Oct 25 2008
Original article, by Joe Mowrey and sub-titled Which Candidate Supports Petraeus, the Bailout, the Death Penalty, Nuclear Power, the Occupation, the Cuban Embargo …, via counterpunch.com.
Ooooh…a guessing game. I wonder who it could be? Hmmmm? Let’s find out below the fold!
Sep 02 2008
Note #1: This is a highly personal diary but it touches on some important issues like education, prison reform, the drug war, the death penalty, war and peace, and man’s inhumanity to man. To the extent that it is self-indulgent, I beg your forgiveness.
Note #2: I’ve been reluctant to post this for both personal and political reasons. The personal will become obvious as you read, the political being all that’s going on right now such as the police state bullshit in MN, the repub convention and their ‘oh we’re so serious about governance’ choice of Palin for VeePee. But it occurs to me that there’s always going to be a lot going on, so I probably should just post it now that it’s not quite ready.
Part I – Words Are Like Poison
I believe that we all have a story to tell…here’s mine.
I wrote about growing up as an Army brat in An American Tale.
Life as a military dependent was a fascinating way to grow up and contributed much to the formation of my personal point of view. I would take nothing for the value I have derived from my interactions with other cultures. It taught me that deep connections are often made between profoundly different people, suggesting what has become a theme in my life – that we are all more alike than we are different.
Jul 18 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
WaPO reports that Maryland police infiltrated and spied upon peace and death penalty abolition groups in 2005. The information the cops gathered was apparently sent to other law enforcement agencies. No crimes were alleged to have been committed by the activists.
That crushing sound you hear is the crumbling of the First Amendment:
Undercover Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on war protesters and death penalty opponents, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year while Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was governor, documents released yesterday show.
Detailed intelligence reports logged by at least two agents in the police department’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division reveal close monitoring of the movements as the Iraq war and capital punishment were heatedly debated in 2005 and 2006.
Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests.
Then-state police superintendent Tim Hutchins acknowledged in an interview yesterday that the surveillance took place on his watch, adding that it was done legally. He said Ehrlich (R) was not aware of it. “You do what you think is best to protect the general populace of the state,” said Hutchins, now a federal defense contractor.
Did you read that? The then state police superintendent says that the surveillance “was done legally.” I feel so very assured and comforted by this conclusion about the law. And protected. Protected from what you might ask? And from whom? “To protect the general populace of the state” is a police goal that apparently does not include protecting the privacy and right of association of death penalty abolitionists and peace activists.
Jun 26 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 this week that Louisiana’s statute permitting the death penalty for child rape was unconstitutional. The decision was a step against extending the barbarianism of the death penalty to crimes in which the victim was not killed.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the opinion, saying, in essence, that the crime, awful as it is, does not merit capital punishment.
“The incongruity between the crime of child rape and the harshness of the death penalty poses risks of over-punishment and counsels against a constitutional ruling that the death penalty can be expanded to include this offense,” Kennedy wrote.
He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Put simply, a majority of the Supreme felt that as a substantive matter, the death penalty for child rape was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment and could not be permitted.
Jun 06 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
Today the US Government tried unsuccessfully to move the Gitmo death penalty show trial of five “enemy combatants” toward a “trial” by arraigning the accused. Unfortunately for the US, today’s proceedings were a complete and utter joke show. And a complete embarrassment. And they were the previews of the upcoming Gitmo Joke Show “trial”
Reuters reports:
The accused al Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks stood in a U.S. military court on Thursday, sang a chant of praise to Allah and said he would welcome the death penalty.
“This is what I wish, to be martyred,” Pakistani captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the highest-ranking al Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, told the Guantanamo war crimes court.
/snip
As the judge questioned him about whether he was satisfied with the U.S. military lawyer appointed to defend him, Mohammed stood and began to sing in Arabic, cheerfully pausing to translate his own words into English.
“My shield is Allah most high,” he said, adding that his religion forbade him from accepting a lawyer from the United States and that he wanted to act as his own attorney.
Isn’t that just a super beginning to the arraignment before a death penalty “trial”? A “trial” that is supposed to lead to convictions and not acquittals? A “trial” that is supposed to result in five executions? But that’s not all. Not by a long shot.
[Mohammed] criticized the United States for fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging what he called “a crusader war,” and enacting “evil laws” including those authorizing same-sex marriages. /snip
The judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, tried to persuade the men to accept their military lawyers, but all refused.
Aziz Ali said he had barely been allowed to meet with his lawyer anyway and described him as “a signboard” hung up so the government could say, ‘Hey, we give these people lawyers.”‘
“All this is just a stage play,” he said.
May 13 2008
AP reports that charges have been dropped against the alleged “Twentieth Hijacker”, Mohammed al-Qahtani:
The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo who was alleged to have been the so-called “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11 attacks, his U.S. military defense lawyer said Monday.
Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of six men charged by the military in February with murder and war crimes for their alleged roles in the 2001 attacks. Authorities say al-Qahtani missed out on taking part in the attacks because he was denied entry to the U.S. by an immigration agent.
But in reviewing the case, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford, decided to dismiss the charges against al-Qahtani and proceed with the arraignment for the other five, said Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, the Saudi’s military lawyer.
The charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning that they could be reinstated. al-Qahtani was to face the death penalty, along with five others, in trials before Military Commissions at Guantanamo.
Why were the charges dropped? Because al-Qahtani had been tortured. Of course, Crawford did not say. And his lawyer couldn’t comment yet.
