AI and S.3930

Amnesty International has put together a fairly succinct and poignant piece commenting on the consequences of the passage of S.3930 (i.e. the Military Commissions Act of 2006). I still don't have much to say here that wouldn't quickly take on an essay-like air yet again. Seeing as the folks at AI are exponentially more intelligent than I am (which, sadly, isn't really saying too much), I'll just slap their list of bullet points below for the sake of posterity. Maybe someday I'll be smart enough to understand them and comment.


[Excerpted from AMR 51/154/2006.]

• Strip the US courts of jurisdiction to hear or consider habeas corpus appeals challenging the lawfulness or conditions of detention of anyone held in US custody as an "enemy combatant". Judicial review of cases would be severely limited. The law would apply retroactively, and thus could result in more than 200 pending appeals filed on behalf of Guantánamo detainees being thrown out of court.
  
  
• Prohibit any person from invoking the Geneva Conventions or their protocols as a source of rights in any action in any US court.
  
  
• Permit the executive to convene military commissions to try "alien unlawful enemy combatants", as determined by the executive under a dangerously broad definition, in trials that would provide foreign nationals so labeled with a lower standard of justice than US citizens accused of the same crimes. This would violate the prohibition on the discriminatory application of fair trial rights.
  
  
• Permit civilians captured far from any battlefield to be tried by military commission rather than civilian courts, contradicting international standards and case law.
  
  
• Establish military commissions whose impartiality, independence and competence would be in doubt, due to the overarching role that the executive, primarily the Secretary of Defense, would play in their procedures and in the appointments of military judges and military officers to sit on the commissions.
  
  
• Permit, in violation of international law, the use of evidence extracted under cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or as a result of "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating or degrading treatment", as defined under international law.
  
  
• Permit the use of classified evidence against a defendant, without the defendant necessarily being able effectively to challenge the "sources, methods or activities" by which the government acquired the evidence. This is of particular concern in light of the high level of secrecy and resort to national security arguments employed by the administration in the "war on terror", which have been widely criticized, including by the UN Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee. Amnesty International is concerned that the administration appears on occasion to have resorted to classification to prevent independent scrutiny of human rights violations.
  
  
• Give the military commissions the power to hand down death sentences, in contravention of international standards which only permit capital punishment after trials affording "all possible safeguards to ensure a fair trial". The clemency authority would be the President. President Bush has led a pattern of official public commentary on the presumed guilt of the detainees, and has overseen a system that has systematically denied the rights of detainees.
  
  
• Limit the right of charged detainees to be represented by counsel of their choosing.
  
  
• Fail to provide any guarantee that trials will be conducted within a reasonable time.
  
  
• Permit the executive to determine who is an "enemy combatant" under any "competent tribunal" established by the executive, and endorse the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), the wholly inadequate administrative procedure that has been employed in Guantánamo to review individual detentions.
  
  
• Narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act by not expressly criminalizing acts that constitute "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment" banned under Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions. Amnesty International believes that the USA has routinely failed to respect the human dignity of detainees in the "war on terror".
  
  
• Prohibit the US courts from using "foreign or international law" to inform their decisions in relation to the War Crimes Act. The President has the authority to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions". Under President Bush, the USA has shown a selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the absolute prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment.
  
  
• Endorse the administration’s "war paradigm" – under which the USA has selectively applied the laws of war and rejected international human rights law. The legislation would backdate the "war on terror" to before the 11 September 2001 in order to be able to try individuals in front of military commissions for "war crimes" committed before that date.

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There may be worse things than being a Nazi.

The title I owe to MDM.

The sentiment I owe to the Executive branch of the United States of America; the rubber-stamp, right-wing, rights hating, do anything (or anyone) to maintain power Republican Party; and the spineless Democrats in Congress that maybe, just maybe, could have actually stopped this from happening.

The rage I now feel I owe to a nation which, as Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, so pointedly stated, "collectively yawned" in response to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (a.k.a. Bill Number S.3930 of the 109th Congress).

Today, already a day after the bill's signing, I only provide a link to the Library of Congress access point for S.3930, and to the GPO's .pdf version of the same. I do so with the intent of referring back to it once in a relatively more reasoned state of mind. No one reads this blog, and that's probably for the best, but at least it will serve as something of a record of this date and these thoughts. I honestly can't say much more without fear of losing what little patience I have left. Suffice it to say, I just needed to say something.

I will comment later. Enjoy the bedtime read.

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Self-Indulgent Nah, nah, nah.

My personal tastes for individual behavior tends to be somewhat more refined than merely pointing at someone and laughing until exhausted or soiled. I also generally try to avoid mocking those that I know my friends respect--or at least tolerate. Although it's been common throughout my life for me to dislike (or even despise) many of my friends' friends, I try and give them the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. I figure, if someone I respect is willing to waste their time on them, they can't be entirely devoid of value. Right?

That said, there are limits to my (obviously) overabundant congeniality. I can't go into just what those limits are, but I can provide an example. Consider the following image:


It isn't enough that "Giles Weaver" (a pseudonym probably intended to hide the author's shame) manages to butcher Nietzsche's name in a way that I haven't seen since the first time I tried to teach the melancholy syphilis sufferer to a Freshman Intro. class. His use of the epigram without proper citation (it's from Beyond Good and Evil, #156, dumbass) only goes to demonstrate the amount of "Nietze" Mr. Weaver has actually read; let alone understood. It can be no typo. Missing three letters in the man's name can be no typo.

