January 26, 2009 archive

Tonight, the TV newsmagazine “60 Minutes” did a story on the economic crisis facing Wilmington, Ohio, a town of 12,000 people nearly all of whom are being laid off by freight corporation DHL.  If you missed the heartrending segment, you can watch it here:

Here’s what Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” didn’t tell you: there’s a promising local effort to help the people of Wilmington — and there are a few things you can do to help their plan become a reality without getting up from your computer.

My favorite diary since the election, This Miracle Brought To You by American Unions, written by Empywheel, illustrated beautifully how “the gain” of unions is so much greater than “the cost”.

My story, and this diary, is smaller in scope because its more personal and is about what unions really mean to those of us lucky, no BLESSED, enough to be in them.

Docudharma is a small community of very smart (albeit funny looking) people. We may not have all the answers, but we certainly are witty and crafty enough to reply in an amusing fashion! So if you have a question, whether snarky, simple, political or philosophical, be it meta, meaty, maddening or impossible to answer,….what the hell? Post it here and see what happens! You have nothing to lose but your underwear! Heck, there is a chance it might even get answered, possibly even correctly!

Any questions?

After Barack Obama signed that long-awaited and much-anticipated executive order to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and conduct a thorough review of the case files for each and every detainee by a cabinet-level panel, a significant spanner was tossed in the works.

On many of the detainees, there are no case files.  Instead, information on many of the individual detainees is “scattered throughout the executive branch,”  so that ‘cabinet level panel’ will spend the first weeks of their task looking for information and relevant materials.  

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Put plainly – when you are reverse-engineering convictions you don’t put things in files that might end up running counter to your desired outcome.  

As a result of the incompetence of the previous administration, some truly dangerous people have been released, and truly innocent people have been held without charge or trial for years on end.  

A former Bush administration official, unwilling to allow his names to be used, insists that the Obama administration will come to the same conclusions.  

“All but about 60 who have been approved for release,” assuming countries can be found to accept them, “are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people,” said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

Obama officials said they want to make their own judgments.

“The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable,” another senior official said. But “it’s clear that we can’t clear up this issue overnight” partly because the files “are not comprehensive.”

Charles D. “Cully” Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases. Threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee were often required, he said, to persuade the CIA to “cough up a sentence or two.”

The disarray in assembling the case files is so severe that one former prosecutor at Guantanamo asked to be relieved of his duties, in the formal request he cited as a reason that evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”   He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”

I read about this, and I feel personally betrayed.  My entire life has been spent in service to this country.  I was born into it, carried it on, and married into it, too.  We faced down an ideological adversary that violated human rights, ignored due process and locked people up for life after specious show-trials.  And less than twenty years later, we became something worse.  

Personally betrayed?  That is an understatement of what I feel right now. This is not my America.  I have spent the last eight years wanting my country back.  

Now I have it, and I don’t recognize it.  

Damn them all straight to hell for this.  Public hanging with a new rope is too good for these traitorous, limp-dick, torture-porn-loving perverted fucks.