The Dissent of Man
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foudroyant's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, February 14th, 2005 | | 7:24 am |
Aussie terror suspect 'tortured by US'( Read more... )While it is not an unknown phenomena for people to have false memories upon seeing newspaper reports, it is the last sentence that is extremely disturbing. He said Washington did not charge Mr Habib because it didn't want to make evidence about his alleged involvement and training with Al-Qaeda public. | | Sunday, October 10th, 2004 | | 9:05 pm |
The lessons of history as neglected by the Versailles Treaty, from History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The Spartan representatives speak to the Athenian assembly seeking an end to the war following the events at Pylos. In our view, where great hatred exist, no lasting settlement can be made in a spirit of revenge, when one side gets the better of things in war and forces its opponent to swear to carry out the terms of an unequal treaty; what will make the settlement lasting is when the party that has it in his power to act like this takes instead a more reasonable point of view, overcomes his adversary in generosity, and makes peace on more moderate terms than his enemy expected. In such a case, so far from wanting to get his own back for the violence that has been done to him, the enemy is already under an obligation to pay back good for good, and so is the more ready, from a sense of honour, to abide by the terms that have been made. And men are more inclined to act in this way towards their greatest enemies than towards people with whom they have only minor differences. Then, too, when others are willing to make concessions it is natural for one to give way gladly oneself, just as it is natural, if one meets with an attitude of arrogance, to face things out to the end, even against one's better judgement. | | Thursday, August 5th, 2004 | | 5:03 am |
The latest terror warnings in America have been shown to be just rehashed old information. New Terror Alert Based on Years-Old Data from the Washington Post put the lie to the warnings. So what could have motivated these entirely pointless warnings? The title of the article A Nation in Danger. Or a President in Peril? from the Independent says it all, while Williams Rivers Pitt spares no sarcasm in his own analysis. It is indeed extremely suspect that in the remarks of the Director of Homeland Security that he mentions something as partisan as the following. But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President’s leadership in the war against terror.As Williams Rivers Pitt says... George W. Bush and his administration officials are using terrorism - the fear of it, the fight against it - to manipulate domestic American politics. They are, as they have every day for almost three years now, using September 11 against their own people. They are also getting stumblingly obvious about it. We are being lied to, clumsily, again.What particularly stuns me is that I just read the chapter in Tocqueville's Democracy in America which warns of the dangers of allowing reelection of the president of the United States. When... the head of state puts himself in the running, he borrows the force of the government for his own use.... It is the state itself, with its immense resources, that intrigues and corrupts.
If the representative of the executive power [ie. the president] descends into the [election] [lists, the care of the government becomes a secondary interest to him; his principal interest is his election. Negotiations, like laws, are no longer anything but electoral schemes for him; places become the recompense for services rendered, not to the nation, but to is head. Even though the action of the government might not alwaysbe contrary to the interest of the country, it would, in any case, no longer serve [the country].
It is impossible to consider the the ordinary course of affairs in the United Stated without noticing that the desire to be reelected dominates the thoughts of the president; that the whole policy of his administration tends toward that point; that his least steps are subordinated to that object; that above all as the moment of the crisis [that is, the election] approaches, individual interest is substituted in his mind for the general interest.It seems all the worst features of American democracy as presaged by Tocqueville are coming through in the current presidency. | | Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 | | 1:35 am |
| | Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 | | 1:09 pm |
Torturing Children by William Rivers PittThe biggest story of the Iraq war is about the torture of Iraqi children.
A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz' recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report.
The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of the abuse of these children. Staff Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police only stopped the interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A separate incident described a 16 year old being soaked with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was also a prisoner.
Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your government at war." According to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70% to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this what we have become? | | Monday, July 19th, 2004 | | 2:55 am |
Sailing Toward a Storm in China: U.S. Maneuvers Could Spark a WarQuietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.
This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.
Normally, the United States uses only one or at the most two carrier strike groups to show the flag in a trouble spot. In a combat situation it might deploy three or four, as it did for both wars with Iraq. Seven in one place is unheard of. | | Friday, July 9th, 2004 | | 10:38 pm |
An American convoy smashed an Iraqi's car and a soldier shot the driver dead. Yesterday afternoon, Haïdar Khani was perhaps not driving very slowly on the big four lane avenue that borders the immense Mansour Mella hotel complex in Baghdad's administrative center. Four American Humvees driving at high speed suddenly came up behind his modest red Toyota Corolla. The first violently slammed the little car, pitching it up against the grille of an Anglican church facing the hotel. This same armored vehicle stopped then and an American soldier calmly fired two shots at Haïdar Khani through the Toyota's rear view window. Several witnesses saw the 31 year old driver get out of the Toyota, blood streaming out of his neck, then collapse, dead, on the sidewalk. The same GI then aimed at the passenger, Mahmoud Jassem, whom he wounded with a bullet in the arm. The Humvees then immediately departed for an unknown destination. ( Shattered ) | | Wednesday, July 7th, 2004 | | 1:22 am |
About Independence, New York Times Editorial (after the Michael Moore article on the link) People too often get the impression that the only people who use the nation's civil liberties protections are lawbreakers who were not quite guilty of the exact felony they were charged with. Perhaps we should thank the Bush administration for providing so many situations that demonstrate how an unfettered law enforcement system, even one pursuing worthy ends, can destroy the lives of the innocent out of hubris or carelessness.
