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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
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Shots Fired Inside NY City Hall. A "man in a blue suit" apparently opened fire from the balcony of the New York City Hall Chamber, getting off a dozen shots and wounding two before fleeing. [Hit & Run]
The summary is a bit outdated--the linked article says that the shooter was a political opponent of the councilman he killed, so this was an assasination and not just some random nut. He shot the councilman, and then was killed by a security guard, and no one else was reported hurt.
There's no mention of what their political disagreement was. Given where this happened, it's entirely possible that it was a justified act by the shooter.
2:12:10 PM 
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Aide takes blame for Iraq claim. A senior US adviser accepts blame for not removing claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions from a presidential speech. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]
Now that the designated fall guy has been selected, will we still have to listen to members of Congress pretending they were misled by something that was an obvious lie from the beginning?
12:05:06 PM
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Berkeley Social Scientists Define Conservatives. Berkeley social scientists report that they have scientifically established that political conservatives are motivated by "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity." They hasten to assure the public that they are not being "judgmental" and that "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."
I can hardly wait to see their "objective" scientific analysis of libertarianism. [Hit & Run]
I'd be willing to bet that this was paid for with tax dollars.
10:25:20 AM
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Tests 'show Saddam's sons died'. The US military in Iraq says extensive tests confirm that Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed in an attack by coalition forces. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]
The government isn't backing off or equivocating as they did following past "discoveries," so I think it's reasonably safe to say that they're telling the truth this time.
10:17:07 AM
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Secret Evidence. Camille Taiara has a very interesting article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the use of secret evidence against suspected terrorists -- a practice that didn't begin with 9/11, though it's become much more common since then. The center of the story is a Sikh man named Harpel Singh Cheema, imprisoned since 1997 for reasons the reporter does her best to discern. But he's not the only one:
In one such case, a stateless Palestinian by the name of Hany Kiareldeen spent 19 months in jail -- much of it in solitary confinement -- based on secret evidence alleging he was a member of a terrorist organization. Once finally revealed, it turned out the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "evidence" consisted of uncorroborated allegations that terrorists convicted of planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had regularly communicated with Kiareldeen by telephone at his home prior to carrying out their goal. Yet the phone calls had been made months before Kiareldeen had moved into the residence. Kiareldeen didn't even know the group he was accused of corroborating with.
In another case, the INS held seven Iraqis it said entered the country without valid visas -- although they had participated in a failed Central Intelligence Agency plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein and were evacuated from Iraq by U.S. government forces in October 1996 and, indeed, had suffered persecution and torture under Hussein's regime before that.
The article reads like a dark and bitter comedy. One of those Iraqis spent a year in prison, for example, after an incompetent translator "confused KLM, the acronym for a Dutch airline the man had traveled on, with a terrorist group." [Hit & Run]
The first comment on this post says that, "George W. Bush specifically ran against the use of secret evidence, especially when he was campaigning up in the contested, Arab-heavy state of Michigan." It doesn't surprise me. After all, he also campaigned against Clinton's policy of repeatedly attacking foreign countries that hadn't done anything to us.
9:44:04 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 1:55:50 PM.
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