Presidential Scholar, Afraid Bush Torture Letter Would Be Confiscated, Hid One Up Her Sleeve

[Hissyspit]

My goodness. There was more drama to this than we knew. I am so proud of these kids:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/56635

- snip -

Mari described Bush's reaction to the letter: "He read down the letter. He got to the part about torture. He looked up, and he said, 'America doesn't torture people.' And I said, 'If you look specifically at what we said, we said, we ask you to cease illegal renditions. Please remove your signing statement to the McCain anti-torture bill.'

- snip -

Mari knows a little bit about detention. Not high school detention, but detention Guantanamo-style. Mari recounted this to the president: "I said that for me personally, the issue of detainee rights also had a lot of importance, because my grandparents had been interned during World War II for being Japanese-American." The government has since apologized for imprisoning more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during the war. Mari said she was also inspired to act by her mother, Willa Michener. She, too, was a Presidential Scholar -- 40 years ago, in 1968 -- and had wanted to confront President Lyndon Johnson with her opposition to the Vietnam War. She deferred to a teacher, who Mari said "stressed it was important to stay quiet when you're in the presence of the president." Willa Michener has regretted it since, Mari said.

Mari called her mother as soon as she left the White House to tell her what she had done. "She was actually in the Holocaust Museum in the last room when I called her to say that we had given the letter. She didn't know there was a letter beforehand. ... And she said that she walked out into the bright sunlight with tears streaming down her face, but since a lot of people walk out of the Holocaust Museum that way, you know, no one noticed anything out of the ordinary."

Another Presidential Scholar, Leah Anthony Libresco, from Long Island, N.Y., helped write the letter. She, like Mari, is remarkably eloquent. "If I'm going to be in the room with the president, I've got to say something, because silence betokens consent, and there's a lot going on I don't want to consent to." Her middle name, Anthony, comes from the famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Afraid that Mari's letter would be confiscated before she was able to deliver it to the president, Leah had a handwritten copy of it -- yes, up her sleeve. She handed it to a reporter, as she said later in a blog, "at The No Child Left Behind photo op for which the Scholars were apparently supposed to be a backdrop."

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[Swamp Rat]

1. "silence betokens consent"

Wow! :applause:

Mari gives me hope. :patriot:

[Hissyspit]

2. I started choking up when I read this, SR.

Especially the part about her mother crying in the Holocaust museum, and Mari telling * to remove his signing statement from the torture bill. Amazing. It does give hope.

[leftchick]

11. that is my sig line

:)

:applause:

[Decruiter]

45. My heart sings and I feel hopeful as well. These two young women, along

with a number of their other honored classmates stood up. Yeah, I'm crying. They are just beautiful.

We elders really need to come together and be the role models these kids are looking for.

I hope Dubya had a sleepless night after meeting up with our future.

[krkaufman]

51. That quote's from the other gal.

Leah Anthony Libresco

[salin]

3. Wow!!!

[Disturbed]

5. These young people have more courage than Congress.

There is hope for Amerika when more people will stand up to the Fascism.

[PurpleChez]

17. That is too true!

[dddem]

4. Their parents must be very proud.

I know I would be.
Good for them!

[Berry Cool]

6. They really ARE heroes in every way!

Good for them! :applause:

[wakeme2008]

7. Pic

Girl on the far right



from http://wellesleyeducationfoundation.org/bee.htm

I love ppl with names like Mari Oye easy to Google for :)

[fasttense]

8. I once watched a special on gifted children.

Seems about the time they turn ten they are so socially aware, that they are frequently haunted by those less fortunate around us. They can't understand their own good fortune and wonder about the disparity between themselves and those who suffer in our society. These kids are truly gifted.

[tblue37]

16. At age 6, my son used to wake up and run downstairs at

6:30 a.m. to turn on CNN, because he was so concerend with what was going on in the world. (Back then, Ted Turner's CNN was still a news station.)

Later, when he was 14, he gave up watching network news altogether. One day not long before that point, when I had been too busy to read the paper all day and I knew he had watched the news, I asked him if anything important had happened in the world. It was a day on which some plane had gone down somewhere. He said, "Apparently the only thing that happened in the entire world today is that a plane crashed and some 7-year-old kid has her own lemonade stand."

He had already figured out that the MSM wouldn't cover more than one story at a time--and it had to be a "car-crash" story, not real news. He was also aware that those stupid warm and fuzzy human interest stories were sucking up what little time the networks made available for "news."

My daughter, also strikingly gifted, took her master's in social policy in Dublin as a Fulbright scholar last year, focusing on the impact of various laws and policies on child welfare. She is now a 4th-year med student, and she plans to spend a fair amount of her time when she is done with her training working in inner city clinics and in Third World countries.

