George Packer's Blog, page 248

Mike Allen and Nay Phone Latt

Tonight PEN will honor Nay Phone Latt, a young Burmese blogger who is serving a twelve-year sentence in a remote and harsh prison for using his blog and the Rangoon Internet cafés he owned to spread news about the street demonstrations that peacefully challenged Burma's military regime in 2007. I wanted to meet Nay Phone Latt when I travelled to Burma in early 2008, but he'd already been arrested. I met other young bloggers, journalists, and activists who knew him. They were almost painfully ...

Streetwalkers

A few days ago, at a fundraiser for the International Rescue Committee, a very tall, very baby-faced guy in a business suit approached me with a copy of "The Assassins' Gate," my book on Iraq. He said it had been helpful when he was writing his senior thesis at Brown on U.S. foreign policy. We chatted, I signed his copy, then asked what he was doing in New York. There was a slight hesitation. "Investment banking." And for some reason, that ended the conversation.

The percentage of Ivy League g...

An Evening with Tariq Ramadan

Cooper Union, the East Village hall where Abraham Lincoln demolished Stephen Douglas's states-rights argument for the extension of slavery a hundred and fifty years ago, was the setting last night of Tariq Ramadan's first U.S. appearance since the State Department lifted the six-year ban on his visa. As one of the panelists, I had a close but narrow view of the event. I heard about but missed seeing the lively scene outside, with a large crowd trying to get in: friends and foes of Ramadan...

Truth, but Not the Whole Truth

The Wikileaks video of a lethal incident in Baghdad in July, 2007, reminds me of footage I once saw of Brazilian hunters in a helicopter chasing Indians as they fled across the bush and mowing them down for sport. And it left me with the same sickened feeling—at the cold-blooded merriment of the shooters, their safe and dehumanizing distance from their targets, the exposed helplessness of the Iraqis being shot up in the sunwashed street. Shame, disgust, outrage: these are the normal, the...

Tariq Ramadan Comes to America!

For years, the U.S. government has barred entry to Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Islamic scholar. This stupid policy began in 2004: Ramadan was about to assume a professorship at Notre Dame when the State Department revoked his visa. At first the government gave no reason, then pointed to Ramadan's small donations to a couple of pro-Palestinian organizations that were suspected of funnelling money to Hamas. Since he gave the money between 1998 and 2002, and Hamas was not put on the official...

Burma's Opposition Boycotts

The Burmese military regime knows how to do one thing well: survive. Twenty years ago, it nullified an election that was massively won by the party of the opposition, the National League for Democracy. It placed the party's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under a house arrest that, with a few brief respites, continues to this day. For two decades, the regime has consolidated its power, created an economic oligarchy, ended most of the ethnic insurgencies or fought them to a draw, crushed any...