The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.
The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.
So, it being Monday (laundry day), I wandered off on another google-chase.
“I’m a normal man,” said Boumediene, who at the time of his arrest worked for the Red Crescent, providing help to orphans and others in need. “I’m not a terrorist.”
Ah ha! Greenwald links to a 3 minute youtube of the interview:
In an ABC News EXCLUSIVE today, Jake Tapper has an interview with Lakhdar Boumediene. It has aired in part on Good Morning America and will hopefully be seen far and wide.
Lakhdar Boumediene is an Algerian who, while living in Bosnia working for the International Red Crescent, was arrested by the Bosnian government (at the behest of the Bush administration) shortly after 9/11 on charges of plotting to blow up a U.S. and British embassy, but was then quickly cleared by Bosnian courts of any wrongdoing and ordered released. But as he was about to be released — in January, 2002 — he was abducted by the U.S. military inside Bosnia and shipped to Guantanamo, where he remained without charges for the next almost 8 years, and was clearly tortured.
Will we finally get some sanity from an “informed citizenry” now?
I suggest you call or email any of your “moderate” friends and family and urge them to watch it.
The government furthermore asked for a stay in the proceedings of any cases under this ruling:
In sum, the extensive harms to the Government and the public interest involved in further proceedings envisioned by the Court in these cases, and the likelihood of respondents’ success on the merits of appeal, strongly warrant a stay pending appeal.
The NYT editorial, “The Next Guantánamo,” put it this way:
It’s certainly true that one has no difficulty finding cult-like liberal veneration for Obama – those who invoke Bible-like “he’s-a-master-of-11-dimensional-chess” clichés to justify whatever he does (the Lord works in mysterious ways but even when we don’t understand what He does, we Trust that He is Supremely Good and more Wise than us and knows best); who declare, in Bush-like “with-me-or-against-me” fashion, all critics of Obama to be the Enemy; who pay homage to Kim Jong Il-like imagery such as this and this; who believe that “trust” — a sentiment appropriate for family and friends but not political leaders — should be vested in Obama and thus negate any concerns over how he exercises power. Some overly-eager journalists and bloggers are devoted to carrying forth the administration’s message (usually delivered anonymously) in exchange for favorable treatment and/our due to a painfully excessive sense of devotion, and there’s a Democratic establishment with a built-in machinery to defend Obama no matter what he does.
But outside of those anonymity-granting blogger/journalists and Democratic apparatchiks, these drooling, worshipful, subservient sentiments are largely confined to the fringes. With some exceptions, to find this right-wing-replicating blind loyalty to the Leader, one has to search blog comment sections and obscure diarists. Many — arguably most — of the most vocal liberal Bush critics have kept their critical faculties engaged and have been unwilling to sacrifice their political values and principles at the altar of partisan loyalty.
It should be emphasized that mere criticism for its own sake is also not a virtue. Those who reflexively and blindly criticize whatever Obama does (based on the immovable, all-consuming conviction that he is intrinsically Evil) are nothing more than the opposite side of the same mindless coin as those who reflexively and blindly praise whatever Obama does (based on the immovable, all-consuming conviction that he is intrinsically Good). Pre-ordained, overarching judgments of Obama that are detached from his actions and grounded in Manichean caricatures are irrational in equal measure, whether that judgment yields praise or condemnation.
A rational citizen, by definition, praises and supports political leaders only when they do the right thing (regardless of motive), and criticizes and opposes them when they don’t. It’s just that simple. Cheerleading for someone because they’re on “your team” is appropriate for a sporting event, not for political matters. Political leaders deserve support only to the extent that their actions, on a case-by-case basis, merit that support, and that has largely been the behavior of progressives towards Obama.
Two stories from today’s news highlight the hubris of the U.S. executive branch as regards its assumed right to conduct unrestrained surveillance of its citizens, and engage in torture in violation of all laws.
Both Emptywheel at Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com have done a stellar job tracking the Cheneyesque descent (H/T EW) of the Obama Justice Department when it comes to the question of executive privilege over classified material, especially when it comes to the courts. We already have witnessed the spectacle of the U.S. pressuring a British court on the suppression of documents in the Binyam Mohamed case.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has succinctly made the point about the pending Obama victory, saving me the trouble of writing it out in my own strained syntax:
It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don’t assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I’ve explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness — reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.
It doesn’t help that Obama has already voted with the national security fetishists on FISA expanded wiretapping.
