tortur

Quoted: So why has a legal policy statement been classified and withheld for five years? The answer to that question is now clear. The memorandum would have produced reactions of ridicule and outrage from throughout the professional community—as indeed it has. The author and the classifier knew that. They used classification as a political tool to keep something which is a quintessentially public document out of the reach of the public. Moreover, this classification reflects a regular pattern of abuse by the Bush Administration, a fact to be kept in mind when considering Attorney General Mukasey’s harsh and factually unfounded criticisms of pending legislation designed to reign in the use of state secrecy claims to cloak corruption and criminal conduct by state actors.

Quoted: DHAKA, Bangladesh, Dec. 14 -- An elite security force in Bangladesh has become little more than a government death squad, employing torture and killing more than 350 suspects in custody, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Thursday.

These republicans absolutely scare me.

Several anti-waterboarding groups demonstrated the technique on the streets of Washington, DC. The volunteer is a paid actor who said he researched the technique, then decided he had to do this to show the world that waterboarding is torture. (Nov. 5). Copyright 2007 The Associated Press

Harper's has posted a piece about Guy Fawkes and explains three lessons we should take from his plot to blow up Parliament:

1) Torture never works and is always wrong
2) Beware the government that rules by fear
3) A government that stereotypes is unjust

Quoted: Today Guy Fawkes is increasingly viewed as the heroic figure prepared to stand against an unjust and oppressive state, as a martyr and a victim of torture. What are the lessons of Guy Fawkes Day for 2007?

Six white defendants are now facing charges of the torture of a black woman. This is also a hate crime as it seems. These people are accused with stabbing their captive with a butcher knife, pouring hot water onto the victim, making the captive black woman drank their urines.

More online karaoke fun.

Quoted: Karaoke live on the internet! Sing along to free music downloads. Great resources for webmasters and web designers.

Physicians for Human rights is denouncing the US's "enhanced" torture techniques as torture. This video is pretty powerful

click to play

If the only thing barring the sovereign from denaturalizing any citizing and reconstituing them as an enemy combatant is the goodness of his will, then it can only mean that we are all potentially nothing other than a living body that can be killed with impunity--and thus the end of democracy itself.