A disturbing story from Information Clearing House explains why the RNC was held in Minnesota, and why the police there acted as if war had been declared on America's population. In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism. Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givins, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Max Spector, face up to 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty.
Affidavits released by law enforcement which were filed in support of the search warrants used in raids over the weekend, and used to support probable cause for the arrest warrants, are based on paid, confidential informants who infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence.
WHAT?!? Minnesota has its own version of the constitutionally dubious USA PATRIOT Act? What folly is this? It does explain how and why the modern-day version of the 1968 'police riots' at the DNC in Chicago occurred in Minnesota. The sonsabitches want to establish a test case that equates protest, dissent, or simply thinking for yourself as TERRORISM.The criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally have engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. The complaints list all of alleged violations of law during the last few days of the RNC — other than violations of human rights carried out by law enforcement — and seeks to hold the 8 defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence. Searches conducted in connection with the raids failed to turn up any physical evidence to support the allegations of organized attacks on law enforcement. Although claiming probable cause to believe that gunpowder, acids, and assembled incendiary devices would be found, no such items were seized by police. As a result, police sought to claim that the seizure of common household items such as glass bottles, charcoal lighter, nails, a rusty machete, and two hatchets, supported the allegations of the confidential informants.One has to assume that TPTB (the powers that be) really don't care about getting convictions in these cases. It will suffice for them if a pall of fear is cast over any act of political independence, and even if it doesn't they've got at least eight people who might question their 'patriotic' motives locked up at least until after the elections are over.
So the question to ponder is: if it's not a democracy any more, what do you want to call the current system of government?"A nation that loses control of its check on its commander in chief
is something other than a democracy."
-- John Dean --
Me and my big mouth (er, .., keyboard.) Having promised to do a series on fascism in America I find myself with an embarrassment of riches in terms of links to pursue and connections to research. Make no mistake, the idea of a movement to exert fascistic influence over American society is not a rhetorical device, nor by any means hyperbolic. Naomi Wolf points out that it's not hyperbole if one compares present day America to Italy in the 1920s or Germany in the 1930s, when fascists were taking over those countries. And the ten-point blueprint that she lays out for repressive regimes certainly has a chilling similarity to the actions of the Bush regime. Just to remind you, here's Naomi's list:"While communism is the control of business by government,
fascism is the control of government by business."
-- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Fascist America --
The aim of Bu$hCo's brand of fascism is not just to provide profits to corporate cronies, but also to put them out of reach of all responsibility for their actions. The heinous acts committed without consequence by Blackwater/KBR mercenaries in Iraq are a case in point. The government has literally become a partner in crime with the multinationals. And then there's this from a recent New York Times:War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
-- George Orwell --
In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.The reaction of the corporations to this new trend are woefully predictable.
Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.
Some lawyers suggest that companies may be willing to take more risks because they know that, if they are caught, the chances of getting a deferred prosecution are good. “Some companies may bear the risk” of legally questionable business practices if they believe they can cut a deal to defer their prosecution indefinitely, Mr. Khanna said.I would be lying to you if I said that this was something new in American history. Watch this clip:
Legal experts say the tactic may have sent the wrong signal to corporations — the promise, in effect, of a get-out-of-jail-free card.
As (James Madison) put it, 'the primary responsibility of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.'One of the things that emerged from the Congress of the Confederation was the Electoral College, the subject of a recent post by law professor Jonathan Turley.
While the Framers were great believers in the natural rights of the common man, they actually had little faith in the judgment of the common man. Indeed, most of the Framers were unflinching, unrepentant elitists. They wanted a representative democracy to create a buffer of educated men between citizens and their government. It was not until 1913 that the country finally amended the Constitution to allow for direct election of senators (who were originally elected by state legislatures).We've seen Turley's views before on various matters, notably the Prosecutors' Purge scandal, and the wider implication that the prosecutors who weren't purged, as well as the one's who replaced the dismissed US Attorneys have turned the Department of Justice into a partisan playground of Republican corruption. It's a good thing at least that the cases are tried before elected and uncorruptable federal judges. Er, nope.. as Turley again points out.
Throughout U.S. history, the Electoral College has worked as designed: to place elections in the hands of an elite. Past controversies involved the same personal wheeling and dealing that we’re seeing today with superdelegates.
