"Is it safe?"

When I saw the announcement on TV today about Michael Chertoff's nomination for Homeland Security czar - Nominee Criticized Over Post-9/11 Policies - the pictures of Chertoff rang a bell.
That white hair, those hollowed cheeks, those burning eyes - who oh who did that remind me of?
And then it hit me -- its Lawrence Olivier's evil Dr. Christian Szell from Marathon Man. Here's an Olivier photo -- not from Marathon Man, but it shows the resemblence.
And the big question is the same for both Szell and Chertoff -- Is it safe?

People's choices are Michael Moore and Ellen Degeneres

The 31st Annual People's Choice Awards gave Michael Moore the nod for best film for Fahrenheit 9/11.
And Ellen Degeneres won two awards, for daytime talk show host and funniest female star, while Will and Grace won for best sitcom
So much for the pro-Bush, anti-gay "mandate".
Won't it be interesting to see what happens at the Oscars? Nominations announced Jan. 25.

Williams blinks first

Maple Leaf flies again over Newfoundland
Williams is quoted as saying "Not everyone may have agreed with our decision, but we were able to focus the attention of the country on our issue." Yeah, sure. The issue everyone is now paying attention to is why Newfoundland and Labrador elected a loud-mouthed schnook as premier.

Kill them all except six, for pallbearers

Remember John Le Carre's January 2003 op ed piece The United States of America has gone mad? Remember Margaret Atwood's April 2003 Letter to America ? Atwood wrote "If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you've fouled your own nest. "
Now read Newsweel's latest scoop -- the Pentagon and the CIA want to set up death squads in Iraq and going into Syria too, and the only argument appears to be over which agency will get to do the dirty work -- like two little boys fighting over a new toy, they both want it first.

Secrets and lies

Another great post on Guantanamo torture at Digby's Hullabaloo
So today I'm reading a second-hand bookstore book - John R Maxim's 1989 book The Bannerman Solution-- and I come across this paragraph, describing how the hero cop is figuring out who the bad guys are:
"So the former FBI guy is now probably CIA and has some new secret job . . . almost everything is secret with those assholes. Even the time of day is on a need-to-know basis. The real reason everything's a secret is that hardly anything they plan ever works the way they meant it to and hardly anything they ever find out ever matters a good goddamn in the long run and if they didn't keep it all secret everyody else would know that too."

Added to Bartletts

To "Now, watch this drive" can be added "Get some devastation in the back".

Torture update

Balkinization's Marty Lederman, who worked in the Office of Legal Council office from 1994-2002, provides a series of posts on all of the torture laws and prohibitions and to whom these do or do not apply, in the Bush administration's previous and recent opinions. I found this from the link at Tapped via Liberal Oasis.

Senate "approved torture" -- NOT!

So I kept hearing on the talk shows last night that Reagan and the Senate endorsed torture in the 1980s -- well, NOT!
Its just another damned Republican Talking Point, ginned up to confuse the masses and confound the talk show hosts, who were caught flatfooted by these bald statements.
Here is the August 2002 memo which defined "torture" and "not-torture". Torture, according to the memo, means "that the victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be assoiated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result. . . [mental suffering] must cause long-term mental harm."
So things like sticking burning cigarettes in someone's ear, or chaining someont to a stool for hours, or incarcerating someone in a hot room, or pretending to execute someone, or threatening to send them to jail in Egypt, and so forth, fall into the category of "not-torture".
The memo also notes that, in 1984, Congress criminalized torture to fulfill US obligations under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. At that time, torture was defined only as severe pain or suffering intentionally inflicted.
So here we are: by parsing the definition of "torture" so narrowly, and by noting that "torture" was what Congress criminalized in 1984, the Talking Point can be stated that Congress, in effect, approved all the other actions which the memo defines as "not-torture". Neat reasoning, huh? How clever! Oh, those lawyers sure can write good!
The Talking Point demonstrates exactly the same kind of contorted, convoluted, ammoral, slippery thinking that is demonstrated in the memo itself.
And there also seems to be another Talking Point that the Senate in the 80s approved Reagan's decision to torture terrorists. Well, again, this doesn't appear to be the case. There were two additional Geneva Convention Protocols adopted by an intergovernmental conference in 1977, designed to deal with terrorism and its targeting of civilians. Reagan decided in 1987 that he would not ask Senate to ratify Protocol I (Victims of International Armed Conflicts) -- Reagan said Protocol I gave too much protection to terrorist groups -- and Senate apparently decided not to ratify Protocol II (Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts) until Protocol I was revised, which it hasn't been.

