The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us by Frank Rich.

 “BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. This is a plot out of “Syriana” by way of “Chinatown.” There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes law in its current form.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was briefly suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

The Price of Loss. How the Americans value civilian lives in Iraq. Comment by Lily Hamourtziadou

The American military has expressed regret “that civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism,” after the 11 October killing of 15 women (one pregnant) and children in an air raid near lake Thar Thar.1 The civilian death toll by US fire was 96 in October, with 23 children among them, while in September US forces and contractors killed 108 Iraqi civilians, including 7 children. In August US troops killed 103 civilians, 16 of them children, and in July they killed 196. In fact, during the last five months US forces in Iraq have killed over 600 Iraqi civilians. Regrettably, as always.

It is the ‘price to pay’, the ‘sacrifice’ that has to be made as we fight terrorism, the ‘cost’ of this war against evil forces. That is what we say to justify these killings. But those of us who speak of this price to be paid, this sacrifice to be made, do not pay this price, do not make this sacrifice. Our own country is not being destroyed, attacked, occupied. Our own children are not being blown up, our civilians are not becoming homeless by the millions. Those who speak of the necessity of this sacrifice, would they be prepared to pay such a price? In their own country? With the blood of their own families?

1 Iraq strike ‘kills 15 civilians’ BBC, 12 Oct 2007. IBC record k7704

2 ‘Army Bates 550 - 554′ 13 Feb 2006 (via ACLU) IBC record d1910

3 ‘Army Bates 762′ 18 Feb 2006 (via ACLU) IBC record d1908

4 ‘Army Bates 342 - 343′ 1 Jan 2006 (via ACLU) IBC record d1904

5 ‘Army Bates 1149 - 1152′ 1 Jan 2006 (via ACLU) IBC record d1905

6 Knowing the enemy difficult in Iraq Katarina Kratovac, AP, 7 Oct 2007. IBC record k7615

How much easier it is to sacrifice others, to let others pay with their lives. The value of those lives is hardly high enough to trouble us. It is nothing our military cannot afford. Here is an example:

“A fisherman was fishing in the Tigris river in the early morning, when a Coalition Forces (CF) helicopter flew over and shone a spotlight on him. The fisherman began to shout in English, ‘Fish! Fish!’ while pointing to his catch. A patrol of Humvees arrived, and as the deceased bent down to turn off the boat’s motor, CF shot and killed him. CF did not secure the boat, which drifted off and was never retrieved.” Compensation for death denied due to combat exemption; compensation for boat granted: $3,500 US.2

The US Army paid $7,500 to two children whose mother they killed inside a taxi that ran a checkpoint — both children were also in the taxi, and were shot and injured; they also paid $6,000 for killing a child looking out of the window, while a raid was on-going in the house across the street.3 4 They refused, as they do in the majority of cases, to compensate the child whose father they killed as he drove home, but agreed to make a ‘condolence payment’ of $1,500.5 More recently, the US military is reported to have paid $2,500 to each family of the three men they killed near Abu Lukah, as they guarded their village.6

There are more:

Al Matasan Street, Samarra, Iraq

Claim on behalf of Iraqi [Redacted] by son. [Redacted], who was deaf, was shot and killed by US forces near the Samarra museum. Two eyewitnesses corroborated the story. Finding: denied for lack of evidence and combat exception. Condolence payment granted: $500 US.7

Samarra, Iraq

7 ‘Army Bates 0952 - 0958′ 4 Nov 2005 (via ACLU) IBC record d3353

8 ‘Army Bates 588 - 591′ 28 Apr 2005 (via ACLU) IBC record d3352

9 ‘Army Bates 889 - 892′ 27 May 2005 (via ACLU) IBC record d3348

Claim on behalf of Iraqi [Redacted] by parent. [Redacted], a four year-old girl, was playing in her front yard when she was killed by Coalition Forces’ (CF) fire. The CF and a Humvee were trying to cross the road and they shot to clear the traffic. A bullet ricocheted off of a wall and hit [Redacted]. Army memo: “A SIGACTS investigation revealed no activity meeting” the incident’s description, and “the claim is too old to verify.” Finding: denied due to lack of evidence. Condolence payment of $2,500 US granted.8

Tikrit, Iraq

Claim on behalf of Iraqi [Redacted], an ambulance driver. [Redacted] was on his way to the scene of an accident with an IED when he was shot and killed by a US soldier. Finding: negligent fire; Compensation: $2,500 US.9

Reading through the Army compensation reports, it is fairly clear just what the value of an Iraqi life is, of how the loss of a beloved child, parent and sibling is valued, priced. A few thousand dollars (if that) is how much they are worth, and no more. Their loss covered by a shockingly low monetary compensation. No further consequences, punishment, no further accountability.

