Fear and Religion - BFFs

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile....Guantánamo

A hunger strike among detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who have been imprisoned by the United States military without trial — some for more than a decade — is continuing to grow, although there is sharp disagreement between the military and lawyers for the detainees about how many are participating.

[...]

Lawyers for detainees and military officials agree that waning hopes for any release among low-level prisoners are an underlying cause of the unrest. Congress has placed restrictions on further transfers, nearly halting any departures even though about half of the remaining inmates were cleared for release years ago. The bulk of the low-level detainees are Yemenis.

Because it now appears that the prison will remain open indefinitely, the United States Southern Command, which overseas Guantánamo, has requested nearly $200 million to renovate facilities that were built to be temporary and are now deteriorating, including barracks and a meal hall for the guards.

  NYT

Military guards at Guantanamo's communal camp fired four non-lethal rounds at detainees early Saturday morning as the facility commander forced them into single cells in an apparent effort to stop a prolonged hunger strike.

Currently, 43 detainees are on a hunger strike at the prison; 13 of those are being force fed.

[...]

The action was taken "in response to efforts by detainees to limit the guard force's ability to observe the detainees by covering surveillance cameras, windows, and glass partitions."

[...]

The military said that more than 40 detainees are participating in the hunger strike, which began in February, but detainees have told their lawyers the strike is much more widespread and involves the vast majority of the 166 detainees remaining at Guantanamo.

  Huffington Post

The raid came shortly after a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross completed a three-week visit to examine the prisoners and study the circumstances of a hunger strike that has been roiling the camp for weeks.

[...]

The military has not allowed reporters to visit the prison for several weeks.

  NYT

Lawyers for the detainees say the hunger strike was triggered "as a protest of the men's indefinite confinement without charge and because of what they said was a return to harsh treatment from past years.

[...]

The US military, needless to say, denies these claims.

[...]

As the New York Times' Charlie Savage notes […], the conflicting claims are difficult to resolve. That is in part because journalists have very restricted access to the camp and no access to the detainees.

[...]

Whatever is true about the camp, the vast majority of those detainees have been kept in a cage for years - some more than a decade - without so much as having been charged with anything. They haven't seen their families in years. Ten prisoners have died at the camp, the latest one just four months ago under very suspicious circumstances. [...T]here have been recent mass suicide attempts.

[...]

Whenever the issue of Guantánamo is raised, there are instantly deceitful efforts to relieve President Obama of any responsibility for the ongoing disgrace that is the camp. That is accomplished with the claim that Congress blocked him from closing the camp, a claim that is true but extremely misleading: as I've documented many times before, and as the ACLU has often noted, Obama's plan was not to "close" the camp but rather to re-locate it and its core, defining injustice - indefinite detention - to Illinois (what the ACLU called "GITMO North"). Indefinite detention - being kept in a cage with no charges and with no end in sight - is one of the prime grievances driving this hunger strike, and Obama - completely independent of Congress - fully intended to preserve that system.

[...]

Just last week, detainee lawyers were infuriated when camp officials canceled all commercial flights to Guantánamo, thus severely restricting their access to their clients at exactly the time that grievances over worsening treatment led to the strike.

Not only have most of those detainees never been charged, but dozens of them have been cleared for release by the US government, yet continue to languish in cages with no release possible. That inexcusable injustice is due in part to a moratorium imposed by Obama - that's imposed by Obama, not Congress - on the release of all Yemeni detainees, who compose the bulk of the remaining detainees.

[...]

As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out last September, after the death of a former hunger striker, more detainees have died at the camp (ten) than have been convicted of wrongdoing in what he called its "kangaroo courts", meaning its military commissions (six).

  Glenn Greenwald

Talk About Your Happy Easter

An Easter morning craving turned into a cause for concern for the chief of police in Lawrenceville, Ohio, after the cake he ate turned out to be laced with cannabis oil.

“All I can describe is, it was the worst feeling in the world,” Mike Berkemeier told WBNS-TV on Friday. “I thought I was dying.”

Burkemeyer said he ate the entire cake on March 31 after seeing it on his kitchen counter. But when he began feeling ill, he told the station, he drove to his station for help.

[...]

Medics from the local fire department took Burkemeyer to a hospital. Later, he said, his daughter told his fiancee about the cake’s “secret ingredient.” The cake was allegedly brought to the house by a friend’s boyfriend.

[...]

Burkemeyer was given a sedative to sleep off the effects of the cake. WBNS reported that the Sheriff’s office for Hocking County, Ohio, is determining whether to charge the man with assault and “corrupting another with drugs.”