This week, Michael Gableman celebrated a considerable victory: the first defeat of an incumbent judge in 40 years for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His opponent Louis Butler was also the first African American on the Court. Yet, the $5 million race shows the steady trend toward high-priced campaigns to change the make-up of courts by legal and corporate interests.So to recap: The laws of the country are written by bought and paid for corporate-friendly hacks, prosecuted by more partisan corporate hacks and tried in front of judges who are already pre-bribed by corporations before they even take the bench. If the outcome is in question the appeal could go all the way to the ultra-partisan corporate friendly Supreme Court.
The accumulation of all powers,
legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands
may justly be pronounced the very definition of a tyranny."
-- James Madison --
In the usual way that Americans have been taught to view history Joseph Stalin was an unrepentant monster whose Communist government suppressed and murdered its own citizens, denying them their rights and imprisoning them in cruel and inhuman gulags for the slightest act of disagreement with his regime.Stalin, while a valiant ally in the war, stands out as one of history's biggest meanest bastards. Estimates of the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin range as high as 20 Million. Most died by starvation as the result of disastrous agricultural policies that removed subsistence farmers from their land in misguided collectivization efforts. Many more died as a result of Stalin's extreme paranoia, taken out and shot or tortured to death in the infamous gulags. Stalin was evil.My point was and remains that it wasn't Marxist doctrine that caused Stalin to be a megalomaniac, it was his paranoia and his embrace of totalitarian tactics to eliminate any threat to his rule. The great purges carried out in the 1930s are but one case in point.
...[I]n the post-war era, a great lie was sold to the American people, one I believe a vast majority of Americans still believe today. That lie was a great propaganda coup, providing the right wing with a magic hammer with which to beat its enemies mercilessly. That lie led to the cold war. That lie was that the evils of Stalin's Soviet Union were somehow the inevitable result of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Which anyone even passingly familiar with socialist doctrine can tell you is absurd. A simple comparison that clarifies the effects of this great lie is this; The Red Scare was to post-war America as International Jewry was to Nazi Germany. The great threat that justifies all excesses. The great brush to paint all our enemies. The Red Scare.
“A lie would make no sense,
unless the truth were felt to be dangerous.”
- Carl G. Jung -
"Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie.Just look at how successful this undeclared class warfare has been. The Republicans opposed Social Security when it was first introduced on the grounds that it led to the 'slippery slope towards communism.' The fact that it helped the vast majority of Americans survive was not an effective counterargument in their narrow rightwing view. And they are STILL trying to dismantle the most successful program in the country's history. They have successfully blocked any form of universal health care with the same slippery slope canard. "OOOH - it might lead to communism. Slippery slope - ooga booga. Be very, very afraid." So you see how the ghost of the long dead Joseph Stalin is still acting as an ally to Corporate Fascist America. The frickin' ownership society they envisage can hardly be differentiated from a slave state.
In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people,
this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country.
To ignore that--not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor--is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power...
...If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"--do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth.
Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars."
"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal,
but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward,
the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards."
-- Bertrand Russell --
In the opening pages of Tom Clancy's Patriot Games the hero, Jack Ryan is visiting London. Unfamiliar with the English practice of driving on the left side of the road he checks to the left, where he expects traffic, then steps out onto the road and is nearly killed by a bus coming from the right. It seems to me a fitting image of what has happened to the US in the last 7 or 8 decades. While paranoically obsessing about a perceived threat from the left, America has left itself wide open for a takeover from the corporate right.To tie this in to what's happening today, one needs only this quote from a pre-eminent veteran of the cold war.
