many aspects of Alaska policy, politics, economy and other areas would hold the state back, particularly Alaska's First People.

He was the first person to point out to me that Anchorage wouldn't exist but for the contributions made to the state economy everywhere but Anchorage itself.  Not that Wasilla contributes much either, but people here don't go around knocking just about every other community in the state like many Anchoragoneans do.

Meanwhile - even if you live in Wasilla - please consider helping Ron Devon in his quest for a seat in the Alaska Senate.

If Only Sarah Palin Had Run... You Have Got to Be Kidding

--- by Geoffrey Dunn

Sarah Palin has apparently fooled another foreigner, this time a young British historian, Timothy Stanley, who can't quite see the American political landscape from his ivory tower at Oxford University.

In an "opinion piece" appearing at CNN.com (actually it borders more on phantasma), Stanley has rather absurdly posited that, had Sarah Palin entered the 2012 Republican Primary, "she'd have the nomination sewn up by now" and that "she'd be running even in the polls with the president."

It's a fool's fancy, of course, because Palin not only didn't have the moxie to run, she also lacked the requisite organizational skills to fashion a national campaign. And it's clear that she wanted to run very badly. She is obsessed with Obama--she has attacked him at every turn possible since she first began verbally assaulted his character during the 2008 campaign--and she is driven by a tenacious, albeit mercurial, ambition to maintain her presence on a national stage.

But a lock and even money? Surely he jests.

For the sake of argument, however, let's take Mr. Stanley--who has just completed a fawning political biography of Pat Buchanan--seriously for a moment. What would have happened if Palin had indeed run for president during the current election cycle?

Mitt Romney most certainly would have entered the race. But so, too, would have all the other dime-a-dozen conservatives--Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum, Cain, Pawlenty, et al--because none of them respected Palin enough--nor her organization enough--to stay out of the primary until Palin had made her decision. Palin was particularly furious that Perry threw his cowboy hat in the ring before she made up her mind.

How does Mr. Stanley arrive at his fanciful conclusion? He compares apples to kumquats.

He argues, for instance, that Palin suffers from "none of Newt Gingrich's intellectual hubris." Well, few people do. But she also lacks his superior debating skills and his in-depth knowledge of American political history. He also has a substantial national record of political accomplishment. Palin had an erratic half-term as governor of a surprisingly small state, during which a Republican-led legislative investigation found her guilty of "abusing her power." That's hardly a record on which to secure the presidency.

Stanley also proffers that "there's no way Palin would have promised to put a mine on the moon or suggest arresting judges who make decisions that are too liberal." Hmmm...Palin can, of course, see the moon from her home in Alaska, so there's no telling what she might have suggested for the lunar landscape; and this is someone who argued that end-of-life planning for seniors was the equivalent of "death panels."

Is her brand of conservatism really "far more domestic and down-to-Earth" than Rick Santorum's?

Come now. This is a woman who has pontificated about Putin rearing his head in American air space and who only recently charged that Obama was out to "weaken" the U.S. internationally. I'm afraid that Palin's peculiar ideological vision knows no borders.

Mr. Stanley contends that Palin's "only two serious public gaffes in 2008" happened when "she was unable to name a newspaper" and when she "was stumped by the Bush doctrine." Say what? Let me remind Mr. Stanley of Governor Palin's immortal response when she was asked by Katie Couric about the proposed federal bailout:

That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade--we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

That's a verbatim quote. Tina Fey didn't have to change a single word in her famous turn as Palin on Saturday Night Live. That's right, not a single word.

Apparently Mr. Stanley was out of radio-range when Palin gave her celebrated interview to a French-Canadian comedian posing as French president Nicolas Sarkozy. When the Sarkozy character said to her, "You know, my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she's so hot in bed," a giggling, star-struck Palin responded, "Oh my goodness, I didn't know that."

Palin, Mr. Stanley argues, "has always been a classy, well-choreographed performer." Apparently he doesn't recall that Palin's political operatives placed images of bulls-eye targets on Congressional seats during the 2010 election, and then, in the aftermath of the violent assassination attempt on Gabriel Giffords, Palin turned herself into a victim during a morally obscene response to the massacre, claiming that she had been a casualty of "blood libel" by "journalists and pundits." Classy she has not been.

Mr. Stanley contends that Palin, unlike Santorum, would have never responded "bullshit" to a question posed by a reporter--but when asked about Santorum's vulgar response, Palin strongly defended it, asserting that "he and the other candidates, all of them, they need to do more of this." Palin has chastised Obama for lacking "cajones" and has further asserted that certain reporters for Politico were "impotent and limp."

