War on Terror – Page 26

It’s The Secret Annexes, Dummies

Published on May 30, 2007

TPM Muckraker has garnered opinions from various lawyers and civil liberties types (and a fat lot of good they’ve done us so far) who say that the Presidential directive I blogged about. the one that givies supreme power to Bush follwing any catastrophic incident at home or abroad (as defined by guess who, Bush.) is nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here, move along, you’re all a bunch of paranoids, calm down.

And I’m Marie of Rumania.

What’s important are the secret annexes to the order, the ones that are classified, the ones no-one’s allowed to see. These secret annexes:

23) Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto, are hereby incorporated into and made a part of this directive.

But of course they’re not hereto attached.

Who knows what they actually say, but in the light of Bushco’s ongoing power grab I have a pretty good guess. Halliburton didn’t get that open-ended domestic detention centre contract for nuthin’.

Typical bloody soft centrists though, to assign benign motives to a president whose every action in office has been the very opposite of benign.

Did it not even occur to these experts to ask themselves, if they are still of the opinion that the order changes nothing: why now? Why issue it at all?

It’s all in the secret annexes, dummies. And we won’t see those until the Deciderer decides to decide he’s the Dictator (cue the manufactured attack by Iran) or Cheney executes his domestic coup, whichever comes soonest.

[Added to later because I thought it was skimpy]

Blair’s Alberto Gonzales, But Worse

Published on May 29, 2007

The Rt Hon Attorney General, Lord Scum of Scumshire and !st Baron Scum

Anyone who’s studied any law knows that a functioning legal system is not just about the laws themselves – they’re just words on paper – but also about the people who make and administer them, and their motives for doing so.

If you want to know just how badly political self-interest has perverted Brirish law and just how deep the depths that New Labour has dragged our formerly much-admired legal system to are, you’ve only read this morning’s Independent and its revelations that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith did an Alberto Gonzalez and enabled the torture and murder of detainees by British personnel, ignoring his own army’s senior legal advice in the process, caring little whether British troops committed or would be prosecuted for war crimes.

Lying us into a war with his flip-flopping legal opinions – and probably blackmailed into it by a desperately-sucking-up-to-Bush Tony Blair threatening to reveal his adultery – wasn’t enough; he also allowed himself to be bullied by the known drunk and abuser, then Secretary of Defence (and now Home Secretary, at least for a while, heaven help us), that loathsome, meddling Scot John Reid, into setting aside the Human Rights Act when dealing with Iraqi prisoners.

Good enough for us Brits but not for the ragheads, apprently, being as they are by New Labour’s lights lesser humans.

Cue the beatings, hoodings, torture and murders from the licensed pyschopaths we’ve been training in our foot regiments. They should’ve been kept under tight control by their senior officers, that’s what senior officers are for – but the officers were ordered not to by Goldsmith.

From the White House to No. 10 to Goldsmith to Iraq and Afghanistan – nothing negates the indivual responsibilty for those horrendous acts of violence but those who gave the orders, and those who gave the spurious legal figleaf for them to so so, are the truly guilty.

Goldsmith, like so many of the lawyers British and US government is afflicted with is careerist, weak, self-interested scum. He sold his country’s honour, such as it was, for the sake of position; the price was the maimed and the damaged and the tortured and the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prospect of violence cascading down the generations; but it seemed a price worth paying to him to be Attorney General, and cheap at that.

How big a hypocrirte is he?

Believe it or not, from 1998 until his appointment as Attorney General, Goldsmith was co-Chairman of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and he was the Prime Minister’s Personal Representative to the Convention for the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Alberto Gonzales at least has the excuse of being an unqualified hick real estate lawyer way out of his depth.

Goldsmith has no excuse whatsoever.

Yes, he’s scum, though that really doesn’t do the depth of my contempt justice.

What, Me Worry?

Published on May 27, 2007

How much further is the authoritarianism of New Labour going to be allowed to go before it’s put a stop to, and who is going to do it?

We hear this morning that now they propose to allow police to stop and question anybody, anywhere, anytime, about anything at all, with no probable cause and no need for any crime having been committed – and those who refuse are to be charged with obstruction of the police.

And now Whitehall even wants to put litter=droppers on the DNA database.
Are they crazy? Yes. Crazy like a bunch of technofascists. It’s not just the sweeping powers being given to police that we need to worry about, either:

Civil liberties groups are warning that the details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.

That rather puts the lie to those New Labour supporters insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possiible worlds – people like well-padded journo and ‘cultural critic’ Mark Lawson, whose asinine assertion in the Guardian on Friday that datamining is nothing to worry about, really, is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.

A commenter put it better than I ever could:

Markson
May 25, 2007 8:08 AM

Wow, the writer is exceptionally naive, especially in a world that has witnessed what the Bush administration has done with data mining. No one is paranoid to fear that governments may use Google’s vast search database to turn it on its citizens, just as Bush used AT&T to spy on Americans (w/o warrants mind you) and the Chinese government has used Yahoo to arrest a dissident.

This Pollyanna belief that because there are laws against such behavior in democracies that mortals won’t break those laws or the public will rise up is foolishly dangerous. There is no greater example of that folly than the United States where Bush has succeeded on destroying constitutionally protected rights in an unprecedented fashion and the public is apathetic (either being ignorant of the scale or believing that it’s scope is limited and accurate).

Exactly.

Mark Lawson and media figures like him are overprivileged, overfed over-insulated tossers who need to get out of North London or Bow or wherever the latest middle-aged trendoid meedja hangout is now and then. Lawson’s horribly representative of a technologically and politically illiterate cadre of journalists who were in bed with Tony (and now with Gordon) and who just flat out don’t see what’s happening. By minimising the threat Lawson and his ilk are actually enabling it.

When government authoritarianism is combined with ID cards and a DNA database and supplemented by commercial datamining, any remaining civil liberties, any claim to being private individuals that we have, is gone. Forever.

The information may be all about us, but it isn’t ours any more: even our thoughts are regularly monitored and sold.

What’s not sold is seized: in the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allows the government to seize and sweep broad swathes of information about us from companies and data providers, basically on spec (and it’s about to get worse). In the US the Patriot Act and National Security Letters serve the same purpose.

The wall between commercial and governmental data mining is now so flimsy all it will take is a enough hot air from a determined politician to blow it down completely.

Now they want our DNA too.

Soon we will all cease to be private individuals and become the property of the state, with no aspect of our lives left unmonitored, unsurveilled or uncontrolled, not even our genes. By 2010 every UK ‘citizen’ is to have a biometric ID card, the information on which is to be collated with what’s already held by government.

Liberty claims that, per head of population, the UK has five times as many people on the DNA database as any other country. The government estimates that even if the database is not expanded to include the details of minor offenders, some 4.5 million people will still be on it by 2010.

The expansion of the database is prompting fears that people from ethnic minorities are being stigmatised. According to research by the Liberal Democrats, under the existing system within three years the details of more than half of all black men will be on the DNA database

Almost 40% of the male black population, many of them children, have their DNA on criminal file, despite their having never been charged or convicted of any crime.

Oh, and just in case you though this apparent discrimination was accidental, the biometric ID cards are being brought in for foreigners first.
Guess who’ll be constantly asked to produce their ‘foreigners’ ID papers? You can bet that they sure as hell won’t be white and they won’t be foreign either.

Not content with seizing our DNA, the New Labour government’s latest wheeze is that children – even in the womb – are to be identified by social services departments as being ‘at risk of future criminal behaviour’.No only that, they’re proposing that not just hard data but gossip and speculation about us should be shared amongst government departments:

UK Proposes Department of Precrime

It seems the Blair government’s attacks on civil liberties will continue even during the PM’s farewell tour. The Times today has printed a leaked plan from the Home Office violent crime unit which if true is almost beyond belief.

The proposal is to force frontline public sector workers to report people they merely think might one day commit a violent offence. This speculation will then be collated by a national agency and shared amongst a range of bodies such as local authorites and the police.

The proposal includes terms like “sufficiently concerned” which sound good. However if staff have a statutory duty to make such reports then they will obviously cover themselves by reporting more rather than less. Remember that we’re not just talking about specially trained personnel. We’re talking about anyone in the public services who comes into contact with us.

If this monstrous scheme goes ahead it will in effect create a national database of gossip, hearsay and uninformed speculation – some of which will undoubtedly be malicious. Once on the database you’ll probably never get off. An unfounded accusation could follow you for the rest of your life.

And of course data, like that from Sure Start and other arms-length, semi-privatised or outsourced agencies, goes right into the ‘caring services’ pool.

It’s called the multi-agency approach, but it’s authoritarianism by stealth. Cemtral government is leeching off public service workers’ best efforts to help people. The people on the ground may have the best will in the world, but when a government is hell-bent on social control and has the means to do it, good people get crushed.

But it’s going to take principled people in the public services like that to fight this: only if the public and civil service unions refuse to play ball with New Labour, refuse to go along with and to implement these mad dictatorial schemes, do we have any chance of escaping a future that’s very scary indeed.

If civil servants decide to use their power they could bring the country to a standstill – and they could easily put a spoke in any scheme the government thinks up to oppress the populace, because after all they’re the ones who have to implement it.

But Will thay? How likely is that to happen? I don’t know. I wish I did.

“I Am My Child’s Mom”

Published on May 21, 200753 Comments

Or, ‘Raising Hell, The Dr Laura Way”.

It seems Dr Laura Schlessinger, scourge of the morally lax parent, may herself have raised a sociopath. Oh, how I love the smell of hung petards in the morning….

First a little backstory, for non-Usanians like me who may not be that familiar with ‘Dr Laura’, the bizarro-Oprah of talk radio. Dr Laura Schlessinger is a rightwing radio ‘therapist’, wannabe tv star and self-help book author, whose fans absolutely lap up her harsh strictures on sexuality, relationships and child-rearing.

Her show’s syndicated on Clear Channel radio US-wide; Clear Channel, part-owned by Mormon presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital (which has all kinds of interesting connections with some decidedly neofascist types) has a history of manufacturing and broadcasting far-right reactionary radio ‘personalities’.

So far, so usual for the US rightwing media machine and its creatures.- but Dr Laura is special. First off she’s a doctor, of sorts; even though it’s a Phd. in physiology not pychology it authenticates her very subjective advice as somehow quasi-medical and so iher personal emotional hangups’re adopted as sound principles by her rightwing supporters, some of whom are so loyal to her personally that they describe themselves as ‘Dr Laura’s Army’.

Dr Laura fits the Clear Channel mould perfectly; she’s a cruel homophobe and a hypocrite with a shady past (by her own stated standards) who preaches to others what she does not practice herself. She’s a vicious piece of work with it, as I’ve discovered the more I’ve read:

Even more shocking was her treatment of a Connecticut eighth-grader for an award-wining essay on free speech on the Internet. Attacking the girl by name, she maliciously asserted: “If she was my daughter, I’d probably put her up for adoption. . . .When she makes her marriage vows, and her husband has sex with someone else, let’s see if she thinks that this philosophy works. She also suggested that the girl be “sacrificed,” Inca style!

Someone who could treat a child that way should never be allowed near one in a therapeutic or a parental sense, IMHO. Who knows how many children’s lives she’s affected with her self-interested, twisted ideas? Well, one at least has been severely affected according to this report, and having found out what unpleasant child-rearing ideas his mother has it comes as no surprise – in fact it almost seems inevitable.

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called ‘repulsive’
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 05/19/2007 12:15:45 AM MDT

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, “Family Values Talk Radio,” the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

[…]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Dr. Laura’s publicity people and the US Army are now trying to suggest that this site was created by mysterious ‘enemies’ engaged in ‘information warfare’. Uh, huh, right, yeah, because Al-Qaeda or the Mahdi army have got nothing better to do than to fuck around creating fake MySpace pages about the batshit crazy sons of psychotic wingnut radio personalities.

After the Salt Lake City Tribune published this report ‘Dr Laura’s Army’ leapt to her defence in the papers’ pages, bombarding it with oddly similar emails, the overall tone of which was ‘don’t blame her for the decisions her child makes’. Bollocks to that, she doesn’t get off that easy – particularly since a major part of her schtick appears to be telling parents that they are indeed responsible for their child’s behaviour. Her catchphrase is even “I am my kid’s mom,”, FFS.

Dr Laura was once asked a very pertinent question a while back about the kind of behaviour her own son is apparently exhibiting , by CNN’s Larry King:

KING: And then how do you explain those where you had parents that drifted and the kid turned out terrific, and other places where the parents did all the things you said to do and he turns into a serial killer and everyone on the block is shocked?

SCHLESSINGER: When we take the fringe of the bell curve of exceptions and try to make them speak for the rule we’re not being fair. We’re taking extremes to try to get away from a truth that we know morally, intuitively we know what we need to do. I think human beings — I mean, from the time we’re born we have the ability to be selfish, we have the ability to be selfless. But I think small creatures are basically selfish, and we always have to strive against our selfishness every day in every way.

Shorter Dr Laura – “I don’t know what makes psychos. Ask me another”.

But she did know the answer all along.

Laura Schlessinger’s appearance in Utah last week included a visit with Army families at Fort Douglas. In an interview with The Tribune, she said, “We raised our son to be a warrior.”

Now see, there’s the problem right there. This is the kind of ‘warrior’ he became under Dr Laura’s tender care – at least according to what may admittedly beunreliable sources, ie someone who says they were at at school with Schlessinger Jr.:

I was in school with Derek in fourth and fifth grade. He was a sadistic bully then. He was a terribly unhappy kid who boasted about all the money his mom made and threatened, bullied, and beat up younger kids.If a teacher tried to discipline him or in any way thwart him he would threaten that his mom would get them fired and would sue them. I don’t know if she could but I know it scared a lot of teachers I don’t know a kid in school who was sorry to see him go when his mom put him in private school. We used to call him Malfoy because he reminded us of the character from Harry Potter. I wouldn’t be amazed by anything the guy is assused of, up to homicide. He is a nasty piece of work.
May 19th, 2007 at 19:09:49
From: KEN KORNFELD

Now, Schlessinger Jr. has been serving in special forces, and there might be those who’ll say PTSD! but that’s a copout. Special Forces are the soldiers who did this. This typifies what’s on young Deryk’s MySpace page:

In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life.

No doubt Dr Laura herself will be one of those who scream “PTSD!” too, supporting her little ‘warrior’ and his pyschotic tendencies to the end. But there’s no evading her responsibility: as she’s said herself –

SCHLESSINGER: …men are born of women, they are trained by women, they date marry that are trained by women, they marry women they are trained by women. A lot of what women get from men is their own doing, and that’s why I wrote this book because we primarily have the control in the relationships of the quality of the relationships.

How does that petard feel, Dr Laura? A little uncomfortable, perhaps?