Word: defeatism
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...Jimmy Carter's 56 appeals-court nominees were rated that low. After watching glumly as the number of Reagan appointees climbed to a third of the 761 federal judgeships, opponents in Congress have started digging in their heels and building support. Two weeks ago, in the first such defeat for the Administration, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 8 to reject the nomination of Jefferson Sessions, 39, the U.S. Attorney in Mobile picked for a federal district court judgeship in Alabama. Witnesses said that Sessions had called the N.A.A.C.P. and several other civil rights groups ''un-American,'' and once...
...demonstrates that the Administration, fully aware that as many as a third of the detainees in Guantánamo may have had no connection to terrorism, still proceeded with medieval treatment that the Red Cross warned was "categorically" torture. Mayer's work (nearly 400 pages of sometimes graphic detail) may defeat the casual reader. But her account of secret prisons, black-hooded renditions in the middle of the night and unexplained detainee deaths is necessary reading for those who would understand how the Bush Administration came to turn away from the light...
...Hassan Nasrallah, who had orchestrated the trade. He claimed the lopsided deal as legitimacy for both his decision to capture those two Israeli soldiers in the first place and his wider strategy of armed confrontation with Israel. For almost 60 years, Arabs facing Israel have had to choose between defeat and peace, but now, according to Nasrallah, the success of Hizballah's asymmetrical warfare has offered a model for all the movements in the Middle East dedicated to destroying Israel. "The essence of the region is the resistance," he said in a rare appearance to welcome the returning prisoners...
...strongholds like the Cordillera Occidental, FARC commanders and soldiers remain defiant. And while it might sound delusional to many, they insist the guerrillas have more life than the government claims. "They've been saying [we're defeated] since the 1960s," says Comandante Alberto, who joined the FARC when he was 15 and has spent more than two decades in these mountains. "If they couldn't defeat us when we were a few dozen farmers, without uniforms and hardly any weapons, how can they beat us now when there are [still] thousands of us all over Colombia? This is a propaganda...
Either way, few believe the FARC could ever topple the government today. And for many, it's getting harder to believe that the government won't eventually defeat the FARC, a 44-year-old insurgency. But it still has thousands of armed fighters, a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars and a triple-canopy rain forest to hide in. Despite the heavy blows it's taken in recent years, the rebels continue to dominate regions like the Cordillera Occidental, where teachers, farm laborers, health workers and even locals who have spent more than a year outside the area...