"Calling Franz Kafka, white courtesy phone"

This is incredible but, unfortunately, not unbelievable.MSNBC - Panel ignored evidence on Gitmo detainee

A military tribunal determined last fall that Murat Kurnaz, a German national seized in Pakistan in 2001, was a member of al Qaeda and an enemy combatant whom the government could detain indefinitely at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The three military officers on the panel, whose identities are kept secret, said in papers filed in federal court that they reached their conclusion based largely on classified evidence that was too sensitive to release to the public. In fact, that evidence, recently declassified and obtained by The Washington Post, shows that U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information that linked Kurnaz to al Qaeda, any other terrorist organization or terrorist activities. [emphasis mine]
In recently declassified portions of a January ruling, a federal judge criticized the military panel for ignoring the exculpatory information that dominates Kurnaz's file and for relying instead on a brief, unsupported memo filed shortly before Kurnaz's hearing by an unidentified government official. Kurnaz has been detained at Guantanamo Bay since at least January 2002. "The U.S. government has known for almost two years that he's innocent of these charges," said Baher Azmy, Kurnaz's attorney. "That begs a lot of questions about what the purpose of Guantanamo really is. He can't be useful to them. He has no intelligence for them. Why in the world is he still there?" . . . Justice Department lawyers told Azmy last week that the information may have been improperly declassified and should be treated in the foreseeable future as classified.

There will come a time when America will have to apologize to the world for Guantanamo and for what it is doing there, as well as at its other secret prisons. 'I was just following orders' was not an acceptable excuse in 1945 and it won't be in 2005 either.

Dawn of the Undead

James Wolcott: Terri's Law, Sponsored by Kraft Cheese
So now there's talk of Terri's Law - what I would call "The Dawn of the Undead" --which would prevent the withdrawal of life support from anyone without a Living Will, or even for someone with a Living Will if a relative disagreed.
This is, I guess, supposed to satisfy the hysterical anti-abortionists who are picketing the hospice and trying to hire hit-men.
Well, the hospitals and the HMOs will soon put a stop to THAT -- they know how much a law like that would cost them, and for what? So that an hysterical or cruel relative could force the family to continue to worship the empty body?
Once again, its an anti-abortionist attempt to try to deny the right to choose to the person himself or to his closest family.

The latest on the torture papers

Taking a short break from the All Terri, All The Time news obsession, here's a quick update on the latest prisoner torture news -- first, the latest ACLU press release American Civil Liberties Union : Army's Own Documents Acknowledge Evidence that Soldiers Used Torture. Another Friday document dump. on Good Friday no less, reveals more evidence of systematic and strategic torture of Iraqis: a teenage boy's jaw was broken during a beating; a detainee died by being exercised to death; soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of detainees" and the units who had lost the most soldiers during insurgency actionw were encouraged to "payback" detainees.
Here is the ACLU page listing the other government documents on torture that have been released following the ACLU lawsuit.
And here's the latest news about prisoner homicides -- 27 detainee deaths linked to foul play
And here's the latest about children being held as prisoners -- this CNN story from a couple of weeks ago.
There, isn't it great to be up to date?
Now, back to the latest breaking Terri Schiavo news. . .
UPDATE: Another torture story from yesterday that I should also include in this roundup: Blows that led to detainee's death were common practice, reservist says Here's what they did to a part-time cab driver: ". . . the pathologist who examined Dilawar, 35, testified . . . the tissue in Dilawar's legs had been so damaged by repeated blows that 'it was essentially crumbling and falling apart.'. . . Army investigators have said that Brand wasn't alone in brutalizing Dilawar. Four interrogators are accused in the documents of kicking Dilawar in the groin and leg during the course of his interrogation, slamming him into walls and a table, forcing him to maintain painful contorted body positions during the interview and forcing water into his mouth until he couldn't breathe . . ." And here's what was done to the brother of a Taliban commander: ". . . According to an Army investigation, Habibullah was so badly hurt by repeated knee strikes that 'even if he survived, both legs would have had to be amputated.'. . . another soldier in the platoon bragged that he had kneed Habibullah at least 50 times "and he deserved every one."