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."A chillingly familiar theme in the post 9/11 America. It's hard not to see how the fear-mongering inspired by Stalin is just like that inspired by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Stalin was of course the first bogie man bent on world domination and in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Which brings me to another pithy and pertinent quote.-- General Douglas MacArthur --
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely
or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear"
-- Bertrand Russell --
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell --
I've been hatching a lament for several days now, on the sorry state of what passes for justice anymore in the nation that used to be America. Naomi Wolf posted recently at Huffington Post on a topic that was pretty much where I was going anyway. Long story short, that handbasket that America's future is riding in is not just nipping down to the store for a quart of milk. The erosion of anything resembling justice is pretty much complete. As the Australian reported earlier this week, New South Wales Justice of the Peace Mamdouh Habib is suing the Australian federal government -- which under the Howard administration had colluded with the US in committing various abuses against detainees and due process -- for having allowed him to be arrested wrongly in Pakistan in 2001, kidnapped and sent illegally to Egypt. There this Justice of the Peace was illegally imprisoned and tortured for six months. After that the United States held him for FOUR YEARS in Guantanamo.I could quote much more of this article, but it's better if you just read the whole thing yourself. You might be angry, but you won't be disappointed.
[...]
Get that? A justice of the peace in a developed-world democracy. Had you heard of that?
Me neither.
[...]
They rendered an Australian justice of the peace -- and that rendition did not even make the US news. So how can we be sure there is something so sacred about an American justice of the peace or even a judge? Say, an American judge who ruled against the Military Commissions?
What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion -- roughly three weeks' worth of profits -- for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.There's not even any pretense that this case is going to be decided in an unbiased manner on its merits, or with reference to the Constitution and legal precedent. The will of the Corporatist government of Pricktator Extraordinaire George W. Bush is all that matters. The Constitution, after all, is just a Goddamn Piece of Paper. And there are more stories from just this week indicating how far the rule of law has diverged from the idea of 'a nation of laws, not men.'
"So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?" Roberts asked in court.
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey refused yesterday to refer two new House contempt citations to a federal grand jury, saying the White House aides involved in the case cannot be prosecuted because they were following legal advice from the Justice Department.Or how about the sham that has attended the fight over the renewal of the Protect America Act, which is about anything but protecting America? Over 80% of the riders in the aforementioned proverbial handbasket can catch a distinct whiff of sulfur, but you'd never know it from watching FOX "news" or CNN.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Mukasey said the refusal by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and formerpresidential counsel Harriet E. Miers to comply with congressional subpoenas "did not constitute a crime."
[It] won't be seen by most Americans. This is because the Discovery Channel bought it hoping to air it -- but then backed out. (Its affiliates have close ties to the military-industrial complex.) Will the Oscar win get it on the airwaves? Doubtful.Call me paranoid, but I can't help thinking that perhaps the Discovery Channel bought this documentary not hoping to air it, but to ensure that no-one else could air it. At any rate there are numerous signs and portents that bode ill for the near future of America. One is reminded of the ominous opening of Act IV, scene 1 of Hamlet,
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Throwing us all aside, the US Senate has capitulated once again to theWe carried you in our arms
On Independence Day,
And now you'd throw us all aside
And put us on our way."
-- Tears of Rage --
(Bob Dylan & Richard Manuel)
thread I made an oblique observation that the DINO problem may be much worse than we thought. Look at the way the voting breaks down by how close those Democratic Senators who voted with the Republicans are to facing the polls: Here is the list, with the cohort to which each Senator belongs. I think It shows an interesting trend.I think the numbers pretty much provide their own analysis. There may be any number of stealth Republicans with D's attached to their names who will vote with the R's when necessary to get a measure passed, but refrain from doing so unless necessary in order not to blow their cover. I could be wrong, but when Nosybear remarked that I had implied such a premise, I ran the numbers and here you see the result. You do the math, as they say. To be honest I haven't done any stats or probability problems in decades, and wouldn't know how to test this result to see if it passes a significance threshold.
