Inside a Prison Outside the Law

Mother Jones {MoJo} Drumbeat brings the link to the site for the book The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law

Read exclusive excerpts from narratives by the attorneys who have represented Guantanamo Detainees, at above link

About The Guantanamo Lawyers

This new book contains over 100 personal narratives from attorneys who have represented detainees held at “Gitmo” as well as at other “black sites” such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

“One of the most inspiring features of the post-9/11 world has been the willingness of lawyers from all walks of life to volunteer to represent those condemned to indefinite detention at Guantánamo. This book provides an invaluable birds-eye view of what it’s like to fight for justice in a law-free zone, representing men who the government has labeled the worst of the worst.”—David Cole

“This is a fascinating and revealing behind-the-scenes account of the human stories inside Guantánamo, told candidly by some of America’s best, and most public-spirited, lawyers.”—Jane Mayer

Review: "The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law"

"This collection of stirring narrative, government data and testimony, edited by two of the lawyers for those detained by the Bush administration as unlawful combatants at Guantnamo, puts America on notice about the issues of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. Denbeaux and Hafetz have edited together accounts from 100 other detainee advocates into a chronological narrative of legal battles: to gain access to their clients, to establish the detainees' right to habeas corpus, to describe the occupants of 'Gitmo' (at its peak, 750 from 40 countries) and the torture and mistreatment of detainees. They describe their clients as underlings, working stiffs and not the high officials of any terrorist group. Plowing through legal red tape, bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and political maneuvering, Denbeaux and Hafetz fight for the men who are isolated without diversions or outside contact. The desperate words, quoted here, of Gitmo detainees on torture grab the heart and do not let go. This compelling book on the American penal colony and its residents is a cautionary tale of overzealous executive wartime power and the awful mess it sometimes leaves behind." Publishers Weekly

Justice as Paradox: Civilian Trials for 9/11 Suspects

Jonathan Hafetz has a blog post up at Balkinization. A Short excerpt is below.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement Friday that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and four other individuals allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks would be brought to trial in federal court takes an important—if long overdue—step towards restoring the rule of law. No longer are these men “high value detainees,” a label invented out of whole cloth to sanction their previous disappearance into a secret CIA prison and torture. After resurfacing at Guantánamo in September 2006, they are now, finally, defendants in the U.S. criminal justice system, which has shown repeatedly that it is well-equipped to handle terrorism cases while protecting legitimate national security concerns. This was the result advocated by the ACLU’s John Adams Project, and it is a welcome one.

You can also listen to a radio interview Jonathan did at The Takeaway about civilian trials for terrorists.

Or listen here:

The Book: "The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law"

The Site: The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law

As MoJo Calls It: A Few Good Kids?

The Pentagon in the Classroom

We were saying what was actually going on but those doing it kept denying, as they passed on the talking points to their public mouths and those were carried forward by the flocks, that relished in being led, on any online board, right wing feeding troth site, and in reply's wherever they could be placed.

No child left behind.... the battle lines?

How the No Child Left Behind Act allowed military recruiters to collect info on millions of unsuspecting teens.

This was just more from the cheney/bush cabal acts against the country, and their growing list of proof of crimes against this Nation and Our Constitution, no one was safe, especially our children, needed to fill the ranks of bringing democracy? to others by extreme force!!

John Travers was striding purposefully into the Westfield mall in Wheaton, Maryland, for some back-to-school shopping before starting his junior year at Bowling Green State University. When I asked him whether he'd ever talked to a military recruiter, Travers, a 19-year-old African American with a buzz cut, a crisp white T-shirt, and a diamond stud in his left ear, smiled wryly. "To get to lunch in my high school, you had to pass recruiters," he said. "It was overwhelming." Then he added, "I thought the recruiters had too much information about me. They called me, but I never gave them my phone number."

Nor did he give the recruiters his email address, Social Security number, or details about his ethnicity, shopping habits, or college plans. Yet they probably knew all that, too. In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students' GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid's habits than do his own parents.

