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Thursday, September 28, 2006 |
BringItOn!: "When the final history is written on Iraq, it'll look like just a comma..." (George W. Bush)
He doesn't understand one iota, let alone know where to put the dot. George W. Bush will go into history as a war criminal and a pathological liar.
USNewswire: "As the United States Administration seeks new legislation stripping Guantanamo prisoners of the right - now affirmed twice by the U.S. Supreme Court - to judicial review of their imprisonment, attorneys for Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian citizen imprisoned for nearly five years without charge at Guantanamo, today filed an application in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against Bosnia and Herzegovina for on-going violations of the European Convention on Human Rights."
Yahoo: "The White House refused Wednesday to release the rest of a secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat, as the Bush administration tried to quell election-season criticism that its anti-terror policies are seriously off track."
Prospect: "Thanks to the recent 'compromise' between the hard-core torturers in the Bush administration and 'moderate' Republican torture opponents, we continue to live in a country that does not officially endorse the infliction of 'severe pain'. That would be torture, you see. 'Serious pain,' however, is fine. That's merely cruel and degrading treatment. (The president used to be against that, too, but, well, things change.)
The interesting thing is that the compromise defines 'serious pain' as 'bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain', so the ultimate significance of this distinction between serious and severe might be called into question. More to the point, the law simply shreds the very concept of law, as Jack Balkin explained with this rundown of the components:
Eliminating the writ of habeas corpus, denying anyone the right to invoke rights guaranteed by Geneva in judicial actions, prohibiting the use of any foreign sources in construing the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, proclaiming that the president is the authoritative source of the meaning of Geneva with respect to the War Crimes statute, amending the War Crimes statute with language that allows the president to continue to engage in torture-lite (after all, he is now the authoritative source of its meaning), and finally, making all these amendments retroactive to November 26, 1997."
TheWorldCan'tWait: "On October 5, people everywhere will walk out of school, take off work, and come to the downtowns & townsquares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to join us - making a powerful statement: NO! THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US! AND WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!"
11:45:03 AM 
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Independent: "A 62-year-old woman was arrested and cautioned for common assault yesterday, after a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest involving 70 people was broken up by mounted police and officers with dogs.
Kate Hudson, the CND chairperson, complained the response was heavy-handed. Greater Manchester Police said last night that a Section 14 order, compelling the protesters to disperse, was served after they 'refused to co-operate'."
CommonDreams: "The Rev. Andrew Foster Connors remained calm yesterday as a police officer put his hands in white plastic handcuffs and searched his pockets after he crossed a police line outside the U.S. Capitol.
Less than an hour later, the Rev. Roger Scott Powers was also led away in handcuffs from the interfaith demonstration against the war in Iraq in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building.
The two Presbyterian ministers from Baltimore were among 71 people who were detained yesterday as they protested the war in Iraq - and continued Baltimore's long tradition of civil disobedience against wars."
NYTimes: "Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge's bench or jury box. Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings.
Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many - truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers - have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.
But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.
These are New York's town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices."
11:28:20 AM
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Independent: "Poland was rocked by its second political crisis in a week yesterday when a senior aide to the Prime Minister was filmed secretly offering financial and political inducements to persuade an MP to switch political parties.
The row is likely to deal a fatal blow to the beleaguered, right-wing government led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and bring elections next month."
More fun is in the offing when Romania and Bulgaria join the EC.
11:16:38 AM
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