It's true, I think. Many gifted children really are very socially aware particularly sensitive to the plight of others. Nevertheless, I also think gifted kids can go the other way--being so wrapped up in their own interests that the rest of the world scarcely even seems to exist for them.

[MsRedacted]

31. I think kids like that, gifted if you will, observe and understand the world

and all it's problems naturally. No one has to say: hey the media is biased, they just put 2 and 2 together. Like your son did.

It's hard though, to see the enormity of the mess when you are a kid -- before you are really mature enough to handle it. It can get scary. It can be easy to just shut it all off and dig deeply into the things you can control -- the things you are good at.

Everyone thinks being 10x smarter than everyone else is a "gift" but for some kids (and young adults) beleive me, it's not. It can be lonely place.

Think of being 10 years old and the only people who understand what is going on in your head are adults -- and not even all adults, just the smart ones.

[nashville_brook]

20. i'd love to know the name of the special or where it aired or anything...

anyone, if you can remember, that would be great.

i studied ethics/morality and gifted children in college and would love to have a look at this.

[kineneb]

24. ahh, that explains a lot about my childhood

I still remember watching the Kennedy funeral (age 5), and am still traumatized by Vietnam. I spent far more time than my peers watching and reading the news, back when there still was something of worth on the tube and the papers.

I missed the demise of the visual media, not having had a TV since 1979.

[coffeenap]

25. Happened to my son--I could tell you endless stories. nt

[Solly Mack]

9. and they knew the letter risked being confiscated

to ask the President to not torture is so daring an enterprise that stealth measures have to be adopted to ensure the message gets out



that's the world America's children are growing up in

Yeah - it's good they understand its workings...but that doesn't make it any less tragic.

[Judi Lynn]

14. So sad, poignant, and it's wonderful knowing it was that important to them,

that they felt they had to think ahead, and not accept initial defeat. They were prepared to face real trouble over this. That puts ideals above personal security. Very unusual for people of any age.

What it says about what has happened to the office of the President is overwhelming.

[Hissyspit]

29. That did not even occur to me as I posted this.

Sad, sad administration.

[rodeodance]

10. REC. Grand story------

[Cooley Hurd]

12. America will be in good hands with this generation of Americans...

It gives me hope that the crimes of the last 30 years will NOT be repeated when the torch is passed to people like Mari Oye and Leah Anthony Libresco.

God speed, girls!:patriot:

K&R.

[tanyev]

13. If only they were in charge right now.

Hopefully the nation can hang in there a few more years.

[shance]

42. I don't think so. We need actual adults in power. Individuals who have experienced painful

situations and who have become better people through them.

Life experiences make us better people - when we avoid life experiences and are constantly insulated from any harm or accountability you have the myopic, insulated people who are running our country right now.

I haven't fully read the piece however I actually see too many children who have been given too much privilege, too much undeserved credit, too few challenges and too little consideration for others and too much consideration for themselves.

[tanyev]

53. Oh yes, "adults in charge". Isn't that what we got in 2001?

At this point, I'd be willing to take my chances with an eighteen year old that can come up with a quote like this: "If I'm going to be in the room with the president, I've got to say something, because silence betokens consent, and there's a lot going on I don't want to consent to." And if you notice, I did say I hope the country can hang in there a few more years--until kids like this really are old enough to bear the responsibilities.

[warren pease]

26. Only problem is...

... people like them will continue to be marginalized and treated as social misfits and chronic whiners by the bastards who control the official propaganda mechanisms -- corporate spin doctors, governmental apologists and our national cesspool of media liars, suck-ups and status quo cheerleaders.

Oye and others of similar mind will either have to settle for work at someplace like the Brookings Institution, publish little-read books critical of conventional US domestic and foreign policies, or seek work in another country.

Notice that Chomsky and Zinn and others of like political viewpoint are universally blacked out by all US mass media, except for the very rare op/ed in some regional paper, and except for Chomsky's lone appearance on national TV, which apparently created such massive negative viewer response that you might have thought he had advocated eating puppies or selling infants into slavery.

Unfortunately, there will be no place for her or like-minded thinkers in influential positions the US -- never really has, sure as hell isn't now, and probably won't in the foreseeable future, if there is any such thing anymore.

Although political and social dissent is critical in any functional nation-state, I just wish to hell that once, just once, in my lifetime, the dissidents were from the other side -- frothy, furious, jesus-obsessed, spelling- and punctuation-challenged, dumb-as-a-post wingnuts with their panties in a continuous twist as they try to get the other 70 percent of the population to regress into whatever mass hallucinatory state is required to ever trust these jackbooted liars and thieves again.