Anyone more sane than I that might be reading this (which is a most obvious contradiction if ever I saw one), might think I've gone off the deep end...again. With all that's going wrong in the world (some of which Mr. Weaver comments on in his article), certainly there are better things to lose sleep over (haha..er...gak) than some crackpot screwing up the name of probably the most mis-quoted, mis-interpreted, and mis-used philosopher in history.

Actually, let me take that back. Following Dennett's lead in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995: 461), I'm inclined to consider Nietzsche not as a philosopher in the traditional sense (whatever that means), but as a sociobiologist. Dennett ranks him just after Hobbes; I'd consider it a tie.

Back to my ranting. Why get so worked up over such an ostensibly trivial error? Maybe "Giles Weaver" really isn't that well read in Nietzsche, and just found the quote on some random Nietzsche quote generating website. So what? Must everyone be versed in such things?

My short answer: "Yes."

My slightly longer answer: "At least if they want to portray themselves as even mildly 'educated' (again, whatever that means)."

I admit, I read Nietzsche at 12 and, as has been well established, I'm not right in the head. (Whether there is a lurking causal connection in the preceding claim, I've yet to determine.) However, you'll recall that just a handful of paragraphs earlier, I mentioned that my Freshman Intro. students managed to survive Freddy N., so it certainly isn't that much to ask, is it?

And now my longer and incredibly personal-issues-motivated answer: Academia is suffering enough already. It has long since ceased to be an institution concerned with the pursuit and advancement of knowledge, and has become just another corporate entity. Anyone attending a state university may as well go to aisle 43_Q of their local Walmart and simply purchase a degree of their choice.

After all, that's all the average university student is really interested in acquiring: the paperwork that says their "eligible" to earn more money than the "lazy people" they're all so convinced are responsible for the poverty in the Sudan, etc..

And it's all the major universities are really interested in providing: so long as you buy it from them and not from some bulk discounter with their "roll-back prices."

And at the end of the day, it's all the majority of faculty at said universities are willing to deliver any more. Those that ever cared about anything have been, or are in the process of being, run out by their younger, more cut-throat, more "efficient," and all-so-predictably corporate counterparts.

Don't believe me? Ask one some day. Ask a university professor hired after the mid-70s why they do what they do. Then ask them how the university judges their performance as a professor. Pause, and pay careful attention to their answer. If it comes quickly, it will most likely be the prepared response they gave in their first (or second) job interview. Even if they tell you the truth and are on of the rare "true academics" in the world, their answer will no doubt remind you of something like this:

A priest and a cab driver find themselves face-to-face with the pearly gates and Saint Peter himself after the cab driver slams his car headlong into an oncoming wave of NYC garbage trucks (yeah, right). Pete looks to the cab driver and says, "Ah, we've been expecting you. Here are the keys to your one-off Lamborghini/Aston Martin hybrid sport SUV. It's gold, just as you'd always wanted. And here are the keys to your ocean-front home overlooking the Playmates-only nude beach. Do enjoy."

Saint Peter then turns to the priest and says, "Hello, Father. We've been expecting you as well. Too bad about that cab ride, but at least you're in a better, and much less smelly, place. So, here are the keys to your slightly rusty 1973 Ford Pinto and your studio apartment over Mr. Wang's Chinese Palace and Sushi bar."

The priest pauses as the cab driver squeals past in a flurry of excess and beach-babe-nudity. "Forgive me for asking," the priest says, "but could I inquire as to just how it is you distribute wealth here in heaven?"

"I'm glad you asked," replies Saint Peter. "It's all rather complex, but in a nutshell, we make use of the Harvard Business School's latest research on employee efficiency and performance-based advancement...or something like that...it's really all a bit beyond me. At any rate, it really just means that wealth is distributed in proportion to an employee's (in this case, person's) overall contribution to the success of the company and its profitability (in this case, Heaven and Special-Guy™ Recruitment). Now, we recognize that you've done a great many things in your life, and you'll be happy to know that you even managed to save a couple of souls along the way. That cab driver, however... Well, he's another story. Within 15 seconds of getting into his cab, everyone of his passengers was praying like there was no tomorrow."

It was probably funnier when my shrink told it just after calling me a "slob whose brain had slowed down." Funny guy...a real fucking crack-up.

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For the Love of (Being) an Unnamable Omni-being.

I was slow to post this one, but I've been slow to post, simpliciter. What's so important that I'd actually break from my derangement induced silence to (minimally) comment on? Simple: the potential for cool new ways to play god. I genuinely enjoy the idea of being able to fumble about with the code that underpins just what it means to be created in the image of an omni-being. Sure, our code, by virtue of being a cheap mimeograph copy, is finite and flawed to the point of being illegible, but that funky blue ink will still get you high. And besides, "playing god" (i.e. the nasty, horrible, blasphemous act of expanding human knowledge in the pursuit of truth) is precisely what we ought to do. That way we can all finally have something in common with the evangelicals: secular humanists will be able to play at being the very thing that fundamentalists of every vein have used for centuries as a means of dehumanization and projection. Well, I guess we could talk about our love of virtual violence.

Anyway, enough abject stereotyping; they's talk nnn'stuff real good for themselfs:

Go ahead...watch...you know you want to...


And a full documentary (50-odd minutes) from our friends across the pond:


What's that quote again? You know: the famous one that gets people all in an uproar and causes average Americans to spontaneously assert that they have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the political history of China and the other countries no red-blooded patriot should ever choose in a game of Risk. Seems like it was something about needing masses of opium to make sense of religion...

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