To all you good but absolutely crazy people”

      HAPPY THANKSGIVING IN SPITE OF
          BAD MEWS!

this book looks good.

Guantanamo is the world’s most famous (or infamous) prison?  Displaced Abu Gharib and the Bastille, has it?

What a shameful country the United States is.

“And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
(George Orwell, 1984)

“We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.”
(Sam Smith)

“The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. “
(Harold Pinter, playwrite)

“American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force.”
(Philip Agee, CIA Diary)

“Political will is the ultimate determinant of spending priorities. There’s always money available for war and corporate bailouts; there’s rarely money available for social programs.”
Adolph L. Reed, Jr.)

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
(Abraham Lincoln)

I’m sure the Bush/Cheney logic went ... we grabbed these guys and told everyone they were hardened killers who would kill anyone they could.  Now we have guys who don’t fit that model, who have no connection to terrorism and what do we do?  If we admit they exist, the whole argument about them will fall apart and we will be embarrassed.  Better to sweep them under the rug and not let anyone know we were so wrong.

Remember ... perception before truth is always the way leaders think.  They don’t want us to know the truth and the illegal way they make decisions.  Gitmo served their need to show they were tough and fighting terror.  This story shows how morally corrupt they actually are.

It is a very bad thing to be ashamed of the actions of ones own country. It is much worse to be ashamed and to do nothing. We continue to live in our artificial paradise, satisfied with cheap toys purchased at usurious interest, living an inflated lifestyle that comes at a great cost to many around the world.

I recall the words of a wise man, one “Pocho” by name, who was banned by democratic underground for a five word answer to the question,“why were we attacked on 9/11”. That answer was, “because we had it coming”.

Some months ago I read “Midnight Ferry to the Windward Side,” by Attorney Clive Stafford Smith, which presents similar cases in his personal experience.  The thing to remember is that, as long as these Bush-era “executive orders” allowing incarceration on hearsay or insufficient evidence, and without demands for habeas corpus rights, are still “on the books” (which they are) then no-one is safe from persecution. No-one.