September 2007 archive

In the last minutes of her life, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein was dropping off and picking up paperwork at the central customs office near al Khilani Square in Baghdad.  McClatchy reports that as she walked out of the customs building:

an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets. Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

She must have hated us for our freedoms . . . fortunately, Blackwater USA was on the job and pumped several bullets into her to teach her to have more respect for the greatest democracy on earth.

Four other people were also killed in this incident.  As we all know, a week later Blackwater security guards thugs killed 11 people and wounded 12 more in central Baghdad.  Video confirms that they were unprovoked when they opened fire on a car with three people and a baby in it, killing them all.  By the time they finished firing, 7 more innocent people were dead, one of them a mother with eight children. 

This is what Iraqi “democracy” looks like.  Unless we’re very fortunate, American “democracy” may look much the same way if there’s a catastrophic war with Iran or another 9/11 and Blackwater is deployed on American streets to provide “security”.

Climate disintegration, Katrina, and the Military Commissions Act are all  thought of together in my view…

Newcomb: On the North American Indian tradition of liberty

SOURCE

Bush’s power grab, assisted by a Republican majority in Congress, has also threatened the Bill of Rights, which was intended to protect the civil liberties of the individual from abusive governmental actions and thereby prevent tyranny. With the recent passage of the Military Commissions Act that Bush signed into law on Oct. 17, he and Congress have even suspended the writ of habeas corpus that has been part of the English Common System since the Magna Carta of 1215 A.D.

Don’t hear much about Paiutes.  At least I don’t.  Then again my hearing isn’t so hot.  All I know about the Northern Paiutes or Snake Indians is that as warriors they were a match for the Apaches and lived large in high desert country where the Apaches might have starved.

I know a little bit about that because I was born in Adel, OR, named for somebody’s sweetheart or a cow.  Nobody knows which. Here is a picture of the whole damn  town. I suspect there were a lot more Paiutes living in Adel than later invaders.