So much for her pose as a ‘deeply religious Catholic mother and grandmother’.
No conscience, no morals, no humanity; her faith and maternal insitincts are a nothing but a shallow pose.
The woman is a piece of shit and the same goes for her party.
Torture
Comment of the Day II
At Digby, again – this time on the news that a prisoner at Gitmo had attempted suicide by cutting his throat with his fingernail:
Clearly if those terrorists are going to weaponize their fingernails, its our obligation to use a rusty pair of pliers to rip them out to ensure the safety of the Homeland.
Its not torture, its for the Greater Good.
Freewheelin’ Freddie | 12.05.07 – 6:49 pm | #
“Respect My Authoritah!” Part Infinity.
Remember when bloggers were considered hysterical – no, shrill – for warning about the accelerating development of fascism and the corporate state? Well, it’s too late for recriminations and we told you so’s now – it’s already here and this is what it looks like.
It’s tempting to consider that video from a complacent British standpoint – with vague, amused contempt for the untutored colonials, and oh, look it’s Utah, well what can one expect with all those religious nutters? Besides everyone knows (except them apparently) that the yanks have gone batshit insane. Common knowledge, innit. But we’re OK, aren’t we? That de Menezes thing, that was just a one-off. wasn’t it?
If only. When it comes to being subject to the whims of a sadistic copper we British are no better off. Take this postman who refused to move his van and took a beating, for example:
Now give those coppers tasers… oops, we have.
Even untrained, ‘unarmed’ British plods are now getting these electric cattle prods and the power to use them pretty much at will; and when police have tasers, they tend to use them.
An enormous amount of money has been made by the Taser corporation and the morally dubious cops that work hand in hand with it, selling torture instruments to US and British police, to sleepy rural police forces and riot squads alike. Remember the movie Hot Fuzz, where the sleepy Somerset vilage has an armoury the size of a small state? It’s not that big a joke.
The Police Federation, which represents junior ranks, has called for funding to supply a Taser to every British officer. Well, there’s a surprise.
I’ve written before about the connections between former NYPD chief Bernie Kerik, now charged with corruption, but less well-known are the ties between senior British police offioers and the sale of tasers.
There is a revolving door between UK and US government, civil service, police, defence and the arms industries. The profit-making corporations have merged with the political parties, the state and the apparatus of state security.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini.
Well, this is what corporatism looks like, in the US and at home. What are we going to do about it?
[Edited April 2009 to add additional video, to fix links and for general grammar.]
“I believe that Judge Mukasey is the best we will get”
So said Diane Feinstein yesterday. I ask again, what has the NSA got in her file?
The positions of Senate Democrats like Schumer and Feinstein are becoming harder and harder to justify. How either can possibly have been said to have done their duty to the constitution or the electorate in approving Mukasey is a mystery: both senators’s said their stickling point on his approval as Attorney General was what Mukasey defines as tolrture and specifically one point: whether or not he thinks waterboardiong. is torture.
But why?
Why did they make that the pivotal issue, when there are much bigger stumbling blocks ro appointing Mulkasey to to be the nation’s lawyer? Things like Mukasey’s belief that there are few limits to executive power: for example this is the man who held that the arrest and indefinite detention of US citizens withoiut charge or trial by the military was legal:
On December 4, 2002, Mukasey ruled that “the President is authorized under the Constitution and by law to direct the military to detain enemy combatants in the circumstances present here, such that Padilla’s detention is not per se unlawful.” Instead, Mukasey ruled only that Padilla could “submit facts and argument” to challenge whether there was “some evidence” supporting President Bush’s finding that he was an “enemy combatant.”
The Second Circuit overturned Mukasey’s decision on December 18, 2003, holding that the Non Detention Act (18 U.S.C. 4001(a)) prohibited Padilla’s detention and that the president had not shown that “Padilla’s detention can nonetheless be grounded in the President’s inherent constitutional powers.”
But then Schumer and Feinstein have reason to go along to get along.
Kangaroo Courts as Wingnut Welfare?
Bryan Finoki writes at BagNewsNotes and in more depth at his own blog, Subtopia, about the militarisation of public life and public space.
His latest post is about the US’ “Expeditionary Legal Complex”, aka ‘Camp Justice’.
Camp Justice is a moveable, tent-city courtroom and jail complex that can be dopped down virtually anywhere to dispense American ‘justice’ on the spot, presumably at the barrel of a gun.
Judge Roy Bean would be proud.
It’s currently located at Gitmo and is primed and ready to convict innocent and guilty alike for offences they’ve never been properly charged with using coerced evidence in order to retrospectively justify their kidnapping and detention in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a handy imperial posession now reinvented as a legal black hole for the purpose of hiding and torturing foreign citizens for political purposes. As Bryan puts it:
“In a frighteningly lucid and surgical essay The Vanishing Point geographer Derek Gregory describes the war on terror as a “war on law”, or a “war through law” – through the suspension of law. While emergency is the state’s tactic it is ultimately the law itself that is the most critical site of political struggle, he contends. If I recall correctly, Derek explains how Guantanamo Bay was established as a purposefully ambiguous political space camouflaged in the folds of legal uncertainty. In short, the U.S. left Cuba while still claiming jurisdiction over the base but not official territorial sovereignty, which allowed it to exist in between a place of law and lawlessness – essentially a place of “indeterminate time” and “indefinite detention.” He calls it a “site of non-place” created for a “site of non-people” located on the peripheral edge – or the “the vanishing point” – of the legal spectrum where international law is no longer enforceable (and therefore non-existent), and where American sovereignty has no application. It is the ultimate space of legal oblivion, you might say.
It is neither a legal nor an illegal space and in all juridical dimensions is neither existent nor non-existent: it is – as far as I can make of it – the production of a convenient and sub-legal nowhere.
If that isn’t Kafkaesque and terrifying enough (and we’re only talking about Gitmo here: we haven’t even touched secret prisons in Diego Garcia, Afganistan and elsewhere) now this criminal administration has created a convenient and sublegal nowhere that can go travelling.
This is not the first Camp Justice.Here’s the permanent one on Diego Garcia: there’s one in Baghdad and more are planned:
… let me remind you, according to an older Times story additional complexes have been planned for various regions in Iraq, and I’d be willing to bet that if we took a closer look we might even find similar justice-in-a-can deployments in Afghanistan, Libya, the West Bank, etc. I don’t think it would be difficult to predict the future geographies of portable justice, if you know what I’m sayin’.
I know what you’re sayin’, Bryan.
But what also interests me is who will be dispensing this ‘justice’. There is known to be dissent amongst top-ranking military lawyers about the administration’s continued illegal outrages and I also wonder, on a practical level, if JAG even has enough military legal staff to run these camps, even if military lawyers were prepared to co-operate.
If they’re not willing, then that means outsourcing.
Cue the traditional handing over of plum posts to right-thinking associates of the administration. I predict a rush of applications to be prosecutors, not only from the Bush government’s favourite fundy law school, Pat Robertson’s Regent law school, but also from those good germans fron the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty law school – which is conveniently producing its first graduating classes just at the right time. Even the necessary ancillary staff are being trained as I type, at a Department of Homeland Security sponsored hugh school. The Camp Justice buildings may look temporary, but they’re thinking long-term and long-range here.