But the levers of power have been and will probably continue to be under the control of corporatists and the seriously rich, with their bought-and-paid-for employees in congress and the white house pulling the levers when they're told to by their massuhs.


wp

[KoKo]

47. Good Points...and the best of them will never even make it into the Think Tanks that are so

dominated by nepotistic families who seem to populate them with brothers sisters fathers, mothers, nieces and nephews. I was glad when Josh Marshall called Norman Podhoretz and is ilk "crackpots."

The "Crackpots" have been running things for a long while.... Their contol doesn't allow the voices of others to be heard anymore.

[progressoid]

15. Hope for the future.

[EVDebs]

18. 'Only in America' the land of the free and home of the brave would something THIS IRONIC happen nt

[Mythsaje]

19. K&R

If only more of our citizens were as brave as these kids.

[Marnieworld]

21. wow what an inspirational family

The daughter of interned Japanese Americans meeting the president is enough of an amazing story. For their granddaughter to do it too and then being so heroic, and healing for her mother simultaneously? Well I can't the only one to tear up from this right? These kids are heros, certainly mine. :patriot:

[krispos42]

22. Kick and Rec...

And yes we do torture, lying Bush person!

[IChing]

23. I'm glad these people are coming out of the woodwork

nominated.

[redqueen]

27. "silence betokens consent"

thank goodness she had the presence of mind to keep a copy.

[Hamlette]

28. k&r for a great story. There is hope. n/t

[AnnieBW]

30. Good for her!

I'll raise a toast to these Presidential scholars - the TRUE leaders of the next generation!

:yourock:

[swimmernsecretsea]

32. You've made us all proud, Mari. You're brave and compassionate.

I hope you go far in life, and I hope that this experience shows you that bravery is a great thing. It comforts you and sustains you. Thank you for doing this. You did it for all of us.

[proud2BlibKansan]

33. Wow what great kids!!

[proud patriot]

34. I'm glad that Mari's mom was able to be witness

to her daughter's courage and patriotism.

[MagickMuffin]

35. Mari you are more Presidential than our current pResident

:applause::applause::applause::applause::applause::applause:

Please consider a career in government someday. Until then don't ever be afraid to stand your ground.

[Judi Lynn]

36. Kick!

:kick: :kick: :kick:

[sellitman]

37. Unfair! bush turd didn't even understand the letter, there were no pictures of goats.

Wish I was a fly on the wall.

[wryter2000]

38. Amazing

I'm glad Olbermann and his staff gave them a round of applause.

[Senator]

39. These Kids Need to Teach Madame Squeaker How to Deal With War Criminals

You open a mouth. You put them on notice.

You don't sit silent, in a complicit pretense that "all is well."

----

[ClayZ]

40. Bravo! K and R

[MetaTrope]

41. There's a horrible security issue here

If she had an envelope stuffed up her sleeve, there could just as easily have been something undetectable like a porcelain shiv. I certainly hope the Secret Service will take note of that, and also sincerely hope that other honored high school students won't.

[colorado_ufo]

43. Honor and courage, shining brightly.

Wow, just, wow.

[Hissyspit]

44. .

[Madspirit]

46. k&r...n/t

[DearAbby]

48. I am humbled by the actions of these young ladies.

The courage this took, the risks at this age...truly awesome.

[Bitwit1234]

49. And doesn't this make you proud...

Just think we have some young people in this country who love it. Who want to make a difference,who believe in the Bill or Rights and the Constitution. Who don't just sit in front of the American Idol show,or listen to their Ipods all day long. Maybe we can pull this country out of the slime bush and his enablers have drug it yet. Do you think.

[Lisa]

50. These students? Presidential material ...

Keep an eye out for them in another couple of decades (or much sooner, if the age restriction on running for the White House gets changed).

I'm very impressed. This is a wonderful story ... even though Bush probably can't get past seeing these young people as a convenient "backdrop" for his own purposes. At least they were able to let the rest of the world know about their decision. And how especially gratifying for Mari's mother, that her daughter was able to do something she'd always dreamed of doing. Surely, speaking out in the presence of the President is symbolic of all the best America can be -- thoughtful, courageous, idealistic, determined.


p.s. my parents were interned in the camps. They've been frightened all their lives that something really bad would happen if they took part in any form of protest, even if the cause is just. Mari's mom must be overwhelmed, that her daughter looked power in the eye and was unafraid.

[fooj]

52. She gives me hope.

[Vinca]

54. True patriots. I applaud them. nt