Month: March 2006

Professor Bainbridge wants to know.

From the local news:

"Sources say Taheriazar told police he was seeking retribution for the treatment of Muslims around the world, according to ABC News justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. Taheriazar apparently told police he tried to rent the biggest SUV he could find to use in the attack."

We’re lucky no one was killed.

I met a chap from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at our pro-Denmark D.C. rally. He emails unsettling news from campus, after the student paper published some of the Danish cartoons:

"After the initial angry letter, the situation was handled respectfully and peacefully, with a sit-in at the Daily Tar Heel, a symposium, and a peaceful rally in front of the student union.
Well, it’s a little early to say what’s going on, but perhaps you’ve heard.
At noon today, a recent graduate named Mohammed Reza Taheriazar … well, drove his jeep into the Pit (a gathering place off of the quad) and hit 9 people.  Given the placement of the Pit, this was obviously an act of aggression; it takes more than a little finesse to get your car that far into campus without being a maintainance vehicle or an ambulance.
There are also reports of a bomb threat two hours later. The bomb threat news is just breaking, and so far nobody knows if it has anything to do Mohammed’s road rage. For that matter, there is not yet any evidence that this was motivated by the cartoon published in the Daily Tar Heel, although I’m choosing to connect the dots.
On behalf of the student body, let me stress that this is miles beyond anything else that has happened in the three weeks since the cartoon was originally published. I might be willing to venture that this guy is a loon who was merely waiting for a reason to fly off the handle, and a three-week-old Islam-related controversy was what he went for (after all, how committed can he be if he turned himself in?)"

Stay posted.

Snarksmith‘s Michael Weiss emails of the rally in New York expressing solidarity with Denmark:

"It was hugely worthwhile, if for no other reason that street theatre became a spontaneous forum of democracy, with people sharing their reasons for being there. (Even the sparse MSM in attendance seemed to gel to the good humor and nobility of the occasion.) A huge 18-wheeler at one point drove by honking in solidarity with us (and you know you’re on the right side of history when the teamsters are behind you.) I also wanted to say that quite a lot of people found their way to Second Avenue because of your site… It’s a fitting sequel to the premature obituaries which have lately been written on blogs that mere word-of-mouth and click-of-mouse were responsible for this ample and dignified assembly."

I must say that the little band of democrats who gathered in DC had the same experience; and it was really cheering to have been there. These haven’t been your usual rallies with moronic chanting. They’ve been gatherings of individuals in support of individual freedom. And when you love liberty, it shows. In public, there’s less anger than friendship, less orthodoxy than spiritedness. Or so it seemed to me.

The blogger Michael Totten continues his tour of Kurdistan. Here’s his latest – a visit to Saddam’s former torture chambers. The photograph above is a memorial to six Kurdish children murdered by Saddam’s thugs. I have made a great deal of fuss over torture committed by the Bush administration, but that is because I believe in this country as a beacon for freedom, not because I hate it, or want to see its honorable war fail. It’s because I love this country and believe in the cause of this war that I am so distressed by this horror. And it’s always important to say, although it of course goes often without saying, that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of abuse and torture allowed during military detention by George Bush, as a misguided part of intelligence gathering, and the orchestrated, impervious, brutal torture-state controlled by Saddam. Totten tours a building where over 10,000 people were murdered. In Abu Ghraib under General Miller, we’re talking six. All torture is evil; but there is no equating the sins of the liberator with the crimes of the dictator. Totten observes:

"The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall. ‘I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.’ ‘Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.’"

We absolutely should hold ourselves to account for our failings; but I am not about to believe that sustaining the evil of Saddam indefinitely was a coherent long-term or even short-term alternative. That’s why I am not yet prepared to throw in the towel. Far from it. Michael begins his account with this:

"The Iraqi Kurds I met who have been to Iran wanted me to know ‚Äì and they want you to know, as well ‚Äì that the distance between the Iranian people and their hideous regime is galactic. I heard the same refrain over and over again: ‘Persians are just like us.’ In other words, they are liberal, secular, pro-Western, and fed up with tyrants. ‘Iranians love America,’ the Kurds told me. ‘They have nothing to do with Ahmadinejad.’"

It’s these people we have to keep faith in, the quiet ones, those not in angry mobs, those who appear whenever they have a chance to have a meaningful vote, those who simply want to live a free life, and follow their faith, without terror or tyranny. Those people live in Iraq and Iran. Their voices are being drowned out by a cacophony of hatred. But they are still there. And, now as much as ever, we need to stand by them.

P.S. Visit Michael’s tip-jar. He has no corporate support, as I now do. And he’s doing important work.

All the evidence the "20th highjacker" provided the government he now says is untrue. He says torture extracted the data from him, in many cases the sole evidence against up to 30 other inmates at Gitmo. It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it? Time is now also providing the full interrogation log of Qahtani. See if it fits your definition of torture. Make your own mind up.

The Bush-Cheney policy of torturing military detainees survived the veto-proof Congressional ban through a presidential signing statement. But what guarantees its survival as an actual practice is the same law’s prevention of tortured or mistreated detainees from seeking redress for their mistreatment through the courts. So they’re stuck in limbo – free to be tortured by the executive branch, and stripped of constitutional defenses. So the mistreatment goes on:

"These allegations . . . describe disgusting treatment, that if proven, is treatment that is cruel, profoundly disturbing and violative of" U.S. and foreign treaties banning torture, Judge Kessler told the government’s lawyers. She said she needs more information, but made clear she is considering banning the use of larger nasal-gastric tubes and the restraint chair.

In court filings, the Justice Department lawyers argued that language in the law written by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) gives Guantanamo Bay detainees access to the courts only to appeal their enemy combatant status determinations and convictions by military commissions.

"Unfortunately, I think the government’s right; it’s a correct reading of the law," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The law says you can’t torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can’t enforce that law in the courts."

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer representing several detainees at Guantanamo, agreed that the law cannot be enforced. "This is what Guantanamo was about to begin with, a place to keep detainees out of the U.S. precisely so they can say they can’t go to court," Wilner said.

The torture regime is still in force. Just as Cheney wanted. And you thought you lived in a democracy.

This blog post begins:

"It was 15 years ago today that our 8-year-old son Ryan suffered a severe brain injury that left him unable to walk or talk or feed himself. He was in the hospital (in two hospitals, actually) for over six months, and ever since has lived with us at home. I thought I would share some of the lessons I’ve learned in these past 15 years."

Read the whole thing.

Don’t pay off your credit card debt in one big chunk, or Homeland Security will be after you.

Four months after publication, the artists who drew the now famous cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are now all in hiding under police protection in Denmark. One of their daughters was sought out at her school by a group of twelve men, according to this interview. She must now go into hiding as well. Fascism is alive and well in Europe. And it is holding free people captive.