When law enforcement officials make mistakes, there is an all-too-human temptation to press on rather than admit an error. Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was arrested in connection with the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid, even though he had never been to Spain. Spanish authorities had taken a fingerprint from a plastic bag discovered at the scene and F.B.I. officials thought it matched Mr. Mayfield's prints, which were among the many from discharged soldiers in the enormous federal database.
The American investigators must have felt they hit pay dirt when they discovered that Mr. Mayfield was a convert to Islam, that his wife had been born in Egypt and that he had once represented a terrorism defendant in a child custody case. The fact that there was no indication he had been out of the country in a decade did not sway them. Neither did the fact that Spanish authorities were telling them that the fingerprints did not actually match. Mr. Mayfield was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the F.B.I. pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary.
Virtually every time the Bush administration feels cornered, it falls back on the argument that the president and his officials are honorable men and women. This is an invitation to turn what should be a debate about policy into a referendum on the hearts of the people making it. But this nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.I believe more than ever that laws are primarily meant to protect the innocent, and the punishment of the wicked is only ancillary to that primary purpose. When this order of things is turned on its head, then tyranny will rampage unfettered through the land. | | Monday, June 28th, 2004 | | 12:37 pm |
| | Saturday, June 26th, 2004 | | 5:22 pm |
Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet MythSome monasteries had their own private prisons, reports Anna Louise Strong. In 1959, she visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, and breaking off hands. For gouging out eyes, there was a special stone cap with two holes in it that was pressed down over the head so that the eyes bulged out through the holes and could be more readily torn out. There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disembowling.21
The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master's cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.22 To support the Chinese overthrow of the Dalai Lama's feudal theocracy is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in Tibet. This point is seldom understood by today's Shangri-La adherents in the West.
The converse is also true. To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. One common complaint among Buddhist proselytes in the West is that Tibet's religious culture is being destroyed by the Chinese authorities. This does seem to be the case. But what I am questioning here is the supposedly admirable and pristinely spiritual nature of that pre-invasion culture. In short, we can advocate religious freedom and independence for Tibet without having to embrace the mythology of a Paradise Lost. | | 2:00 am |
| | Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004 | | 1:16 pm |
It's finally been packaged in a form everyone can accept as canonical. Some arbitrarily nominated commission has said that there has never been any link whatsoever between Iraq and the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. That's something anyone with a heart and half a brain has known ever since the Bush administration started down its warmongering path. So why is it now that it's respectable to adopt a conspiracy theorist stance that people are calling this Bush's credibility gap? I don't know what the hell a credibility gap is, but I know Bush has been lying, lying through the skin of his teeth, lying his pants off, lying on a express through train into hell, and this is called a credibility gap? Everytime I see another article that says Bush should go this November, I think, what the hell are the Americans waiting till then for? Bush should go, and he should go now, and he should go straight to jail, not pass go, and not collect the few million he's pocketing from the war he and his cronies engineered. And here's what the man himself had to say about his "credibility gap". "It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies', 'The Lies of George W. Bush', 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'. I'd like to tell you that I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie." (during the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, May 1) That is how cavalier he gets about sending the most lethal military in the world to kill and to maim (and to die too), and joking about false pretexts is par for the course too. | | Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 | | 1:11 pm |
| | Friday, June 11th, 2004 | | 12:29 pm |
Why Japan Remains a Threat to Peace and Democracy in AsiaThat's a fairly undeveloped thesis, but the essence of why I would not trust the Japanese is in that essay. Japanese pornography may sound like great fun to people the world over, but it only highlights the brutality ensconced deep within the Japanese soul. | | Tuesday, June 8th, 2004 | | 2:08 pm |
| | 1:58 am |
How to take over the world, practical tip #1. I'm reading about the French Revolution right now (prompted by this delightfully written book A History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 by Fyffe), and it's pretty much more fascinating than the gloss of a treatment it received in our secondary school education. While checking out references, I came across the following here. Under revolutionary ideology, the French Catholic Church could no longer exist as an independent corporation a separate Estate. The Assembly nationalized Church property, placing it "at the disposition of the nation," and simultaneously made the state responsible for the upkeep of the Church. On the basis of these "national lands" (to which the property of émigrés and the crown would subsequently be added), the Assembly issued paper notes known as assignats, which soon came to be treated as money.