Those of us who opposed this war and the long occupation that followed hold our political leaders responsible for the horrors of Iraq. We sometimes blame our soldiers. We always blame the terrorists. But we are reluctant to blame our nation or ourselves. “We can continue to blame the Bush administration,” writes Frank Rich, “but we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.” We cannot simply ‘look the other way.’10

10 The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us Frank Rich, New York Times, 14 Oct 2007.

We, who have lost very little, who have sacrificed very little, who have paid very little, we ‘turn the page,’ to use Rich’s phrase, and we continue to speak of ‘our’ war, of ‘our’ fight against the terrorists, ‘our’ ideals, ‘our’ kindness, ‘our’ courage; things that we value far more than the lives of millions of others, people whose deaths do not hurt us, whose loss does not affect us, and whose sacrifice we do not see bloodying our own hands.

Is never too late to express yourselves…..MEA CULPA my friends….

Married or Single is ultimately a state of mind. You love somebody and join them for as long or as little Life allows.
We are like two ships passing each other in the night and sometimes….. having a common destination, we are mooring together in the same port. Children and family are a special shared port destination for most people. They are the safest harbor known to man. Our biological destiny after all dictates to found a home, make a family, spawn and die.

Pretty fatalistic news makes up the history of mankind.

But take courage for it is Not so for ships and sailors.
Remember ships are not build to stay in a safe harbor but rather to ply the seas searching for their next port of call….

Faitfull as well as faithless sailors guide them there with a sure hand across the watery paths indistinct but for the mermaid that seeks their seed…

 

No one can quite explain why certain people make huge efforts to help others, exercise their compassion and even offer their lives in what we would call heroic manifestations of humanity.

 My view is that such endeavours are attempts, part instinctive but also perhaps part conscious, to escape from the fatalism which surrounds life. A human is born, lives, usually in some kind of servitude, breeds and dies. Not much free will is exercised during the majority of lives in this world. There is nothing one can do about his fate but accept it. The wild people are no less imprisoned by their environment and the conformity experience.

Yet people, occasionally, perform extraordinary feats of courage, through a brave heart; sometimes with what we can only call a moral objective.

 There are many well-documented instances of altruism that are against the self preservation instincts that humans are supposed to possess and, even more important, appear to be fighting against fate, to achieve a kind of freedom of the will — over events, and over their own frail bodies. This is quite different from, and superior to, the freedom to roam — much closer to what St Paul meant when he wrote of the freedom we find in Christ.

The idea that people may be imbued with an idea of freedom which leads them to fight against blind, meaningless fate is a striking one.  People fight so that they can overcome fate not to survive but really to live for ever even if they die. This seeming contradiction has given us the Archbishop Romeros of this world and the father Chencos and so many other unsung contemporary heroes of mine whom I miss sorely every time I think about self renunciation.

I am studying the resistance we offer to fate, and the freedom we secure by our efforts — the internal freedom which is the only true kind — we can learn lessons about the spiritual evolution of man. For he and she were once prisoners of a blind, purposeless and seemingly implacable fate, described in all ancient religious tracts or great cultural books such as the Vedas, Torah, Bible, Quran, Mahayana, Ramayana etc. Why did they not remain so? It was undoubtedly because in the early development humans studied the operations of nature, both frightening and benevolent, over long periods and with great attention, and came to the conclusion  that nature was ruled by beings of great powers, who could be somewhat prayed and asked for things of natural powers.

 The efforts of supplication, whether by sacrifices or prayer, might not succeed, but at least humans had a fighting chance. or so they thought. A comforting thought indeed. There was something they could do to alter or improve their lives. They did not have to submit without protest or struggle with events over which they had no control whatsoever. This self-importation of the notion of God in human brains, the discovery of religion and a consciously practised morality as a means to elevate the human condition was the origin of all progress. With it came the notion of freedom to struggle against adversity in all its forms, for if humans could improve their lot in some directions, they could do it in many others.

