The BBC is featuring a series of satellite images from the European Space Agency, showing the effect of the current heatwave on Europe. This is pollution from cars, otherwise known as smog:
This may become a permanent, even worsening state of situation every summer. Lovely.
That last post, calling the US a potential Rwanda? Drop the ‘potential’, insert ‘actual.
Raw Story: Video shows Ghraib-like torture by sheriffs lead to man’s death, say groups, family
Jennifer Van Bergen Published: Tuesday July 25, 2006
On Feb. 6, 2006, Jessie Lee Williams, Jr., a 40-year-old black man in a Southern Mississippi jail, was allegedly hooded and hog-tied by police, beaten about the head and testicles and ultimately died from blunt injuries to the head.
The coroner determined the death was a homicide. The local sheriff indicated law enforcement agencies were investigating and that the individual targeted by the investigation is ?no longer employed by the Harrison County Sheriff?s Department.?
Despite the fact that the beating was videotaped, no arrests have been made.
Williams? family has filed a $150 million civil suit for damages. Last Friday, the sheriff?s attorney in the Williams case asked the court to halt the civil proceedings until the criminal investigation is complete in order to avoid self-incrimination.
The complaint documents numerous previous incidents of abuse in the Harrison County jail booking room where Williams died, including beatings, hooding, use of a restraint chair ? called ?the torture chair? or ?the devil?s chair? by inmates ? and a technique similar to water-boarding where a sheet was wrapped tightly around the head of a man in the restraint chair and water was poured into the breathing hole.
In April, US Attorney Dunn Lampton told reporters, ?We?re moving at a good speed.? Lampton told Harrison County Sheriff George Payne not to discuss the investigation with anyone and Payne has not returned RAW STORY?s calls.
US Prisons the Training Ground for Military Detentions?
A recent Amnesty International report covered by RAW STORY revealed that nearly 200 African-American men in a Chicago prison have alleged torture between 1971 and 1991. The report concluded there are troubling similarities between detainee abuse allegations in US military prisons around the world and US prisons at home.
Williams? treatment, like that of many of those in the Chicago cases, is similar to reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US detention facilities in the Middle East. The nurse?s notes in Williams? case states that Williams was placed in a restraint chair, hooded, sprayed with pepper spray, and had blood coming from both ears. He was told by the restraining officer that the officer would kill him, after which the man choked him until he couldn?t breathe.
Based on witness statements, the attorney for the Williams? estate commissioned an artist to create an illustration which shows Williams being carried hooded and hog-tied.
The caption reads, ?This picture is a depiction made of the Harrison County Adult Detention Facility’s booking room on the night of February 4, 2006, based upon witness statements, in which Jessie Lee Williams, Jr. was hog-tied, shackled (hands to feet), sack on his head, blood dripping from the beating, and carried like a human suitcase ? soon to be slammed/dropped on his face ? two times.?
Such treatment closely resembles methods depicted in photographs of detainees at Abu Ghraib.James Johnson, an Australian with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters Degree in Psychology, who has been an advisor to the Australian government and has been researching the US penal system for eleven years for a book, says, ?I believe that the principal method of torture applied in the prisons is psychological. However outright brutality is used quite regularly.?
Johnson provides examples from letters inmates have written him: solitary confinement, rapes, beatings, use of restraint chairs, hooding, shackling to the floor, sleep deprivation, extreme air-conditioning, reduction of food allowance, refusal of medical treatment, electric cattle prods, TASERs and water-boarding. Williams suffered serious burns on his back from being shot with TASERs.
?Everything you have read about them using in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo is used in American prisons,? Johnson avers. ? That is where most of the torturers gain their experience.?
Read the rest here, if you can bear it.
Hyperbole? No, I don’t think so, not when you read constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald and Media Matters’ dissections of the increasingly hysterical and violent calls for the jailing (and worse) of dissenters against Bushco:
In addition to the Media Matters items, there are numerous unreported stories regarding the right-wing blogosphere that are of great significance. Let’s read about what goes on as part of the daily “discussions” at Little Green Footballs (whose daily readership numbers place it very near the top 100 daily newspapers in terms of circulation figures), and in similar venues of derangement such as Free Republic.
What type of rhetoric is one of the leaders of the pro-Bush blogosphere, Glenn Reynolds a/k/a Instapundit, a University of Tennessee law professor, promoting with his links, and himself disseminating on a regular basis? What sentiments motivate publication by Michelle Malkin of some of the most disturbing and hateful propaganda posters which can be imagined? And what causes three bland, corporate Minnesota lawyers at Powerline to routinely accuse political opponents and journalists of treason, urge their imprisonment, and engage in “rhetorical excesses too frequent to list”?
