In 1988, 73% of people opposed same sex marriage. A new poll finds that for the first time more people favor it than oppose it, by a margin of 46% to 42%. See the trend in this figure.
Belief in god, like opposition to equal rights for gays, has no rational basis and is thus susceptible to the same kind of collapse in support.
Scott Horton says that classified Department of Defense documents show how the enforced nudity practices used on Bradley Manning is deliberate policy to a break prisoner’s will but can have unpleasant repercussions.
Manning’s special regime raises concerns that abusive techniques adopted by the Bush Administration for use on alleged terrorists are being applied to a U.S. citizen and soldier. Classified Defense Department documents furnish an alternative explanation for the use of enforced nudity: “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” Other documents detail how enforced nudity and the isolation techniques being applied to Manning can be used to prepare the prisoner to be more submissive to interrogators in connection with questioning.
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Under established rules of international humanitarian law, the detention practices that a state adopts for its own soldiers are acceptable standards for use by a foreign power detaining that state’s soldiers in wartime. So by creating a “special regime” for Bradley Manning, the Department of Defense is also authorizing all the bizarre practices to which he is being subject to be applied to American soldiers, sailors, and airmen taken prisoner in future conflicts. This casual disregard for the rights of American service personnel could have terrible ramifications in the future.
It amazes me that people in authority take these measures assuming that their own people will never be at the receiving end. Remember that Ray Davis, a reputed CIA agent, is currently being held for murder in a Pakistan jail. What would be the US reaction if the Pakistani authorities subjected him to this kind of treatment? He is already being kept in isolation with round-the-clock monitoring.
Meanwhile, authorities stressed the stringent measures they have put in place to protect Davis in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail, following angry rallies in which his effigy was burned and threats from extremist clerics.
Surveillance cameras are trained on his cell in an isolation wing, his guards have been disarmed and a ring of paramilitary Punjab rangers are posted outside. About 25 jihadi prisoners have been transferred to other facilities.
What if the authorities torture him to get him to talk? What if they forced him to be naked for extended periods of time to break him psychologically? The US would have absolutely no standing to protest, since they are doing it to their own soldier.
Maybe the US authorities just don’t care since it is never the policymakers who are at risk of such retaliation but lowly people way down the totem pole and thus expendable.
Reports are now emerging that Ray Davis, the American arrested in Pakistan for gunning down two people in the crowded streets of Lahore, was not just a CIA agent but acting head of the CIA in Pakistan, thus making lies of the claim by the US government that Davis was just an ordinary US consular official going about his business who had shot the two people in self-defense as they tried to rob him.
This revelation was hardly a surprise since the official US story right from the beginning simply did not make sense. Look at the items found in Davis’s car: a 9mm gun and 75 bullets, bolt cutters, a GPS unit, an infrared light, telescope, a digital camera, an air ticket, two mobile phones and a blank cheque. Hardly the things that a mere consular official would carry around on a shopping trip. Furthermore his behavior during and after the incident was not that of an ordinary person.
On 27 January, Raymond Davis, a bulky 36-year-old CIA agent with a shock of grey hair, was winding through the chaotic Lahore traffic when he stopped at a red light. A motorbike carrying two men, coming from the opposite direction, swerved in front of his Honda Civic. The pillion passenger was carrying a gun. Davis, a former special forces soldier, whipped out his 9mm semi-automatic Glock pistol and, still behind the wheel, opened fire. Five shots sliced through the windscreen. Muhammad Faheem, a 19-year-old street criminal, fell dead.
Davis got out of the car and took aim at the motorbike driver, Faizan Haider, who had started running. Another five shots rang out and Haider fell to the ground, having run 30ft; a postmortem indicated he was hit three times in the front and twice in the back.
Davis walked back to his car, called for help on a military-style radio, then started to photograph the dead men. Anwar Khan watched from his restaurant across the street, amazed at the American’s sang-froid. “He was very peaceful and confident. I was wondering how he could be like that after killing two people,” he said.
The US government sent John Kerry to Pakistan in an attempt to get Davis released. Kerry pledged that “the U.S. Department of Justice would open a criminal investigation against Davis.” The attempt failed. Did Kerry really think that people there would believe his statement, since the US is now notorious for not investigating and punishing anyone in the government who torture their own citizens and murder foreigners? As Scott Horton writes
In order to secure Davis’s freedom, Senator Kerry and Secretary Clinton need to be able to argue to their Pakistani counterparts that the United States is capable of investigating the Lahore incident fairly and taking criminal or disciplinary action as appropriate. Davis claims he acted in self defense, attempting to stop a daytime robbery. The use of lethal force in such circumstances may well be justified. That’s the sort of call that a prosecutor would normally make after a thorough investigation.
The problem is that America’s track record shows clearly that it doesn’t investigate or act on claims involving either intelligence agents or contractors. As I noted in earlier Congressional testimony, the United States has a de facto policy of impunity for its security contractors and agents who kill or injure foreign civilians.
But apparently Kerry did manage to spirit out of the country the other shadowy Americans who, in rushing to Davis’s aid in a failed attempt to get him away from the scene, sped along a crowded one-way street in the wrong direction and in the process killed an innocent motorcyclist.