Evan Bayh (D-IA) - III
Tom Carper (D-DE) - I
Kent Conrad (D-ND) - I
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) - I
Daniel Inouye (D-HI) - III
Tim Johnson (D-SD) - II
Herb Kohl (D-WI) - I
Mary Landrieu (D-LA) - II
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) - III
Claire McCaskill (D-MO) - I
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) - III
Ben Nelson (D-NE) - I
Bill Nelson (D-FL) - I
Mark Pryor (D-AR) - II
Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) - II
Ken Salazar (D-CO) - III
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) - I
Jim Webb (D-VA) - I
This year's cohort II (4 out of 12)
Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller
25%
2010 cohort III (5 out of 15)
Evan Bayh, Daniel Inouye, Blanche Lincoln, Barbara Mikulski, Ken Salazar
33%
2012 cohort I (9 out of 22)
Tom Carper, Kent Conrad, Dianne Feinstein, Herb Kohl, Claire McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Debbie Stabenow, Jim Webb
41%
Without judicial review, and able to hide behind the State Secrets wall, there are no limits. The telecoms, the alphabet soupers, or the White House can spy on Congressmen of the opposition or even their own side for purposes of blackmail. They can listen in to conference calls of their competitors, steal trade secrets, practice insider trading without 'officially' being an insider. They could even bug trysts between lovers just for some kind of sick sexual gratification.Jenn provided a link to this Raw Story piece about Bush's recent revelation that there were indeed telecoms who co-operated with illegal activities, something he has never come right out and said before. Man, that is one cocky bastard, filled with the certainty that he has destroyed the very concept of Justice in America! May he die the death of Herod the Great.
We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand.
Now, I want you to know that while we watched,
You discover there was no one true.
Most ev'rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do.
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so low
And life is brief.
As I write this, it was within the last hour that the 110th Session of the Senate of the United States passed by 68 - 29 the most constitutional damage EVER. Consider the 4th Amendment wrecked unless some miracle happens in the House and/or in the Conference report.Here is a pretty good summary of what went on, what will happen next.
But let's have a look at this in a total context.
THE PRIMARIES: Both Senators Obama and McCain were on the floor, voted on the amendments and the actual final bill. Senator Clinton was not on the floor and did not vote.
THE PRESS: SadButTrue's post below pretty much sums the climate up; LIES.
THE COURTS: Bear with me here. This is a little complex. The FISA court continues to say that there is likely information that the public should know that exists in the classified materials the ACLU seeks. Christy Hardin Smith at FDL puts it better than I can:In other words, there is likely information that the public should know that exists in these classified materials, but the Congress, and not the courts, is the place in which these matters ought to be investigated. It's a strong hint from the FISA court, but they are not going to go beyond that because to do so, in their opinion, would be a violation of their role in this oversight tango. (And I have to wonder if the documents that the House is combing through contain this information -- or is it something beyond what they have been given?)
That the FISA Court has gone on record publicly not once -- but twice now-- on this issue screams volumes. That there is no clear resolution to these issues says a lot about where we are politically, and about the levels of frustration that is engendering among a whole host of people inside and outside the Beltway.
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
-- Henry A. Wallace, Vice President to FDR, 1944 --
The Danger of American Fascism
Glenn Greenwald has a good post up this morning, about how the Wall Street Journal is fudging the facts in support of telecom immunity. Most blatantly they are trying to present it as though immunity already exists and the Democrats are trying to change the law. Nothing could be further from the truth. The laws have been on the books for some time, and it's the White House that wants to change them retroactively, as GG shows:Just marvel at this paragraph, incoherent and false in equal parts:Welcome to the Orwellian world of Bu$hCo™ doublespeak, a dialect apparently not far from the corporate language of buzzwords. Greenwald goes on to dissect further lies told in this same editorial, most prominently the idea that the telecoms are not already protected for actions in compliance with legal government requests for co-operation. IOW, even when the government may have been acting illegally, the telecoms are protected if they can demonstrate a 'good faith' argument that they believed otherwise.By far the worst threat is an amendment from Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on these wiretaps after 9/11. The companies face multiple lawsuits, so a denial of even retrospective immunity would certainly lead to less such cooperation in the future.The assertion that Congress has failed "to ban such wiretaps directly" is an absolute lie and there is no other way to phrase that. The reason there are lawsuits brought against telecoms isn't because of some cliched liberal-judicial-activist effort to impose on telecoms obligations which don't exist in law. The opposite is true: the lawsuits were brought precisely because telecoms violated multiple clear, long-standing laws that make it illegal to do exactly what they did: namely, allow government spying on Americans and access to their customer data without judicial warrants.
This is precisely the goal of the left, which has failed to get Congress to ban such wiretaps directly but wants to use lawsuits to do so via the backdoor.
[...]
