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PATH: BS | Government | 1984
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Torture Victim Wrongly on No-Fly List Gets Humanitarian Award
Posted by wizeGurl
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[Terroir-ism] |
 In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was returning to Canada from vacation. What he didn't know was the the Canadian Mounties had given his name to the U.S. as an Islamic extremist with connections to Al Qaeda, even though there was no evidence of this and he was no such thing.
So when he made a connection at New York's JFK airport, he was taken into custody. He was held in the U.S. for two weeks, put on a private plane and taken to Jordon, placed in a car and driven to Syria, where he was imprisoned in this country known for its use of torture. He spent 10 months in a small, dark cell, being tortured by the Syrians on behalf of the U.S. government before they decided that he really wasn't a terrorist and let him go.
To make things worse, even though he had been released and exonerated in a Canadian judicial inquiry, he was placed on the no-fly list and remains there. So when an international human rights group honored him with an award for his work to prevent the use of torture, he was unable to fly to New York to accept the award in person--despite efforts by both the Canadian government and the human rights group to allow him to travel to the U.S. to attend the ceremony. |
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60 Minutes Gets No-Fly List
Posted by wizeGurl
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[Terroir-ism]
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 CBS News Magazine 60 Minutes recently obtained a copy of the nation's No Fly List, a list of names of suspected terrorists given to airlines so that these people can be kept off your airplane. To protect national security, 60 Minutes will not be releasing the list itself, but it is releasing a few details. They found that the list is "incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, and a source of aggravation for thousand of innocent Americans."
For openers, the list is enormous. It's more than 540 pages long. Although before 9/11, the list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel was just 16 names, today's list has 44,000. Another 75,000 people are on an additional list of people the government thinks should be pulled aside for additional security screening. |
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Fahrenheit 451 Banned during Banned Books Week
Posted by wizeGurl
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 Really, there's no better way to celebrate Banned Books Week than by banning a book about banning and burning books. Say that three times fast.
Yes, a caring parent in Texas (how surprising) found out from his darling little girl that her class's reading assignment, Ray Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451, actually contained "bad language" and "smoking," plus a whole host of other bad influences on young people who've been raised in hermetically sealed Skinner boxes and have therefore never been exposed to such things before.
Well, naturally he was upset that these things were in a book assigned to second-graders. Oh, wait, you say the offended girl was a high school sophomore, just like I was when we read the same book in a city of 75,000 in the free-thinking state of Louisiana decades ago? |
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Bumper Sticker Store
A lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union has uncovered a manual from the Bush Administration detailing its tactics for suppressing protests at presidential appearances. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two people from Colorado who were forcibly removed from a presidential "Town Hall Meeting" because their car had a bumper sticker that said, "No more blood for oil." They have obtained a copy of the "Presidential Advance Manual," which details tactics "to stop a demonstrator from getting into the event." A section titled "Preventing Demonstrators" advises event organizers to recruit local Republicans into "Rally Squads" whose "task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors [sic] (USA! USA! USA!) As a last resort, security should remove the protestors from the event site."
While meeting with a group of high school seniors from the Presidential Scholars program in the East Room of the White House, President Bush received an unexpected surprise: a letter signed by 50 of them urging Bush to halt "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security, the new government meta-agency tasked with keeping our entire country safe from terrorist attacks both foreign and domestic, has come up with one humdinger of an idea. Having apparently run out of ideas on how to predict the next terrorist attack, they are turning to a group of people who are experts at making stuff up. When you're the government agency looking for some ideas about the future of terror, who do you turn to? Science fiction writers, of course.
In what the mainstream media has largely ignored, President Bush signed an executive order on May 9th effectively making Congress and the rest of government obsolete in the event of another attack or national catastrophe. Bush basically becomes a dictator, in complete charge of the U.S. government.
In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Alabama statute banning the commercial distribution of sex toys, saying that there is no fundamental right to privacy raised by the plaintiff's case against the law.
Copies of notes handwritten by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by defense attorneys for former White House staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case.
President Bush has signed into law a bill to build a $9 billion dollar wall between the United States and Mexico. Unfortunately, only a little over $1B has been allocated towards the building of the wall; it won't completely cover the border, and there's an addendum that says the money doesn't really have to be spent on a wall, so we're not really sure what this indicates except that the people and the mainstream media, once again, aren't paying attention.
Olbermann points out that this may be "the beginning of the end" of freedom and liberty for United States citizens. No word yet if CSI will be cancelled, which apparently would create a bigger uproar among the populace.
Residents of trailer parks set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house hurricane victims in Louisiana aren't allowed to talk to the press without an official escort, The Baton Rouge Advocate reported.
Three people convicted of looting a liquor store in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year were given the harshest sentence possible in a Louisiana court on Wednesday.
Here's a snippet of the information AT&T and the US Government are desperately trying to supress:
Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp. began sharing records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls with the NSA shortly after the 2001 terror attacks, according to USA Today. But when the NSA came calling, former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio broke ranks with fellow former Bell companies and didn't sell out his customers...
