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POPSChristianity Today on torture David Gushee for the evangelical Christian magazine Christianity Today on five theological grounds for the unequivocal and universal condemnation of torture by Christians, and why, from a Christian perspective, no exceptional circumstances can ever justify the use of torture. From February 2006.
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POPSNo Justice with Military Commissions Act In 1873 the Kiowa War Leader, MoManTee surrendered to the Army at Fort Sill, (OK territory). He was promptly put into a two foot tall crawl space under the Commanding Officers Office where he was taunted and starved and taken out only for torture. When he was “visited” by officials he was taken out, cleaned up and dress out in “full regalia” only to be returned to the crawl space after the ‘visitors’ left. It was later reported that he “starved himself to death in protest to his being imprisoned”—–
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POPS"My Guantanamo Diary" Seven years, hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced from their country, several trillion dollars spent (including estimates of future costs), and all we've really got to show for it is ... (drum-roll) ... a sentence of 5.5 years for Osama's driver. Fracking amazing.
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POPSPhotos of "Prisoner Boxes" used in Iraq "Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F , it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be inside these boxes." Photos included.
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POPSJimmy Carter on GTMO To stay the hand of vengeance.....Not Bush and Co. Vengeance and weapons are the only, well oil, thing on their mind. But perhaps just as it happened to Hitler: The demise may come out of their own ranks. We need a Stauffenberg who could change history.
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POPSU.S. Military Frees 10,000 Detainees in Iraq Detainees are sometimes released for political purposes. For instance, the recent amnesty law which released thousands of suspected insurgents in an effort to bring certain Sunni groups back into the government. They are also released when it is determined they held no intelligence value, or posed no threat. In Iraq, the average time of detention is just under one year. Of those now in detention, 12 are women, more than 300 are juveniles, 200 are third country nationals and about 200 are over the age of 60, the US military statement said.
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POPSAvoiding ‘CSI Kandahar’
they’ve just invalidated — decided the job is better done by politically unaccountable courts … the better to spare Nadler and his cohort from telling voters exactly what protections they’d lavish on the people trying to kill us. The attorney general begs to differ. The justices ruled that detainees get judicial review, but, as he posits, they “stopped well short of detailing how the habeas corpus proceedings must be conducted.” Many significant questions remain open, and, Mukasey rightly insists, “it is well within the historic role and competence of Congress and the executive branch to attempt to resolve them.” LAYING DOWN MARKERS The Justice Department has to live with the chaos caused by Boumediene’s dumping of approximately 270 combatants on the district courts with no guidance about how the cases should be handled. Fans of Kennedy & Co. laughably point to this as a demonstration of the high Court’s restraint. In Justice Antonin Scalia’s apt dissenting phrase
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POPSThe putsch that imperiled America "Others have been less scrupulous for reasons that do them even less credit than ideological fanaticism. Take, for example, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II. In a sworn statement, Air Force Col. Morris Davis -- the former top prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions -- says he resigned after being pressured by Haynes to move forward with politically "sexy" prosecutions even though Morris believed the evidence against the defendants had been obtained by torture. Davis said he also told Haynes that a few acquittals at Guantanamo, if warranted, would send a message that the commissions sitting there were fair, just as the not-guilty verdicts against some Nazi defendants had done for the Nuremberg trials. Haynes' response was emphatic, according to Morris: "We can't have acquittals! We've got to have convictions! ... If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?""
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POPSAnother Terrorist Kangaroo Trial With alot at Stake So the government caught bin Laden's driver, we are told to believe, but yet they lost bin Laden? Right! It's all a lie and another show trial for a fictitious account to justify a fake war for regime changes. It is not only Mr Hamdan's future that will be determined by the trial. There is great concern among members of the Bush administration that they too could find themselves before foreign or international courts for the role they played in facilitating and encouraging the torture of detainees. The infamous "torture memos" circulated by Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Charles Addington, and two former administration figures, Douglas Feith and Alberto Gonzales, covertly approved the abuse of prisoners by the CIA. These men were publicly warned recently by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when Mr Powell was Secretary of State, to "never travel outside the US
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POPSUK House of Commons: U.S. Goverment Lied to us. Cont... "Britain's denials that its territories have been used for "extraordinary rendition" were dramatically undermined last night after the United Nations claimed that Diego Garcia has been used as a detention centre to hold US suspects. . . . The revelations raise fresh questions about the island's role in the process of extraordinary rendition -- moving suspects to interrogation centres in third-party countries where they are held outside the law -- and why the UK government was apparently unaware that its ally was operating a prison on Diego Garcia to house so-called "high-value detainees"."
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POPSGetmo Video Release How many 15 year old Canadians do you know who take vacations into war zones without their parents? Outraged Canadians are dangerous (scoff). This is why we need quick and decisive tribunals in regards to "detainees" We are wasting our money and destroying their lives. The detainees should be brought to justice or acquitted of their charges in a timely fashion.
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POPSWhite House Ignored Detainee Innocence As far as I can figure out, this is the Bush admin. worrying that it might be embarrassed by the ham-handedness of their wide net approach to collecting detainees. Instead of admitting that they may have gone a little overboard, they kept innocent people in prison. This creates a new class of political prisoner -- the inconvenient and unrectified mistake.
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POPSSupreme Court Ruling Inspires New TV Series :) Here is some of what is set to air during the presidential elections in the fall of 2008. Check your local listings. Fast-paced and wildly comedic, the series confronts social issues, while it indoctrinates the viewers with correct progressive messages. Three major American networks are about to launch new legal drama series that feature lawyers litigating in defense of armed Muslim bystanders picked up on the battlefield and wrongly accused of being enemy combatants. Quick spin-offs of such successful shows as Law & Order and Boston Legal are in the works at ABC and NBC, while CBS promises an original sitcom about a lawyer who not only defends accused terrorists, but is himself a terrorist.
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POPSGlenn Beck on US prisoners: "shoot them all in the head" Mass murder recommended as response to SCOTUS decision. I can think of few comments as woefully depraved. Shall we process them into sausage and eat them, too, once such limits are removed? This guy's views should set America howling for his dismissal.
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POPSLike I said, we won't need SCOTUS no mo'!
If one more "R" gets on SCOTUS we can all say TOOTLES to civil liberties & HELLO to Fascism. A statement from an everyday Alarmist? No its serious! The court now in lockstep with the "R" ideology which protects the wealthy and gives a nose-thumb at those who need help. The kind of social order they wish to spread across our land, is not democracy. Not with, cruel punishment for those who can't pay their way out of a guilt accusation. Not with, melt down of habeas corpus. Not with, stripping a woman of her right to choose what's best for her body & circumstances. Not with, laws, claiming Voter Id's before one can vote. Not with, reducing punitive damages to large corp. who will become more reckless not having to face large losses to their beloved capital. Not with, dismantling gun-control laws putting all at risk of being murdered by the disgruntled, the disturbed who should never possess lethal weapons. Remember 1 or 2 more "R" justices and you can kiss your, you-know-what bye-bye:-(
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POPS"My Guantanamo Diary" All About Naive
And this is how Mahvish Rukhsana Kahn,assesses every one of her clients. She accepts without question detainee stories of widespread torture, brutal interrogation, commonplace Quran desecration and illegal confinement. But she never bothers to reference al Qaeda's "Manchester Manual," that instructs its members to allege torture and abuse as part of their defense against Western legal systems. Besides her sympathies for the "innocent" Afghans, Kahn grew openly contemptuous of the American military men and women serving there. She describes mocking a posted "Soldier's Creed" to a guard and how she had to learn "the military's sneaky speak" - her description of terms commonly used in the detention process. She refers to one female guard repeatedly as "Rodent Face," and repeats one detainee's story about how he found the guards "androgynous" and that "we can find no sign of manhood in this army." If she was bothered by these attitudes, she doesn't mention it.
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POPSChild Detainees Battle System Alone
Eight immigrant youths suing the Abraxas Hector Garza Treatment Center in San Antonio describe being beaten repeatedly, so severely that several required hospitalization. The abuse continued even after it was reported to their caretakers' supervisors. In Nixon, Texas, ten detained young people filing a Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid lawsuit allege repeated assault and retaliation upon reporting the abuse. Of course, most abused detainees do not have access to pro bono lawyers and cannot hope to sue; much more often than not, their stories go untold. For the most part, however, the facilities' violations are kept from the public eye - and the eye of the federal government doesn't see much of them either, according to a recent OIG report noting that "interviews with Department of Unaccompanied Children's Services central office officials indicate that little oversight of facilities occurs." Federal officials aren't required to meet with children when they visit the facilities.
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POPSLike we needed more evidence that the Bush presidency talks crap... I don't know whether I'm more horrified that the comparison to "The Hunting of the Snark" is apt or that our government is keeping these folks at Guantanamo for fear of mistreatment back home. Maybe they're afraid that the water used for water-boarding won't be from a Brita pitcher. We suck.
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POPSOn Suing The Enemy “It bears repeating that our opinion does not address the content of the law that governs petitioners’ detention. That is a matter yet to be determined.” Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who is nothing if not plain-spoken, was his usual clear and precise self on this occasion, “The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” And not just Americans, if Mr. Justice Scalia proves as prescient as he is plain. Already prisoners at Guantanamo who have had to be released have returned to attacking American troops and/or civilian targets, and had to be recaptured. Having again entered the maw of the American judicial system, who knows if they will ever face justice? That question, too, remains Yet To Be Determined.
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