Thus human beings ceased to be wholly fatalistic and some of them became Promethean. Without this development I should think it highly unlikely that the race would exist today. As it is, our future appears limitless, if we retain our freedom of will and our refusal to accept material domination. But will we? Fatalism is deeply rooted in many people; it is a subjective propensity rather than an objective fact, and its expression takes many forms. In the ancient world it survived the discovery of gods. It grafted itself on to the new concept, so the fates came into existence as new forms of deity, themselves to be appeased, but to no purpose since they had no ultimate aim themselves and anyway were unappeasable. With the exception of the Aristotelian thought and the Greek revolution of Reason; It was fatalism which held back the world of antiquity from progress, and was in the process of destroying it when Judaeo-Christianity came to the rescue.

Two Millenia forward, fatalism is on the march again, in its new form of militant atheism. It has made big strides, particularly in the past decade, especially in higher education, and has captured key universities and education departments.

 Modern materialist fatalism takes two particular forms. In science, especially in the current fashion- able subject, biology, it has produced Darwinian Fundamentalism. This is now taught as the explanation of everything by the process usually called the survival of the fittest, but might equally be called the destruction of the unfit. In academic philosophy, which has become a mere slave of Darwinism, it is called Naturalism, though there is nothing in human nature about it. It teaches that any phenomena not capable of a materialist or scientific investigation are outside the reach of philosophy.

This combined attempt by two of the leading academic ‘disciplines’ to banish not only metaphysics and religion but any form of spirituality or psychological truth from human activities will ultimately destroy all progress. It teaches that human beings are not essentially different from the lowest form of life, nor from a puff of dust or a lump of rock. The only thing which exists is matter, in various forms, subject to irresistible laws which determine existence or extinction. But existence has no purpose and extinction no significance.

Since the 16th and way into the early 20th century the Jesuit teachers said that if belief in God disappeared so that even its memory was lost from human hearts and minds; our race would become no more than a race of very clever animals. But in the future……our ultimate fate would be too horrible to imagine.

Yet Guru Rinpoche in the 8th century said: “I am optimistic for our growth and wisdom. My father is the intrinsic awareness. My mother is the ultimate sphere of reality. I belong to the caste of non-duality of the sphere and awareness. My name is the Glorious Lotus Born. I am from the unborn sphere of all phenomena. I consume concepts of duality as my diet. I act in the way of the Buddha.” Carrying a message and teaching for 55 years in Tibet, he firmly established the tradition of study, contemplation and meditation, there. Guru Rinpoche  walked upon the entire land of Tibet and blessed all the mountains, lakes and caves as places for accomplishment. legend and religious belief has it that he concealed varieties of learning and spiritual treasures including texts, teachings, revelations, and he made prophesies regarding the future. Most notably that when the people were ready the knowledge will be revealed to them….

In essense Guru Rinposhe said that humans need to educate themselves, discover their inner and outer truths and be free through the revelation of wisdom. Pretty radical knowledge of Metaphysics for a man teaching and living in the East during the time of the great Darkness of Europe and the Western world. At that time the ultimate scientific achievment in Western Europe was the use of the horse collar for draft animals. Good agriculture….is important but let’s realize the debt we owe to the Tibetan traditions escaping to the West and the pain that today’s Tibet is feeling can be shared and lifted through our own acts of generociy of spirit and compassion.

I used to think the Jesuits were too pessimistic. But if it is true that modern atheism is just another form of fatalism, capable in the long run of destroying all progress, then we will become just ingenious brutes, though not so clever as even the child responding to St Augustine by the seaside of Carthage.

Apple just put the new I-Phone on the market and it was celebrated today as the most dynamic new product launch in the UK this year. There were the usual ‘need to get a life’ people waiting outside of the London store as well as elsewhere to get their hands on this hot eye candy of an Apple consumer product.

A slew of useful Apps are embedded in the I-phone but they are the usual suspects and nothing radically new for us. The glaring lapse of Apple is to include any social enterprise tools or any environmental or fair trade or green Apps embedded. Why? Where is the radical innovation here?

 A couple of months ago in San Fran, I proposed to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO a very useful Social Exchange Application for Goodwill giving through the I-phone. he listened attentively and pronounced it a great idea.

