RIP Habeas Corpus

A new law has been voted by the U.S. Congress which will give brand new powers to the President.

George Bush will decide -- in secret if he chooses -- what methods of interrogation he considers to be abusive, a New York Times editorial reported. This, of course, is the same man who already has authorized secret prisons overseas and whose underlings already have subjected suspected terrorists to forms of abuse ranging from simulated drowning to being stripped naked and left standing for days in “stress positions.” And that was before anyone passed a law giving him permission.
This law gives permission at wholesale prices. The Times reported it also:
* Allows coerced evidence, if deemed “reliable” by a judge.
* Limits the definition of torture so severely that it “would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.”
* Could subject legal U.S. residents and foreigners living in their own countries to arrest and “indefinite detention.”

Friday’s Washington Post reports: “The (law) empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone (emphasis added) it determines to have ‘purposefully and materially’ supported anti-U.S. hostilities.”
Could anyone mean – well -- anyone? After all, it is the executive branch under this law that is entitled to pull people off the street. And with no trial required and no need to file charges, who is to say whether that executive branch would have good cause or any cause for doing so? How would we, the public, find out? There are no checks, no balances, no legal processes to be followed.

The full article is here.


Posted in: _Democracy , _HumanRights , _USA

Justice in Russia

A first-year conscript at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy was forced to squat for several hours while beating him last New Year's Eve. The incident led to the amputation of Sychyov's legs and genitals.

Links here, here and here.

For this, Junior Sergeant Alexander Sivyakov was sentenced to 4 years in prison.

What I would like to highlight here is not only the atrocities taken place in the Russian military during hazing. But also the incredible set of values Russian judges put on things.
As a reference, I would like to give 2 examples:
- an accountant was sentenced to 3,5 years for having forgotten to declare $20,000 to the tax office in the Yukos case.
- a protester having put a poster saying "Putin, leave office" on a wall of a old communist building destined to demolition was sentenced to 7 years for destruction of public property.


Posted in: _Democracy , _Society , _HumanRights

An Inconvenient Truth

Here is the speech from Al Gore about Global Warming he gave at New York University School of Law on Monday 18 September 2006.
Really worth reading.
If you are interested, I recommend the documentary he made, An Inconvenient Truth.


Posted in: _Economy , _Sciences , _Society

Fair and Balanced

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) is bringing our attention (here) to what Fox News displayed in its lower third when Chavez was having his speech at the UN.
Questions like: "How dare Hugo Chavez blast the United States?"

Check out all of them in the FAIR article!

Fox News, fair and balanced indeed...


Posted in: _USA

QOTD

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

- Albert Einstein

George and Hugo speeches

Here is a post of Miguel de Icaza about the speeches of W and Chavez at the UN this week.
I advise you to read the Billmon link as well :)

Chavez is way to theatrical to be taken seriously on the world stage but he makes some good points, among others the double moral of the USA.


Posted in: _Democracy , _Geopolitics

Air Veritas

Very entertaining article from The Economist (here).

Here is how it starts:
"In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an honest one sound like?

“GOOD morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust.”"

Some people wrote to The Economist (here) and gave their comments on this piece.
Here are my favorites:
SIR – I appreciated the honest safety-announcement from Veritas Airways (“Welcome aboard”, September 9th). But it forgot to mention that at today's cruising altitudes passengers are exposed to a considerable amount of radiation, especially on transatlantic flights close to the pole.
SIR – The bright-yellow lifejackets are not intended to act as flotation devices. They are there to make it easier for the recovery services to spot the bodies strewn across rough terrain. (I was once asked to put on a life-jacket over central Germany, some 300 miles from the sea.) And the advice to adopt a head-down fetal position in the event of a crash landing does nothing to preserve life, given that the stall speed of a modern airliner means it will connect with the ground at terminal velocity. However, the position does tend to preserve dental data, useful for identifying dilapidated corpses.
SIR – For a truly irritating experience, nothing beats flights to and from Brussels. Safety instructions are screamed at you in four languages—Dutch, English, French and German—each spoken with such a terrible accent that one wonders if the flight attendants have a mother tongue at all. I love it when they finally shut up, but at the end of the flight the torture is repeated when they shout to tell you how much they loved having you aboard, again in four languages.
SIR – The most honest briefing I have ever had was on a helicopter flying me to an oil rig in the North Sea: “Take off your watch because it stops your survival suit making a good seal around your wrist. If we go down and the water gets inside the suit, it's so cold you'll last about five minutes.”


Posted in: _Fun

Funny Stuff

Click on the pictures for the big version :)

Posted in: _Fun

The Men Who Knew Too Much

I would like to redirect you guys to a post from the BradBlog (here).

Here is the introduction of the post:
"Is someone murdering people who know too much about NSA wiretapping overseas?
Two whistleblowers — one in Italy, one in Greece — uncovered a secret bugging system installed in cell phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration."

Coincidence???


Posted in: _General , _Democracy

Mexico's Elections

I would like to point you guys to this entry (here) of Miguel de Icaza's blog about Mexico's election...

It seems to me that the current government is doing all it can to ignore what people reality voted like and simply doesn't care about democracy.
Not counting the vote properly and fairly is bad enough, but trying to control the population and the demonstrating crowd via paramilitary groups is simply a shame.


Posted in: _Democracy