The national lands were sold by auction at the district capitals to the highest bidders. This favored bourgeois and rich peasants with ready capital, and made it difficult for needy peasants to acquire the land. The sale of Church lands and the issuance of assignats based on their value had at least three major consequences. three major consequences
First, it largely solved the financial problem and eliminated the need for constant borrowing. Second, the hundreds of thousands of purchasers gained a strong vested interest in the triumph of the Revolution, since a successful counterrevolution was likely to restore their properties to the Church. Finally, there was an unanticipated effect. After war broke out in 1792, the government greatly increased the volume of assignats beyond their underlying value, thereby touching off severe inflation and new political turmoil. | | Monday, June 7th, 2004 | | 12:08 am |
The inherent weakness of Prussia, as applied to Singapore. Far more serious... was the danger that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine.-- History of Modern Europe, by Fyffe | | Sunday, June 6th, 2004 | | 1:40 pm |
Looking through Truthout in a daze, I saw this stunning article. Beating Specialist Baker, by Nicholas Kristof The prison abuse scandal refuses to die because soothing White House explanations keep colliding with revelations about dead prisoners and further connivance by senior military officers - and newly discovered victims, like Sean Baker. If Sean Baker doesn't sound like an Iraqi name, it isn't. Specialist Baker, 37, is an American, and he was a proud U.S. soldier. An Air Force veteran and member of the Kentucky National Guard, he served in the first gulf war and more recently was a military policeman in Guantanamo Bay. Then in January 2003, an officer in Guantanamo asked him to pretend to be a prisoner in a training drill. As instructed, Mr. Baker put on an orange prison jumpsuit over his uniform, and then crawled under a bunk in a cell so an "internal reaction force" could practice extracting an uncooperative inmate. The five U.S. soldiers in the reaction force were told that he was a genuine detainee who had already assaulted a sergeant. Despite more than a week of coaxing, I haven't been able to get Mr. Baker to give an interview. But he earlier told a Kentucky television station what happened next: "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was `red.' . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: `I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' " ( Read more... ) If the U.S. military treats one of its own soldiers this way - allowing him to be battered, and lying to cover it up - then imagine what happens to Afghans and Iraqis. President Bush attributed the problems uncovered at Abu Ghraib to "a few American troops who dishonored our country." Mr. Bush, the problems go deeper than a few bad apples. | | Thursday, May 13th, 2004 | | 2:34 pm |
It is not unusual to see Americans vaunting their political system as being unique and original, that of the grand experiment of democracy. Notwithstanding the fact that by many measures, the American system of politics falls miserably short of the definition of democracy, there still remains the historical anomaly that American democracy is neither the first nor the best example of such. Everyone knows the birth of democracy is attributed to Athens (whose mortal struggle with Sparta represented the eternal contest of autocracy against democracy), Not everyone knows that the oldest existing parliament in the world is in Iceland, and it first met in 930. It is very apparent that the tradition of democracy is not some fancy new theory, but an integral aspect of the growth and development of humanity. Why should that be so? It seems that the allocation of political power is not an arbitrary process, but merely an outgrowth of one's economic standing. This is crudely illustrated by American politics today, where the winners of political contests are those who have the most money to spend on ads and the ilk. In the feudal age, one's economic prowess was dependent on the lands and how effectively they were worked. Thus, there was an inherent motivation to improve the lands and treat serfs fairly; though it seems that the entire system was essentially a massive monopoly with serfs forbidden from moving around, and thus the impetus for development was blocked until the advent of the industrial revolution. In the feudal age, these lords essentially were equal in power and thus were compelled by such circumstance to meet as such in parliaments, supposedly representing their "constituents" who were the true source of their power. The parallels with the modern political process are fairly evident. In times earlier than that as in ancient Athens, people were essentially equal in terms of economic standing and thus met as equals. It seems tempting to conclude that the abstraction of political power is a natural step from there. What I mean is this, that people in Athens saw that they met as equals (due to source of power) and then decided therefore that all people should naturally meet as equals. Of course in Athens, being a citizen was dependent on many strict conditions and was far removed from the principle of universal suffrage. I was going to say something else, but I've forgotten already. Hmm. | | 2:00 pm |
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