February 23, 2008 archive

I am fairly geeky. And I like museums. They don’t even have to be highbrow, super educational, entities to entertain me.

I took most of these in the summer when it was hot and rainy and I had nothing better to do with my time. While y’all were out changing the world I was hanging around empty museums.

Yes, this is a shrunken head. Don’t know who it belonged to either.

Cool masks….

This is what the inside of the original Piggly Wiggly looked like. The guy who started it lived in Memphis.

He built this gorgeous house…

He never actually lived in it, he went bankrupt. It now houses the Pink Palace Museum where I took the pictures.

Thanks for looking. Please don’t rec pony party, hang out chit chat, and then go look at the excellent offerings on our recent and rec’d list.

When I came online this morning I saw that the Green Zone in Iraq had suffered an attack of mortar bombs and/or rockets:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A barrage of mortar bombs or rockets hit Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone, home to the U.S. embassy and Iraqi government ministries, on Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

Of course for operational security reasons, we cannot know if there was any damage or what kind of damage or anything else:

“I can confirm that we did receive indirect fire and that it was multiple rounds,” said U.S. military spokesman Major Brad Leighton, referring further queries to the U.S. embassy.

U.S. embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo refused to say whether there had been casualties or damaged.

“To maintain operational security, we do not comment on indirect fire into the International Zone,” she said.

And of course what would the military official response be without a reference to Iran?

The U.S. military has blamed missile attacks on the Green Zone on so-called “special groups”, rogue elements of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia they say receives funding and weapons from neighbouring Iran. Iran denies the charge.

So we can’t know what damage was done by this attack.  Yet we can hear the military tell us they know exactly where this attack came from and that Iran has to be behind it.  Guess that’s not a secret so we can all know who the REAL enemy is!

It has been a bad week for Health Net in California. On Thursday, the health insurance giant was sued by the Los Angeles city attorney on behalf of all Californians for “illegally cancelling policies to avoid paying large claims.” On Friday, a judge ruled against Health Net in suit brought by a Southern California woman for cancelling her insurance as she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Although both cases might be viewed as victories, they are properly viewed as symptoms of a terminal illness not a cure.

The New York Times today reports that Justice Department is going to investigate the Justice Department’s approval of the CIA’s use of waterboarding torture:

The Justice Department revealed Friday that its internal ethics office was investigating the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and was likely to make public an unclassified version of its report.

The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.

You’ll pardon me, please, for not dancing in the streets.  “Waterboarding” shouldn’t be the focus of the inquiry.  The focus should be on torture in all of its forms and in all of the locations where it might be practiced (including Gitmo, Black Sites, Diego Garcia) and all of the agencies of the Governmetn and their contractors who might be using it.  And we don’t really need an “unclassified version of a report” about how torture was approved.  We need an end to torture. Period.  And we need criminal prosecution of all of those who approved it.

Some context, if you will:

*C.I.A. director Michael V. Hayden admitted a couple of weeks ago that the CIA used waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 on 3 prisoners but claimed that the CIA didn’t do that any more and that the legality of what it did was “uncertain.”

*Attorney General Mukasey refused to launch a criminal investigation of those who used torture waterboarding or of their superiors, because CIA employees couldn’t be prosecuted for things Justice had told them were legal.  Jarrett’s review focuses on the government lawyers who gave that advice.

*According to the Times, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have launched a criminal investigation of the C.I.A.’s destruction in 2005 of videotapes of harsh interrogations torture and a week after Congress passed a ban on coercive interrogations, which President Bush has said he will veto.

According to the Times:

In a letter to two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mr. Jarrett wrote that the legal advice approving waterboarding was one subject of an investigation into “the circumstances surrounding the drafting” of a Justice legal memorandum dated Aug. 1, 2002.

The document declared that interrogation methods were not torture unless they produced pain equivalent to that produced by organ failure or death. The memorandum, drafted by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was withdrawn in 2004.

Mr. Jarrett said the investigation was also covering “related” legal memorandums prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel since 2002. That suggested the investigation would address still-secret legal opinions written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, then and now the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that gave legal approval for waterboarding and other tough methods, even when used in combination.

We know about the Yoo and Bybee memoranda and how they were altered in 2004.  We know about the Bradbury opinions.  Doubtless there are others as well. Don’t we know that those reached barbaric, incorrect conclusions about the legality of torture?

Mr. Jarrett said his office was “examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”

Doh.  We don’t need a further, public investigation of these opinions that might endanger prosecution of these individuals.  We need to prosecute them.  The public investigation is a day late and more than a dollar short.

I am no expert on qawalli music but I do know that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

was considered on of the greats. I have one or two of his CDs.

Naturally, I have no idea what the words are saying but it is pretty powerful contemplative stuff.

A few pictures of my favorite local swamp to zone out on….

Please don’t rec pony party, hang out, chit chat, and then go read some of the excellent offerings on our recent and rec’d list.