NION will reopen after the primary campaign season.
We are going to lead by example, by maintaining the highest standards of civil liberties and human rights, which is why I will close Guantanamo and restore habeas corpus and say no to torture.
Because if you are ready for change, then you can elect a president who has taught the Constitution, and believes in the Constitution, and will obey the Constitution of the United States of America.
The Wikileaks group have struck again. Today they revealed that Guantanamo staff have been engaged in a campaign of propaganda, revising the web encyclopedia Wikipedia entries, including removing detainee IDs from Wikipedia, and posting pro-Guantanamo propaganda around the web. He, or they, have posted repeated encouragement for readers of various web sites to go the the "JTF GTMO" web site, Wikileaks reports. For example, in response to the Wired article reporting the Wikileaks release of the 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures manual, an GTMO IP address posted:
Well, if you really want to see some great photos and stories about the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, visit their website at http://www.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil.
This posts was signed "usnavymc1." This name was also used to post over 100 articles to dig.com. For example, in October this "name" submitted:
JTF Admin Specialist provides support and encouragement
jtfgtmo.southcom.mil - GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Oct. 19, 2007 - As long as Sgt. Edna Torres can remember she wanted to be a part of something that helped other people and her community. The police force was her first step. In 1984, she joined the Puerto Rico Police Force in hopes of doing just that. Although she received great satisfaction working for the police, Torres wan
Among other edits are changing Fidel Castro's Wikipedia entry to include "Fidel Castro is an admitted transexual."
Wikileaks has traced these the user name ""usnavymc1" to military "journalist" Richard M. Wolff , though it is possible that others may have shared the IP address and/or this user name.
These efforts at propaganda seem particularly amateurish, as if a staff member was ordered to post puff pieces and was interested in impressing a superior officer. About these efforts, Shayana Kadidal, Managing Attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative said:
"The military's efforts to alter the record by vandalizing Wikipedia are of a piece with the amateurism of their other public relations efforts: their ridiculous claims that released detainees who criticize the United States in the media have 'returned to the battlefield."
However, these efforts suggest a concern for their public image among GTMO staff. It would seem they have a sense of the scorn with which the prison is viewed around the world. Propaganda efforts like these will do little to improve that image.
Notoriously (depending upon your point of view), this past weekend the Washington Post published an article revealing that a number of top Democrats and Republicans were briefed in September 2002 on CIA interrogation methods. They were "given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk." The reported techniques are said to have included waterboarding.
Yesterday, Pelosi released a statement clarifying what happened from her perspective. This must have shocked even a little those Democratic Party stalwarts, but no, as we'll see, their Nancy can make no mistake. She was, you see... helpless.
That's how commonscribe eloquently and originally described what has happened regarding Katrina and New Orleans.
The Great Forgetting can be seen in how BushCo has been successfully keeping Katrina and New Orleans on the back burner in the hope that nobody recalls how Bush was responsible for New Orleans' flooding. Or for letting New Orleans languish afterwards...
The Great Forgetting can be seen in how the mainstream media has been doing BushCo's bidding by keeping New Orleans out of the news...it can be seen in the way New Orleans and Katrina almost never come up in debates...it can be seen in the rejection by the Commission on Presidential Debates of New Orleans as a venue when Ole Miss made the cut...
Last night we had news that the CIA, in 2005, destroyed videotapes of the "interrogation", aka, torture, of two al Qaeda detainees. One of these detainees has been identified as Abu Zubaydah. Of special relevance is that, according to Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair last summer, Zubaydah was tortured by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Thus, it is possible that the destroyed tapes show Mitchell and/or Jessen "keeping interrogations, safe, legal, ethical, and effective" -- as the American Psychologists repetitively tells us psychologists do -- by waterboarding and other techniques.
First it was the leak of the 2003 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Manual for Guantanamo. The SOP included procedures for psychological torture and abusive conditions of detention, including long-term isolation to foster dependence upon interrogators and "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process". Also, prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross.
The military assured critics that "SOPs by definition, undergo periodic review and change as situations warrant. Detention operations at JTF-GTMO have evolved significantly since 2003..."
Now Wikileaks has released a copy of the 2004 SOP, and guess what? Nothing changed, unless (mostly) for the worse! As the Washington Post notes, since the Supreme Court "prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there."
The first nominees' debate of 2008 is slated for Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi on Sept. 26. Ole Miss has to be the most undeserving debate venue and Oxford the most unqualified community selected, and it's not just because of Oxford's mere 650 hotel rooms.
Ole Miss is steeped in racist symbolism. The fact that Ole Miss had been chosen instead of New Orleans, which per the Times Picayunehad been looking at historically-black Dillard University as a venue, means that by rejecting her, the commission passed up the historic chance to use for the first time as a venue such a school. This makes the stance regarding those on the Commission for Presidential Debates (or at least their decision-makers) regarding race at least a little suspect.
Below the fold is what happened at Ole Miss that renders this university an unsuitable debate venue and why, if the members of the Commission on Presidential Debates were to show true moral courage (which they won't, because of their and BushCo's agenda, but....) they'd scratch Oxford in favor of New Orleans. The following shows why Ole Miss would not deserve to be a debate venue even if Oxford had 65,000 hotel rooms.
Historical analogies that rely for strength upon generally-held assumptions - often exemplified by a folksy appeal to authority in the form of the phrase, "they say" - carry with them both advantage and disadvantage. The recognition of human nature ("power tends to corrupt...") does make for convenient shorthand, but as with all generalizations, these little chestnuts also run the risk of imprecision when the discussion goes beyond the super-broad. "They" say, for example, that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, which for an historioranter raises a few interesting questions: What if the circumstances of the times have few, if any, precedent? What if leaders of narrow vision had at their disposal technology that could kill on a scale that had theretofore been unimaginable? What if ideology replaced common sense as a guiding political force?
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll look at the origins of the last war to be called "Great." Along the way, we'll encounter nations which based policy around the concept of their peoples' historical destiny, some guys with great facial hair, and analogies that may fall apart on the micro scale, but get damn scary when looked at through a wider-angle lens.
In another of those "I know they do it but I can't believe they actually say it moments, the Times (of London) report that the US government claims the right to kidnap people anywhere it wants, if they are accused of a "crime" in the US. Like the ban against torture, the legal remedy of extradition is another of those needless legal niceties to be thrown overboard by the all-powerful US government:
AMERICA has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects.
he American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.
If someone had told me that someone would be selling a Sioux scalp online on the 143rd Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre; I would have hoped, "Surely nobody would be that barbaric and seeped in genocide denial." Right?Wrong.
(Photos will be deleted after the scalp is in the proper tribal hands. For verification only)
Many aspects of the devastating war in Iraq have compelled our attention - we agonize over the rising body count among our own forces, we express our rage over the staggering reports of innocent Iraqi dead, we read between the lines of official statements to glean the larger motive behind the invasion.
Another less visible battleground in the Iraq war has been the American Constitution. Under the broad mantle of national security, the Bush Administration has claimed exemption from the protections enshrined in our Constitution and defined in International agreements. Prisoners continue to be detained for years without acknowledgment of their whereabouts, without counsel. They are subjected to extremes of deprivation and torture.
There is a growing consensus that the harrowing images of Abu Ghraib did great trauma to our national psyche - and was one of the steepest falls from grace in our nation's history.
Like everyone else, I had seen the images that came out of Abu Ghraib and was shocked and saddened by them. And like so many others, I wondered how could people, particularly Americans, treat others so inhumanely? I initially set out to do a documentary about why ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of evil. Were the people who committed these acts psychopaths? Or were they the sweet kids next door behaving badly in times of war?
There's nothing like defeat to demoralize the vanquished and embolden the victorious. But such clearcut victories or defeats, while they may happen in warfare, rarely happen in political battle. Due to repeated charges of torture of detainees, and the lack of elementary rights of prisoners in U.S. detention centers like Guantanamo, supporters and opponents of a proposed ban on U.S. psychologist participation in national security interrogations disputed their varying platforms at last August's convention of the American Psychological Association (APA).
I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.
A Cheyenne cemetery is in the same direction as where my mother told me she watched gypsies camp through her west window as a girl, about ½ mile from that house. I have reverently walked though that Cheyenne cemetery as early as ten, looking at the headstones and wondering who they were and where they came from. I did not know then, that in that cemetery were descendants from the Sand Creek Massacre.
I was recently interviewed on the Pinky Show about the contributions of psychoanalysis to understanding our American culture and empire in the age of the War on Terror.
Here is the YouTube version:
Those preferring can read the transcript after the fold [reproduced with permission of the Pinky Show]:
