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Saturday, April 15, 2006  

It's not torture if the Field Marshall orders it

Over at Salon is a report on new evidence that Donald Rumsfeld was "personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as 'the 20th hijacker.'" Mohammed al-Kahtani was "forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform 'dog tricks' on a leash" and "received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days." When told that interrogators were "right on the verge of making a breakthrough" with al-Khatani using the techniques he ordered, Rumsfeld is reported to have said, "Fine."1

Yesterday's Salon story is based on disclosures in a December 20, 2005, Army inspector general's report on conduct by Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, former commanding general in charge of Guantánamo Bay detention center. Salon obtained the report this past week through the Freedom of Information Act. The report has Miller and Rumsfeld "talking weekly" during the period of al-Kahtani's interrogation.


1.  "What Rumsfeld knew," Salon, April 14, 2006. See also the summary at Think Progress.

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posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 3:05 PM |


Thursday, April 13, 2006  

Feds pounce on UGA sophomore dressed as pirate

ATHENS (GA) - On the University of Georgia campus for a community training project on Tuesday, federal ATF agents detained a student as a "suspicious individual" when they spotted him hobbling near the Georgia Center while dressed as a pirate.

The student told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs ninja event when he was grabbed by agents with guns drawn.

"Aye, it was surreal," he said. "I was moving smartly from Wesley to the Snelling cafeteria when I heard the bilge rats yell 'freeze.'" At first, he thought a friend was playing a joke.

The University Police Chief said the sophomore was released as soon as he was found to have violated no laws. "He spoke like a real pirate, so that was enough for us," the Chief said.

The ATF special agent in charge said agents thought something was amiss when they "noticed someone wearing a bandanna across the forehead and acting in a somewhat suspicious manner, saying things like 'Avast, me hearties!' and 'Arr!'" and then trying to run across the campus on a peg leg. "And it wasn't even Talk Like a Pirate Day," said the agent.


Satire using a loosely re-written news article published today in the Ledger-Enquirer.

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posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 5:10 PM |


Wednesday, April 12, 2006  

Sticks and stones ... but the news hurts more

Here's more information about the Bushevik liars. Read on, and weep with me:

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary

Washington Post
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A01

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by US and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, US intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq—not made public until now—had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.


[ READ MORE » ]

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 3:00 AM |
 

How to make a perpetual motion machine

There are occasions, as we well know at New Quaker, when disparate events come together in a weird juxtaposition. Well, it's happened again. Get out your kaleidoscope and twist it. See if you don't notice what I notice about each of these news reports:

  • "NASCAR officials criticized an NBC news magazine program on Friday, saying it tried "to manufacture the news" by bringing a group of Muslim men to one of its car races to see if they would be mistreated by NASCAR fans." Reuters, April 7, 2006.

  • "The NBC newsmagazine 'Dateline' agreed to pay a civilian watchdog group more than $100,000 to create a pedophile sting operation that the network plans to feature in a series of programs next month, network representatives and the organization's founder said. As part of the sting, the network also went along with police officials' deputizing of the group's members, in effect turning 'Dateline's' made-for-TV operation into a law-enforcement action. The segments, taped last month in Ohio, have prompted news media observers and others to question NBC's methods and criticize its practices." Washington Post, April 9, 2006.

  • "Pharmaceutical companies are systematically creating diseases in order to sell more of their products, turning healthy people into patients and placing many at risk of harm, a special edition of a leading medical journal claims today. The practice of 'disease mongering' by the drug industry is promoting non-existent illnesses or exaggerating minor ones for the sake of profits, according to a set of essays published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Medicine." Times, April 11, 2006.

  • "The National Archives agreed to seal previously public CIA and Pentagon records and to keep silent about US intelligence's role in the reclassification, according to an agreement released under the Freedom of Information Act. The 2002 agreement, requested three years ago by The Associated Press and released this week, shows archivists were concerned about reclassifying previously available documents—many of them more than 50 years old—but nonetheless agreed to keep mum." AP, April 11, 2006.