I'm not sure whom Mr. Stanley thinks he's fooling.

As for her match-up with the GOP frontrunner, Mr. Stanley contends that "Palin would have been a far more effective anti-Romney candidate because her strengths accentuated Romney's weaknesses." That Palin is a bigger draw on the hustings goes without saying. So is Lady Gaga. But Romney has ground out an all-but-certain victory in the GOP primary by his steady performances in the debates, strong organizational skills, and a formidable fundraising ability--all of which would have made mincemeat out of Palin.

The fact of the matter is that while a Palin candidacy certainly would have roused her narrow base--and generated considerable media coverage--she would have stumbled, almost with certainty, through the early primaries, and then faltered like all the rest of the angry mob before Super Tuesday. She possessed none of the grassroots organization required in Iowa (she had only a single operative on the ground); she is despised in New Hampshire (she alienated many GOP operatives during her visit to the Granite State in 2008); and her own protégée in South Carolina, Nikki Haley, came out early for Romney.

Moreover, Palin's fundraising efforts tanked. A year ago, she had raised the most money of any potential candidates in the GOP field. But in the aftermath of her discordant response to the tragedy in Tucson, contributions to her political action committee, SarahPAC, slowed to a trickle. During the past six months SarahPAC has raised less than half of what it raised during the same time period a year earlier.

But the real telltale numbers regarding Palin are her negative favorability ratings nationally. Had Stanley understood the political calculus of realpolitik, he'd grasp how facetious his argument really is. Ever since her disastrous Couric interview--her inability to name newspapers that she read was only the beginning of her problems-- Palin's favorability rating has trended precipitously downward. A CBS poll conducted last fall, right before Palin announced her decision not to run, showed that her favorability rating among all voters nationwide had sunk to 21 percent.

Secured the nomination? That's a joke. Polling even with Barack Obama? Get serious. Anyone who's ever been involved in a real campaign knows those are numbers that cannot be overcome by any candidate.

Again, the proof is in the pudding. In the so-called silent primary leading up to the 2012 election, several important figures from the conservative Republican establishment signaled their opposition to a Palin candidacy, from Karl Rove to Peggy Noonan, from Anne Coulter to George H. W. Bush. Former McCain campaign senior advisers John Weaver and Steve Schmidt dubbed a potential Palin run for the White House as "a political apocalypse" and "catastrophic," respectively. Former Bush White House communications chief Nicolle Wallace, who also served as a senior adviser to McCain, characterized Palin as "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."

These are all Republicans, mind you. In maneuvering towards a run for the presidency, Palin was traversing a political bridge to nowhere, and fast.

"The Republicans," Mr. Stanley assures us, "desperately need a candidate who can appeal to lower-income voters, who can rally men, who can gain women's votes, who can bring out conservatives in large numbers and who can appeal to a younger demographic."

This is all speculative smoke and mirrors on Mr. Stanley's part. A detailed poll conducted little more than a year ago in Alaska thoroughly disputes his assertions. Palin's favorability ratings were lowest among women over 60. Her favorability with voters under 40 was a dismal 32 percent. Her only strong demographic was white males over 50. Her overall favorable/unfavorable rating among all Alaska voters was a whopping negative-18. She's political toast in Alaska, just as she's toast on the national stage. Bring out the marmalade. She's back to her trailer-trash feud with Levi Johnston these days--and that's probably where she best belongs.

That Palin loves the political tease of running for national office goes without saying. She thrives on taunting Obama and pretending that she has a role to play in the national dialogue. But for the most part, she's a joke and a punch line, a fringe player on the Republican right. Hers is a political nihilism, to borrow a phrase from one of Stanley's more thoughtful countrymen, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

As for 2016? By then Palin will have been long forgotten as a serious political figure. She may be a talking head somewhere, or in another bad reality show, but if Romney secures the nomination (all but certain) and wins the election (Vegas has him as a 9/4 underdog), it will be his party for the next eight years. If Obama wins (he remains the slim favorite), it will be Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Nikki Haley or John Thune or Bobby Jindal or some other newcomer to the field--not someone, Mr. Stanley, who thought that the Queen of England makes British foreign policy decisions.

Care to wager, ol' chap?

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's best-selling The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power was published by Macmllan/St. Martin's in May of 2011.

reprinted with author's permission 

Tom Keough Cartoon on Bradley Manning

click to enlarge