 Five members of Congress, including Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) were arrested today when they blocked the front entrance at the Embassy of Sudan in Washington, D.C. Their protest and civil disobedience was designed to embarrass the military dictatorship's ongoing genocide of its non-Arab citizens.
| Maybe as a side effect. I think it was probably designed more to embarrass the Bush administration. This'd be the demonstration George Clooney was talking about yesterday, another pointless exercise, designed more to achieve TV coverage than to actually do anything. |
All told, 11 people were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, including six activists as well as representatives Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston), Jim McGovern (D-Worcester, Mass.), Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and John Olver (D-Massachusetts). They were held in a jail cell for about 45 minutes and then released.
| I recognize four of the names off the top of my head without googling them. Lantos is the only one of them I have the least bit of respect for. Jim Moran and Sheila Jackson Lee are disasters. |
"If you're looking for lack of international morality, Darfur encompasses all aspects," Lantos said before his arrest. "Here we see the slaughter of innocent black women, children and men by a monstrous regime." Lantos, 78, was first elected to Congress in 1981. Two years later, he founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. As the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, he has pressed the Bush administration to take steps to deter the state-sanctioned murder and rape of hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan's Darfur region. "We have been calling on the civilized world to stand up and to say, 'Enough,' " Lantos said. "The slaughter of the people of Darfur must end."
| Bush has stood up and said "Enough!" The rest of the world as mostly replied "Oh, leave them alone. They're having fun." We belong to the UN so we can get that kind of support against bloodthirsty regimes. |
Lantos' arrest comes as a diverse coalition of human rights activists is planning to stage major Sudan-related rallies Sunday in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other cities here and overseas. In recent months, the deteriorating situation in Sudan has become a dilemma for the Bush administration, which formally declared the killings in Sudan genocide in September 2004.
| I'm curious, even though I've been watching since Day 1, how it's become a dilemma for Bush, but not for Bashir or Kofi or Amr Moussa. |
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