Every culture has had its own form of foot binding, resting as it does on the shared, irrational belief that we always know what's best for the other person. Once you throw into the cultural mix the commercial reach of the corporation and entitle the corporation to control the medium of the message, you have the opportunity to create the perfect storm of mind binding, where not only is the medium the message (à la Marshall McLuhan), but the message really doesn't exist. The form of the message may determine how that message will be perceived, but the corporation effectively manages to create for us a kind of "esse est percipi." If the corporation's "thing" is made up of all of the qualities that it alone attributes to it, then it should follow that the thing exists only when someone enters into a commercial relationship with it. If there is no one there to buy it, it doesn't exist, for in this model "to be is to be purchased."

In this philosophical model, then, the government's attempt to take away information, to make it secret and inaccessible, prevents even the purchase of facts, of what exists now or has existed in the past. Real fascists know how the game is played.

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posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 1:15 AM |


Tuesday, April 11, 2006  

Louie Louie

Who says that this Internet thing will never catch on, or that you can't learn something new every day? I happened upon Theo's site, Louie Louie, devoted to the history of the song and those mysterious lyrics, both naughty and clean. He opened his website in 1995. Here are the real lyrics, which are decidedly poignant:

Louie Louie, oh baby, me gotta go.
Louie Louie, oh baby, me gotta go.
A fine little girl, she waits for me.
Me catch the ship across the sea.
I sailed the ship all alone.
I never think I'll make it home.

Louie Louie, me gotta go.
Three nights and days we sailed the sea.
Me think of girl constantly.
On the ship, I dream she there.
I smell the rose in her hair.

Louie Louie, me gotta go.
Me see Jamaican moon above.
It won't be long me see me love.
Me take her in my arms and then
I tell her I never leave again.

Louie Louie, oh baby, I said we gotta go

Theo explains: "Inspired by Chuck Berry's 'Havana Moon' and the Mercer/Arlen composition 'One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)' along with maybe some other conscious or subconscious sources Richard Berry wrote down the lines spoken by a homesick and lovesick Jamaican sailor, who explains to a barkeeper named Louie that he wants to go back to his darling he's left on his home island. Nothing much of a literary highlight, but THE perfect pop lyric. You have to sing SOMETHING, and as long as the chorus is catchy enough to be remembered after having heard it only once, the rest doesn't really matter."

"That's the main reason that so many different versions exist, especially the Kingsmen's unintelligible version has lead to many phonetic interpretations and misinterpretations that have added a lot to Louie Louie's legendary status. Back in 1963, everybody who knew anything about rock 'n' roll KNEW that the Kingsmen's Louie Louie concealed dirty words that could be unveiled only by playing the 45 rpm single at 33 1/3. Eventually the FBI got involved, conducting a thirty-month investigation that led to Louie's reputation as a dirty song."

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 3:40 PM |


Monday, April 10, 2006  

Bush has another Conversation with God

From a fly on the wall in the White House bedroom:

GOD:   George. George. Wake up. It's me.

BUSH:   What, what—who's that?

GOD:   It's me, God. Wake up, George. I have another important mission for you.

BUSH:   Yes, God, O great and mighty God. I'm up. I'm awake ... let me turn up this radio receiver on my back .... there. How may I serve you?

GOD:   I want you to attack Iran. You must stop President Ahmadijejad from acquiring nuclear weapons. There will be no diplomatic solution to this. You must act now, act preemptively, to stop this mad man and this AXIS OF EVIL! You have the new bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, the B61-11, to use against Ahmadinejad's underground sites. They don't want nuclear power for electricity. They want it so they can make Weapons of Mass Destruction, to control the entire Middle East—and to destroy my beloved Israel. Don't forget the oil. The Iranians are terrorists. You must resolve to spread democracy in Iran. The Iranians are freedom-loving people. It's time for a regime change. You must attack them. Kill, kill. Just like Afghanistan and Iraq, and that's all going so well now, thanks to you.

BUSH:   Okay, God. I'll do what you want. I'll get Field Marshall Rumsfeld to put together an assault force and start using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. I'll get around to it tomorrow. I have to get some more sleep. Being president is hard work, you know.

GOD:   You rest now, George. Over and out.

