From The Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has determined that detainees tried by military commissions in the U.S. can claim at least some constitutional rights, particularly protection against the use of statements taken through coercive interrogations, officials said.

The conclusion, explained in a confidential memorandum whose contents were shared with The Wall Street Journal, could alter significantly the way the commissions operate — and has created new divisions among the agencies responsible for overseeing the commissions.

First, I have to wonder who in the Obama Administration would pick the Wall Street Journal to share confidential information with.

And although this decision would seem to be a no-brainer, it does show how far we’ve fallen that I would even call this good news.

Finally, they still won’t use the word torture … now it’s “coercive interrogations.”

More on the flip.

I’ve been reading here and there about changing hearts and minds, about reaching out to those on the other side of the divide, communicating with our “allies” in the Democratic Party and on the liberal blogs.  The thought goes something like this, “You are not helping your cause by this tone, you’re only reaching those who already agree with you.”

There’s a big difference, I believe, between reaching out and caving in.

Particularly when it comes to the liberal blogs, I find it strange that folks act as though we are politicians who must compromise our values in order to effectively communicate for our causes.

I don’t have to worry about getting elected or re-elected.  I have no lobbyists threatening to cut off my funding.  I don’t have Rahm Emmanuel breathing down my neck and threatening me to take a particular political position or lose the support of the powers in the party.

I am an individual and a citizen of the United States with all the powers that affords me.  I not only have the right and the obligation to petition my government with my concerns but the freedom to state those concerns in the form of staunch advocacy and solidarity with those who I believe are suffering from injustice.

The only real communication that can take place between human beings is on the ground of equality.  As Activist Guy commented so eloquently in my essay When the debate is over:

Common ground can only be found

after ground has been taken and held.  Common ground can only be found between equals, and since one side in any issue is the side of hegemony, they start out holding all the ground.  Some of their ground must be taken and held, and shown to be beyond recapture, before hegemony will negotiate honestly as an equal.

Zeitgeist, June 2009.

All the irony has been used up and hip is coopted in its pre-embryonic stage, wow.

So the hippest parts of the hippest philosophies are released into the cybersphere and general world culture through various other means and all sorts of people grok this rain of wisdom not just from group endeavors like named spiritual paths but from crazy mystics visionaries witches artists maniacs that emerge individually from their travels in existence.

And coyote howls in the full moon night at the sacred Four Corners in the West.

The old ways have been hip enough to change with the times.  We see it in the blogosphere, new forms for old hidebound traditions.  Dusting those treasures off.

Kerouac, there’s a video somewhere of him describing what “hip” means.

Imagine the beats, it’s right after World War II and in America there’s the boom of imperialism in the air and folks can finally have their own homes with labor saving appliances . . . . and the beats just dug something else entirely about America and about being a human being.

They swam against a merciless tide … them and a nascent musical movement, rock and roll, race music that left no mother’s child unchanged and of course that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Cultural misappropriation.

Old R&B saying, “If it’s in you, it’s gotta come out.”

So it keeps coming out in new forms everytime the old ones are stolen and coopted and twisted to material ends.

The form is only important because of the content.  And the content is love.

Happy Friday to all.  Summer has arisen here in the Big Apple.  I hear our public transportation system infrastructure is not doing well around the country.  As a rider of the W and N trains, in solidarity, I salute and wish courage and good luck to all public transportation riders across the land!

(Crossposted from Orange)

Today is Torture Accountabilty Day.  There will be events across the country, American citizens making the case that those who committed the moral crime against humanity of torture be held accountable for their actions.

Holding those in the highest positions of power to the law, what a notion.  We know the politics that prevents this, the powers who want these crimes once again swept under the rug.

We heard on Monday from the Supreme Court that Valerie Plame’s suit against Cheney, et al., will not be allowed to go forward.  Scooter Libby was found guilty of obstruction of justice.  Mister Bush commuted his sentence.  And surprise, surprise, there now is no case, even as we all know what happened.  There is no accountability.

From Kai over at Zuky:

On this day in 1982, Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, at his own bachelor party, by racist white auto workers in Detroit who blamed Japan for layoffs in the US auto industry. The murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said, “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”

On July 14, 2008, Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by racist white teens shouting anti-Mexican epithets, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The murderers, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were convicted of simple assault. Two days ago, they were respectively sentenced to 6 and 7 months in county jail. Piekarsky’s lawyer Frederick Fanelli said, “You would be proud to have any of these kids in your classroom, and any of them as your children.”