A Pakistani judge has now denied the US government’s claim that Davis has diplomatic immunity and thus should be freed and allowed to leave the country. The Pakistani government, a US client, would prefer the higher courts to overturn this decision but there is so much popular anger against Davis and the US that doing so might cause riots and de-stabilize the government. The opposition to his release has intensified ever since the 19-year old widow of one of the victims committed suicide because in addition to her grief she felt that Davis would escape punishment. It is not helping that there are reports that the victims’ family members are now being threatened to not give evidence against Davis, and suspicions abound that these thugs are acting on behalf of the US.
So what exactly was Davis doing in Pakistan? The Pakistani newspaper Dawn reports:
Sources have revealed that a GPS chip recovered from Davis was being used in identifying targets for drone attacks in the tribal region.
It was also learnt during the probe that Davis made upto 12 visits to the tribal areas without informing Pakistani officials.
The 36- year-old US official was reluctant in giving out information about his visits to the tribal region, sources added.
The US Embassy officials were exerting pressure on the authorities, asking them not to expose the information received from Davis.
Why was he going to remote tribal areas? David Lindorff, who has been following the case closely and first brought to my attention his murky background, says:
As I reported earlier, both Pakistani and Indian news organizations are claiming, based upon intelligence sources, that Davis was involved in not just intelligence work, but in orchestrating terrorist activity by both the Pakistani Taliban and the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has been linked to both the assassination of Benezir Bhutto and the capture and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Multiple calls to members of both groups were found by police on some of the cell phones found on Davis and in his car when he was arrested in Lahore.
There are so many unanswered questions swirling around this story. Why would the CIA be working with terrorist groups in Pakistan that are ostensibly opposed to the US? What about the long-standing links between the Pakistani intelligence service ISI and groups like the Taliban? Was Davis going behind the backs of the ISI to create direct links with those groups? What about the allegations in the Pakistani media that the two people shot dead by Davis were members of the ISI who were tailing him? I have no idea what the answers to these questions are. Davis clearly has information that may not be palatable to a lot of people and his life is in danger.
In the meantime, Davis is being held under rather extraordinary security because of rumors that the Americans will try to spring him, or even poison him. Davis is being shielded from any direct contact with U.S. officials, and a box of chocolates sent to Davis by the Embassy was confiscated.
I frankly cannot see how this is going to end. The US and Pakistani governments would undoubtedly like to bring this to a quick close and send Davis back to the US, where he will very likely not even be investigated let alone tried. He may even be promoted if past actions are any guide. But people in Pakistan are furious about the matter and releasing him could cause an explosion of anger.
Robert Fisk reports that a demonstration against the Saudi regime is planned for Friday and the government is mobilizing troops to quell it. The regime has a reputation for coming down hard on protestors and has reportedly told the leader of neighboring Bahrain that if he does not crack down on dissent within his country, they will do it, to prevent the contagion from spreading. Bahrain’s protestors have been having daily demonstrations in that country and this is making the Saudi government uneasy.
If there is a brutal crackdown, this will put Obama and Clinton in a quandary. It is fairly easy for them to condemn Libya’s leader for brutality and threaten retaliation against him, although their options are limited. But the corrupt autocrats who rule Saudi Arabia are longtime US allies and friends of US leaders.
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
There are more concrete signs that the end of religion is nigh than the ones I gave in the previous post in this series. We have the phenomenon of churches closing all over the place. In Cleveland, the Catholic diocese closed a huge number of churches recently, angering the dwindling number of parishioners who still attended them.
Howard Bess, a retired Baptist minister, says that young people are leaving religion in droves.
In a single generation, the Christian church dropout rate has increased fivefold. The Barna Group, a leading research organization focusing on the intersection of faith and culture, says 80 percent of the young people raised in a church will be “disengaged” before they are 30.
In the past 20 years, the number of American people who say they have no religion has doubled and has now reached 15 percent. Those numbers are concentrated in the under-30 population. The polling data continues to show that a dramatic exit is taking place from American Christian churches.
Beyond those numbers, denominations across the board are acknowledging loss of membership, but it is worse than they are reporting. Many churches report numbers based on baptized constituents, yet actual Sunday morning attendance doesn’t come close to those numbers.
The message that is being drummed into our ears every day is that America is broke and that the middle class and the poor are the ones who must bear the pain of solving the problem, because we must never, ever, raise taxes, even on the very rich.
In a speech in Wisconsin in support of the unions, Michael Moore says what I have been saying for sometime, that the problem is not that America is broke but that a greedy oligarchy is looting the country’s wealth.
“Let me say that again, and please someone in the mainstream media, just repeat this fact once. We’re not greedy. We’ll be happy to hear it just once. 400 obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 now have more cash, stock, and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.
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The nation is not broke, my friends. There’s lots of money to go around, lots, lots. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits in their well-guarded estates. They know. They know. They have committed crimes to make this happen.”
As Jason Easley and Sarah Jones comment:
Moore did something brilliant. He shifted the narrative. Republicans want the Wisconsin story to be about the budget. Early on Democrats were focused on the issues of liberty and collective bargaining. Moore broadened the message and created a third narrative about how decades of pro-corporate and pro-wealthy economic policies have redistributed the nation’s wealth from the people to a small group of super-rich haves. This is the story that terrifies both conservative politicians and the network of billionaire wealth that owns them.
I am glad that someone of Moore’s prominence is getting that message out. We cannot expect the Democratic Party leadership to do so since they are part of the oligarchy.
There is a clever person who uses the same clip taken from a real German film about Hitler’s last days and inserts different subtitles to reflect current situations. Here is one result.