Letter Never Sent

Last night after hanging out with my friend, Sara, we went down and met with Dru and George at a free talk by Richard Stallman (of GNU Linux fame) for the SXSW interactive thing. That was pretty neat. I wish I had the speech in text because he brought up some points I had missed. He did a good job explaining the problems of copyright.

After that we all piled into my car and met Dru’s friend, Kate (who is really, totally cool), for coffee and some food. I disclosed way too much personal info last night. Regret, regret. It was really cool to finally meet George since I wasn’t able to meet up with him when I was out in Walnut Creek. He is a really cool guy with a wicked (and occasionally scandalous) sense of humor.

I saw Der Fuehrer in his televised ‘news conference’ tonight. This guy is the biggest stooge. In a strange news item FoxNews reports that Iraq is trying to acquire British and American military uniforms so war atrocities can be pinned on the United States. I’m sorry, but this sounds like the biggest load of crap and obviously is some small attempt by government propagandists to prepare for any murder and genocide and mass destruction committed by the American military while we ‘shock and awe’ Baghdad and destroy a nation.

These are worth reading. Get some ideas and write an email to your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend or partner.

Dublin 2 December 1909
To Nora,

JIM

CNN: Amnesty International criticizes U.S. handling of terror suspects:

Military coroners ruled that two detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan were homicide cases in December, but a military source said it was not clear whether anyone would be charged. (Full story)

One senior military official said, “This investigation may not go well for us.”

Both men died at Bagram air base shortly after their arrival. The first man died December 3 of a pulmonary embolism and the second one December 10 of a heart attack. Autopsies found that “blunt force trauma” was a contributing factor in both cases, military sources said.

This is even more proof that our government and its agents commit cold-blooded murder as well as the more routine torture, maiming, and killing under the umbrella of ‘just war’.

Here are some interesting bits lifted from various places:

1. FoxNews: Senator Wants ‘Human Shields’ Punished
2. Big Brother taping and archiving peace protests: Coulter, a veteran activist and no rookie at demonstrating, said she asked the identification technician why police were taping the crowd. “She told me: ‘This is a crime scene,’ ” Coulter recounted. “Since when is people exercising their right of speech and assembly a crime? Now democracy is a crime?”
3. LA Times: U.S. Expands Clandestine Surveillance Operations: The number of secret searches approved by Ashcroft since the 9/11 attacks is triple those authorized in the previous 20 years.
4. Pentagon, media agree on Iraq war censorship: Reporters to be “embedded” in military Another clause states that all interviews with military personnel should be on the record—an attempt to prevent the leaks that occurred during the Vietnam War, when servicemen anonymously divulged damaging information or expressed disgust about the conduct of the war. In the Iraq war, military staff will face disciplinary action for saying too much.
5. CNN imposes new “script control”: CNN became notorious after it revealed following the 1991 Gulf War that it had allowed Pentagon “trainees” into the CNN newsroom in Atlanta. According to Fisk, however, CNN “is not alone in this paranoid form of reporting. Other US networks operate equally anti-journalistic systems.”

   There is ample evidence for this assertion. During the Gulf War, NBC’s Tom Brokaw echoed the White House and the dominant media mantra when he told viewers that the US was not responsible for civilian casualties. “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm’s way,” he said.

   Today, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media routinely presents unadulterated pro-administration propaganda as news, citing sources such as “senior defense officials,” “administration officials,” “some American intelligence officials,” “military officials” and “defense officials.”

Disgusting behavior by the CIA. Truly dispicable treatment even for ‘terrorists’. From the NY Post:

WASHINGTON – A CIA team will use “all appropriate measures” to convince the just-captured mastermind of the 9/11 attacks to talk – including dangling freedom for his two young sons, who are in U.S. custody.

Law-enforcement sources told The Post that the CIA has had the 7- and 9-year- old sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in custody since September, and plans to use them as leverage to get the No. 3 man in al Qaeda to disclose Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts and details of future terror operations.

This is in addition to the physical and mental torture the US and it’s ‘friends’ initiate in order to squeeze ‘detainees’. Generally, the US passes the suspects off to a third country who actually supervise the physical torture while an American asks the questions. This is publicly acknowledged by our freedom-loving, democratic government.

From Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977, pp. 3-8.

Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, in its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric; perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of “humanization”, thus dispensing with the need for further analysis. And, in any case, how important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system, the definition of the essentially corrective character of the penalty and the tendency, which has become increasingly marked since the nineteenth century, to adapt punishment to the individual offender? Punishment of a less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display, should not all this be treated as a special case, an incidental effect of deeper changes? And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of power is power” – George Orwell