When The Light Comes

Conditions: Warm.

Fear of Justice?

So, the Obama administration has decided to take it's five top aces from Gitmo and try them in open court in New York. That's a fairly brave decision there, and not without it's risks. For what do we really know about the top dog, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?

Mohammed has admitted to interrogators that he was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. He allegedly proposed the concept to Osama bin Laden as early as 1996, obtained funding for the attacks from Mr. bin Laden, oversaw the operation and trained the hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was born in Pakistan's Baluchistan province and raised in Kuwait. He also has been charged in a 1995 terror plot to bomb or hijack 11 US-bound flights originating in Asian countries. He was arrested March 1, 2003, during a raid by Pakistani officials in Rawalpindi, a city outside Islamabad.

Wow, that's a pretty damning statement. I wonder how he came to make it?

Where to prosecute Mohammed and al-Nashiri has been particularly problematic for the Obama Administration, since it is now widely known that both men were waterboarded multiple times while being held in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ah. And there lies the problem. For if these guys are to go in front of a court of law, said court is going to have to consider the fact that any evidence of admissions of guilt are also accompanied by the point that these guys were tortured. How do you get around that?

But legal authorities consulted appeared to agree that the Justice Department must have a high degree of confidence in the strength of these cases, even though one of the central issues will be admission of evidence obtained through torture. Holder said the DOJ has substantial evidence not yet made public and, presumably, not obtained through coercion.

So, there's other evidence they have. Secret evidence. That perhaps wasn't obtained through torture. Well, since this will be an open court case the evidence must presumably made public and then we'll know for ourselves. But it still doesn't really address the who torturing part of the deal.

The Bush administration filed charges against the men last year before a military commission, asserting that it would be difficult to successfully prosecute the men in federal court in part because that might force the US government to disclose and defend the prisoners' treatment in CIA custody.

- truthout.org/

And the full disclosure of just what the CIA and the military and who knows who else were up to in the war on terror just might be enough to derail court cases focusing on these suspects. But that's the price you pay for freedom, I guess.




Film Review: Capitalism. A Love Story

Michael Moore has taken on a lot of big targets in his films, but his latest one seems like a mountain too high, or a bridge too far. Moore's latest target is capitalism, that bedrock of American civilization. Moore sets out to illustrate, basically, how capitalism was good, how it's now bad, how it was changed or mutated into what we have now, and essentially how it should now be replaced with Socialism. Throughout, in his bumbling, common-man fashion, Michael interviews common folk who have become victims of America's latest recession, using them and their tears to illustrate his wider points.

So where did capitalism go wrong? Basically back in the eighties, when the regulators were taken out of the system, a process that has set in slowly over many years, and the effects of which are starting to be felt more and more with each crisis. According to Moore, Reagan started the rot when he allowed Wall Street guys to start calling the shots from inside the White House, and it's been downhill ever since.

What's particularly chilling, more than the scores of people who have become victims by not reading the fine print of their mortgages and debt payments, is the background information regarding the massive 700 billion dollar bailout that was given to companies that had friends and or former employees as advisers to the White House. No one seems to know what happened to that money, as it was voted in in a climate of fear that the economy was about to go bust, and so had no strings attached to it, and no requirement as to how the money would be used. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, a saying that now applies to the system that Capitalism has become in America. Moore's documentary is powerful, but it's aimed against a system so big and far reaching it really struggles to encapsulate the full breadth of the problem, especially since Moore insists on spending a large amount of time personalizing the economic crisis. Still, it's a worthy film. Not as powerful as Fahrenheit 9/11, but strong in it's own way. Four Fat Cats out of Five.



- Peace out