Socialist Sushi

ACLU Obtains Rules for Secret Court

The Justice Department has argued in a recent court case that librarians, booksellers and other businesses can easily challenge a controversial provision of the USA Patriot Act by appealing to a super-secret court that approves surveillance of terrorists and foreign intelligence agents.

The only problem, according to a document released last week, is that the same court does not allow anyone but government attorneys and agents inside its doors.

I get more and more angry about the state of this nation with every article like this. Secret courts and the gov’t watching everything you do used to be what the big bad soviets did. Now we’ve brought it home to the USA.

The 9-11 Commission has released its report. I haven’t had time to read it yet.

I have, however, downloaded it and put up a mirror to the full report here.

If you want to view it in HTML, I put a quick conversion here, or you can download a gzipped tar file of the html and associated files here.

If you have a nice, fast, server, please mirror the HTML and let me know.

Updated: HTML is now much nicer.

SavannahG8Summit.org: Savannah Area G8 Summit Resource

They even have a RSS feed, which is nifty.

Took several pictures this morning. There’s a fence running down the center of telfair square. I’ll be out at lunch to take more.

Teen suicides over exam message (May 24, 2004)

An Indian teenager killed herself after receiving a mobile phone text message saying she had failed her school leaving exams, although she had actually passed, a report said today.

Very sad.

Pressure from parents and peers on students to score high marks in the exams is immense and each year dozens across the country kill themselves when they find they have failed.

A new city law in Brunswick gives police the power to halt protests during the G-8 summit now that the governor has declared a pre-emptive state of emergency in coastal Georgia through June 20.

Police empowered to halt G8 protests under Georgia’s state of emergency, via FindLaw.

Couple of things about this. First, everyone keeps complaining about how many protesters may come to this thing. Well if it’s so horribly, why in the world did we agree to host it? The people renting out venues and hotels to the press and visitors aren’t complaining too much about th emoney.

Second, this article points out the same thing was done in 96 for the Olympics. Good thing they did, too, or we might have had a bomb go off or something. Oh, wait…

1. Don’t photograph yourselves torturing prisoners.
2. Don’t torture people who work for the press.

Guess they didn’t have enough training.

“I was just following orders.”

Mr. Bray has it write with his observations:

Scott McKenzie, 38, of Clearwater, Pa., a sergeant first class: “We never learned how to deal with a riot, what to do when we were being assaulted.” Here’s a hint: Don’t torture people.

Exactly. All this talk about not having enough training. Seriously now: Do you need training to know it’s wrong to hook wires to a guy’s genitals? Do you honestly need a class in that?

“Now remember, soldier, it may seem ok to you to strip these folks and pose them in sexual positions but, oddly enough, it’s wrong.”

“Really?”

“I kid you not, son. Oh, and leave the digital camera in your tent, alright?”

That’s the other thing: if you are going to torture people, please take note: Don’t take freakin pictures!

And I love the headlines at :”PHOTOS SHOW AMERICAN SOLDIERS HAVING SEX WITH ONE ANOTHER” We really are a nation of perverts.

The Department of Defense has ordered that no more pictures of the coffins of soldiers be released. Seeing the cost of our policies in Iraq is apparently too much for this administration to handle.

Saying it “reflects the families’ wishes” means very little. First of all I’m sure most families wished their loved ones were never sent into combat but that mattered very little. Second of all the return of our dead is an event and the American public has a right to see a record of it, period.

This hiding of reality is yet another symptom of the loss of freedom in this country. People die in war, and no policy can be properly evaluated unless you have all the facts. But since it’s an election year the price paid in American blood is more than anyone wants us to know.

It would be so simple to just blame Bush for this, but honestly I think it would happen no matter who was in office.

Photos of Soldiers’ Coffins Revive Controversy (washingtonpost.com)

After Dover Air Force Base, the main port for returning remains, released hundreds of government photos of the ceremonies, the Defense Department ordered yesterday that no more photographs be released. In addition, two employees for defense contractor Maytag Aircraft were fired after the Pentagon complained about a photo of flag-draped caskets taken by one of them that appeared in the Seattle Times.

From The Memory Hole.

(local mirror)