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Mudflats: Storm Warning!

September 16, 2008 in Current Events, Law, Politics, alaska by Mardé | No comments

Mudflats latest post is a storm warning! A legal blizzard is hitting Alaska. Suddenly five Republicans on the Legislative Council, consisting of eight Republicans and four Democrats, are bringing suit against the other members and the Council itself to delay the investigation until after the November 4th election, plus they are suing to remove two of the Democrats. This is the investigation of Palin’s dismissal of the Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan. Originally, the Council had voted unanimously to perform the investigation. Here’s what Mudflats says about Walt Monegan:

Walt Monegan was, in a word, beloved. He was beloved by the troopers he lead, the people he served, and basically anyone who had the privilege of working with him. He cared about people, the important issues, and he was the real deal. There are many Alaskans today thinking, “Who do these people think they are to come here, and tear down the likes of Walt Monegan?” You have to remember, the rest of the country is “outside”. We are “inside”. That feeling defines Alaskans. We don’t like the government coming in here and telling us how to run things, dammit. And we don’t like outsiders ripping apart respected public servants in our town.

Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating, very well written, and humorous to boot in spite of everything, or maybe because of it. There are already 133 371 405 responses.

See the typical moose below from which Sarah makes her burgers! This great moose picture comes from a Garrison Keillor article today, A liberal in moose country.

UPDATE: For a great slide show with music of the 50 photos taken at the anti-Palin rally in Anchorage on Sunday, Sept. 14, see here.

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Dangerous ICE

August 9, 2008 in Immigrants, Law, War by Mardé | 10 comments

This dangerous ICE does not refer to thin ICE on a lake but instead refers to the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency, the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security. This ICE is dangerous because it has used fear of 9/11 to construct an enormous bureaucracy, independent of the legislative and judicial branches of government, justified solely for the purpose of fighting the war on terror but instead is used in an escalating undeclared war on illegal immigration. ICE has lately developed an insidious and clever “fast-tracking” scheme which on May 12, 2008, handed down to illegal immigrants 130 man-years of prison time based on bogus charges at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.

I had heard about this at the time but hadn’t fully realized the seriousness and inhumanity of the operation until I saw this post on Missy’s blog, If You Don’t Know About This … You Should, and read the 20-page report by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas who was a Federally Certified Interpreter at the US District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.

As if breaking up families with children wasn’t enough, men and women were driven to court like cattle in separate groups of ten, “shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through”, unable to understand the trumped up charges of social security fraud and identity theft leveled against them. All they knew was that they had paid up to $300 each for the right to work at the meat packing plant. Most never knew what a social security number meant or whose identity they were supposed to have stolen. Here are the last two paragraphs of that report:

“When the executive responded to post-9/11 criticism by integrating law enforcement operations and security intelligence, ICE was created as “the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” with “broad law enforcement powers and authorities for enforcing more than 400 federal statutes” (1). A foreseeable effect of such broadness and integration was the concentration of authority in the executive branch, to the detriment of the constitutional separation of powers. Nowhere is this more evident than in Postville, where the expansive agency’s authority can be seen to impinge upon the judicial and legislative powers. “ICE’s team of attorneys constitutes the largest legal program in DHS, with more than 750 attorneys to support the ICE mission in the administrative and federal courts. ICE attorneys have also participated in temporary assignments to the Department of Justice as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys spearheading criminal prosecutions of individuals. These assignments bring much needed support to taxed U.S. Attorneys’ offices”(33). English translation: under the guise of interagency cooperation, ICE prosecutors have infiltrated the judicial branch. Now we know who the architects were that spearheaded such a well crafted “fast-tracking” scheme, bogus charge and all, which had us all, down to the very judges, fall in line behind the shackled penguin march. Furthermore, by virtue of its magnitude and methods, ICE’s New War is unabashedly the aggressive deployment of its own brand of immigration reform, without congressional approval. “In FY07, as the debate over comprehensive immigration reform moved to the forefront of the national stage, ICE expanded upon the ongoing effort to re-invent immigration enforcement for the 21st century” (3). In recent years, DHS has repeatedly been accused of overstepping its authority. The reply is always the same: if we limit what DHS/ICE can do, we have to accept a greater risk of terrorism. Thus, by painting the war on immigration as inseparable from the war on terror, the same expediency would supposedly apply to both. Yet, only for ICE are these agendas codependent: the war on immigration depends politically on the war on terror, which, as we saw earlier, depends economically on the war on immigration. This type of no-exit circular thinking is commonly known as a “doctrine.” In this case, it is an undemocratic doctrine of expediency, at the core of a police agency, whose power hinges on its ability to capitalize on public fear. Opportunistically raised by DHS, the sad specter of 9/11 has come back to haunt illegal workers and their local communities across the USA. ”

” A line was crossed at Postville. The day after in Des Moines, there was a citizens’ protest featured in the evening news. With quiet anguish, a mature all-American woman, a mother, said something striking, as only the plain truth can be. “This is not humane,” she said. “There has to be a better way.””