He delegated the process, but after his initial entusiasm, he passed it on to his trusted lieutenants who let this project die off. This was due to their obvious lack of interest in anything that doesn’t have a direct line of sight to profitability. Next quarter thinking has invaded Apple. the economic downturn makes Social Enterprise and Corporate Responsibility to take a way back … seat on the Apple’s innovation agenda.

Is this the Leadership we expect from Steve the most charismatic of the Tech world’s CEO?

Or is his leadership tarnished by his lieutenants not carrying through?

Either way the road is slippery. When the economy is in the dolldrums it is when we need to exhibit fearless leadership and to be vigilant and forward thinking with innovation. It is not when we are coasting along at 90 mph on a free highway. Storm weather captains we need with large compassion in their hearts for those others in times of Crisis. A Social Exchange will support those people in need through giving and supporting the organizations NGOs, and NPOs who work and advocate on their behalf everyday in the field.

That’s what we do with compassion and that’s where real Leadership’s mantle rests.

Apple failed Social innovation this year, but there is always the future. But that is not the way Apple became the undisputed leader in coolness and tech design. They seiged the future first and took giant risks in the past but somehow now they have become risk averse or perhaps a little weak kneed.

Yet this is the future and it won’t wait for Steve’s boys to get their act together or brace their knees for the green gardening neccessary to blossom the Social Innovation field.

Arguably the Old Merry UK is pages ahead of the US on Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship but it’s well behind the magnetic shores on strict technology entrepreneurship, business development and tech Innovation. yet now they try to catch up mightily.

 That is why we launch our new Tech and Social Entrepreneurship Innovations in the UK and not in the US. Now we go ahead and built the Social Exchange as an independent App and we will get support from NESTA , UK’s Technology Innovation, entrepreneurship, social support arm. But the most gigantic innovation of mine and Satori Social ventures is the BillionPeoplePhone which we call ‘Bphone’ and will launch also in the UK this Fall season.

London is a great place for Social Tech innovation even with the slow on the uptake Gordon Brown hagis fed, highlands free range goverment. I like living here and have many friends who find it stifling politically and the nanny state can be an Orwellian Nightmare. Imagine driving from plymouth to london and getting something as 8 different speeding tickets from various cameras along the way. I had an expensive cheap thrills ride. The icing on that particular cake was the cumulative ticket that the camera enhanced Met traffic police issued me on the end of the trip by calculating the distance covered and the time it took me to arrive from the first camera clocking me to the last one in Belgravia. The horrors of technology and the snooping state. Now for speed driving we also have to go free range in the Scottish highlands. Anyways, Times change and London is still a super cool place to develop technology and social innovation.

After all….It is no accident that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx sharpened their teeth here and are still neighbors in a local cemetary.

Foes, as well as friends, must have justice

This article was written by one of those hyphenated western women who marry foreign men…

Yet this hyphenated woman is a marvel of eloquent justice and has inside her enough fight for civil rights and social justice that she is assured her words are heard even if the article the standard published was read by conservatives who revolted…

met her in a friend’s dinner and admired her pluck for telling me that justice is earned and not granted….

Read on. I sincerely share her ideas. Yours, pano

19.06.08  Evening Standard article,

by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

This week, two obtuse and fanatical London Muslims who manifestly hate the West witnessed great British justice. Abu Qatada, a cleric close to Bin Laden, was released from prison and placed under house arrest and all-day curfew restrictions. He will not be deported to Jordan, where he is wanted for terror attacks. As Dominic Grieve, the new Tory shadow home secretary, says: “The man’s presence is an offence.” And yet, and yet, this evil man is protected by the rule of law.

So, too, is Samina Malik, 24, “the lyrical terrorist”. Working at WH Smith at Heathrow, this Londoner in hijab and trendy denim jackets penned sickening (and third-rate) poems in praise of Islamist violence and beheadings. The terrorist was her muse; she his dreamy, imaginary moll. She was convicted of possessing jihadi propaganda. Now the Court of Appeal has decided that accessing propagandist material is not unlawful, unless presumably a proven connection is established-between the ideas propagated and action. Instead of outrage, I hope Britons feel pride. We have shown how an upright democracy works.

In these times of extreme provocation, when understandable fears grip millions, immutable legal safeguards must be defended; they should never be bent. That belief united the people from Left to Right who came out against the 42 days in detention without charge, including David Davis.