Dueling banjos

I hear the twang of dueling banjos as Jeb Bush tries to establish the "culture of life" at gunpoint -- the Bush Banzai Brigade vs the Pinellas Park Police. Police 'showdown' averted Film at 11.
Well, I was right -- I said earlier that doctors would not want to reinstall the feeding tube without legal authority, and it looks like this was one of the factors that stopped the Bush Banzai Brigade from carrying Terri Schiavro out of the hospice by force -- that, and the prospect of a pitched battle with the police, with the protestors and media caught in the middle.
The media, of course, would have loved it -- new people to interview and new video to show over and over and over. Hey, it would be even better than Jessica Lynch, because it could show American law enforcement getting beaten and shot by other American law enforcement, all in the cause of the "culture of life".
You know, if you wrote all this up as a novel, no publisher would accept it -- the story is just too incredible for fiction.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Res Ipsa Loquitur.....
Ross, great piece.
Its about Hunter Thompson and Billmon and the whole damn thing.
I wish Hunter Thompson hadn't done it. But I am glad that Billmon is back. The world needs voices of sanity and truth, now more than ever - do not go gentle into that good night, rage rage against the dying of the light.
I have revised that myself to say "blog, blog against the dying of the light" and to use it as the slogan for my blog. Now partly thats just a joke, but partly I really believe it.
When you look at the history of great battles, it often seems that one of the significant factors for the winners was an unexpectedly better technology.
In the battle against the fascism of the Bush administration I believe that blogs may play a decisive role.
Maybe I am deluded because of my own blog experience, when I discovered Liberal Oasis in the fall of 2002 and felt it truly was an oasis in a world of insanity, when Bush was marching inextolerably toward a pointless, needless war with Iraq and the dems lost congress in the midterms and the media acted like the anti-war movement did not exist.
But just as the discovery of Liberal Oasis allowed this middle-aged woman from Saskatchewan to connect with like-minded people all across the continent and even around the world, so do the on-line communities created by Kos and Atrios and RossK and Frog, and Robert and Pogge and Canadian Cynic and all of us, allow unforeseen connections and synergies which the forces of darkness did not anticipate and have not planned for and cannot stop.
And maybe, together in cyberspace, we will prevail.

Its up-is-downism, again

WorldNetDaily: Nazis: Pioneers in medicine
This Buchanan column talks about how Terri Schiavo is like a Christian martyr groaning under the Nazi heel.
I've seen a lot of stuff in the last two months talking about American fascism under Bush and worrying about the fascist tendencies in the Bush administration. Do you think this Schiavo hysteria is what the Bush fascists were waiting for, so that they can use it to try to accuse their opponents of what they themselves are guilty of?
It's like the supporters of AWOL Bush accusing war hero Kerry of cowardice.
Its another example of what Josh Marshall calls Up-is-Downism.
I am calling it Jessica Lynch syndrome -- the desire to see Jeb Bush and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders burst into Ms. Schiavo's hospice room, scoop her up at gunpoint, and spirit her away to a hospital where, because the doctors likely wouldn't do this surgery without legal authorization, they would also have to force the doctors at gunpoint to reinstall the feeding tube.
Still crazy, after all these years.

Best line of the day

From a commenter on this post at Daily Kos :: What Happens When Worlds Collide?:
"Reality is what refuses to go away when you stop believing in it."

A uniter, not a divider

CBS News | Poll: Keep Feeding Tube Out
My daughter raised this point -- if 82 percent of the public think that Bush and congress made a mistake in interfering with the Terry Schiavo case, I guess it can now be proven that Bush is actually a uniter, not a divider. He has united the American public in disapproval of what he did.

What a great weight loss idea!

Yahoo! News - You Want Fingers with That? A customer took a spoonful of chili which included a human finger. After spitting it out, authorities said "Then they had some kind of emotional reaction and vomited."
Well, I should think so.
Hey, maybe Weight Watchers should try this with their frozen dinners -- having to watch out for the occasional body part would be a guaranteed way to make you eat slowly, and maybe even lose interest in eating altogether, wouldn't it.

NOW I get it

Pandagon: The ghouls and vampires who oppose choice
Well, I'm finally starting to understand why the anti-abortion people are leading the "culture of life" charge to try to get the feeding tube reinserted in Terri Schiavo.
Like abortion, its not about life, its about choice. And once again, its not "what choice" but "whose choice" that is basically the issue.
I have argued on this blog that many of the people who say they are anti-abortion are actually just anti-choice -- what they are actually opposed to is allowing individual women to choose for themselves whether or not to get an abortion. They usually concede that if her reasons are "good enough", like that the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or that carrying the baby will kill her, then a woman could get an abortion in that situation. In other words, they think its OK for a woman to have an abortion if a committee of doctors OKs it , but not if the woman decides for herself.
Parenthetically, this is why I was so pleased to see the Conservatives agree last weekend that they would not adopt a policy supporting new abortion legislation -- they finally accepted that people can be pro-choice without being pro-abortion.
Getting back to the Schiavo case, I see the same "anti-choice" approach as it taken toward abortion. The basic attitude seems to be that Ms. Shiavo's own choice must be disregarded, ignored, marginalized, disbelieved or overturned. This choice has been confirmed by legal evidence presented in court, reviewed and cross-examined, evaluated by lawyers and by Ms. Schaivo's own guardian, and accepted as factual by judge after judge -- first, that Ms Schiavo is and will always be a vegetable, and second, that she would choose to die rather than to continue to live in such a condition. Instead, the argument seems to go, the choice should be made by her parents or her sister or her brother or the congress or Jeb Bush or the Supreme Court -- anyone, really, who would base the choice on their own mystic, magical, wishful thinking rather than on Ms. Schiavo's choice. Baiscally, they are writhing and turning to avoid accepting that she made her own choice.
And in a postscript -- I read the saddest comment on a blog today. The commenter said she had worked in the same workplace as Ms. Schaivo's brother and that he was a sad man, having spent his entire adult life, 15 years, embroiled in this case. I wonder if her parents or brother or sister ever considered whether Ms. Schiavo herself would have wanted them all to suffer for so long over her twisted body and empty mind.

