The US has been asked to reveal the location of 39 people believed to have been kidnapped and held in secret CIA prisons.

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/06/08/10130941.html

The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question. But seizing men, women and children and placing them in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards certainly is.

At the last count, the U.S. Congress estimated that 14,000 individuals were in some kind of U.S. detention around the world…

*With apologies to Lewis Carroll

The Greatest Country In The World^® will be allowing the rabble to demonstrate in favor of the restoration of habeas corpus and the rule of law today in Washington, D.C. Citizens have been without those rights since September of last year, when Congress – incapable of reading anything put before it – abrogated the Constitution.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, there are some who believe that the Constitution has been in doubt since King George took the throne after he was anointed by the Supreme Court. More have taken it upon themselves to declare that it has been that way only since September 11, 2001. Others might agree that the PATRIOT Act is anything but.

Whatever the case, I wonder how Jose Padilla and others feel about their new-found suporters? I wonder how many of the demonstrators are aware of the length of Mr. Padilla’s incarceration, his lack of access to counsel and the degree to which he has been tortured by the Greatest Country In The World^®?

It will be interesting to see if all the King’s men – otherwise known as Batons For Freedom And Religion^TM – will be capable of restraining themselves on live television and not further their cause by pummeling the citizenry into agreeing that what King and Cheney God hath wrought, no mere man shall be allowed to tear asunder.

Updated: We’ll have some of the same in Mexico. Good luck with that.

In 2000, Plan Colombia’s cost of 7.5 billion dollars was going to end civil war, revive Colombia’s economy and put drug cultivators and traffickers out of business:

…to restructure and modernize the armed forces and the police, so that they will be able to restore the rule of law and provide security throughout the country, to combat organized crime and armed groups and to protect and promote human rights and international humanitarian law.

And, among other things,

A counter-narcotics strategy, in partnership with other countries involved in some or all of the links of the drug-chain: production, distribution, sale, consumption, asset laundering, precursor chemicals and arms dealing. And, at the national level, to stop the flow of drug-money the fuel of violence — to the insurgent and other armed organizations.

To date, the effort doesn’t look good. Colombia has produced more coca – almost 30 per cent more – than in 1999. All is not lost, though, in the eyes of the White House and its drug czar. (What the hell? I thought Pablo Escobar was a drug czar.) In scenes reminiscent of Viet Nam, planes have decimated an area more than twice that of Rhode Island.

“…the good news, which is almost universally overlooked, is that these fields, which are regularly sprayed, pruned back, and otherwise brutalized, are far less productive that they traditionally have been.”

Production is up, but the plots aren’t as fertile.

I’m heartened by the good news.

The New York Times has a brief article on how King George’s administration is fighting to keep American meatpackers from testing all of their animals for mad cow disease (BSE – bovine spongiform encephalopathy). Meatpackers presently test less than one per cent of beef carcasses for the disease. The problem is, as the USDA sees it, that wider testing could lead to false positives that might harm the industry.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m in favor of anything that will cull diseased products from the food chain. One would expect, in light of the failure of the inspection system to discover contaminated toothpaste, dog food and other materials – including contaminated cattle feed – in a timely manner, that the government would view favorably and not challenge a business that wants to put the safety of it’s consumer base first.

Alas, that isn’t the case.

The U.S. federal court system has ruled that the government doesn’t have the right to restrict mad cow testing; however, the USDA has appealed the decision which will delay implementing the testing by a small meatpacking company in Kansas – Creekstone Farms Premium Beef.

Cost is the argument being used by the larger beef producers against wider testing. I wonder what the human cost will be in the future for testing less than one per cent of the beef carcasses in the present?

Moral highground finally regained

The war in Iraq continues to go well, with advances in health care being among the most notable, as evidenced by this May 17 news report from Gorilla’s Guides :

“Doctors, nurses, administrators, and all other staff in Fallujah hospital have gone on indefinite strike after the second episode in as many months in which the American controlled, directed, trained, and financed, green zone forces and police in Fallujah supported by American troops violently stormed the hospital, severely beat staff, and destroyed equipment and supplies.

The strike was called as the result of an attack on members of the rescue crews by green zone forces and green zone police. The police and militia beat the doctors and staff, smashed doors and windows and destroyed quantities of hospital supplies.

According to the young doctor in the hospital who alerted the news agency to this latest attack the attackers: “justified their attacks on the pretext that hospital staff treated the gunmen inside it”.

They obviously didn’t get it right the first couple of times, as seen below, so they moved on to Fallujah, as noted above:

“On May 1st there was a similar attack on Naaman hospital in Adhamiya Baghdad – the same Adhamiya that the Americans have walled off. During that episode all patients, except for three in the intensive care unit who were too desperately ill to be unhooked from their respirators, were ejected from the hospital onto the street, sometimes violently, and snipers were posted on the roof.”

I perused an article on Alternet that discusses the news propaganda machine that is now in vogue across America. [ Link here. ] It’s another example of the dumbing down of network news and current affairs programming that has become commonplace. The author, Don Hagen, calls it a “Sliming Bowl”, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

I find the video in the article particularly interesting. It shows a compendium of clips disparaging Barack Obama, presently a contender for presidential nomination in the 2008 election campaign.

One of the ideas put forth to counter the Slime Bowl effect is for the candidates to ignore any kind of faux news and not participate in their shenanigans. I don’t think that would hold up under scrutiny, given the audience numbers for the network, but if it’s possible, it sure sounds like a good start.

The article goes on to describe the disinformation machine that is the current occupier of the White House together with the “news” organization that is faux. It’s an interesting read, and to me paints quite a picture of how the disinformation campaign will unfold during the two year campaign. Which reminds me – when did election campaigns start running two years in advance?

It should be quite a show to watch.