I sat next to him last Sunday in a castle in Kent, celebrating the civil partnership of a mutual gay friend, and, trust me, Davis is no softie on crime. We had such arguments. But he is right to put up a robust fight for our ancient freedoms and legal protectionsand to extend them to the enemies within. Such feelgood idealism is all very well, you might say, but doesn’t stop those consumed by hate and vengeance. And there’s the rub. There is no way we can be sure that these generous verdicts or the valiant protests against 42 days will make one terrorist manqué think again. I fear that for those with distorted minds and poisoned hearts, redemption is pathetic weakness.

Qatada and Malik may well feel scorn and a perverted sense of victory. No matter. Justice and decency eventually weaken villainy, says Shakespeare in Measure for Measure: “We must not make a scarecrow of the law, /Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, /And let it keep one shape, till custom make it/ Their perch and not their terror.”

The Bard was an old idealist but his concepts survive the day…Yours, pano

 

CHANGE FORWARD 1305 AD IN ENGLAND : HABEAS CORPUS CREATED

Habeas Corpus = We command that you have the body, is the name of a legal action, or writ, through which a person can seek relief from unlawful detention of themselves or another person. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.

Also known as “The Great Writ,” a writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum is a summons with the force of a court order addressed to the custodian (such as a prison official) demanding that a prisoner be brought before the court, together with proof of authority, allowing the court to determine whether that custodian has lawful authority to hold that person, or, if not, the person should be released from custody. The prisoner, or another person on their behalf (for example, where the prisoner is being held incommunicado), may petition the court or an individual judge for a writ of habeas corpus.

CHANGE FORWARD 1305 AD IN AMERICAN COLONIES 1787 : HABEAS CORPUS REINFORCED

The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the “extraordinary,” “common law,” or “prerogative writs,” which were historically issued by the courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The most common of the other such prerogative writs are quo warranto, prohibito, mandamus, procedendo, and certiorari. When the original 13 American Colonies declared independence and became a constitutional republic in which the people are the sovereign, any person, in the name of the people, acquired authority to initiate such writs.

The due process for such petitions is not simply civil or criminal, because they incorporate the presumption of nonauthority. The official who is the respondent has the burden to prove his authority to do or not do something. Failing this, the court must decide for the petitioner, who may be any person, not just an interested party. This differs from a motion in a civil process in which the movant must have standing, and bears the burden of proof.

The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. Albert Venn Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts “declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty.” In most countries, however, the procedure of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of national emergency. In most civil law jurisdictions, comparable provisions exist, but they may not be called “habeas corpus.” The reach of habeas corpus is currently being tested in the United States. Oral arguments on a consolidated Guantanamo Bay detention camp detainee habeas corpus petition, Al Odah v. United States were heard by the Supreme Court of the United States on December 5, 2007, and recently by HR 1955 The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2006.

CHANGE FORWARD IN USA IN 2008 AD : HABEAS CORPUS REINSTATED BY THE SUPREME COURT

IN THE US : On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush recognized habeas corpus rights for the Guantanamo prisoners.

CHANGE BACKWARD IN ENGLAND IN 2008 AD : HABEAS CORPUS TRASHED

IN THE UK : On June 11, 2008, the House of Lords passed legislation allowing for detaining prisoners without rights of Habeas Corpus for 42 days without charges filed against them.

IT SEEMS THE US IS EXCTRACTING ITSELF FROM IT’S FOLLIES WHILE THE MERRY OLD IS EMBARKING SECURELY INTO THE QUICKSANDS OF OBLIVION AND LOSS OF ANCIENT CIVIL RIGHTS BY RENOUNCING THE HABEAS CORPUS

You know the politicians are interchangeable when you have both GB in America and GB in England. Their terror stricken mentality is also interchangeable. Rabbit breeders both of them with an IQ near that of the Grapes of Wrath citizen retard preacher Jim Casy.

Why don’t we lock up all the MPs who voted in the House of Commons for the 42 day incarceration? I mean lock them up for 42 hours and let them see how unjust incarceration is affecting a person’s mentality when they are locked up without reason or specific charge and without representation or access to competent counsel. They will surely change their tune if they  find themselves behind bars without special treatment and without cause. Even if for 42 hours, they will be forced to examine life and the meaning of it long before their cellphone batteries run out. By the way make sure to have them leave their cellphones outside the cell.