BUSH:   Ten-four.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 12:25 PM |


Sunday, April 09, 2006  

Miffed about myths

There come times when even our most cherished ideas must face the gauntlet of skeptical scrutiny and have to be either revised or pushed aside. We think that the constipation of reason ended with the Medieval era, as when the Copernican world view was finally discarded for something closer to empirical fact, but we can still find ourselves having trouble digesting the truth. Like, for example, the idea that federalism is really an efficient system.1 Or that a meteor killed the last dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period.2 Or the irrefutable evidence for the practice of cow tipping. And then we're not sure what to do about the unassailability of Darwinian evolutionary theory, or the myth of climate change through Global Warming.

But I think we could very easily move to the top of such a list the idea that the American political structure comprises a two-party system. This myth may end up being discredited in a way that we could find painful. Americans can put up with a lot of grief, but we have a very low threshold for the pain caused by a bankrupt economy. On April 7, CBS News reported that the "collapse of a $2.8 trillion House GOP budget blueprint threatens to send Republicans into the fall election season with deficits on the rise and no plan in place to contain them."3 That could signal the dismantling of the Republican machine in Washington. The Democrats may take delight in this, but they seem not to have anything substantive to offer in its place, and at times appear indistinguishable from the other party. It's as if one could take out half the seats in Congress and replace them with a mirror, and no one would notice the difference. Ralph Nader called them Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and he wasn't taken seriously. I can appreciate Cindy Sheehan's anger at the faltering of the anti-war movement:

The challenge of the peace movement, now that we have identified the problem so well, and have the vast majority of Americans on our side, is to convince each and every last American that he/she has a very intimate and personal stake in what we are allowing our government to do in Iraq and the world.

We are not just outsourcing our torture to other countries or paying private mercenary contractors to do it: by sitting on our duffs and allowing the torturing to continue: we are the torturers. We are the subhuman beings who put the black masks on our victims, water board them, or do other inhumane and despicable acts on fellow human beings.

By writing to our elected officials and complaining about this or that, but by not voting our consciences and allowing ourselves to panic and vote for a party when we know that both parties (except for a few notable exceptions in all parties) have been bobble-headed, rubberstamp tools for the Bush Regime. We are electing people who do not have our best interests at heart, but who vote to fund more money for war and killing and absolve themselves of the responsibility by saying that "they were tricked." We should vote for people who want war to end and did not vote against America by giving George the keys to operate the war machine when they knew he was irresponsible, no matter what party affiliation they claim.
4

The anti-war, pro-peace movement can't get any traction while American voters continue to be lured by the sweet scent of inertia. No American politician seems to want to be seen anywhere but in the center, even if Americans are at a respectable distance from the epicenter of belief on the Iraq conflict.5 But that is not because of character or conviction, but of who these politicians are representing. It's certainly not you and me. Sheehan and Nader are both correct, at least to the extent that we have moved toward a nuanced one-party structure, but that fact rests not on ideology but on the very system that constrains our candidate choices and silences opposing viewpoints. Corporations and corporate interests are the true citizens of power in the US. These can be defeated through different election processes6 and through real discernment, or maybe, just maybe, when our economy begins to collapse under the weight of irresponsible federal spending.


1.  New Orleans is still coming to terms with this viewpoint.
2.  "More Evidence Acquits Dino-Killer Meteor," Discovery News, March 27, 2006.
3.  "House GOP Budget Plan Collapses," AP, CBS News, April 7, 2006.
4.  Cindy Sheehan: "The Anti-War Movement?," Common Dreams News Center, April 7, 2006.
5.  Take, for example, the national poll conducted by ICR Survey Research of Media, PA, which showed that a near majority of voters either strongly or somewhat agree with a pledge not to vote for pro-war candidates. That was reported in March 2006. See the news item reprinted at Zogby International. See also "Vermont Dems vote to urge Congress to impeach Bush," in AP, Seattle Times, April 9, 2006: I'm not ignoring the effort by the Democrats in Vermont to have Congress impeach the president, nor that New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin also preceded them in this, but let's not forget that Russ Feingold's recent effort to "censure" Mr Bush was effectively buried by his colleagues' silence.
6.  There are several very effective alternative electoral processes which can overcome Duverger's Law. Wikipedia has several good articles on the Condorcet method and preference voting systems such as instant runoff voting.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 4:25 AM |
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