Gee now who was that that foretold the coming future, and how close were the predictions of this thought of "Big Brother!"!!

Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft..........Read Rest Here

Now why does this Vitter name ring a bell, hmmmm, known but only important as to show what a total snake and lackey to his masters, not those he's hired to represent, is capable of doing while under the guise of being a family values man.

The MoJo article is from David Goodman who is a contributing writer for Mother Jones and coauthor {with wife Amy} of "Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back". For more of his stories, click here.

Katrina

The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina

There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath.
—By James Ridgeway

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren't too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely "natural" disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.

But there's an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state.........Read Rest Here

July 7, 1903: "March of the Mill Children"

Labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones led the "March of the Mill Children" over 100 miles from Philadelphia to Pres. Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed "The Wail of the Children" speech. Roosevelt refused to see them.

The Autobiography of Mother Jones

In the spring of 1903 I went to Kensington, Pennsylvania, where seventy-five thousand textile workers were on strike. Of this number at least ten thousand were little children. The workers were striking for more pay and shorter hours.......

The Wail of the Children This article originally appeared in Mother Jones Speaks, ed. Philip S. Foner, Monad, 1 983

Mary Harris (Mother) Jones - Union Activist

We want President Roosevelt to hear the wail of the children who never have a chance to go to school but work 11 and 12 hours a day in the textile mills of Pennsylvania; who weave the carpets that he and you walk upon; and the lace curtains in your windows, and the clothes of the people. 50 years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers. 50 years ago the black babies were sold COD4. Today the white baby is sold on the installment plan.

In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?

I shall ask the President in the name of the aching hearts of these little ones that he emancipate them from slavery. I will tell the president that the prosperity he boasts of is the prosperity of the rich wrung from the poor and helpless.'

A Few Quotes of "Mother" Mary Jones:

*** Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

*** My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

*** The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.

*** I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

We need to get back to the idea of a real capitalist society, where all share in the wealth of their labor and investments! We need more "Mother" and "Father" Jones to step forward and rebuild what we once had started and carry that forward, not allowing it to be destroyed again!!

Those who came before fought to hard and we've let that disappear, and yet we think we're more educated!!

Blackwater

Blackwater's Fired Up by Audit Coverage

Bruce Falconer and I reported yesterday that a federal audit [PDF] of Blackwater's security contracts in Iraq concluded, among other things, that the firm had regularly failed to meet staffing requirements on two of its State Department task orders and could owe the government $55 million. Blackwater's spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, just emailed an "amended statement" on the audit, disputing how its conclusions were characterized in some media reports. I saw this one coming when I read the Wall Street Journal's coverage this morning, which carried the headline, "Audit Finds That U.S. Overpaid Blackwater." (Similarly, ABC is now reporting: "There is no assurance that personnel staffing data was accurate or complete and that correct labor rates were paid.")

Here's what Tyrrell had to say:.......................

MoJo: The Pentagon's PTSD Denial

How killing scars soldiers—and their loved ones.

In the spring of 2002, an Army major named Peter Kilner submitted an unusual essay to Military Review, a journal published by the Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kilner argued that combat leaders have an obligation to justify the killing their soldiers do. "Soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively," he wrote. "If they are unable to justify to themselves that they killed another human being, they will likely, and understandably, suffer enormous guilt" that could balloon into post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). Top brass who ignored the issue, he concluded, were "treating their soldiers as commodities, not as persons."

SNIP: Read Rest Here

"Another Walter Reed-Type Scandal"

Soldiers at the military hospital languished in part due to incompatible databases and dismal record keeping. Welcome to the Pentagon's $20 billion medical-records boondoggle.

The above subject title is a report, over at Mother Jones, I couldn't think of a better title than used, really, written by Niko Karvounis who, according to the Mother Jones info at the end, is a program officer at The Century Foundation, where he researches health care, among other issues and is a regular contributor to HealthBeatBlog.org.