Amy Goodman reported from the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul), site of the Republican National Convention, September 1, 2008, Labor Day:
Armed groups of police in the Twin Cities have raided more than a half-a-dozen locations since Friday night in a series of preemptive raids before the Republican convention. The coordinated searches were led by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher but conducted in coordination with federal agencies….
Minnesota Public Radio is reporting that the FBI is at least one of the “federal agencies” acting in concert with the Minneapolis/St. Paul police departments. A professor at the University of Minnesota has snapped a photo of FBI presence at one of the raids. Many of these police gestapo actions involved two dozen or more riot police entering private homes with guns drawn, handcuffing the residents, and rifling through the house to search computers, and political literature.
Glenn Greenwald has been doing some important reporting on the Anthrax investigation this past week and if you haven’t seen it yet I think it’s well worth checking out.
We now know — we knew even before news of Ivins’ suicide last night, and know especially in light of it — that the anthrax attacks didn’t come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government’s scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government — from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.
Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role — I’d argue a very major role — in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue — including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework — were justified and even necessary in order to survive.
ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and — as importantly — to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They’re allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.
I just got done reading Keith Olbermann’s tortured excuse for not calling out Barack Obama on his FISA cave, and frankly, it’s as lame as it can get. Sorry, Keith, but you’ve sold out to the far right without even realizing it. Here’s why.
Throughout this campaign, you’ve been doing little or nothing but bash Hillary Clinton for all the wrong reasons. While the senator supposedly representing New York has undoubtedly made plenty of verbal gaffes and has a poor record of defending the Constitution against the shrub and his gargoyle, you focused your rage exclusively upon her, and for all the wrong things. One example is her suggestion that the bigot bloc might not vote for Obama, which is true: no matter how much he panders to the far right, no matter how often he bashes blacks to their faces, the bigots in this country simply are not going to vote for a black man for president; they’d sooner cast their ballots for a white woman. You, however, joined in with those who relentlessly attacked her for pointing out this fundamental truth.
The stab-in-the-back legend (German: Dolchstosslegende (help·info), literally “Dagger stab legend”) refers to a social myth and persecution-propaganda theory popular in Germany in the period after World War I through World War II. It attributed Germany’s defeat to a number of domestic factors instead of failed militarist geostrategy. Most notably, the theory proclaimed that the public had failed to respond to its “patriotic calling” at the most crucial of times and some had even intentionally “sabotaged the war effort.”
The legend echoed the epic poem Nibelungenlied in which the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried is stabbed in the back by Hagen von Tronje. Der Dolchstoss is cited as an important factor in Adolf Hitler’s later rise to power, as the Nazi Party grew its original political base largely from embittered World War I veterans, and those who were sympathetic to the Dolchstosslegende interpretation of Germany’s then-recent history. – Wikipedia
For those of you unfamiliar with this blood libel the melody goes kinda like this-
We were winning our war of aggression until those Jewsdirty fucking hippies meddling kids stabbed us in the back.
What makes it blood libel is the implication that people who were against the war and saw the utimate futility of it “sacrificed” the blood of our brave soldiers for nothing as if to have “sacrificed” it to a real God like Mars or Mammon were any better.
Once you put your money in the pot boys, it’s gone. I could so kick your ass at poker.
It’s hardly surprising that the American Theo-Corporatist Party is resurrecting this meme and their Presidential nominee is endorsing it-
Notoriously (depending upon your point of view), this past weekend the Washington Post published an article revealing that a number of top Democrats and Republicans were briefed in September 2002 on CIA interrogation methods. They were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” The reported techniques are said to have included waterboarding.
Yesterday, Pelosi released a statement clarifying what happened from her perspective. This must have shocked even a little those Democratic Party stalwarts, but no, as we’ll see, their Nancy can make no mistake. She was, you see… helpless.
He hits another one out of the park today with his blistering dissection of Fred Hiatt’s September 5th WaPo editorial, Rogue Regulator, and the other neocon chicken hawk cheerleaders and conspirators like John Bolten who have been smearing Elbaradi for years so they can get their war on.
How far does the rot go? To very core of our policy and media establishment-
…
Somehow, it was decided in our political establishment that being completely wrong about the worst strategic disaster in our country’s history — the invasion of Iraq — is not a cause for any diminished credibility at all (and having been right is no cause for enhanced credibility). Even after the invasion of Iraq, our Hiatt-modeled political establishment even proceeded to smear and target those such as Mohamed ElBardei who were clearly proven right, as though being right was a crime.