Signs that the apocalypse is upon us

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
Read it and weep.

"Stop the insanity"

Well, I'll say.
Poor Mrs. Schindler was quoted today as saying this, and I agree but in a different context.
Schiavo's Parents Suffer More Setbacks
This is reminding me now of the Princess Dianna funeral on speed -- in that case, we saw a riotous two-week outpouring of hysterical grief, followed by an embarassed and somewhat shamefaced return to normalcy. In this case, it has taken only a few days to go through the hysteria phase and reach the embarassed stage, the stage where people see Ms. Shiavo's "baby seal" face and mutter to themselves, please no more. and change the channel.
Except, of course, for Pat Buchannan -- who said tonight on Hardball that President Bush should get federal marshals to burst into Ms. Schiavo's hospice room and scoop her up and take her to a hospital where, presumably at gunpoint, doctors would reinstall the feeding tube by force. When Matthews asked him under what authority the president could do that, Buchannan said, well, he's the president. Oh for heaven's sake, do you guys think you elected a king?
Please, please, stop the insanity!

So how are things going in Iraq these days?

John Burns writes in this NYT article, There Are Signs the Tide May Be Turning on Iraq's Street of Fear, about how maybe, just maybe, things are going better on Haifa Street in Iraq.
But the article gives me a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling. "In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital's core with something approaching impunity. But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed."
This is progress? An 18 month battle for a single Baghdad street, where things are so much better now because the insurgents are attacking "in smaller numbers"? Oh wow!
And then there is Today in Iraq's reference to this Asia Times article: Shocked and awed into 'freedom' , which provides an Iraqi-eyed view of daily life now in Iraq:
"Highways in and out of Baghdad are suicidal: the Americans can't control any of them. Anyone is a potential kidnapping target, either for the Sunni guerrilla or criminal gangs. Officials at the Oil and Electricity Ministries tell of at least one attack a day. Oil pipelines are attacked and distribution interrupted virtually every week. There's a prison camp syndrome: almost 10,000 Iraqis incarcerated at any one time, in three large jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib. . . . The Sunni guerrillas register an average of scores of attacks a day, all over the country. Roadside and car bombs are still exploding in leveled Fallujah. The Baghdad regional police commander was assassinated on Saturday. The resistance has infiltrated virtually all government and police networks . . . "
So I don't think it matters very much whether things are going better for the Americans along Haifa Street.

Yes!

Every time I start feeling that our civilization is crumbling, something like this gives me hope.
This Catholic bishop originally refused a Catholic funeral for a gay bar owner. Now, following protests organized by Americablog among others, and obviously some soul-searching, the bishop has changed his mind, saying he now realizes his condemnation was unjust. Its impressive to see that people CAN change, isn't it. Bishop apologizes for barring Catholic funeral of gay nightclub owner

It only hurts when I laugh

Rumsfeld Cautions Iraqis on New Government
This made me laugh -- "[Rumsfeld] warned that Iraqis had to 'be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group. This is too serious a business over there and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that.'
So here is Rumsfeld warning Iraq against hiring people just because they're friends or from a particular tribe -- when the United States screwed up the Iraq economy and reconstruction because it insisted on hiring people to staff the coalition provisional authority office whose only qualification was that they were Republicans who had sent their resume to the White House or posted it on the Heritage Foundation website. The Washington Post reported last June that "most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said."
Read this entire WP article to refresh your memory about the miserable history of the Iraq occupation -- and see if you agree that the insurgency is really all Turkey's fault because Turkey wouldn't let the US send 30,000 troops into Iraq from the north, as Rumsfeld also said this weekend, or whether this is just one more ass-covering remark from an incompetent administration.