The medium is the message

The Smirking Chimp writes about the Guantanamo message to America:
"The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay is the brightest star in the Bush firmament. It towers over the political landscape like a monument to human cruelty . . . What is it that we fail to grasp about Guantanamo? Are we so blinded by the assuring narrative of democracy and personal freedom that we don't recognize the symbols of tyranny when we see them? The reality of Guantanamo is quite stark; a dull-gray world of cinder-block and wire situated beyond the reach of any law or regulation. Is their some doubt about what this really means? . . . Guantanamo is a deliberate effort to overturn every legal protection that safeguards the individual from the arbitrary actions of the state. Simply put, it is the end of the law . . . The Gulag at Guantanamo casts a pall over American political life. It illustrates a seismic shift in our fundamental values as Americans and a wholesale betrayal of our commitment to human rights. Concentration camps are anathema to democracy and Guantanamo is asphyxiating the promise of American justice. Institutions that once were counted on to protect the individual have been casually discarded by the perpetrators of the most despicable crimes against humanity. The Bush administration has assumed the role of Grand Inquisitor; dispensing 'cruel and inhuman' punishment without remorse or hesitation. They've elevated injustice to a level of state policy. "
I never understood Marshall McLuhan's statement "the medium is the message" until I considered Guantanamo -- it was built as just another prison, sure, but one consciously designed to subvert constitutional due process and prisoner of war conventions. In just three years, it has distorted American thinking to the point that the US now has a nominee Attorney General who supports presidential rule by divine right and who endorses torture - and the lock-step Senate Republicans, and probably a few Democrats also, will likely vote for him.
Maybe with the Patriot Act vote they had some excuse in 911 panic. And maybe with the Iraq War vote they had been sandbagged by mushroom cloud scenarios.
But with Gonzales, they will know exactly what they're voting for -- government of the gulag, by the gulag and for the gulag.

Its about time

The Globe and Mail: Canada to send DART to Asia on Thursday
Thanks, Paul - you finally did the right thing .
UPDATE: Also a good idea is that the government will accept for the 2004 tax year charitable donation receipts for Asian relief issued up to Jan 11. Great move that will encourage donations.