The immigration raid was described at the time by the local TV channel:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrDXYMtGA4I[/youtube]

As Missy points out, the blogger Border Explorer has been continuously reporting on these events. This five-minute video by the Sojourners, linked from Missy’s blog, captures the real impact of the devastating immigration raid on this town:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDnSi80w7OI[/youtube]

The big question is what can be done to combat this sort of thing in the future, to limit the growing power of the DHS/ICE? Can the next administration act? Can Congress? Clearly, a great deal of immigration reform is needed immediately. How can this be done?

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Texas Law

December 26, 2007 in Current Events, Law by Mardé | No comments

Hey, Texas doesn’t scrimp on the capital punishments. The state is bucking the downward trend of executions at 60% of the total in the country.

The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.

How about adding an extra verse to that great old song, Deep in the Heart of Texas? Here’s the first verse that we often enjoy singing around the campfire.

The stars at night are big and bright
(clap, clap, clap, clap),
Deep in the heart of Texas.

How about inserting this as a second verse?

Death rows by day are here to stay
(clap, clap, clap, clap),
Deep in the heart of Texas.

Hey, we’re tough here in Texas! No weak-kneed lily-livered libruls here!

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Supreme Disgrace

October 11, 2007 in Current Events, Law, Politics by Mardé | 4 comments

At last one member of the MSM (Main Stream Media) has spoken out about the refusal of the SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States) to hear the Khaled el-Masri case. Thank you New York Times!

Here is “an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the Bush administration’s morally, physically and legally abusive anti-terrorism program”, and the SCOTUS refuses to hear the case! What is this country coming to? What has it become?

Here’s the final paragraph of that editorial, but try to read the whole thing.

In refusing to consider Mr. Masri’s appeal, the Supreme Court has left an innocent person without any remedy for his wrongful imprisonment and torture. It has damaged America’s standing in the world and established the nation as Supreme Enabler of the Bush administration’s efforts to avoid accountability for its actions. These are not accomplishments to be proud of.

An understatement, if anything.

American Torture

September 16, 2007 in Current Events, Law, Torture by Mardé | No comments

I noticed today on The Washington Note a post by Scott Paul entitled American Torture on Tour, so I took a look at that. There will be a tour of two of Scott’s colleagues with Michael Otterman to three cities to discuss Michael Otterman’s new book, American Torture. I opened the latter link and found a post, “Jose Padilla: More Sinned Against Than Sinning”. It’s incredible the torture that this person, an American citizen, went through! Here’s an excerpt:

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, who had moved to Florida and converted to Islam in 1994, was arrested on May 8, 2002, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, after several years abroad in Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was held for a month as a material witness and interrogated by the FBI, and was then designated as an “enemy combatant” and transferred to a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where, for 43 months, as described by Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor, he was “held not only in solitary confinement but as the sole detainee in a high-security wing of the prison. Fifteen other cells sat empty around him.” Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and “an expert on the debilitating effects of solitary confinement,” who conducted a detailed examination of Padilla for his lawyers, said that it was “clear that the intent of this isolation was to break Padilla for the purpose of the interrogations that were to follow.”

What were his crimes? Here’s another excerpt:

Even overlooking the fact that this was, at best, just one notch up from a “thought crime” – and that there may be something wrong with a system in which, as Brian Frazier told the jury, “you can find that the defendants are guilty even if they never killed or harmed anyone – under the law it is the illegal agreement that is the crime” – the brandishing of the application form was enough to convince the jurors of Padilla’s guilt. After a three-month trial, they took only eleven hours to reach a verdict. Noting that this meant that the jurors spent less than one hour of deliberations for each week of trial testimony, whereas “the rule of thumb, [as] any trial attorney will tell you, is that one week of trial testimony usually tracks one day of deliberations,” CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen wrote that both lawyers and reporters were “shocked by the speed of the verdict.” According to the New York Times’ account, one juror said that she “had ‘all but made up her mind’ about the defendants’ guilt before deliberations began.”

There are a lot more eye-opening facts in this article which I’d call a must read. And to think, this horrendous injustice has been essentially ignored by the mainstream media in America. When will the American people wake up to what their government is doing in their name and with their tax money!?

Religion in Prison: oh no

September 10, 2007 in Law, Politics, Religion, War by Mardé | No comments

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

It’s too dangerous to have religion in prison!! The prisoners might become Islamic radicals and blow the place up, let alone what might happen when they get out! Perhaps all prisoners should be in gitmo for our protection?

Of course this ruling occurred during the Bush administration. All the crazies in America seem to have congregated there.

Gitmos Across America

June 27, 2007 in Law, Politics by Mardé | 4 comments

I just got sickened in reading the New York Times lead editorial today. The boom in immigration detention, in which people are ensnared for dubious reasons, is set to rise to a new and shocking level if the amendment by Senator Lindsey Graham to the Senate immigration bill goes through. As pointed out in the editorial, the new mantra in this country is apparently toughness. Ya gotta be tough! In the meantime, people die in prisons without access to medicines or lawyers. It’s disgusting and sickening! What is this country coming to? What has it become?