And what does all this have to do with holding those in power accountable for torture?  What are these connections I am making?

How can it be described, the feeling of a trail freshly blazed and taking that first walk upon it?

A path you created for yourself with all the wonders of the world at your disposal!

I call that Liberation and Freedom.

Casting off the shackles of conditioning that have oppressed every generation since human beings learned they could oppress each other.

Casting off the shackles is exhilirating in itself because the load feels so light!

Whoo, those fucking shackles were very heavy!

And then for the first time, moving around without the fucking shackles.  Wowzville.

Free.

(Phoenix Rising from Elfen Harmonics)

First time moving as a free human being.  That first step a big rush of pure direct experience, removed from words and concepts and thoughts in the totality of being, the reality of liberation.

mcjoan posted an interview yesterday at the Orange with Glenn Sulmasy, a National Security and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard, Professor of Law and Commander and Judge Advocate, U.S. Coast Guard Academy.  The interview spoke of how we should deal with the folks left at Gitmo, the notion of preventive detention.  He wrote a book:

His book presents a “third way” solution for trying the detainees in what he proposes to call the “war against al Qaeda,” and to deal with the thorny issues of the Guantanamo detainees. He proposes scrapping military commissions, forgoing military courts and federal civilian courts and establishing a new court system, a national security court, overseen by civilian judges that allows for habeas appeals and focuses exclusively on trying the “quasi-warriors” picked up on the battlefield in the war against al Qaeda.

It was an interesting post and mcjoan had a lot of criticism of Sulmasy’s ideas on how to deal with those pesky terrorists.  Sulmasy goes into great detail on how we can extricate ourselves from the mess Bush left Obama in making these decisions about what to do with the Gitmo detainees.

But there’s something wrong here and I haven’t seen it expressed to my satisfaction so I’m going to give it a shot.

Today Malcolm would be reviled even more than back in the day, even more, because he was change, the real deal.  He ought to be in the history books because his is a distinct American lesson.

‘Course we don’t teach about race in America in our schools and we sure don’t talk about it in our mainstream culture, so it’ll be a while before the rest of the country ever catches up to Malcolm.

His life embodied change.   He believed strongly in each phase of his remarkable life, his father taught him about black pride before the term ever came to be, and this in the Jim Crow south, and Malcolm just learned, he trusted each step in the way that he knew what was going on, he lived each phase of his life fully and completely the good and the bad.

For those of you who have followed New Orleans political events on the many local blogs that have sprung up since Katrina, this story brings certain feelings:

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and his wife have been quarantined in China after a passenger on their flight exhibited flu-like symptoms.

From E at We Could Be Famous:

Totally surreal.

Did Mr. Nagin name an acting mayor before his journey? Would it be the role of City Council to appoint one in the event he did not? Is the Mayor going to be fit to lead if he now must face down this mutant cyborg super flu?

This is actually one of the most graceful Nagin resignation scenarios out there.

Drink fluids.

From Raw Story:

President Barack Obama has tapped an anti-abortion activist to a senior Health and Human Services “faith-based” position just a week after the murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller.

Alexia Kelley is executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), and will head the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services.

According to The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, “Kelley is a leading proponent of ‘common ground’ abortion reduction — only CACG’s common ground is at odds with that of Obama. While the administration favors reducing the need for abortion by reducing unintended pregnancies, Kelley has made clear that she seeks instead to reduce access to abortion.”

But wait!  There’s more to the story.  Ms. Kelley is a progressive who supported Obama as well as Kathleen Sebelius as head of HHS, in opposition to her own Bishop.

This week, oy vey.

As in blogging oy vey.

So I’m really writing to myself tonight, just to get it into words and then forget about it.

You love Obama?  You  hate Obama?  You are indifferent to Obama?

Fine with me and any permutation in between.

What excites me about the political times we live in are the citizens.  Politicians are citizens, but you’d never know it with our present system.

So I’m interested in the citizens.

And not everyone is a citizen, not in my subjective view.

As buhdy and others have said, there are citizens and there are consumers.

Citizens are annoying and politicians wish we’d just shut up and go away.  They are willing to spend a great deal of money to distract us!  Please, please, just shut up and go away!  Can’t you see how difficult my job is?  I have to please everyone all the time and I can’t!  There are more important things than your concerns!  

Constituents.  Ha ha.  To the politician we are the audience.

Unless we yell.  And then they pay attention because that’s their job, that’s something they can understand.