Its about defending the constitution, folks

Well, a Google search for today's "Guantanamo" headlines reveals that the news about the US Guantanamo plan is being covered in the US and around the world -- with considerable differences in tone.
The foreign coverage speaks to the heart of the story - that the US government plans to jail people for life without evidence or trial. The Sydney Morning Herald headline is "Senators dennounce plan to jail suspects for life without trial" and various other Australian newspapers echo this approach. UK Guardian ("US plans permanent Guantanamo jails") and Telegraph ("Guantanamo suspects face a life in captivity"), the Gulf Daily News in Bahrain ("US may hold suspects for life"), the Pakistan Daily Times ("Washington mulls life-term detention for terror suspects") and other headlines in the Indian Express, Xinhau China, Al-Jazeera, the Mathaba Net in Africa, the Mail & Guardian in South Africa.
In the few American newspapers that have run the stories, the headlines are usually either innocuous - like the Lexington Herald Leader ("US planning detainees' future") the Knoxvill News Sentinal ("US reviews imprisonment plans") - or themselves condemn people without trial, like the New York Post's "Feds Eye Life for Terrorists".
There are two slightly longer takes: the Chicago Tribune today publishes a story headlined "Legal tide turning on detainee issue" saying that US lawyers are now getting on board the detainee issue, though its main focus is still on the Gonzales AG confirmation hearings rather than on the detainees themselves. And Salon today publishes "Indefinite and secretive" which explains helpfully that "The new prisons are intended for captives the Pentagon and the CIA suspect of terrorist links but do not wish to set free or put on trial for lack of hard evidence." I guess even Salon thinks there is such a thing as "soft" evidence, which is sufficient to justify life imprisonment on its own, unexamined merits.
So I looked around the progressive blogosphere for outrage and found only a few postings: this diary at Kos and this at All Spin Zone, and the Washington Post stories posted on Buzzflash. That's it. Digby is covering the torture issue very well, but I haven't seen any imprisonment posts there. I have likely missed checking some others, but I couldn't find anything posted on this either at Liberal Oasis, Seeing the Forest, My DD, Blogging of the President or Eschaton. (I know some other blogs, like Frogsdong, Oliver Willis, Pandagon are on hiatus or away for the holidays so I didn't expect to see anything there.)
Now, I know democrats don't want to be seen as "soft on terrorism" and the progressive blogospere generally follows the party approach, but come on, folks -- this isn't terrorism, its your own damn constitution that needs defending -- the United States should not imprison people for life without evidence or trial. You're better than this - or at least, you used to be.
UPDATE: My Blahg is on it, and so is Stageleft.

Gutless toadies

Lugar Condemns Plan To Jail Detainees for Life
What this story should have said:
"A leading Republican senator yesterday strongly condemned as "a terrible idea" a reported U.S. plan to keep some suspected terrorists imprisoned for a lifetime even if the government lacks evidence to charge them . . . Influential senators denounced the idea as completely unconstitutional and condemned the White House and the Pentagon for suggesting a scheme which would "deliberaterly circumvent the Supreme Court rulings for due process for every detainee,"Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday. Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also cited earlier U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as the Geneva Conventions which are intended to prevent indefinite imprisonment without trial. "There absolutely must be due process. No person, whether American or foreign, should ever be detained without evidence," Levin said, also on Fox."
Oh, I wish they had shouted to the rooftops, using language which condemned this evil plan in the strongest possible terms. Instead, these gutless Senate toadies called it just "a bad idea" and asked only for "some modicum, some semblance" of due process.
Has no one in Washington noticed, by the way, that the Pentagon seems to be blithely IGNORING the Supreme Court requirement that a procedure be established to provide due process hearings for every detainee? What kind of government allows its military to disregard court decisions it disagrees with? What kind of president swears to uphold the US Constitution and then ignores it?

I love brave dog stories

Here's one, about a dog saving a child during the tsumani - MSNBC - A not-so-shaggy dog story, complete with happy ending
And I read another one, which I can't find now, about a child who clung to a swimming dog and was saved because the dog knew the direction to swim to safety.

Just another day in paradise

I can hardly believe that this "story" is being reported in such an off-hand matter -- Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects. As if the life imprisonment of people who cannot be convicted of a crime BECAUSE THERE IS NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE FOR CONVICTION is just another routine matter, just a problem of finding some secret place for them where no decent judge or criminal defense attorney will be able to find them. And most chilling, at the end, is the casual talk of so-called "rendition" - sending them to dictatorships where they will be tortured.
Of course, now the US itself apparently falls into that category.
Note, too, the almost-complete lack of names in this article, indicating that the sources for this story are too embarassed to step forward -- so I guess there is still some sense of shame in the US government. Not much, but a little.

More VRWC stuff

Here's some more Vast Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, following up on my earlier posts here and here.
Dave Johnson, from Seeing the Forest, wrote this article in 2003, which notes how a few rich people have funded multiple right-wing organizations and so created the impression of a groundswell of conservative thinking: Who's Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors?