Civil liberties – Page 25

Another Shoe Drops

Published on March 20, 2007

Condi has a thing for Italian shoes, as is well known. she was buying Ferragamos on 5th Avenue as New Orleans drowned – and remember this 2005 picture and the way the US media salivated over those boots?

“Rice’s coat and boots speak of sex and power — such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.”

Condi had better stick to buying those Italian spike heels on the mainland US from now on, because according to the former Milan CIA Chief, now indicted in Italy, it seems that whole dominatrix thing was even truer than the slavering US media thought.

Around that time, strutting around in her Italian boots, Condi Rice was ordering the abduction and torture of an Italian resident. From today’s Der Spiegel :

CIA AGENT ON THE RUN‘I’ve Got Nothing to Lose’

By Georg Mascolo in Washington

Robert Lady, the former CIA chief in Milan, has gone into hiding. He is the subject of an extradition order from Italian authorities for the role he played in the kidnapping of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan. Washington is seeking to derail the trial — perhaps because Condoleezza Rice may have given the operation the green light.

[My emphasis.]

“The attack on the convoy amounted to an assault. It was unlawful because there was no lawful reason for it and in that respect it was criminal.”

Published on March 16, 2007

So said the coroner today at the inquest into Cpl Matty Hull’s death in the Iraqi desert at the hands of negligent US pilots.

Isn’t it handy for those pilots that this verdict can have absolutely no practical effect whatsoever?

The terms of the Blair government-negotiated US/UK extradition treaty allow the US government to extradite any UK citizen from Britain into to American custody without their having to show any probable cause whatosever that an offence has even been committed, let alone that the intended extraditee is a bona fide suspect.

No, the US government’s say-so (and we know what that’s worth)
is enough for Blair and his minions to give up their own citizens to who knows what fate at whose hands.

The reverse does not hold true for US citizens, who may not be extradited to the UK or Europe, or anywhere else for that matter, without a hearing in a US court showing a] that a crime has been committed and b] that there is probable cause to believe that the accused may have had something to do with that crime.

The practical upshot of this is that the pilots whose gung-ho, shoot first, ask-questons-later attitude led to this killing and its cover-up will, like their their torturing colleagues in the CIA who’ve recently been indicted in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, be sitting pretty on their government pensions, sucking up the approbation of the wingnuts, thumbing their noses at justice, all courtesy of that obscene sense of American exceptionalism.

Comment of The Day

Published on March 9, 2007

Concerns online civility and comes from Sifu Tweety in response to another comment on his own post on lawyer Jil of Feministe’s law school and online harassment by rightwing fuckwits:

Sifu Tweety Says:
March 7th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

[…]

What makes me nervous, and why I mentioned it, what makes me nervous anytime anybody of any gender implies it, is the theory that we should somehow “do something” that stops these people from being able to act like assholes in the first place. Because we cannot. There is no way. The internet completely breaks that (already broken) paradigm, and to forcefully reassert that kind of paradigm on the internet breaks the internet. Period.

And the more people don’t understand this, the more people think about the internet as the “real world,” the more likely it is that somebody will actually find a way to break the internet legislatively – again, this is not a partisan thing, although it should be, stupid dems – and then all of the world-changing things we love about this medium, the thing we have in common, will become more broken promises, just like TV, just like cable, just like movies, just like the fucking printing press as most of the world concieves it, as the traditional powers retake control, and all this citizen powered malarkey becomes a memory.

So, yeah, those guys are unbelievable shitheads, but all of us must fight for their ability to do at least some of the things they do. It’s to us that they’ve hitched their wagon, to our tools.

It’s unfortunate sometimes, but freedom means freedom for everyone, even the shitheads, and we just have to accept it. Damn you, personal liberty, why must you be so bloody double-edged all the time?

Happy International Women’s Day

Published on March 7, 2007

Equality of opportunity for women at last! At least when it comes to police brutality that is…

There’s shocking CCTV video just published by the Guardian (also just shown on Newsnight) of 4 Sheffield police officers piling on, and beating unconscious one slight, drunk, epileptic teenage girl at the back of a nightclub then dragging her, unconscious and injured with her pants round her ankles, menaced by a snarling police dog, to a waiting van.

Oh, and did I say the girl is black?

I see a former colleague of mine, Ruggie Johnson, is getting great face time from the whole affair. Looks like Britain may finally have its very own Rodney King, though no doubt the Daily Mail and Express readers are already saying she deserved all she got.

The video is here. Link to it, spread it around: the world needs to see that the British police officer is no kindly old Midsomer Norton bobby on a bike, but a vicious paramilitary thug who’s lost all sense of his own humanity.

Who do you think it is in these northern towns that’s voting for the BNP? There may be very many dedicated officers out there, but they’re vastly outnumbered and intimidated in the lower ranks by callous racist thugs. Now Labour want to give these same thugs even more tools and weapons to herd the proles and chav scum with and to intimidate the rest of us into compliance.

Look at that video; are these the people you want walking around with potentially lethal tasers in their hands?

US To Europeans: “We can Torture and Kidnap You and There’s Not A Damned Thing You Can Do About It.”

Published on March 4, 2007

Not only won’t holding an EC passport save you from being kidnapped and tortured by out of control CIA goons who won’t be disciplined for it, let alone charged, but if you then attempt to sue the criminals responsible for civil damages the American courts will just cover up for them by citing ‘national security’ –

The court said that to make his case, el-Masri “would be obliged to produce admissible evidence not only that he was detained and interrogated, but that the defendants were involved in his detention and interrogation in a manner that renders them personally liable to him.

“Such a showing could be made only with evidence that exposes how the CIA organizes, staffs and supervises its most sensitive intelligence operations.

“The defendants could not properly defend themselves without using privileged evidence,” the decision said.

American Civil Liberties Union director Anthony Romero said the court was wrong.

“Regrettably, today’s decision allows CIA officials to disregard the law with impunity by making it virtually impossible to challenge their actions in court,” he said in a statement.

“The state secrets doctrine has become a shield that covers even the most blatant abuses of power,” he said.

With all due respect to those US expatriates who’re iving on the continent perhaps it’s time EU governments just started snatching random American students, or tourists for instance, from the crowds that throng here – to then ship them off blindfiolded, beaten and drugged, to be tortured in some hidden former Cold War hellhole. See how how you US citizens take it. Why not, this kind of behaviour is openly sanctioned by your government and courts and a large swathe of your population, what possible objection could there be?

Nothing personal, but what else is it going to take to make your country respect the law?