Posted on: June 5, 2009 1:46 PM, by PZ Myers
Hey, FBI, why aren't you enforcing the FACE act?
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(via Survival of the Feminist)
Hope this "person" is on the FBI's terror watch list as well. I've never understood her nor the radical white supremacist fascination with rantings. A medication dosage problem? Schizophrenic, psychotic? I thought she was one of the "mud people"? Aren't they going come back and get her after they've gotten all of them libruls and atheists? I guess my librul brain just doesn't understand the complexities of white supremacy and religious nuttery.
"When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone..."
A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens, torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation, as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours, while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and what it got, no one trusts):
Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.
Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.
"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.
"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures..."
"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda -- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.
"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."
An army contractor received a $12,500 fine, five years' probation, and no jail time for killing a flex-cuffed Afghan who had doused his colleague with gasoline and set her one fire.
The immolation victim eventually died of her injuries, but she was still alive when the contractor shot the prisoner.
As horrific as the provocation was, the sentence seems awfully light for first degree murder of a prisoner. Killing a handcuffed prisoner is absolutely beyond the pale.
Update: The contractor was initially charged with murder but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter, an offense which carries up to eight years in prison. Based on the circumstances outlined in the Danger Room post, I think the charge was way too light, and the sentence was a joke relative to the charge.
The contractor executed a prisoner in U.S. custody. I don't care how evil the prisoner's conduct was. In wartime, soldiers will inevitably take prisoners who have done terrible things to their comrades. The contractor ostensibly got an unusually light sentence because the judge agreed that he was suffering from diminished responsibility because of the trauma of the attack. If we let the fog of war count as a defense for killing prisoners, we're opening the door to summary executions on the battlefield. The contractor is a former Army Ranger, so he has been trained to control himself in battle.
This is a dangerous precedent.
Mobile phone movie shows that militant influence is spreading deeper into Pakistan
A video showing a teenage girl being flogged by Taliban fighters has emerged from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, offering a shocking glimpse of militant brutality in the once-peaceful district, and a sign of Taliban influence spreading deeper into the country.
The two-minute video, shot using a mobile phone, shows a burka-clad woman face down on the ground. Two men hold her arms and feet while a third, a black-turbaned fighter with a flowing beard, whips her repeatedly.
"Please stop it," she begs, alternately whimpering or screaming in pain with each blow to the backside. "Either kill me or stop it now."
A crowd of men stands by, watching silently. Off camera a voice issues instructions. "Hold her legs tightly," he says as she squirms and yelps.
After 34 lashes the punishment stops and the wailing woman is led into a stone building, trailed by a Kalashnikov-carrying militant.
Reached by phone, Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan claimed responsibility for the flogging. "She came out of her house with another guy who was not her husband, so we must punish her. There are boundaries you cannot cross," he said. He defended the Taliban's right to thrash women shoppers who were inappropriately dressed, saying it was permitted under Islamic law.
The Guardian received the video through Samar Minallah, a Pashtun documentary maker and anthropologist who lived in Swat for two years in the late 1990s. It has been passed between Swat residents by mobile phones.
Ms Minallah said the punishment had been inflicted within the last 10 days, following the signing of a controversial peace deal under which the provincial government ceded control of the valley's judicial system to the militants.
"This video is being widely circulated because the Taliban want people to see it. They want to give the message that this is taking place after the peace deal because this is something they ideologically believe in," she said.
Local sources including journalists and human rights workers, some of whom declined to be identified, confirmed the video was recent, although estimates of its timing varied between one and three weeks ago. The Taliban spokesman said it predated the peace deal.
Sher Muhammad Khan, an official in Swat with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said: "They have committed so many atrocities since the peace deal. They have taken entire control of the district. There is nobody to control them; they decide disputes according to their whims."
Since the 15 February deal, a hybrid of traditional and Islamic law has been operational in Mingora, the largest city in Swat district. The qazi courts, as they are known, are not operated by the Taliban but by a related political movement. They have a murky legal status because the changes have yet to be signed into law.
Floggings and other physical punishments have not been imposed in Mingora, where some residents have praised the system's efficiency. However, in outlying districts, where government writ has been entirely crushed, a crude form of gun justice prevails.