Yes 42 hours for those who voted for 42 days behind bars.   The majority of the House of Commons will be wards of the state for two days and nights…Cool

Just make sure Gordon Brown gets a big cell to have room for pacing…

In Douglas Adams’ popular comedy book series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything has the numeric solution of 42, which was derived over seven and a half million years by a giant supercomputer called Deep Thought. After much confusion from the descendants of his creators, Deep Thought explains that the problem is that they do not know the Ultimate Question, and they would have to build an even more powerful computer to determine what that is. This computer is revealed to be Earth, which, after 10 million years of calculating, is destroyed to make way for a galactic bypass moments before it finishes calculations. In Life, the Universe and Everything, it is confirmed that 42 is indeed the Ultimate Answer, and that it is impossible for both the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe, as they will cancel each other out and take the universe with them, to be replaced by something even more bizarre, and that this may have already happened. Subsequently, in the hopes that his subconscious holds the question, Arthur Dent guesses at the question, and comes up with “What do you get when you multiply six by nine?”, an incorrect guess however, as the arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth had disrupted the computation process. However, Dent, Fenchurch, and a dying Marvin did see God’s final message to his creation: “We apologise for the inconvenience”.

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, there are several allusions to the meaning of life. In “Part VI B: The Meaning of Life” a cleaning lady explains “Life’s a game, you sometimes win or lose” and later a waiter describes his personal philosophy “The world is a beautiful place. You must go into it, and love everyone, not hate people. You must try and make everyone happy, and bring peace and contentment everywhere you go.” At the end of the film, we can see Michael Palin being handed an envelope, he opens it, and provides the viewers with ‘the meaning of life’: “Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations”.

All in all the meaning of life is 42 and as such the British Prime Minister’s effort is to remind all and sundry that he is the meaning of Life and if they don’t quickly give him a transfer job from the New Labour to the New Monty Python, he is liable to start another hundred year war with his new pal George Bush whom he respects and imitates…

So what will it be? The meaning of Life or indecent incarceration? or maybe the two buffoons together resorted to their ultimate plan to start a new war in the Middle East and this is just a preemptive move ?

You conspiracy theorists…noodle over this for a while and figure out how many Iran sympathizers, towel head, camel jockeys, simple medresse attending Muslims live and work in Britain and also find out why the government is asking for another 11,000 prison beds to be ready by late 2008…Whom are they waiting for to host? Is this gonna be the next big party hosted by you know whom as a prelude to the Hundred year war the other transatlantic buffoon has proclaimed?

Jim Casy in the Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck is the preacher who loses his faith after committing fornication numerous times but never fails to lead into evil…GB and GB follow strong in his tracks.

Background

As I watched in horror from the public balcony one by one the MPs voted and the British house of Commons passed the most conservative piece of undemocratic legislative crap in it’s illustrious  centuries old tradition. It was passed by a New Labour government headed by a no-man G. Brown who will sink into obscurity. Occasionally he will be remembered for his assault on Democracy and his Hitlerian success in passing this bill due to his machinations and horse trading to effect passage.
Following is an excerpt of an article writen by a long ago teacher and a friend. This was writen a day before the critical vote in the House of Parliament and presents my views succinctly and far better than I could have hoped to put into words….Yours, pano kroko

42-Day Detention:The Threat to our Liberty. Government’s plan is simply part of an assault on our ancient rights

John Major

The Government’s legislation to permit 42 days pre-charge detention brings to the fore the wider question of civil liberties. In their response to the security threat ministers have dragged us ever closer to a society in which ancient rights are seriously damaged. I doubt this is the Government’s intention, but it is the effect. It began with Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq was justified by overegging the threat of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction - perhaps that error was genuine.

But the case for war was embellished by linking the Iraqi regime to the 9/11 attacks on New York - for which there is not one shred of evidence. As we moved towards war, that misinformation was compounded by the implication that Saddam’s Iraq was a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom, which plainly it was not.

These actions damaged our reputation overseas. And, at home - on the back of the threat of terror and two serious incidents in London - they foreshadowed a political climate in which civil liberties are slowly being sacrificed.

• Why detention for 42 days? It just doesn’t add up

• 42 days: bowing to terrorism

• Brown refuses to back down in clash with Cameron

• 42-day detention: liberty on hold

We now know that, despite repeated denials, our Government was complicit in rendition, or - to put it in plain terms - the transfer of suspects out of civilised jurisdiction to a place where they could be held without charge for a lengthy period.