  Raw Story

Wait a minute. He ate the WHOLE cake? Pig.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

A giant "monumental" stone structure discovered beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee in Israel has archaeologists puzzled as to its purpose and even how long ago it was built.

  Fox

And Charlie Pierce is helping himself to a great heap of Christian hate mail with his comments if I’m any judge of attitude and reaction.

The Drone War in Pakistan

After ten years of drone strikes, the Taliban are more brutal than before. What was once called the war on terror is backfiring in Pakistan; the drone is despised.

[...]

Pakistan's last parliament voted to block drone strikes, making them illegal under international law, but has been powerless to stop them.

[...]

"This might be an effective tool to win a battle but this is certainly a counterproductive tool - an illegal, and unlawful, and also counterproductive tool - to win the war," said former Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.

[...]

The drones operate out of U.S. bases in neighboring Afghanistan, and according to the White House, target al Qaeda and Taliban hiding in Pakistan's tribal border region - not civilians.

Karim Khan, who is from that tribal region, tells CNN his brother and son were killed in a drone strike in late 2009.

"They were both government employees, they were not involving in any terrorists acts," said Khan.

He is suing the CIA, but given the chance, says he would take revenge on those responsible.

"I will kill them if Allah give me this opportunity, I will kill them. Because they are responsible for killing my brother and my son," said Khan. "I will kill them because they are criminal."

Lawyer Shezad Akbar represents a hundred families like Khan's.

[...]

"Drones are creating not just one generation but generations of jihadists, because if you kill a father, his son will come and then if you kill his son, his grandson will come, and this is what is happening," said Akbar.

  Jake Tapper

When Jake Tapper, CNN White House correspondent, worked for ABC, he told NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me audience that when Hillary Clinton first became Secretary of State, he saw her one day and greeted her as Senator Clinton, but quickly amended it to Secretary Clinton. He then asked her which title she liked better, and she said, “I like either of them better than what we call you behind your back.”

Oh, meOW!

Awesome

If one day in the not too distant future you can go to the dollar store, buy a thin, flat device the size of a playing card, dunk it in a quart of dirty bath water and use it to generate about 100 watts of electricity 24 hours a day, you can thank the Air Force. Along with other federal agencies, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has been pouring funds into the development of an “artificial leaf,” a low cost solar-powered device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, for powering fuel cells.

[...]

[L]ead researcher Daniel Nocera (formerly of MIT, now at Harvard) called it “one of the Holy Grails of science.”

  Raw Story

That’s wonderful. But let’s not get too excited. YOU won’t be able to "go to the dollar store" and buy any such thing. (YOU won’t be able to buy any such thing at all if the US government has a patent on it and decides it shouldn’t be sold publicly.) YOU might be able to lease something like that from a corporate energy company some day, but don’t think you’re going to pay any markedly less for it than you do now for your energy consumption.

Two Can Play That Game

Russia has published a blacklist of US officials banned from entering the country in retaliation to a Washington sanction against 18 Russians and Chechens accused of committing human rights abuses.

[...]

Russia’s foreign ministry on Saturday called the Magnitsky Act an "absurd" law that "intervenes in our domestic affairs" and "delivers a strong blow to bilateral relations."

"Unlike the American list, which is formed arbitrarily, our list primarily includes those who are implicated in legalisation of torture and perpetual detentions in Guantanamo prison, to the arrests and kidnapping of Russian citizens," the ministry said.

Russia’s list includes John Yoo, a former US Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorising harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

Fourteen more people are named as having violated the rights of Russian citizens abroad, including the US district judge Jed Rakoff and several prosecutors from his district in the state of New York, as well as several Drug Enforcement Administration officers and FBI agent Gregory Coleman.

  alJazeera

It really is the height of arrogant hypocrisy for the US to talk about any other country’s human rights abuses. And Russia would be well within reason to name every director of the CIA since its inception, plus Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz (et al.), and all Commanders in Chief of the US Army ever overseeing Guantanamo Bay prison and secret detention centers around the world. That they didn’t name all those people only shows that they’re playing the same game we are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Negotiating with the Enemy

The same week in which he announced his intention to renege partially on eight decades of Democratic social policy, and to do so in the face of ongoing economic neurasthenia brought on by a whopping huge economic collapse, [Barack Obama went] out of his way to meet with the men whose recklessness and marginal criminality brought on the whopping huge economic collapse in the first place, so they will help him sell measures that will hurt the people who already are suffering from the effects of the whopping big recession these guys caused.

  Charlie Pierce

And he had the GOP to dinner, too....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And Isn't It Great to Have Such a Willing Victim?

I Don't Know, But...

Hey, CBS News.  I don't think "You May Also Like..." is your best title choice for these pages.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.