Officials previously said al-Qahtani had been subjected to a harsh interrogation authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. /snip
U.S. authorities have acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding by CIA interrogators and that al-Qahtani was treated harshly at Guantanamo.
Al-Qahtani last fall recanted a confession he said he made after he was tortured and humiliated at Guantanamo.
The alleged torture, which he detailed in a written statement, included being beaten, restrained for long periods in uncomfortable positions, threatened with dogs, exposed to loud music and freezing temperatures and stripped nude in front of female personnel.
May 07 2008
This disgusting, barbarous event will be overlooked in the news about the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.
This evening Georgia resumed killing its prisoners by lethal injection. William Earl Lynd has been executed. This is the 1100th execution in the modern era and the first following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Baze v. Rees, upholding Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol. It has been almost 8 months since a state killed a prisoner. This is longest amount of time between executions since at least the early nineties.
Convicted Georgia prisoner William Earl Lynd was executed Tuesday, the first inmate to be put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its nationwide ban on executions.
Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51 pm at the Diagnostic and Classification prison in Jackson, Georgia as anti-death penalty activists stood in quiet protest outside.
According to prison officials, Lynd had been “somber all day,” and had requested a mild sedative before being lead to the death chamber.
Lynd had been convicted for the 1988 kidnapping and murder of live-in girlfriend Ginger Moore.
The crime was an extremely brutal one, and Lynd waited on death row for almost 20 years to be killed while he appealed.
Tonight, almost 2 decades later, Georgia executed him by lethal injection. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that “he was the 41st man Georgia has executed since 1983, the 19th by lethal injection.” He was 53 years old.
Barbarism and revenge killing have returned to the US. I want it to be understood that William Earl Lynd was not killed in my name. I detest killing. I detest Lynd’s killing his victim. My heart goes out to the victim, her family, Lynd, Lynd’s family, the lawyers who defended and prosecuted him, the jurors who deliberated his case, the judges who ruled at his trial and appeals, those who wrote and those who read the newspaper coverage of the crime and the trial and the execution, in fact, everyone who had knowledge of this case or any contact with it. How can we live with ourselves when to revenge a killing, we permit our government to kill?
Mahatama Gandhi correctly identified the issue. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
May 01 2008
Liberals are coming to a country near you!
Well, perhaps not liberals in the sense that you and I consider them, but certainly liberal thinking is progressing in our Caribbean Island neighbor.
From BBC:
Cuba’s President Raul Castro says nearly all death sentences are to be commuted to prison terms of between 30 years and life.
It is the latest in a series of liberalising measures. Mr Castro said the decision was humanitarian and not due to international pressure.
Three people charged with terrorism will stay on death row for the time being. Their cases will be reviewed.
While Cuba plans to keep the option of the death penalty on their statute book, this is a very promising move by the Raul Castro administration towards joining the 21st Century in the arena of human rights improvements.
I’m not saying that Cuba is all of a sudden a world leader in promoting Human Rights, but this does bode well as a beginning.
Apr 16 2008
In a 7-2 decision today the US Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection. This will permit Kentucky to resume executions. And, worse, it will end the unofficial moratorium in the 35 other states that use lethal injections in their executions.
The decision is here. It’s long. And it is not uplifting.
Justice Stevens concurred but wrote that he now believes capital punishment itself is unconstitutional. It’s about time. Only Justices Ginsberg and Souter dissented. There were seven votes to permit the killing to continue.
This is awful news for the hundreds of prisoners facing execution on death rows across America.
This isn’t much of an essay. I’m disgusted. I feel gullible to have believed that the death penalty would be abolished by the Supreme Court because of the means the state uses to exterminate its prisoners. This, at best, seemed to me to be a nice flanking attack, but hardly one we could expect to end a barbaric practice that was created by legislative action and has been practiced since before the Constitution itself.
At the very most, those who battle against this barbarism and fight for abolition have been given a slight breather, a chance to catch their breath. The battle now resumes. Again. Every death penalty case has to be fought and fought hard. Every state where abolition can be won in the legislature needs to be organized. Every organization that funds anti death penalty litigation and organizing needs to receive your funds. We all need to add our voices to the call to abolish the death penalty in all cases.
I’d like to think that the 7 months we’ve had of de facto moratorium have taught us one important thing. We can live without the death penalty.
Apr 16 2008
Amnesty International reported yesterday that China is the world’s top executioner. From ITN News in the UK:
But as with everything else in life, there are unseen ties that link China’s use of the death penalty with the United States’ use of torture in conducting the “war on terror”.
Feb 13 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles
Guantanamo Detainee
Yesterday the US announced that 6 Gitmo detainees prisoners would face the death penalty after bogus “trials” with unfair and untested procedures. I wrote an essay explaining why this was an outrage and a disgrace. Today, to my shock and surprise, I discovered an even greater outrage: that the US plans to conduct executions of these detainees prisoners at Gitmo so that the detainees prisoners will be denied any judicial review in the US Courts. If yesterday’s news was dreadful, today’s is even more cynical and and even greater disgrace.
Join me behind the wire.
Feb 12 2008
A Gitmo Detainee
Let the Gitmo show “trials” begin. Let the Bushites promote fear of “terrorism” in behalf of McCain. Let those who have been waterboarded be convicted on statements they made under torture. Let the US show the entire world that it’s mired in its barbarianism and that it will kill to advance a partisan political agenda. Let yet another national disgrace unfold.
Join me across the wire.