It's one of those "Here we go again, on the incompetence and arrogance, of those that were placed on the public payroll under this corrupt and totally incompetent administration and arrogant wanna-be top CEO, only in his dreams, and complacent GOP congress up till the previous election!".


I still can't figure out the why so few, if any, are not running against the policies, or actually the non-policies of the previous GOP controlled congresses, under which six years were under total GOP control, from the administration on down.


Even if there were complicity from the Democratic side the voting records and the Congress records are a mother load of information on an Ideological Policy that can and should not exist in a Free and Democratic Government, even covering the Economics of the Capitalism that was set forth, showing up, not just recently as in yesterday, but right along.


But this is more about what many should be bringing in to the public discussion, especially those who would be freshmen/women in the Congressional Races.


This is, once again and the list is so long, about what the previous 109th Congress didn't do, nor care about, as they were beating the drums of war, their claim to a strong national security, and they with their surrogates were calling us, who were warning them and the majority of this country what was coming, across the whole spectrum, every childish and treasonous name they could muster in their double speak of hypocrisy, lies, and propaganda!

In February 2007, William Winkenwerder Jr. announced he was stepping down from his post as assistant secretary of defense for health affairs following a press conference in which he downplayed the Walter Reed scandal as a mere "quality-of-life experience." In the months that followed, it seemed clear that Winkenwerder's negligence may have been partly to blame for the deplorable conditions at the military hospital. Now, more than a year and half after his departure, Winkenwerder's legacy lives on in a multibillion-dollar Defense Department medical-records management system that many military doctors believe is fatally flawed. One military physician, speaking anonymously, calls it "another Walter Reed-type scandal."

He goes on to explain the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, or AHLTA, that begin in 1997. Who got the contract for it, complaints about it etc..

The military stuck with the system until November 2005, when Winkenwerder, who oversaw all DOD health care, held a press conference rechristening the system "AHLTA." "We have put a new name on what we are doing because it is not a 'version two' of anything, but an entirely new system," he said. But AHLTA was CHCS II, warts and all—and a new name couldn't hide the program's problems.

Over the course of AHLTA's implementation period, which has continued through this year, military doctors have grown increasingly disgruntled with the system. They complain that AHLTA is difficult to use, error prone, and slow, and that it has too many nonsensical tics such as an inability to capture patient data unless the patient stays in a hospital overnight.

More about the failings but also about the success of a program that the VA had already been using for the past 25yrs. and integration problems of this new system with the old and who suffers from the many problems.


And here's the key to their failed ideology and policies:

But Winkenwerder championed the private-sector solution. Like many Bush administration appointees, Winkenwerder was plucked from industry. An MD/MBA, he never served in the military and was a vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield, New England's largest private health insurer, before arriving at the DOD. Winkenwerder was proud of his corporate pedigree: During his nomination process, he told the Senate that "coming from the private sector, I am…confident in the ability of private health care contractors to [provide]…high quality services." (Winkenwerder did not respond to an interview request.)

Right, and we've been watching how the once World Envied Private Sector, businesses and workers, often knocking heads but moving forward with the best in modern innovations and technologies for an advanced society that this planet has experienced in a long time, has sunk to it's own corruption, greed, arrogance, self indulgence, apathy, false superiority,....................................................................., the list is just to long, but a total lack of common sense, critical thought and extremely bad business practices should be added.


It isn't about pride of innovation nor quality products it's about wealth and the road to easy money garnered off the backs of the working masses who still try and get a pride and self worth out of what they do.

The AHLTA debacle hasn't come cheap. So far the Pentagon has invested an estimated $5 billion of taxpayer money in the project. This figure includes the original Integic contract and other corporate handouts such as a $67.7 million follow-up contract for "monitoring" and "management" with Northrop Grumman—which bought out Integic shortly before AHLTA was announced—and another $12.3 million to Northrop and Booz Allen Hamilton for aid in assessing how AHLTA and VistA can share data.

