Running Around In Circles

Conditions: What comes after Cats and Dogs?


Backslidin’

This week saw America take up station yet again, cowering fearfully under the bed. What is it this time, you ask? Gitmo prisoners. The guys illegally thrown into a stateless prison camp in Cuba and tortured for about seven years. President Obama made a promise to close the camp down, which means moving the inmates somewhere, and this week America got really scared about where.

Senators on Wednesday followed through with their vow to deny the Obama administration the necessary money to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Voting 90-6, the Senate stripped $80 million from a supplemental military funding bill, $50 million of which was designated to close the controversial prison and $30 million for a Justice Department investigation into interrogation techniques used there.

The amendment by Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe - both of whom have personally toured the prison - actually goes beyond the military supplemental to deny the administration any past money it could use to close the prison and transfer the prisoners into the United States.

The language reads, "None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release or incarcerate any individual who was detained as of May 19, 2009 at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States."

Inouye was emphatic that Democrats still believe the prison should close, and that his amendment is only a "reality check" on the administration's intent to close it without a plan for the detainees being held there.

"This amendment is not a referendum on closing Guantanamo," Inouye said. "Instead, it should serve as a reality check since at this time the administration has not yet forwarded a coherent plan on foreclosing this prison."

- http://www.truthout.org/052009R

Well, you say that, but then:

Washington - A federal judge says the United States can continue to hold some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without any charges.

U.S. District Judge John Bates' opinion issued Tuesday night limited the Obama administration's definition of who can be held. But he said Congress in the days after Sept. 11, 2001 gave the president the authority to hold anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the terrorist attacks.

- http://www.truthout.org/052109K

So not only do Americans not want detainees put into American prisons, there’s also the fact that they apparently can be left right where they are. So where is this coming from?

One of the main arguments put forward by Obama's critics is that the U.S. prison system can't handle terrorist detainees. On CNN yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said that he didn't think that U.S. prison facilities "could keep some of these detainees secure, at the same time, protecting the surrounding communities."

So the feeling is that America’s prisons aren’t good enough to keep the Cuban detainees locked up. But that doesn’t make any sense at all.

As Durbin pointed out, the U.S. prison system is currently holding hundreds of convicted terrorists "including the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the shoe bomber, the Unibomber, and many others." Indeed, terrorists such as the Blind Sheikh and Zacarias Moussaoui were convicted and sentenced to life in prison at the Colorado Supermax. Additionally, the high-security wing of the naval brig in Charleston, SC, confined Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri for more than five years. The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has noted that, "[u]nlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there."

- alternet.org/

If there’s one thing America can do, it’s put people in jail, and keep them there. And of course if the detainees actually get to an America jail there’s the chance, remote but possible, that they may get some kind of access to the mythical American Justice System. Whoa, what a crazy idea that is. No wonder everyone's scared.



Spotlight on: Michael Biehn

Any film that has Michael Biehn in it is a good one, the man knows how to bring a fully-formed character and presence to the screen. Sadly, though, he seems to have been overlooked in recent years for actors who are frankly shallower. Well this sucks, and it's my pleasure to link to a great article that restates the greatness of Michael.

Michael Biehn is not only a great actor but a master of understatement whose acting style can be likened to Alec Guinness. Give that statement some thought before disregarding an action star. Biehn made the films he appeared in all the richer for his presence. Today he is still working, but relegated to crappy films (with the exception of Planet Terror), hardly the equal of his epochal triumphs.

The argument for Biehn’s greatness is in his natural style and relative restraint, which in hyperkinetic action films functions as a grounding influence, or a calm amidst the storm. His two greatest achievements are two of the greatest films of all time: Aliens and The Terminator. If you say Citizen Kane and Vertigo are greater, bear in mind you have seen Aliens about twenty times, and fell asleep during Citizen Kane. Twice.

- ruthlessreviews.com/

Film Review: Angels and Demons

Don’t tell anyone, but I kinda liked The Da Vinci Code. It wasn’t a great film, in fact it wasn’t really a film at all, more like a conspiracy-theory ice cream dipped in a thin coating of thriller-movie chocolate. But at least said conspiracy theory got a good airing out. The sequel, Angels and Demons, is more like an empty cone. Robert Langdon, the famous symbioligist, returns and is thrown into what appears to be a religious high-brow version of Die Hard 3. Yes, again with the Die Hard 3. It's Die Hard on a Pope. In Vatican city, during the election of a new pope, some guy has kidnapped four cardinals and rigged a bomb to explode at midnight. The only one who can stop it is a New York detec.... wait, no, it’s Tom Hanks. Here’s the difference between John McLane and Robert Langdon: While John would steal a taxi cab and charge through central park in order to jump onto a speeding subway car, Langdon’s first move is to get the local police to drive him to... the library. See, the Illuminati are fingered, and Robert figures out a trail of ancient breadcrumbs across Rome that will lead us ultimately to the bomb.

Which is really all a way of saying this movie is a chance to tourist our way through Rome and Vatican city without having to get on an airplane. And while the idea of the Illuminati trying to have their revenge on the Catholic church is interesting, ultimately the idea is given absolutely no development whatsoever. All we end up knowing about the Illuminati is what Robert tells us at the start. He’s too busy running from statue to statue, identifying markers and looking at maps. It’s a shame because I figured the idea behind these films was to make up for the lack of action sequences with some interesting historical revelations. Instead, we get some fairly pointless twists. Because there has to be big twists in this sort of thing. Everyone thinks this is going on here, and in fact it’s something else over here. Ewan Macgregor plays a very repressed priest and kind of gets lost among the fancy outfits and large sets.

Of course Da Vinci code was a film that was fairly hard on religion, and it almost seems Angels and Demons is trying desperately to make up for it. Robert himself is being told by the catholics in many spots to have respect and to take it easy, and there’s certainly a sense of giving importance and respect to the whole religion thing. Which harms the plot, because it means we can’t have any juicy flashbacks of all the apparent repression and violence inflicted on the scientists of the Illuminati by the Catholics in previous centuries. But in the end the Illuminati have nothing to do with it, and the film bumbles to a conclusion. Two Old Statues out of Five.


- Peace out