One of the pro-Bush blogs most heavily promoted by Instapundit currently displays satellite photographs of the home of the NYT Publisher, along with his home address — isn’t that thuggish tactic worth an article by itself? And virtually every mainstream Democrat, along with journalists who publish articles embarrassing to the Bush administration, are routinely accused in the pro-Bush blogosphere of being traitors and adjudged to be guilty of treason — not by obscure pro-Bush blogs but by the most significant and well-read ones. As a result, as the Media Matters post documents, many pro-Bush bloggers have a virtual obsession with vivid demands for hanging political opponents and journalists.
If you still think, after all that, that such eliminationist rhetoric is all just a joke to be taken lightly and as no real threat, just sound and fury signifying nothing – then let’s take a look at how the horror that was Rwanda came about:
In the beginning, the radio station’ Radio T?l?vision Libre des Mille Collines was a popular station that successfully preyed upon the deep animosities and prejudices between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. The sophisticated use of humor and professional delivery was interspersed with popular Zairean music. Contrasted with the musically staid Rwandan state radio, Radio T?l?vision Libre des Mille Collines quickly developed a faithful audience among the young, who eventually transformed themselves into the ruthless Interahamwe. It was only when the genocide actually erupted that openly racist comments such as “stamp out the cockroaches” were aired.
[…]
Not since the Nazi propaganda speeches of World War II has media been credited with having such a direct influence on inciting violence. The Hutu-led, anti-Tutsi, Radio T?l?vision Libre des Mille Collines has now become a genocidal icon. Synonymous with the term ‘hate-media’, it is a name that has come to evoke fear.
One can only hope that the majority of the regular listeners to talk radio and the readers of the Hate Blogs (note to Skippy, that one’s mine) are using their outrageous output purely as a form of escapist and outrageous entertainment and wouldn’t dream of acting on any of the vicious suggestions being made by the likes of Reynolds, Goldstein and Malkin.
But can we rely on the American people’s batter natures? Do they even have any better natures? Abu Ghraib and Haditha say otherwise. Americans who say that such an avowedly Christian country as theirs would not be hustled by such obvious demagogues as these down the slippery slope to the murder, lynching and imprisonment without trial of alleged ‘liberals’ should study recent history a little more. Not even the Church itself is immune.
On 7 May 1994 soldiers and militias arrived at Shyogwe Diocese aboard a red pick-up vehicle to transport civilian Tutsi refugees to the killing sites. “On that day Bishop Samuel Musabyimana was present and, addressing the soldiers and militias, publicly stated that he did not oppose the killing of Tutsis, but that he did not want killings at the Diocese and that the Tutsis should be taken to Kabgayi to be killed.” (Indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against former Anglican Bishop Samuel Musabyimana).
[…]
On 22 April 1994, S?raphine Mukamana had hidden herself in a garage when militias attacked a convent in Sovu in southern Rwanda. “We sought refugee in the garage and closed and barricaded the doors. Outside a bloodbath is going on. Suddenly an orphan begins to weep as it gets to hot in the garage. At once, the killers approach the garage.” As the refugees refuse to come out, the militia leader Emmanuel Rekeraho decides to burn them alive in the garage. “‘The nuns are coming to help us. They are bringing gasoline,’ I heard [Rekeraho] say. Looking through a hole that the militiamen meanwhile had made in the wall, I indeed saw Sister Gertrude and Sister Kisito. The latter was carrying a petrol can. Shortly upon that, the garage is set on fire.” Testimony against two Catholic nuns, Sisters Gertrude and Maria Kisito in a Brussels court, May 2001.
Before anyone protests the unlikelihood of US Christians ever participating in anything so horrific I have just two names for you: Fred Phelps & Matthew Hale.
They at least are or were honest about their murderous hate. The heroes of the Right blogosphere like Malkin and Reynolds are channeling from behind their safe pc screens an acceptable mainstream version of Phelps and Hale’s evil rhetoric while denying vehemently that they do so. “Mass murder enabler? Me? Not me , I’m just a plain-speaking, down-home blogger.”
They also serve who only stand blog and wait.
BBC Radio 4 history programme Document is to broadcast new informationt released by the UK government tonight that shows that the Stern Gang had Jewish assassination squads in place in England in 1948 to murder the then prime minister, Ernest Bevin, and attack and destroy the Houses of Parliament using high explosives.
Will we hear the current Israeli government condemn the terrorism of their own founding fathers following the release of this information? Can we flatten their cities and wantonly slaughter their civilians in a ‘proportionate’ revenge response now?
Nope, didn’t think so.
Because of course that was then and this is now, and as we all know time sanitises everything – and because it was Jewish terrorism and not Islamic, somehow that makes it legitimate.
Not only that, but apparently having suffered from murderous oppression and genocide absolves a people from any and all wrongdoing for ever and if anyone objects, well that’s just anti-semitism.
Listen to ‘Document’ live here tonight, or listen again later here.
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