We're talking about the so called false impression given of a Strong National Security by a group of, so many names and descriptive words come to mind, extremely incompetent fools, who Never seem to give a crap about anyone but those in their circles, even than turning on the ones who get caught in their web of greed and corruption, using that phrase "Strong On National Security and Defense" to only enhance their power and greed on their Use of those they send into Wars of Choice and the long running Destructive Occupations than Short Change Them when they return. These War of Choice only helping to create a Weak National Security so they can use that as their excuse for the continuation of Perpetual Conflict and Criminal Terrorism!


Niko Karvounis has more, with important backlinks, that should be read, But I'll place a couple of more cuts of thought:

But making these systems interoperable will come at enormous taxpayer expense: Casscells says the price tag for convergence will be another $15 billion over the next several years, putting the total cost of AHLTA somewhere in the realm of $20 billion—four times what the government had originally budgeted for the entire AHLTA process. "There's been plenty of blame to go around," Casscells said at a forum on military health care last month. "Nobody's gonna like it."

Privatization, ain't it great, especially when nobody complains, and those that do are marginalized on the extreme!

For his part, Winkenwerder, who boasted that the system "works" and "is improving care" in an October 2007 interview, is still touting the success of AHLTA. His profile at Deloitte Consulting, where he serves as a senior adviser, proudly claims that he oversaw "the world's…most sophisticated electronic health record system."

But that's what this society and it's modern capitalist ideology is all about, not what you know, but who you know, and how to pad your resumes with lies, but if you know the right folks, Who Cares!!!!

Blog Crawl 1-24-07

PTSD Combat : Winning the War Within

DoD Mental Health Task Force Update
Posted: 24 Jan 2007 01:07 AM CST

Today's News-Tribune devotes 20 full column inches of real estate to the just-concluded two day DoD Mental Health Task Force meeting held in Tacoma, Wash. I'll update with a link to the full article when it's available. In the meantime, columnist Mike Gilbert's blog offers a few.............

The Search is On for Objective, Biological Test for PTSD
Posted: 23 Jan 2007 11:01 PM CST

From Marine Times: Rather than argue over whether a 15-minute survey can determine if service members suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, researchers are trying to find biological ways to make the diagnosis. “We’re looking for an objective, independent, biological...............

Reporting on Today's Changing Journalism
Posted: 23 Jan 2007 05:49 PM CST

Some quick links to share my coverage of the Journalism That Matters and National Conference for Media Reform gatherings in Memphis earlier this month. Most recent report at the top, filed just a few hours ago with ePluribus Media: War on Press -- Press on War Looking Back on.............

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Jan Barry
Children of War

For Americans to break our addiction to war, it will take families working together to live year-round the peace and joy to the world that we sing in Christmas and New Year’s greetings.

One of the tragedies of the war in Iraq is that our soldiers, many of whom are sons and daughters of Vietnam veterans, marched off to a war that bore all the warning signs of the disaster in Vietnam. Like their parents, they eagerly went off to fight in a foreign land they knew nothing about, for a cause that collapsed in the light of the actual facts. What does it take to break such a cycle of excitement and disaster?

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Mojo Blog:
Mother Jones
Our take on the news of the moment, updated hourly.

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An Arab Woman Blues
A Picture is worth a 1000 words.

My dear Friend K. sent me a photo of her country. A beautiful scenic view of a sunset, wishing that one day I will be able to visit this beauty spot where she lives.
I wanted to return in kind. So I checked not less than 100 pages on the Web.
I googled "Pictures of Iraq " "Photos from Iraq" and all that I could find were the following Pictures :

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NAM GUARDIAN ANGEL
Blair rejects call for Iraq withdrawal

Tony Blair has rejected a call for an October pull-out of UK troops from Iraq - but ducked discussing the issue with MPs at a Commons debate on the conflict.
In a deliberate breach of parliamentary etiquette, the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties appeared in the chamber - despite Mr Blair's decision to attend a CBI conference of business leaders in London instead.

Kathie also has some great Video Productions she has put together on her Long Activism on PTSD, at the top of the site

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Mike Ferner

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Eric Blumrich - BushFlash