To claim, as the WSJ does today, that "the left" is using lawsuits as a "backdoor" because it "failed to get Congress to ban such wiretaps directly" literally could not be more false and misleading. And, as always, the falsehoods are bolstered by Bush-following lawyers who are single-mindedly devoted to the authoritarian goal of increasing unchecked government power, such as former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, who hails the WSJ Editorial as "superb" despite what he must know are its undebatable falsehoods about the law.
The persuasiveness of an argument can often be determined by the willingness of its advocates to confine themselves to the truth when making it. That telecom amnesty advocates resort to demonstrable falsehoods -- literally pretending that telecoms did not violate multiple laws when allowing warrantless spying -- is a powerful testament not only to their lack of integrity but also to the deceit and corruption that forms the crux of their efforts.Nor do I believe for a moment that the editorialist's anonymity was an accidental slip. The persuasiveness of an argument can also be determined by one's willingness to put one's name to it. Another way to put this: "A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook." -- Bertolt Brecht
"Both by definition and practice, Laws Of Media deny commercial networks any sort of neutral or unbiased role."
-- Prof. H. Marshall McLuhan --
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
-- Marshall McLuhan --
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
-- A.J. Liebling--
"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell--
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
-- Socrates--
Certainly, Skull and Bones does cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for the Atlantic Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, “If it’s not portrayed positively, I’m sending a couple of my friends after you.” After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones. He scolded me for writing the article—”writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism,” he condescended —and then asked me how much I had been paid for the story. When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he called back.Also Posted at Ice Station Tango. A recommended place to chill out.
“I have just gotten off the phone with our people.” “Your people?” I snickered.
“Yes. Our people.” He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information.
“I’ve never been in the tomb and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article,” I replied.
“Then you must have gotten something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to talk to them,” he wheedled. “I don’t reveal my sources.”
Then he got angry. He screamed at me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article.
“A lot of people are very despondent over this!” he yelled. “Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!” I thanked him for telling me his concerns.
“There are a lot of us at newspapers and at political journalism institutions,” he coldly hissed. “Good luck with your career”—and he slammed down the phone. --Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb
"Here's the deal. You make this tiny personal profit, I'll make this giant corporate profit, eventually I'll bleed you dry, we'll call it your foolishness, and you can pay the tab. Restore Honor and Dignity!"Come to think of it, the current economic crisis gets me thin king of the Great stock market crash, which came about not because of deregulated, but unregulated, financial dealings. Unregulated stockmarket speculation fed by bank loans running amok, actually. Conservatives, Coolidge in particular, failed to intervene, while Wall Street did its best Las Vegas Casino impression. Way to go. Laissez-faire. Let it be. Must not intervene. Let the theft continue. Let them eat cake. I could almost hear the proclamation at George Bush, the Lesser's inauguration, "Let the Plunder Begin!"
OK, I've blogged before about Naomi Wolf and her book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. But having become aware of some much better YouTube footage (hat-tip Punditman at Another Point of View) I felt it was time to revisit the subject.Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.That was from Ms. Wolf's article in Huffington Post, Ten Steps to Closing Down an Open Society. Here are the steps in bullet form:
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
There's a poll at the Idaho Statesman tonight - (middle column, almost to the bottom)Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey has come under fire from some Democrats because he refused to classify "waterboarding," an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, as torture. Do you consider waterboarding a form of torture?There's the usual choices: Yes / No / Don't Know / In some circumstances
Since Attorney General designate Michael Mukasey can’t figure out if waterboarding constitutes torture, we are going to help him out. Brett Kimberlin, the Director of Justice Through Music, a co-founder of VR, wanted to know and to show the public actual waterboarding and torture. He therefore agreed to be the subject of a music video featuring various means of torture approved by U.S. officials and used by military personnel over the past few years.The forced over-wroughtness of the video somehow doesn't seem too consistent with this, "Following the torture session, I was hobbled for three weeks, had scars on my wrists for months, and contracted a life threatening respiratory infection and shingles for which I had to seek medical treatment. I still have nightmares about the torture even though I knew that I would get out alive."
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.Read Malcolm Nance's piece and see why I think the piece at VR is buffoonery and does us no favors. Mr. Nance also presented the same as an abbreviated editorial on waterboarding in the New York Daily News in which he defines some of his credentialing.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation....
One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.
Warning Signs of Fascism, originally uploaded by anarchosyn.
