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You would think someone spiked the punch in the US Congress – they recently signed into a law (pending presidential approval) that would allow anyone (citizens at home and abroad) to be held indefinitely until war like conditions are over.
“Provisions in the bill codify an approach that allows for endless detention of US citizens and non-citizens picked up anywhere in the world. They also gives the US military the option to detain US citizens suspected of participating or aiding in terrorist activities without a trial, indefinitely.
A person can be detained “under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities”, the bill states. The hostility in question here is the “war on terror”, and at the moment, it seems to have no end.”
My first response was, are you frakking kidding me? But no, the madness is in the Senate now.
“Indeed, the chief argument against codifying these provisions and giving the military a role in domestic terrorist investigation is that the system works just fine as it is.
“You can’t find any national security experts in favour of these provisions,” said Heather Hulburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a non-profit foreign policy organisation with a focus on national security.
The list of those against the provisions reads like and institutional who’s who of national security – FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta and dozens of senior White House counterterrorism officials, retired generals and retired interrogators have all come out strongly against allowing the US military to police US streets and detain US citizens – possibly overseas – without trial or access to their countries’ legal system.
John Brennan, the White House senior counterterrorism adviser told a US radio show that he believes the provisions are unnecessary and that “a very strong established track record of dealing successfully with individuals here in the United States who are involved in terrorism-related activities”.
Expert opinion is not what it used to be, but the list of people who work in the business saying that this bill is two fruit loops past crazy is impressive. I’m thinking that if the CIA and the FBI are saying “do not want” maybe congress should listen to their opinion.
“The bill defines the world – the entire world – as a war zone, meaning that anyone can be detained anywhere in the world and they can be said to be on the battlefield of the “war on terror”.
Was it me or did I just here the imperial march start playing…? The US routinely criticizes other regimes for doing exactly what this bill proposes; the irony is crippling.
“Take the case of Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, known to many as simply “the American hikers” during their detention in Iran, where the government accused them of being spies and sentenced them without trial. Shourd was held for more than a year, while Fattal and Bauer waited for two years before they were tried, convicted and ultimately freed.
The rallying cry to release them was strong, if not necessarily sustained. There was even a US Senate resolution, co-sponsored by two Minnesota senators – Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, both Democrats, urging Iran to free the three prisoners.
“The fact that these three innocent Americans have been unjustly detained for over a year is incomprehensible,” said Franken at the passage of the resolution in August 2010.
“The Iranian government 
needs to release Shane, Sarah and Josh immediately so that that they can be reunited with their families and start putting their lives back together.”
Franken and Klobuchar both voted in favour of the NDAA.
Given the way the US typically lambastes states it feels violating fundamental rights by detaining people without end or trial, it seems odd that it seems to going in that direction.
Between increasing troop levels within the US (roughly 20,000 to be deployed internally) and then giving them the option to pull US citizens off the streets and send them Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, the provisions in the NDAA take a page out of the playbooks of governments they routinely criticise.
“This flies in the face of fundamental rights, the constitution and recent US history,” said Manatri, referring to the 2001 attacks.
“In some ways, we’re less thoughtful, we’re less reflective, we’re less concerned with protecting individual rights now than we were 10 years ago. Were any other country to apply the terms of this bill to the US or its allies, the US would be the first to complain.”
The steady march toward authoritarian rule seems to be going unnoticed in the US. The damage wrought by fear and ignorance seems to have no bounds.
As WLC says – A pretty strong argument…
Thanks to NSC for the interpretation.
Well after a little browsing ,here is the extended smackdown WLC so richly deserves, along with more evidence of the contortions necessary to believe the bible is a moral work.
Ethics are what make people stand against tyranny. Saying “no” to the crowd is one of the most difficult challenges we face as social animals. Bradley Manning had the courage to make an ethical stand, we all possess similar characteristics, we just choose to dismiss these ethical impulses. When we do so, our the moral fabric of our society degrades.
“Washington, DC – Private Bradley Manning was just 22 years old when he allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US State Department cables and video evidence of war crimes to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. For that act of courage that revealed to the world the true face of the American empire, he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.”
