Pinging stuff I care about.
“Things you can see that you can’t unsee” dept…
A little Quicktime music video levity for y’all. Dance Commander by Electric Six, video by the unstoppable Ruben Fleischer.
Honestly great tune, and a video that will sear itself into your retinas and never leave.
Speaking of which, I can not stop watching Paperback Believer, a video/music Beatles/Monkees mashup (via boingboing.) I don’t know what it is but I keep going back to it like the Biblical dog to his vomit.
The New York Times > Opinion >NYT op-ed on Guantanamo:
The Bush administration has turned Guantánamo into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It’s a place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11 downhill slide.
So we are stuck for the time being with the disgrace of Guantánamo, which will forever be a stain on the history of the United States, like the internment of the Japanese in World War II.
The story is worth reading because the case discussed shows not only how unjust and evil the government-sponsored torture going on in Guantanamo is, but how useless it is even for its stated purpose.
By means of months and years of detainment, our government was able to force a man to confess to being a part of Al Qaeda and being in an Osama video. Yay us, right? But he wasn’t. British intelligence has since proved that he was nowhere near Afghanistan at the time. He was in England. There is zero evidence that he ever had anything to do with Al Qaeda other than his own confessions under torture — which have been shown to be false.
That’s the thing with these brutal, inhuman interrogation techniques — they force people to tell you what you want to hear whether it’s true or not. Will that help us win the so-called “war on terror”?
Listen up, Republicans — we Democrats can’t do anything about this. Our party has next to no power in America anymore, and if we try to change these things it will be perceived as an attack on the Republicans, and will force the party in power to ever more strongly defend these practices. We need Republicans to repudiate these things and stop them — not deny and minimize them and finally blame them on underlings when they’re exposed by others — we need the Gonzaleses and Bushes and Rumsfelds of the world to change these things themselves. They’re the ones with the power to do so, and they need to be pressed to do so by the people who support them, not by the people who are trying to bring them down.
Come on, Republicans. We need you guys. Come through for us. Write your Congressmen and Senators. Write Bush, write Rumsfeld, write Gonzales. Don’t let this stuff go on in our name, in your name. It’s not helping us win the “war on terror” and even if it was it would be too great a cost.
Mothers told of children being cursed at and provoked by police, threatened with arrest for asking questions, and being body-slammed to the ground.
“I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and they said, ‘We the police. We can do what we want.’ They beat my son,” said Verlina Wilkerson, who burst into tears.
She said police came to her home in 2003, looking for someone who was not there. And when her son, Tyrosh Brown, objected, he felt the officers’ wrath, she said.
The crowd moaned as Tecelia Price described how police stopped her because the tags on her license plate had expired. “They handcuffed me and searched me and felt all between my legs and said they didn’t know if I was a man or a woman,” said the 55-year-old mother, who also cried.
Her son later told her not to complain to police about the incident, because “that will just make it worse.”
“And it did. It did get worse,” she wailed. She identified herself as the mother of Thames Hawkins, who died in the Kent County Jail following his arrest by Grand Rapids Police.
“I came down and saw the officer with his knees on his neck,” she said of her son’s arrest outside her home in May 2003. He was accused of failing to stop for an officer. An autopsy determined Hawkins died of a heart condition.
Assertions of misconduct seem to cyclically appear, and officers are taking the recent upheaval in stride, said Officer Ed Hillyer, president of the Police Officer Labor Council. The force will continue to act professionally while working through the charges.
“Perception, that’s all it is,” Hillyer said. “We’re not hiding anything and when something is validated, we take care of it. That’s been shown as recently as last year.”
Officer Matthew Lockhart was suspended pending his dismissal after fellow cops reported him for using his police radio to injure a suspect during a traffic stop. Lockhart pleaded no contest to aggravated assault last month.
Hillyer, meanwhile, took issue with the city board that solicited people to tell stories of their difficulties with officers.
“This type of a meeting is a joke. You’re asking for people to complain,” Hillyer said. “Every one of our officers knew this was going to be a b—-session. Let them b—-, and we’ll go out and do our job professionally. We knew exactly what was coming this time and there’s no way to satisfy everyone.
With all due respect to the boys in blue, for whose protection I am grateful, I don’t think this Hillyer guy is helping them any by blowing off serious charges of abuse and misconduct as a “bitch session.” Maybe it’s the way it’s being reported, but it sure sounds like serious problems are being trivialized and ignored.
Get Fuzzy today is just mean.
There’s a lot of buzz lately about how a study has shown that students in high school do not know of or value their first amendment rights.
This is largely the Republicans’ fault, of course. No Child Left Behind makes test scores a matter of panicked necessity for schools — everything else has to drop by the wayside. That includes student journalism. And the study demonstrates that participation in student media is one of the things that cures the ignorance and apathy about first amendment rights. Besides the specific outrage of No Child Left Behind, there is the general Grover “I hope a state goes bankrupt” Norquist strategy to cause the states as much financial hardship as possible, in the hopes of forcing cuts in social programs which are anathema to Republicans; intentionally or unintentionally this has ravaged American education.
But blame must also be apportioned the “fear the children!” mindset that was aggravated by the Columbine tragedy, which brought a level of paranoia and authoritarianism in dealing with students, which had been in place in inner city schools for some time, out to the suburban schools as well. Authoritarian schools produce students who expect and accept an authoritarian government.
Interesting comments on this from high schoolers in the updates to this boingboing post.