The woman in the video, named as Chaand and believed to be aged 17, was punished in Matta, a district further up the Swat Valley.
Minallah and other sources said the girl was punished on suspicion of having had an illicit relationship with a married man. She did not receive a trial. "The whole case is based on the suspicions of one neighbour," said Minallah.
The woman's brother is among the men pinning her down, she added. "It's symbolic that he does it with his own hands. It gives him honour in local society, that he has done it for the sake of religion."
The Swat Valley is controlled by Maulana Fazlullah, a charismatic preacher who initially gained popularity through radio broadcasts, then seized control through gun battles, suicide attacks and intimidation of the local population.
Since the peace deal, women have been beaten for shopping unaccompanied in Mingora's main market and dozens of girls' schools remain closed, many of them bombed.
Fazlullah has sworn loyalty to Baitullah Mehsud, the overall Taliban leader from South Waziristan who claimed responsibility for last Monday's eight-hour assault on a police centre in Lahore and has vowed to mount attacks in Washington.
On Wednesday a presumed American drone fired rockets at a compound controlled by his network, killing at least 14 people.
The effective surrender of government authority in Swat has caused great alarm across Pakistan and among western allies.Minallah said she feared Talibanisation would spread across Pakistan. "I have distributed this video because I feel people are in denial. They don't want to believe what is happening." (link)
I guess terrorists are ok if they're 'merkin.
When Democrats are in control, the right moves toward the fringe of the militia right - the nationalists, Tim McVeigh, anti-government types. Today it’s Dick Morris on Fox News: “Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘we’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over’ - well, they’re beginning to have a case”
The tower — still under construction with a projected completion date of 2013 — no longer has the same architect, design or footprint on the 16-acre site. And this week, the owners of ground zero publicly parted ways with the Freedom Tower name, saying it would be more practical to market the tallest building in New York as the former north tower's name, One World Trade Center.
Critics called the name drop an unpatriotic shedding of symbolism by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Some newspaper editorials blasted the agency for years of missed deadlines and changing plans for the site.
You
know what's fucking unpatriotic? Driving honking big, gas-guzzling
SUVs that suck harder than Nancy Reagan and thinking that you're the
center of the goddamned universe. Grow the fuck up and realize that
fetishizing the hole at the bottom of Manhattan Island does not qualify
you for a "Patriotism" merit badge.(link Dependable Renegade)
In a filing today with the federal District Court for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase “enemy combatant.” ... (link AMERICAblog)
The United States is now a nation to be ashamed of and hated throughout the world - for good reason.
By: Nicole Belle on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 3:00 PM - PDTYes, that’s a harsh headline for this piece.
But I’ll ask you to forgive me because, as a Veteran, there isn’t a day on the calendar that causes my hatred — and I do indeed mean hatred — of George W. Bush to bubble over the top more than Memorial Day.
“On Memorial Day, we honor the heroes who have laid down their lives in the cause of freedom, resolve that they will forever be remembered by a grateful Nation, and pray that our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made,” reads Bush’s official Memorial Day proclamation, issued by the White House on Thursday.
The Chickenhawk-in Chief says a lot of things that make this Vet’s blood boil but stuff like saying that he prays “…that our country may always prove worthy of the sacrifices they have made” is almost vomit inducing. ... (link Crooks and Liars)
By: Nicole Belle on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 10:00 AM - PDT
Thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans are returning home only to become casualties of war - at their own hands. Suffering from psychiatric injuries, 1,000 veterans under Veterans Administration care are attempting suicide each month. Almost 40 percent of the young men and women returning from combat almost have proven mental health injuries that include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, major depression and traumatic brain injury.
... (link Crooks and Liars)
Great commentary by Keith Olberman on monkey boy giving up golf.
...
“Mr. President,” he was asked, “you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
“Yes,” began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans — on our history.
“It really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Golf, Sir?
Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq?
Do you think these families, Mr. Bush - their lives blighted forever — care about you playing golf?
Do you think, Sir, they care about you?
You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed.
Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you gave up golf?
...
(link Crooks and Liars)
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