Making an ethical stand always has consequences; I’m surprised Mr.Manning has not been executed yet for his actions. The international media, not heard in the US of course, is picking up the story and telling a significantly different narrative than what the White House would like you to believe.
“All one needs to know about American justice is that if he had murdered civilians and desecrated their corpses – if he had the moral capacity to commit war crimes, not the audacity to expose them – he’d be better off today.”
Not exactly good for the recruiting posters.
“Indeed, if Manning had merely murdered the nameless, faceless “other”, as his Army colleagues on the notorious Afghan “Kill Team” did, he would not have had his right to a speedy trial blatantly violated. If Manning had intentionally killed unarmed civilians, posed for pictures with their dead bodies and slashed their fingers off as souvenirs, he would not have had his guilt publicly pronounced by his own commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama, months before he so much as saw the inside of a military court. If he had killed poor foreigners instead of exposing their deaths, he might even stand a chance of getting out of prison while still a young man.”
War brings a different set of rules to the table, but we in the West would like to think that we possess some noble spirit that sets us apart from the rest. Yo-ho, it is they who are savages, the brutes who kill indiscriminately. What bullocks.
“This isn’t really a head-scratching development. While killing unarmed civilians for sport may not be officially sanctioned policy, it doesn’t threaten the functioning of the war machine as much as a soldier standing up and refusing to be complicit in mass murder. From the perspective of a Washington establishment much more concerned with maintaining hegemony than its humanity, the former – murder – is much less troubling a precedent than the latter.
And so the US government is making an example of Manning, lest any other cogs in the machine start thinking about listening to their consciences instead of their commanders.”
The mirroring of foreign policy onto this case bears further investigation. The bullshite you here about the domino theory and the various red-scares starts with the implicit assumption that the “threat of a good-example” must be quashed at all costs. The illegal terrorist war waged by the United States on Nicaragua is a prime example of a country using resources for its people instead of the multinationals. Raises the poor a few steps out of abject poverty is the “good example” that must be utterly destroyed so “stability” can be restored. Stability being shorthand for globalized corporate control. Focusing on the individual case of Mr.Manning we can observe the same pattern.
Manning’s actions speak of a human conscience, a sense that what was going on was horribly wrong and it needed to stop. Acting on his conscience as a decent human being, Manning took action. Having people empathically relate to official enemies is a big no no in the armed forces, you might start questioning the rational, as such, of what you’re doing there and that, gentle readers, is not allowed.
“Had Manning – instead of exposing the crime – been the one pulling the trigger in the US Apache helicopter that in 2007 murdered at least a dozen unarmed people in Baghdad, he wouldn’t be facing any legal consequences for his actions. Had Manning authorised a 2009 missile strike in Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children, instead of releasing the State Department cable that acknowledges responsibility for the killings, we wouldn’t even know his name.
But Manning didn’t kill anybody. Rather, he was outraged by the killing he saw all around him and angered at the complicity of his higher-ups who weren’t prepared to do a damn thing about. So, the system having failed to ensure accountability, Manning took it upon himself to share the inconvenient facts his government was withholding from the world.
“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy”, he explained in a chat with hacker-turned-informant Adrian Lamo. As an Army intelligence analyst, Manning witnessed firsthand the American empire in action – and it changed him. “I don’t believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore”, he lamented, “only a plethora of states acting in self-interest”.
Transparency, accountability, responsibility are all hallmarks of a functioning democracy. The people of a democracy have the right to know what is being done in their name.
“Confronted with the reality of institutional evil, Manning risked his career – and his freedom – in order to expose everything from mass murder and child rape in Afghanistan to US support for brutal dictators across North Africa and the Middle East. His actions were heroic, and Amnesty International has even credited them as the spark for with jump-starting the Arab Spring. And yet a president who proclaims his commitment to transparency while on the campaign trail is determined to go down as the one whose administration mentally tortured, prosecuted and jailed the most famous whistle-blower in half-a-century.”