Although the intention was presumably to garner information, such action is hardly in the spirit of the nation that gave the world Magna Carta, or the Parliament that gave it habeas corpus.

I don’t believe that sacrifice of due process can be justified. If we are seen to defend our own values in a manner that does violence to them, then we run the risk of losing those values. Even worse, if our own standards fall, it will serve to recruit terrorists more effectively than their own propaganda could ever hope to.

That is no longer theoretical: we now have home-grown terrorists - born in Britain, not in Waziristan. Will they be encouraged or discouraged to rally to militancy if we bypass the sober rituals of law with which we are familiar?

The Government has introduced measures to protect against terrorism. These go beyond anything contemplated when Britain faced far more regular - and no less violent - assaults from the IRA. The justification of these has sometimes come close to scaremongering.

After terrorist attacks on London, Parliament doubled the time that suspects could be held without charge from 14 days to 28 days. Probably, that was justified. But soon Parliament will be asked to increase detention without charge to 42 days. To appease opposition, the Government is cobbling together face-saving compromises. If the measure is passed, it will be a pyrrhic victory that owes more to political survival than principle. Even so, it is hard to justify: pre-charge detention in Canada is 24 hours; South Africa, Germany, New Zealand and America 48 hours; Russia 5 days; and Turkey 7½ days.

There is no proof that an extended period of 42 days would have prevented past atrocities. There is no evidence it will prevent future atrocities. No example has yet been given of why the police need more than 28 days to frame a charge. This is a slippery slope. Assertions that it “might be useful” simply will not do. If we are to curtail the liberty of the individual, we must have more certainty than that.

But it is not only the case for 42 days detention that is bogus. So is the case for identity cards. They were to be voluntary. Now it is clear that they will be compulsory. Yet the Government has admitted that such cards would not have stopped the London bombers. Nor will they cut illegal immigration, since asylum-seekers have been obliged to carry ID cards for nearly eight years. Nor will they have any real impact on benefits fraud, as this is typically caused by misrepresentation of financial resources rather than by identity.

The Government has been saying, in a catchy, misleading piece of spin: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” This is a demagogue’s trick. We do have something to fear - the total loss of privacy to an intrusive state with authoritarian tendencies.

This is not a United Kingdom that I recognise and Parliament should not accept it.

Nor do I believe that anyone can defend another government innovation: a national identity register containing the DNA of tens of thousands of people who have never been charged with an offence. Under present legislation, DNA can be retained permanently for even minor misdemeanours, such as being drunk. A total of more than four million samples are already on the UK database - far more than in any other country. This includes tens of thousands of children, and a disproportionate number of black men. If this is accepted, it will one day go farther. This cannot be right: for me, it is all uncomfortably authoritarian.

So is a society in which the right to personal privacy is downgraded. These days a police superintendent can authorise bugging in public places. A chief constable can authorise bugging our homes or cars.

The Home Secretary can approve telephone tapping and the interception of our letters and e-mails. All of this is legal under an Act passed by the Labour Government. None of this requires - as it should - the sanction of a High Court Judge. Francis Pym once spoke of the democratic deficit of any government having too large a majority. He was right. In a Parliament with a more balanced representation, the undermining of personal privacy, lengthy detention before charge, identity cards and a DNA register would have never been passed.

I understand - and sympathise with - the complex dilemmas of security and crime that face the Government. But, while I understand their motives, their remedies are too stringent and not wise.

No one can rule out the possibility of another atrocity - but a free and open society is worth a certain amount of risk. A siege society is alien to our core instincts and - once in place - will be difficult to dismantle. It is a road down which we should not go.

Sir John Major was Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. In 1991 the IRA tried to bomb him and his Cabinet as it met in Downing Street

MAGNA CARTA BECAME TOILET PAPER IN MERRY OLD… 42 days of detention without charge and without representation merits another rebellion. Cromwell is stirring in his grave. England becomes Guantanamo and Democracy eroded beyond repair. Last Hope now is from the House of Lords to see this folly and to preserve the ancient rights by sending this piece of trash legislation back to the Commons for further reflection upon their ills.  George Orwell was right…It is the Anglosaxon world where extreme and technologically advanced totalitarianism will commence from.

