Monthly Archives: August 2005

Shackled For No Crime; Acquitted But Not Told or Released

A commentator on the previous item points out this story, which I’d missed: Chinese Detainees Are Men Without a Country:

In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China’s communist government — not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.

More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive.

Do Americans understand what’s being done in their name?

For more than three years these unpersons were not allowed a lawyer. When they got one, he was appalled.

One of the Uighurs was “chained to the floor” in a “box with no windows,” Willett [his lawyer] said in an Aug. 1 court hearing…

And all this after they had been cleared — not that the US government was willing to admit this little fact:

All 15 Uighurs have actually been cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay twice, once after a Pentagon review in late 2003 and again last March, U.S. officials said. Seven other Uighurs were ruled to be enemy combatants and will continue to be detained.

Even after the second decision, however, the government did not notify the 15 men for several months that they had been cleared. “They clearly were keeping secret that these men were acquitted. They were found not to be al Qaeda and not to be Taliban,” Willett said. “But the government still refused to provide a transcript of the tribunal that acquitted them to the detainees, their new lawyers or a U.S. court.”

Having wrongly imprisoned them, treated them very harshly at the very least, and having held them long after it had reason to do so, the US government’s position is that these victims should return to their home country — China — a place they fled in the first place due to a well-founded fear of persecution, and where their record of having been in Guantanamo is not likely to better their circumstances.

Words really fail me, here. Can anyone seriously claim to be proud of this conduct by our government? Is there no one in Congress who will act to stop the running sores on the national honor? We do still have a national honor don’t we? Or has that gone missing too?

Oh, do I feel shrill today.

Posted in Guantanamo | 6 Comments

Must Not Annoy the Base. Not Even the Racists.

This is weird and dirty: Profiling Report Leads to a Demotion. The circumstantial evidence is strong that the politicos at the Bush Dept. of Justice are so worried about perturbing white racists that they didn’t want to draw any attention to a report demonstrating disparate treatment of minorities during traffic stops. [Note: Why do I say “politicos” plural, when the article speaks of just one — because I don’t think demoting a civil servant is something that’s easy to do.]

In fairness, one should note that unlike some other reports in other departments (think global warming and pollution), no attempt was made to change the actual wording of the report or its conclusions. Here the fix was just political: first try to tone down the press release, then when the career official objects, decide to issue the report online with no fanfare at all…then demote the official.

Even so, the only motive I can see for not wanting to draw attention to racially disparate actions by local cops — a group over whom the US government has only limited authority, primarily via very rare civil rights lawsuits or prosecutions — is a political fear of annoying white racist voters.

Or is there some other equally plausible explanation I am missing here?

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 2 Comments

ISP Reports 20% of New Accounts are Fraudsters

In It’s a fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud world, my ISP, DreamHost, gives a shocking statistic:

Nowadays, about 20% of our daily sign ups are with stolen credit cards (or stolen paypal accounts), and are for the express purpose of spamming, conning, storing ‘warez’, or cracking (our system or somebody else’s).

DreamHost is responding by using spamassassin-like techniques to weed out the bad guys; it claims under 1% false positives, and false negatives, and says another 2% fall into a gray area that get flagged for — error-prone — manual review.

Posted in Internet | 1 Comment

Cheap Motherboards Can Be Just as Good

Tom’s Hardware Guide — the Internet authority on computer hardware, compares a budget and premium motherboard. The result is surprising, even given they’re both made by the same well-regarded manufacturer:

The low-budget and the premium motherboard provide exactly the same performance when using comparable components.

The only difference that mattered is the feature set, but the $69 board had everything the average user would need, meaning that the $219 model makes no sense unless you are a serious overclocker, plan to use many hard drives, or have a special need for one of the other extra features.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment

Robert Waldman Annotates the Iraqi Proto-Constitution

The first draft of history: Robert Waldman points out key clauses of the Iraqi proto-constitution.

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off on Robert Waldman Annotates the Iraqi Proto-Constitution

Rashomon, Jackboots Edition (Updated)

One view: Daily Kos: UTAH RAVERS TREATED LIKE TERRORISTS!

The other view: Rave Party: Utah County Sheriff’s Office shuts down Rave Party in Spanish Fork Canyon.

The accounts differ as to whether the ravers had all the permits they needed (you need a permit to have more than 250 people on private land way out in the middle of nowhere? So it seems…)

Note however, that there is little but very violent resistance that would justify the kind of force the police are alleged to have used.

Not having been there or knowing any of the participants personally, I am unwilling to rush to judgment as to which account more closely captures the truth, although I’ll say this much: if it proves to be true that the the cops were impounding cameras and trying to stop filming, I think it’s fair to suspect that they might have had something to hide.

And if the accounts of violence, or raiding-despite-a-permit-and-without-a-warrant prove true, then the Utah police are simply out of control — or worse, controlled by really bad and evil people.

Update: As is increasingly often the case, info central on this issue is the wikipedia entry. And what to make of this unsourced claim: “A source inside the Utah government reports that this action was undertaken out of fear that the Rave would be used to rally support for the protest against Bush’s upcoming Utah visit.” They couldn’t be that crazy. Could they?

Posted in Civil Liberties | 5 Comments