Attention: Service Has Been Restored

My dad sent me this hilarious (and painfully true) little service announcement that he received via e-mail earlier this week:

Dear World,

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4th.

Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by January 20th. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improving it in the years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

*The USA*

It is apparent that the new equipment is functioning properly, and that the damage done by the faulty parts is rapidly being repaired. Let's just hope that it is up to task before it: those loose cogs and wrenches did a lot of damage before they were extricated from the works.

A contrast in Veeps: Cheney, Palin, and Biden

Okay, so think about it. We know what Cheney is like: advocate for torture, shill for the oil companies, George Bush puppet master, Mr. Secrecy himself (always flitting back and forth from the infamous Undisclosed Location). Despite his disdain for things like the Constitution, liberty, and civil rights, you gotta give the man one thing: he'd know how to run the country if George dropped dead. (Of course, that's because he is running the country, but that's another issue.)

And there's Obama's selected running mate: Senator Joe Biden. He's got experience up the wazoo, with thirty years in the Senate and loads of foreign policy and national security knowledge. He knows how to campaign, and he's got the savvy to be a real asset to the president, and to take his place if need be.

But then we have Sarah Palin, recently Wasilla mayor and now Alaska governor. She's young and healthy and intelligent, and so far has proven a capable governor. But suppose McCain kicks off? The question that must always be asked of the suitability of a vice-presidential candidate is, "Could they serve as president?"

Yep, politics is the Great Sport of modern America. A better comedy nor scarier horror show you cannot find.

A craven Congress kowtows to the king

Well, the Military Commissions bill passed in the Senate, and our senators were among those voting to allow the president to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants, a privilege not granted to monarchs since 1215.

I quote from the New York Times editorial of September 28, "Rushing Off a Cliff":

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

Apparently, the Republican Party line is that accusation = guilt, the end justifies the means, our intentions will pave the way to Heaven, and torture is a-okay.

From a September 26 letter to Congress signed by 609 legal scholars:

the bill's provisions rewrite American law to evade the fundamental principles of separation of powers, due process, habeas corpus, fair trials, and the rule of law, principles that, together, prohibit state-sanctioned violence. If there is any fixed point in the historical understandings of constitutional freedom that help to define us as a people, it is that no one may be picked up and locked up by the American state in secret or at an unknown location, or without opportunity to petition an independent court for inspection of the lawfulness of the lockup and of the treatment handed out by the state to the person locked up, under legal standards from time to time defined by Congress.

So, don't you feel all warm and fuzzy now?

Popham's wrong on reporting of phosphorus in Fallujah

Peter Popham's Nov. 8 story in the Independent, "US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah" is getting a lot of play lately, but he's quite wrong in one respect. He says:

"Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city."

Well, it went unreported by most Western journalists and mainstream media, but Dahr Jamail, Alaskan and correspondent for The Ester Republic, was talking about the use of phosphorus and other nasty chemical weapons in November 2004. He was interviewed about it on Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman.

It wasn't that Western journalists weren't reporting it, it was that Western mainstream media were ignoring it, just like they ignored other evidence of serious wrongdoing by the US in Iraq. Dahr Jamail also broke the Abu Ghraib torture story: he was reporting on this in December 2003.

So why are the mainstream media so reluctant to touch such major stories? Why are they so, well, timid? Let's pretend it isn't happening, and maybe it will go away?

Fat chance. Corruption thrives on darkness, and when the media don't shine a light on the policy maggots bred by people like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, we get America the torturer, America the briber, America the crony, America the false, the cowardly, the bully, the pirate, the rogue state. These people have prostituted the ideals of our country and dragged us all through septic mud—and the US media let them do it. Popham's recent story makes me wonder what else the media in the US are pretending doesn't exist or isn't happening.

When are we going to learn that using the techniques of the bad guys MAKES US ONE OF THEM?