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What’s next, slingshots?
Police arrest 1,200 in London knife crackdown
Police have arrested 1,214 people in London during a six-week crackdown on knife crime, Scotland Yard said on Wednesday.
Officers found 528 knives after conducting nearly 27,000 searches during Operation Blunt 2, launched after Boris Johnson was elected London Mayor in May pledging to tackle knife crime in the capital.
Press TV: How can it just be one person among so many hundreds of Congressmen who wants the impeachment of George W. Bush in these circumstances?
Gore Vidal: Well it’s because we no longer have a country. We don’t have a republic any more. During the last 7 or 8 years of the Bush regime, they’ve got rid of the Bill of Rights, they’ve got rid of habeas corpus. They have got rid of one of the nicest gifts that England ever left us when they went away and we ceased to be colonies - the Magna Carta - from the 12th century. All of our law and due process of law is based on that. And the Bush people got rid of it. The president and little Mr. Gonzales who for a few minutes was his Attorney General. They managed to get rid of all of the constitutional links that made us literally a republic.
Bush’s top general quashed torture dissent
New evidence shows that despite warnings from across the military, former Gen. Richard Myers shut down legal scrutiny of brutal interrogation tactics.
June 30, 2008 | WASHINGTON — The former Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, helped quash dissent from across the U.S. military as the Bush administration first set up a brutal interrogation regime for terrorism suspects, according to newly public documents and testimony from an ongoing Senate probe.
In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Those military officials called for further legal scrutiny of the tactics. The chief of the Army’s international law division, for example, said in a memo that some of the tactics, such as stress positions and sensory deprivation, “cross the line of ‘humane treatment’” and “may violate the torture statute.”
Myers, however, agreed to scuttle a plan for further legal review of the tactics, in response to pressure from a top Pentagon attorney helping to set up the interrogation program for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Judges cite nonsense poem in Guantanamo case
WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless, dimwitted character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem, “The Hunting of the Snark,” in ruling that the military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant.
The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case,” the court wrote. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.”
The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll’s nonsense poem, in which a hapless crew hunts for a creature that is never quite defined. The Bellman, the ship’s leader, led his men across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeating himself.
“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true,” the Bellman says in the poem.
“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true,” the court wrote.
Color me amused.
Finally got around to watching this yesterday, and I suppose its a testament to the effectiveness of the presentation that it chapped my ass almost as bad as living through that ridiculous spectacle. The old saw of not wanting to see laws or sausages being made holds strong here- we as a nation should be ashamed of what occurred in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. For example, the concept that the Secretary of State of Florida, the megalomaniac Katherine Harris, passed judgment on ballot issues while also acting as Florida campaign co-chair for the Bush campaign, well, that’s what corrupt banana republics do.
Which, in many ways, we are.
Watch this, but be prepared, its appalling.
An Attack That Came Out of the Ether
Scholar Looks for First Link in E-Mail Chain About Obama
The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen’s queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation’s most brilliant minds. The missive began: “THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO.”
Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective — and baseless — Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year.
Tracking down the cretins.
The ‘W.’ Stands for ‘War Criminal’
The House and a shot not yet heard ’round the world
by Nat Hentoff
In a June 6 letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey—largely ignored by a press immersed in the future of Hillary Clinton—56 Democrats in the House of Representatives asked for “an immediate investigation with the appointment of a special counsel to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441) . . . and other U.S. and international laws.”
This isn’t front-page news?
Of course it isn’t.
Boy tackled by Colo. mayor gets restraining order
GREELEY, Colo. - The mayor of this northern Colorado city has a temporary restraining order against him after he was accused of throwing a 15-year-old boy to the ground when the teen refused to stop riding a motorbike.
Mayor Ed Clark, who must stay at least 100 yards away from the boy, told the Greeley Tribune he stopped the boy for his own safety and did not hurt him. He said he will fight the restraining order during a July 7 hearing.
The boy’s father, Tim Stitt, plans to ask the judge to make the restraining order permanent.
Stitt said Clark forced the boy to the ground on Monday and then held him there until police arrived. Police ticketed the boy for driving without a license.
The father said Clark should be charged with assault. Greeley police spokeswoman Joe Tymkowych said Wednesday an investigation was ongoing.
Stitt said his son and Clark have been at odds for weeks after his son had a dispute with the mayor’s wife. Stitt said Clark confronted his son at a basketball court and told him “bad things are going to happen” if he didn’t stop showing disrespect to his wife.
This jackass still has a job? Remind me to never move to Colorado…
Rove Rips NYT For Outing CIA Agent’s Identity And ‘Putting Our Country At Risk’
On Sunday, the New York Times published an extensive article examining the CIA’s interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). The article identified the name of the CIA agent who interrogated KSM, Deuce Martinez.
Yesterday, on The O’Reilly Factor, Karl Rove slammed the New York Times for supposedly leaking the name of a CIA agent. “[T]hey’ve got a very callous view about our nation’s security and interests,” Rove charged:
ROVE: Well, I read their explanation. And basically, it sounded to me like they were saying we put his name out there because we decided we could. And I mean, they didn’t have a good explanation for it.
Rove claimed the United States is put at risk when a CIA agent’s identity is leaked. “Look, they put our country at risk when they reveal the details of a program that saved America from attacks.”
You could almost laugh about this except that irony from traitors? Never funny.
Fox Analyst: Iraqis ‘Owe Us’ 100-Year Leases On Their Oil, ‘We Ought To Take It’
Last week, the New York Times reported that four Western oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP — are in the final stages of negotiating no-bid oil contracts “to service Iraq’s largest fields.” These contracts would run for one to two years, and give the oil companies a “foothold” in bidding on future contracts.
But one-to-two year service contracts aren’t enough for analyst Bob Beckel, a Fox News liberal. On the O’Reilly Factor last night, Beckel said that “what we ought to do is get Iraq to give us a 100 year lease” for exploring their oil fields:
BECKEL: OK, now, what we ought to do is get Iraq to give us 100 year lease on their unexplored — they’re the second largest source of oil in the world. Known reserves. Give the United States oil companies 100 year leases. Let us explore. We can get it quickly. It’s through sand. It’s the fastest way to get oil.
Beckel justified giving U.S. oil companies a century of business in Iraq by claiming, “The Iraqis owe us, Bill. We ought to take it.”
Go ahead, let that concept roll around in your head a bit.
Done?
Ok, go find a shovel, and beat this guy until he resembles the aftermath of a cluster bomb.
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