Yet I say beware the will of the people and the descendants of Cromwell have still some fight left within their ale filled chests.  pano kroko

When I arrived in the Bay area for my bi-seasonal  trip this year, there were two seasonal social events, most of my friends were going to. One was the Black and White Ball of the San Francisco symphony and the other was the weekend at Marconi camp on Tomales bay in Marin county north of the city.  Both events were sold out as successful fun venues to spend time in a party atmosphere, but not both of them were stranger friendly nor inclusive.

For the Symphony’s Ball I was able to ask friends who in turn hunted down and procured for me the elusive tickets for the night’s music concerts and the Black and White party ball……. but for the consultant’s learning camp in Marconi….my friends failed to deliver the desired ticket and invitation despite best efforts.

So I took it upon myself to find out from the lion’s (or better the gatekeeper’s) mouth why I was rejected from participating in the weekend festivities and learning.

The gatekeeper and organizer of the event at Marconi camp is a likable fellow named Jerry, native, wealthy, networked, young San Franciscan. Typical political leanings of the Left coast and fairly typical indulgent nature.

For the rest of the world here follows a user’s cautionary note: The world revolves around California…and more specifically San francisco. So buyer beware.  The day after the less than three hour of requisite sleep following the B&W ball, I had to meet friends and make my goodbyes on leaving the city and it so happened that we managed a coffee with Jerry at Noe.  They say after too much fun one should expect the storm….

Well it came. It came in angry sweeps, from an angry Jerry explaining to me that he found some dirt and he followed the trail of dirt and innuendo from the internet to the person that has been grinding an ax for a decade…to cause me harm and violence. Naturally as we all know righteous McCarthyists or Jack Crow citizen vigilantes are patriotic angry animals that can spread their pure stalinist malice and infect innocents and well meaning citizens with a sense of anger and administration of justice in the hands of the mob is nothing short of character assassination by the net. Joseph Stalin was a photographer too. His propaganda better than Goering’s enticed many romantic idealist’s to execute his victims in righteous anger.  Leon Trotsky found out the hard way when his protege turned menacing angry assasin; what reach and depravity, those petty obsessed dictators who want to exclusively own a revolution are capable of. The pity of the human existence and the seeking of excrement is all too obvious here.

It is very easy to excite people to anger and violence…physical, mental, emotional, verbal, lynchings that can go unpunished forever….or so it seems. Anger is contagious. Mobs rule because of that.

Yet it is very difficult to excite people about being peaceful on their interactions with others. It is very difficult to bring about passion for sitting back and relaxing and passion about doing or saying nothing but remaining in peace and loving kindness with your fellow human beings.  Difficult it is to remain calm when the righteous dictator claims injustice needs to be corrected and the enemies of the people need be punished. That’s how brain infestations start. Anger takes hold and Innocents turn into executioners…willy-nilly.

No man is as dangerous or ungrateful as a benefited, mentored young dictator wannabe…who wants to own some particular revolution.

Some good learning here for Jerry and me too.

As I depart, I take with me the luscious memories of a beautiful city and the beautiful if imperfect people inhabiting it…..Truly the Black and White ball was magnificent with elaborate costumes and beautiful people swaying to the music in an opulence and abundance of sense gratifying food and drink unparalleled.  A deliciously sexy, ego satiating, people meeting that it seemed as if the Ball escaped from the Versailles and sailed the ocean of time to today’s center of fun, the city by the Bay.

Just like a dream in a balmy early summer night.

In the Bay area there is but one tech god and that is Steve Jobs.

Much digital ink is spent about him amongst his detractors and his proponents but the bottom line is that his leadership consistently brings out great apple products and increases the friends as well as the market share of Apple in all areas of business. Then why does he have so many attackers right in his own backyard? The answer is simple and it dawned on me the other night when I met him casually in a reception at an Art Museum function in San Francisco…. Charismatic personalities of people in the public eye are projected as larger than the average and they tend to magnetically attract good and bad. So to sweeten the deal those who are in public service must automatically dismiss praise just as much detritus, the same way that they ought to dismiss comments from unsavory detractors wishing them ill.

Apple is going from victory to victory and no amount of backtalk will diminish their relevance. Especially when the backbenchers sport prominently an I-phone as a badge of honor or even more, when they are developing applications for Apple’s smartphone…. Go figure.

PS: Why people are so conflicted in the Bay area ? Angry at times but sweet, compassionate….yet always beautiful in their quirks. Like children.

I say is the fog…

fog that makes the natives restless.

The inside fog I mean.