Fear of blow holes, the educated, jellyfish and bees.

Being afraid of education, of the educated is a sign that what you are comfortable with is wrong.

Mysterious Siberian blow holes.

How about shopping for a new body when yours wears out?

Pork production, and the need of another book like The Jungle.

No word for blue until the modern times.

The warming of the oceans means more jellyfish.

Viking burial site has Islamic coins.

Recycling all types of plastic just became harder because China has cut back.

Chicago black site.

Bees in danger world wide.  (Thanks for the article link, Steve!)

Discussion on a college campus about the 'problem of whiteness' exposes the very problem as a white freakout occurs.

When good people see police brutality in action and respond accordingly.

What does the collapse of Libya mean to the rest of the world?

Want to address this, Madam Speaker?

Lambert of CorrenteWire:

Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was “off the table.” Anybody for Barney Frank as the new speaker? Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique[ly illegal and unconstitutional?] CIA program designed to wring [torture] vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the Bipartisan group, which included future-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites [gulags] and the harsh techniques [torture] interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill [not to mention the US military**]. But on that day, no objections were raised.

Update 12/10: What Digby said.

The ultimate bully

I'm gonna hit you where it don't show....

Torture isn't torture if it leaves no marks says the Bush administration:

On July 20, George W. Bush issued an executive order authorizing the CIA to use "enhanced" techniques (as the president likes to call them) in its terror interrogation program—including in the CIA's secret prisons, known internationally as "black sites."

CIA director Michael Hayden assures us that "now our mission and authorities [to conduct that mission] are clearly defined." Adds national intelligence director Michael McConnell: "We now have a clear legal basis" for the CIA's crucial national-security responsibilities.

[snip]

But McConnell also doesn't want the tenderhearted among us to fear that the world will regard our nation as monstrous for permitting the use of these methods. When Associated Press reporter Ben Feller asked him whether the American people would be upset if the enemy used these secret interrogation methods on American citizens, McConnell answered:

"I would not want a U.S. citizen to go through the process. But it is not torture, and there would be no permanent damage to that citizen."

In other words, so long as no marks are left on a CIA prisoner, interrogators are left to their time-tested cruelties. However, Elaine Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, makes a very pertinent point: "Administration lawyers may try to convince [CIA] interrogators that the secret interrogation techniques authorized by the president are lawful because they cause no 'permanent damage.' But interrogators shouldn't buy it."

She goes on to list certain long-practiced (and subsequently leaked) interrogation techniques that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the CIA and the president have continually insisted are not torture, or that could not be considered cruel and inhuman. There is every reason to believe that the new presidential executive order includes their use.

Accordingly, Massimino emphasizes: "Stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory bombardment, mock-drowning, and other such abuses can cause serious physical and mental pain. They need not inflict permanent damage in order to violate the law and potentially result in very serious criminal sanctions." Sanctions, that is, that could be directed at administration officials all the way up the chain of command.

The United States tortures, thanks to the Neocons' bloodlust for world domination.



Update: Found where I'd picked this link up: Ripley of Zen Cabin.

Massive and systematic violations of human rights

Done by us to others in the name of liberty, freedom, and the spreading of democracy. The Bush administration has ruined the name of all that is good in the United States.

The special investigator concentrates essentially on two black sites in Poland and Romania. Discussing the Polish secret prison Stare Kiejkutz, Marty told the British TV station Channel Four: "The Polish setup was devoted to those people considered to be the most important terrorists, the ring leaders of the movement, who had the most responsibility. They were the most wanted men."

These so-called "high value detainees" (HVD) included the main strategist of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, high-ranking al-Qaida member Abu Zubaydah, and alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh.

Marty lists eight flights during the period between 2003 and 2005 alone that he and his assistants attribute to the CIA'S HVD program. Most of the planes came from Kabul. The black site at Mihail Kogalniceanu in Romania was in use between 2003 and 2005 and used for lower-ranking HVDs, according to the report.

[snip]

Marty's final report says records show that there were 1,245 proven CIA flights between 2002 and 2005, although it seems that only some of them were prisoner transfers.

The "series of illegal acts" carried out by the CIA was either tolerated or supported by the member countries of the Council of Europe, according to Marty. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provided the necessary international backing through resolutions passed on Oct. 4, 2001 -- which allowed what Marty describes as "blank check" overflight permits, for example. Marty suggests that secret protocols, to which he does not have access, record additional concessions the Europeans made to the United States. During the negotiations over the secret prison in Romania, for example, the US promised Bucharest its support for the Eastern European's country application for full NATO membership, the report alleges.

US President George W. Bush officially acknowledged the existence of a classified CIA program for the seizure, arrest and interrogation of terror suspects on non-US territory only last September, announcing at the same time that the measure would be discontinued following the transfer of 14 suspects to Guantánamo.

Spencer Ackerman of TPM Muckraker quotes the report:

Clothes were cut up and torn off; many detainees were then kept naked for several weeks. ...

At one point in 2004, eight persons were being kept together at one CIA facility in Europe, but were administered according to a strict regime of isolation. Contact between them through sight or sound was forbidden... and prevented unless it was expressly decided to create limited conditions where they could see or come into contact with one another because it would serve (the CIA's) intelligence-gathering objectives to allow it. ...

The air in many cells emanated from a ventilation hole in the ceiling, which was often controlled to produce extremes of temperature: sometimes so hot that one would gasp for breath, sometimes freezing cold.

Many detainees described air conditioning for deliberate discomfort.

Detainees were exposed at times to over-heating in the cell; at other times drafts of freezing breeze.

Detainees never experienced natural light or natural darkness, although most were blindfolded many times so they could see nothing....

There was a shackling ring in the wall of the cell, about half a metre up off the floor. Detainees' hands and feet were clamped in handcuffs and leg irons. Bodies were regularly forced into contorted shapes and chained to this ring for long, painful periods.

And we're fighting to spread these freedoms to countries around the world even if they don't want them. Makes you feel proud all over, don't it?