The resistance to the statue was apparently not so much because of what Obama has or hasn’t done as president, but because they questioned his real contribution to Indonesian society.

“Why should Obama’s statue be displayed in the center of Jakarta?” Linda Christanty, one of Indonesia’s most well-known writers, told Andre Vltchek in an article on Foreign Policy in Focus today. “Why didn’t they erect statues of the reformation heroes — people who were kidnapped during the Suharto era? Such statues would serve as a warning. It could help to prevent some terrible crimes from happening again — crimes like the forced disappearance of the people.”

Due to the mounting protest, Jakarta’s City Park and Cemetery Agency actually took the statue down on Sunday. City officials confirmed that it will be moved to the grade school that Obama attended from 1967 to 1971, which is in the area.

While this protest is fine, I’m a bit surprised that the folks behind the push to take the statue down didn’t express a wider range of grievances. For one thing, I don’t know of any major shift in US policy towards Indonesia, which has really been hideous for decades. And I would think that many in Indonesia – which is a predominately Muslim country – might be offended by the fact that Obama has significantly escalated the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan and has not altered US support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the Muslim world in any meaningful way. But I guess those are just a couple of my own gripes with our dear leader.

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.

Here is the latest from our good friend Jason Laning. While it is definitely rough, I think he makes a good point. Any thoughts?

To see this webcomic in its original size or check out more of his work, stop by his new site. It’s one to keep an eye on.

A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell.

I’m gratified to see, this morning, a front-page report at the BBC on the prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Hundreds of people have been held at Guantanamo; thousands have been held at Bagram.

When I joined Witness Against Torture earlier this year to protest torture and unjust detention, people passing by were often confused. Didn’t Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo? And end torture? When asked, virtually none of them had ever heard of Bagram, a place that represents a troubling wrinkle in the new administration’s attempt to look like a meaningful departure from the excesses—even crimes—of the last.

This passage is particularly telling:

Since coming to office US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month.

But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.

The inmates at Bagram are being kept in “a legal black-hole, without access to lawyers or courts”, according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a legal support group representing four detainees.

She is pursuing legal action that, if successful. would grant detainees at Bagram the same rights as those still being held at Guantanamo Bay.

But the Obama administration is trying to block the move.

The dilemma here should be as clear for activists as for the administration. Guantanamo is in the United States’ backyard, so people’s attention will fixate on it. Bagram is out of sight, out of mind. For the sake of appearances, it might just be enough to clean up Guantanamo and say progress has been made. Not knowing better, well-meaning Americans will be satisfied. But for the sake of real justice, that is nowhere near enough. The violence being done at Bagram is affecting everyone there as we speak. And it won’t be long before the rest of us feel the ripples of its consequences.

Focusing on Guantanamo, we have to realize, is only the beginning. No torture, no inhumane treatment of prisoners, not at Guantanamo, not at Bagram, not anywhere.

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Obama’s nod to nonviolence “one of the most important points that he made.” But many others have had trouble sidestepping the hypocrisy of such words coming from the man in charge of the world’s greatest military power. As Starhawk, a panelist for the Washington Post‘s On Faith blog, pointed out:

For the powerful to demand that the less powerful renounce violence, without making the same demands on themselves or on their allies, is simply to say: “I reserve the weapons of death for myself and my friends.”

The obvious friend is of course Israel, which receives about $3 billion a year from Washington. Right behind them, interestingly enough, is the dictatorship in Egypt, which received $7.8 billion from the U.S. over the past five years. Making matters worse, the Obama administration is requesting a 60 percent cut in funding for pro-democracy groups and initiatives in the country. So even the location of Obama’s speech adds to the hypocrisy of his call for nonviolence, especially considering he made no direct reference to the dictatorship.

While the president may not have a leg to stand on when it comes to espousing nonviolence, he could have at least acknowledged efforts made by Muslims and Arabs to reach a peaceful reconciliation. For one, on the day of his speech in Cairo, CodePink delivered a letter to Obama from Hamas that called for a meeting “on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.”

Without mention of this most people are left to assume that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, know nothing but violence. As McClatchy Newspapers‘ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dion Nissenbaum noted, there is “a question long raised in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Where is the Palestinian Mahatma Gandhi?” Nissenbaum then went on to describe the most recent exploration of that question–a rather comprehensive and insightful article in the Weekly Standard–and quote several leading theorists.

Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement that organizes largely non-violent protests of Israeli actions in the West Bank, argues that there are “many Palestinian Gandhis” who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, including Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who was killed when he was hit in the chest by a tear gas cannister fired by an Israeli soldier.

Salil Tripathi of Forbes also touched on this idea, saying that Obama should have mentioned the nonviolent Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who is known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for raising a nonviolent army of over 100,000 members in the Northwest Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A sharper endorsement of non-violence, citing the many standard-bearers, including those from the region, could have planted the seed of an idea. And, maybe, the paradigm would have shifted.

There is still a chance that it may. But it is unlikely to be inspired by an American president.

A protest sign held by two Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo.

As mentioned in yesterday’s “experiments with truth,” a number of the 17 Uighur prisoners in Guantanamo staged an impromptu protest for visiting journalists with signs that demanded their freedom. There was some doubt as to whether any of the photos taken would be cleared by the Department of Defense. But it appears as though at least one made it through.

The military seemed to consider the occasion a good PR opportunity.

”As you can see, they are pretty much free men,” said a Navy chief who supervises sailors guarding the men at the half-acre compound. He called the protest ”their own doing,” and permitted a dozen reporters visiting the prison to film the signs.

It’s hard to imagine calling anyone who’s been in Guantanamo for seven years a free man.  Just hours after that Navy chief spoke to reporters, a non-Uighur prisoner in another part of the Gitmo complex committed suicide. It was the first suicide at the detention center since Obama took office.