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.
About a decade ago, when I was on Ohio’s advisory board that was revising the state’s science standards, there was the big debate over teaching so-called ‘intelligent design’ (ID) in science classes. One of the people attending those meetings was the superintendent of schools in a largely rural district that was in the southern part of the state close to the Ohio river that separates us from Kentucky.
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The US has agreed to a UN resolution to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Libya for crimes against humanity, but only after a clause was included that exempts any Americans from being brought before the ICC.
Glenn Greenwald highlights how the US government’s disgraceful abuse of Bradley Manning continues and how they shamelessly lie about it.
A lawyer for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking secret government files to WikiLeaks, has complained that his client was stripped and left naked in his cell for seven hours on Wednesday.
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The soldier’s clothing was returned to him Thursday morning, after he was required to stand naked outside his cell during an inspection, Mr. [David E.] Coombs said in a posting on his Web site.“This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification,” Mr. Coombs wrote. “It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. Pfc. Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.”
First Lt. Brian Villiard, a Marine spokesman, said a brig duty supervisor had ordered Private Manning’s clothing taken from him. He said that the step was “not punitive” and that it was in accordance with brig rules, but he said that he was not allowed to say more.
“It would be inappropriate for me to explain it,” Lieutenant Villiard said. “I can confirm that it did happen, but I can’t explain it to you without violating the detainee’s privacy.”
Notice that after requiring Manning to be naked for hours on end, they touchingly say they cannot explain the reasons in order to protect his privacy!
UPDATE: Greenwald says today that Manning will be forced to be naked every night and for morning inspection for the indefinite future.
Can anyone doubt that Manning, who has not even been tried let along convicted, of any crime is being humiliated as a form of punishment and to destroy him mentally in order to warn anyone else who might think of crossing the government of its unchecked power to abuse people?
Jon Stewart and The Daily Show writers were really on a roll on Thursday about the campaign being waged against teachers. I find it extraordinary that public school teachers of all people are being demonized as a major cause of the country’s economic problems. It is a sign of a government, business, and media chattering class that has lost its collective mind and is seeking the destruction of the public school system.
Here are the main clips:
The interview with Diane Ravitch also dealt with education and is worth watching.
I have written before (here and here) about how few people know about ‘jury nullification’, which is the right of juries to acquit some one even if there is no doubt that the law had been broken, if they think that the law used to convict is itself unjust. It is thanks to jury nullification that we now have constitutional protections of freedom of the press and association and assembly.
Although the right of juries to nullify is well established, judges and prosecutors tend to not like it to be well known, the former because it means that juries have the right to ignore their instructions and the latter because they want juries to convict.
Now there is a case where a retired Penn Sate chemistry professor standing outside a courthouse handing out leaflets informing potential juries of their right to nullify has been arrested and charged with jury tampering.
Scott Horton also talks about the case and the history of jury nullification. Sam Smith also discusses the case.
A Texas Republican state legislator has introduced a bill that makes hiring of undocumented workers a crime in which the employer could be punished by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine unless they were hired to do household chores, like maid, caretaker, lawn worker, or any type of house worker.
Because you know how hard it is so hard to get good help these days…
A recent report said that NATO drone strikes have once again killed a large number of civilians including 20 women and 29 children, in a remote region of Afghanistan.
The killing of civilians by drones is an explosive issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan and soon after the story emerged there was a bizarre report that General Petraeus had told Afghan government representatives that all the people killed were members of the Taliban and that he suspected that Taliban sympathizers in the village might have burned their own children in order to make the US look bad.
(The US has apologized for another appalling drone killing of nine children who had been merely gathering firewood. I shudder to think of the number of people who join terrorist groups because of their rage when members of their family and community are killed like this.)
It is always a bad sign when you accuse other people of things that would be unthinkable if said about your own group. The instinct to protect and shield one’s own children seems to be deeply held and universal, is observed in almost all species, and is supported by evolutionary theory. Harming one’s own children is the act of a psychopath and thus rare.
This is what makes Petraeus’s purported statement so offensive. Other commanders are making it even worse by claiming that burning of their children is a common practice among Afghan parents! To accuse an entire village of doing so is a sign of deep desperation and requires a very high level of proof. It is not a charge to be tossed around casually.
I have said many times before that in the immediate aftermath of a major event where a government has likely committed an atrocity, their immediate instinct is to lie their way out if it in order to gain public support, hoping that by the time the truth slowly emerges, people will have forgotten the event or at least passions will have cooled.
We saw this with the case where a US warship shot down an Iranian civilian plane killing everyone abroad. President Reagan and other officials claimed that the dastardly evil Iranian government had deliberately sacrificed their own people by dive-bombing the US warship so that it would be shot down as part of their plan to make the US look bad. This was absurd on its face and was shown later to be a flat-out lie but the US media lapped it up. After all, we like to believe that we are always good and the enemy is always evil.
Then there was the claim that Iraqi soldiers had removed incubators from Kuwait just for the sheer evil pleasure of wanting babies to die. This was also reported unquestioningly by the media but was later shown to be not only false but a deliberate lie planned and implemented by a public relations firm.
Then there was the case of the Brazilian who was shot dead by British police and where every justification given for the killing turned out to be a lie.
Stories that fit so conveniently into a narrative that saves one’s own face and demonizes the enemy have to be treated with deep skepticism. This is why, even though I think that George W, Bush and Dick Cheney are liars and responsible for war crimes, I have never taken seriously the claims of the so-called ‘truthers’ that Bush and Cheney either planned the 9/11 attack or knew about it in advance and allowed it to happen. Such extraordinary claims require a very high bar of proof and nothing close it has been provided.
As I said before, “This is why I always take initial news reports of such events with a grain of salt. I believe that all governments, without exception, lie to their people. They do this routinely and without shame. But most people are uncomfortable accepting this fact and want to believe that their government is trustworthy. And at the early stages of the events, governments and official spokespersons take advantage of people’s trust and use their dominance of the media to make sure that people’s early impressions are favorable. The only reason that governments will hesitate to lie is if the media quickly investigates the original story and gives the subsequently revealed facts as much publicity as the original stories. But as we have see, the present media have largely abdicated that role, playing it safe by simply reporting what the government says.”
It is up to us to suspend belief in obviously self-serving government claims until we see convincing proof.
To no one’s surprise, the US Supreme Court by an 8-1 margin ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church had the right to peacefully picket funerals. This was clearly the correct decision, in my opinion, and what surprises me is that there was even one dissenter (Justice Alito).
I don’t know why people keep taking this church to court. It only gives them the publicity they crave and makes them into First Amendment martyrs. Their First Amendment rights should not be violated just because we do not like what they say.