Another Tor­ture Scan­dal. The New York Times today reported that the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee of the Red Cross gave the Bush admin­is­tra­tion a report last July reveal­ing that it had found that the U.S. mil­i­tary was using psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal coer­cion “tan­ta­mount to tor­ture”… By James Bovard. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

The Feds’ response is interesting:

White House spokesman Scott McClel­lan snubbed the Red Cross charges, and declared today: “We strongly dis­agree with any char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that sug­gests the way the [Guan­tanamo] detainees are being treated is incon­sis­tent with the poli­cies that the pres­i­dent outlined.”

So here we have the White House offi­cially admit­ting that Bush ordered the tor­ture of prisoners.

Attempt to stop manda­tory men­tal screen­ing fails. An attempt by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, to add lan­guage to the omnibus spend­ing bill in Con­gress to require parental con­sent for any mental-health screen­ing done to chil­dren with fed­eral money has failed.

The lan­guage was pro­posed to blunt the effect of a pro­gram pro­posed by the New Free­dom Com­mis­sion on Men­tal Health, which Pres­i­dent Bush estab­lished in 2002. The New Free­dom Ini­tia­tive rec­om­mends screen­ing not only for chil­dren but even­tu­ally for every Amer­i­can. [World­Net­Daily]

For­got­ten Facts of Amer­i­can Labor His­tory. The oft-heard tale about the sad plight of labor as ver­sus cap­i­tal is almost entirely false, writes Thomas Woods, author of a new book on Amer­i­can his­tory. Those parts of con­ven­tional labor his­tory that are true are true for rea­sons other than those alleged by pro-union his­to­ri­ans, who see in them only con­fir­ma­tion of their prej­u­dices against the mar­ket econ­omy. By Thomas Woods. [Lud­wig von Mises Insti­tute Arti­cles]

From kaba:

“Fool­ish lib­er­als who are try­ing to read the Sec­ond Amend­ment out of
the Con­sti­tu­tion by claim­ing it’s not an indi­vid­ual right or that it’s
too much of a pub­lic safety haz­ard don’t see the dan­ger in the big
pic­ture. They’re court­ing dis­as­ter by encour­ag­ing oth­ers to use the
same means to elim­i­nate por­tions of the con­sti­tu­tion they don’t like.”

Alan Der­showitz
[End the War on Free­dom]

AP.  Here’s an inter­est­ing met­ric.  Actu­ally, I think elec­tions, even if there is a high voter turn-out, can under­mine legit­i­macy.  One rea­son (out of many): unrea­son­able expec­ta­tions.
But a low voter turnout, espe­cially in Sunni strong­holds now plagued by insur­gency, would be worse than hav­ing no elec­tion at all, accord­ing to Peter Khalil, a national secu­rity research fel­low at the Saban Cen­ter of the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion.  “You need at least 70 per­cent of the vot­ers to take place to accord legit­i­macy to the next gov­ern­ment. If not, it will fuel the insur­gency and give it a new polit­i­cal dimen­sion,” said Khalil, who served for nearly a year with the U.S.-led occu­pa­tion author­i­ties in Iraq.
[John Robb’s Weblog]

It’s a lit­tle silly to be talk­ing about under­min­ing the legit­i­macy of some­thing that has no legit­i­macy to begin with. The quote aout need­ing 70% of the vot­ers is pretty funny, though. That’s sig­nif­i­canty more than the turnout for any US elec­tion I’ve voted in.

#
Vin Supryni­wicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal -

What do police depart­ments really do? — enforce malam pro­hibi­tum
laws against peace­ful peo­ple, that’s what. Behav­ior that only a few
decades ago would have got­ten them shot and fed to the local
hogs. Behav­ior that still ought to elicit that
response. [stan­leyscoop]
bq.
Let us sup­pose that, mag­i­cally, there were no police. You are sit­ting
at home of an evening, qui­etly read­ing a book. Next door, behind his
own locked doors, your 21-year-old neigh­bor, who inher­ited some
hand­guns from his grand­fa­ther, is spend­ing time with his 16– or
17-year-old sweet­heart, whose fam­ily is happy to know she intends to
marry him and bear his chil­dren as soon as she grad­u­ates high
school. At the moment, the two of them are con­sum­ing some of the
mar­i­juana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race down­town, pound­ing on the door of the sleep­ing mag­is­trate, insist­ing he swear out a war­rant so you can rush back to your neigh­bor­hood, break into your neighbor’s home and arrest him?

Of course not. He’s hurt­ing no one.
[End the War on Free­dom]

Unfor­tu­nately there really are peo­ple who would ruin their neighbor’s life out of a twisted sense of self-importance and self-righteousness.

Mus­lims who act as if Islam had never come and its teach­ings had never been revealed. Ralph Peters:

Etc, etc, etc. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

Kevin Sites, the man who shot the video of a Marine mur­der­ing a wounded Iraqi, has his own weblog.

New C.I.A. Chief Tells Work­ers to Back Admin­is­tra­tion Poli­cies. Porter J. Goss, the new intel­li­gence chief, has told Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency employ­ees that their job is to “sup­port the admin­is­tra­tion and its poli­cies in our work,” a copy of an inter­nal mem­o­ran­dum shows.

“As agency employ­ees we do not iden­tify with, sup­port or cham­pion oppo­si­tion to the admin­is­tra­tion or its poli­cies,” Mr. Goss said in the mem­o­ran­dum, which was cir­cu­lated late on Mon­day. He said in the doc­u­ment that he was seek­ing “to clar­ify beyond doubt the rules of the road.” (link)

I thought their job was to pro­vide intel­li­gence analy­sis regard­less of whether or not the truth sup­ports the administration’s poli­cies. Silly me. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

Amer­i­can Heroes… We sat, hor­ri­fied, stunned with the hor­ror of the scene that unfolded in front of our eyes. It’s the third day of Eid and we were finally able to gather as a fam­ily– a cousin, his wife and their two daugh­ters, two aunts, and an elderly uncle. E. and my cousin had been stand­ing in line for two days to get fuel so we could go visit the elderly uncle on the final day of a very des­o­late Eid. The room was silent at the end of the scene, with only the voice of the news anchor and the sobs of my aunt. My lit­tle cousin flinched and dropped her spoon, face frozen with shock, eyes wide with dis­be­lief, glued to the tele­vi­sion screen, “Is he dead? Did they kill him?” I swal­lowed hard, try­ing to gulp away the lump lodged in my throat and watched as my cousin buried his face in his hands, ashamed to look at his daughter.

“What was I sup­posed to tell them?” He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daugh­ters to help their grand­mother in the kitchen. “What am I sup­posed to tell them– ‘Yes dar­ling, they killed him– the Amer­i­cans killed a wounded man; they are occu­py­ing our coun­try, killing peo­ple and we are sit­ting here eat­ing, drink­ing and watch­ing tv’?” He shook his head, “How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?”

They killed a wounded man. It’s hard to believe. They killed a man who was com­pletely help­less– like he was some sort of dis­eased ani­mal. I had read the arti­cles and heard the sto­ries of this hap­pen­ing before– wounded civil­ians being thrown on the side of the road or shot in cold blood– but to see it hap­pen­ing on tele­vi­sion is some­thing else– it makes me crazy with anger. [Bagh­dad Burn­ing]

An Iraqi’s reac­tion to the mur­der of a wounded man in a Fal­lu­jah mosque.