Officially we want heroes from war, but what we really get are ‘made-men’ who, with the consent of the state, parrot the institutional truths back to the public to keep them in the dark. Outside of the borders of the USA, the notion of ‘defending freedom’ has a much different definition, one much closer to the harsh truth that Bradly Manning chose to share.
Manning said,”I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy”. – Perhaps if the American public could share a similar sentiment democracy might begin to flourish once again in the USA.
Thank you for your powerful words and the courage modeled in dismantling the rotten specter of religion. That is all.
Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011.
The final movement of the Beethoven’s 9th has recently been released by Stephan Malinowski. Catch the third movement here.
Presto; Allegro molto assai (Alla marcia); Andante maestoso; Allegro energico, sempre ben marcato. Duration approx. 24 mins.
The famous choral finale is Beethoven’s musical representation of Universal Brotherhood. American pianist and music author Charles Rosen has characterized it as a symphony within a symphony, the view which will be followed below. It is important to note that many other writers have interpreted its form in different terms, including two of the greatest analysts of the twentieth century, Heinrich Schenker and Donald Tovey. In Rosen’s view, it contains four movements played without interruption.[11] This “inner symphony” follows the same overall pattern as the Ninth Symphony as a whole. The scheme is as follows:
- First “movement”: theme and variations with slow introduction. Main theme which first appears in the cellos and basses is later “recapitulated” with voices.
- Second “movement”: 6/8 scherzo in military style (begins at “Alla marcia,” words “Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen”), in the “Turkish style“. Concludes with 6/8 variation of the main theme with chorus.
- Third “movement”: slow meditation with a new theme on the text “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” (begins at “Andante maestoso”)
- Fourth “movement”: fugato finale on the themes of the first and third “movements” (begins at “Allegro energico”)
The movement has a thematic unity, in which every part may be shown to be based on either the main theme, the “Seid umschlungen” theme, or some combination of the two.
The first “movement within a movement” itself is organized into sections:
- An introduction, which starts with a stormy Presto passage. It then briefly quotes all three of the previous movements in order, each dismissed by the cellos and basses which then play in an instrumental foreshadowing of the vocal recitative. At the introduction of the main theme, the cellos and basses take it up and play it through.
- The main theme forms the basis of a series of variations for orchestra alone.
- The introduction is then repeated from the Presto passage, this time with the bass soloist singing the recitatives previously suggested by cellos and basses.
- The main theme again undergoes variations, this time for vocal soloists and chorus.
Vocal parts
Those words written specifically by Beethoven (rather than Schiller) are shown in italics.
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The full libretto including repetitions can be found on German Wikisource.[13]
In the near ending, it is, “Freude, Tochter aus Elysium“, and also in the near ending, “Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!“, is omitted, then the choir sings the last four lines of the main theme, where they stop at, “Alle Menschen“, before the slow part when the soloists sing for one last time the song of joy.
In the ending climax, the chorus softens quietly on the word “Götterfunken“. Then, the orchestra descends chords in arpeggio form, and in slow maestoso tempo, the full chorus sings, “Tochter aus Elysium, Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Götterfunken!”.[13] The symphony ends with the orchestra playing the final section in prestissimo tempo.
The vocal part of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony thus ends with the final word[13] “Götterfunken” (literally, “spark of the gods”)
Hey, if that is a question you have to ask about a potential candidate do you think that he/she should be in the race? Nominating Gingrich would require any last vestiges of ethical conduct possessed by the Republican Party to be taken quietly into the nearest closet and strangled to death. I imagine Jebus forgives poor old Newt, so everything is hunky dory down south…
Is it just me or does every republican politician preach racism, sexism and bigotry to appeal to the wack-a-loon conservative “value voters” ( *sproing* my irony meter just imploded) and once their votes are secured by promising to disenfranchise demonized minority X (women, homosexuals, PoC, etc) they promptly ignore said base and continue to happily cement the budding plutocracy. You would think this ploy would get old like after the first five times, but behold Perry is knocking them out of the park once again.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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