Open Thread

32 Comments

1. 

   Real History Lisa on March 12, 2006 at 2:45 pm

   Sandy Serrano is on my mind today. I was just listening to her session with Hank Hernandez of the LAPD. she had seen a girl wearing a polka dot dress run out the back door of the Ambassador shouting, “We shot him, we shot him.” Sandy asked “who did you shoot?” and she answered “We shot Kennedy” and kept running. This was the night/morning (it was just after midnight) when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

   Listening to the tape of Hernandez telling her she’s lying, that no girl said that, and hearing Sandy say over and over, but that’s what she SAID, is heartbreaking. When witnesses are treated like suspects something is horribly wrong.

   • 

     Alice on March 12, 2006 at 4:02 pm

     The History channel yesterday spent 2 hours celebrating the Kennedy celebrity in a show called “The Curse of Power.”  Followed by another two hours about proof there was no conspiracy – “The Kennedy Assassination Beyond Conspiracy.”  The feature film for the evening was Oliver Stone’s JFK, and they went all out to tell us that Stone and Garrison were pulling the wool over our eyes and rewriting history.  It was quite fascinating – somehow I was unconvinced.
     I love an artist who dares to be ridiculed for the sake of truth – even his own version of truth.

     About Bobby how does a man shot from the front show no blood on the front of his body, and a pool of blood underneath his head?

     • 

       Real History Lisa on March 12, 2006 at 4:24 pm

       I wonder if that’s the price the network had to pay for airing JFK, which packs the emotional whallop and ring of truth that none of the other shows can touch. Put side by side, the truth is always more compelling.

       I love the film JFK just as a film, too. Fabulously tense, a roller coaster ride for the mind and emotions. LOVE it.

     • 

       BooMan on March 12, 2006 at 4:31 pm

       how does a gun that is at least a foot if not several feet away from someone’s face, leave powder burns on the back of their neck?

       • 

         Real History Lisa on March 12, 2006 at 4:33 pm

         And how do four bullet holes in the doorframe simply not mean anything? The FBI photographed four additional bullet holes in the pantry beyond the 8 that the police had already accounted for, the maximum that Sirhan’s gun could hold?

2. 

   Mattes on March 12, 2006 at 4:02 pm

   my private email and why you did not respond. Even a “I don’t know” would do. I thought this was more of a community than Kos…I am surprised.

   • 

     BooMan on March 12, 2006 at 4:12 pm

     I apologize.  To answer your question, I do know, but am not at liberty to say.  I hope you get a response soon.  I would not give up after one attempt.

     • 

       Mattes on March 12, 2006 at 4:16 pm

       Thank-you for the response!

3. 

   alohaleezy on March 12, 2006 at 4:05 pm

   SusanHu is on my mind. I really miss her here! SUsan…if you are reading, know that you are loved and missed deeply.

   • 

     Grandma M on March 12, 2006 at 7:58 pm

     I too miss Susan Hu very much. What happened to her? I stayed away during the “religious wars” and haven’t seen Susan since I came back. Anyone know?

4. 

   DaveW on March 12, 2006 at 4:10 pm

   This weekend public radio’s This American Life ran the best treatment I’ve ever heard or seen of Bush’s trashing of prisoners’ rights in Guantanamo and around the world. Here’s the blurb:

   Don’t miss This American Life …. as Ira Glass and the crew present one of the most comprehensive explorations to date of the situation at the U.S. military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Weaving together interviews with Bush administration officials, lawyers representing the detainees, and former detainees themselves, TAL examines how Guantanamo represents a break with U.S. legal traditions, both military and civilian. And who, exactly, are the people being detained there? As reporter Jack Hitt puts it, “Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists or a camp full of mistakes?” Tune in for this groundbreaking episode.

   What makes this different is that it talks with former prisoners as well as Bush defenders. It features a quick review of the history of habeus corpus. Political junkie though I am, it taught me a lot about how this piece of the Magna Carta is the foundation of all the liberties we expect in a so-called free society. The show provokes outrage and heartbreak, but somehow manages to be funny at times. This is neither a rant or a dry scholarly treatise or a sentimental sob story. It brilliantly puts a human face on what Bush has wrought in the name of freedom and security.

   The show ran here over the weekend. It might still be on the schedule elsewhere. If not, you can buy a CD now at http://thislife.org/ or listen to it on the Net next week. If this could be played at every rightwing church and bar, America would experience a radical change for the better. If every Dem/Indy candidate played it for voters, the GOP would be finished. It’s that good. Don’t miss it. Spread it around.

   • 

     Arcturus on March 12, 2006 at 4:56 pm

     Thanks for the heads-up! It sounds interesting.

     I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating that the Patriot Act just passed includes provisions that chip into domestic habeas procedures, specifically that will limit the federal courts’ jurisdiction & force them to defer to State courts determination of “harmless error” except in the most egregious constitutional violations. In practice, it will limit even more than present the ability of prisoners to challenge errors & misdeeds in their trials & sentencings in Federal court.

   • 

     idredit on March 12, 2006 at 6:27 pm

     I noted in another thread last night. Have not seen it covered on this side of the Atlantic

     “Britain and US in talks over closing Guantanamo Bay.”

     The US has asked the British government for advice in preparation for closing down the notorious prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by sending hundreds of alleged al-Qa’ida fighters back to their home countries, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

     Senior Bush administration figures have asked British officials for advice on how to hand alleged terrorists over to regimes with a reputation for torture and extra-judicial killings, such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Pakistan.[..]

5. 

   Real History Lisa on March 12, 2006 at 4:26 pm

   Something else on my mind, that I decided to do something about. Please help me – many people don’t want to be “first” or “second” – but don’t mind being, say, “thirtieth”. So please be bold and just sign. You know you want to!

   

   • 

     alohaleezy on March 12, 2006 at 4:42 pm

     Done deal Lisa! Proud to sign your petition!

     • 

       Real History Lisa on March 12, 2006 at 6:19 pm

       Thanks, Alohaleezy. Are you in Hawaii? Escaping our frigid weather??

       • 

         alohaleezy on March 13, 2006 at 9:37 am

         Oh I wish Lisa! I got my handle years ago. I lived on Kauai from 1994 to 1992. I miss it every day but came here to be closer to my beautiful grandleezy.

         • 

           alohaleezy on March 13, 2006 at 9:49 am

           Uh…that should be until 2002. It’s early…ugh!

   • 

     Grandma M on March 12, 2006 at 8:05 pm

     Happy to sign on – Done!

6. 

   Arcturus on March 12, 2006 at 4:40 pm

   “Many prisoners were sent to Jena prison, which had been previously shut down due to the abusiveness of the staff there. I have no idea why they thought it was acceptable to reopen it with the same staff. People were beaten, an entire room of men was forced to strip and jump up and down and make sexual gestures towards one another. I cannot describe to you the terror that the young men we spoke to conveyed to us.”

   Not Abu Ghraib. Not Guantanomo. Another tale, another place.

   “They put us in a gym, about 200 of us, and they gave us three trash bags, two for defecation and one for urination. That was all we had for 200 people for two days.”

   Those are the words of “Benny Hitchens, another former inmate, [who] was imprisoned for unpaid parking tickets.”

   These are the horror tales of “detainees” when Katrina hit:

   Ursula Price, a staff investigator for the indigent defense organization A Fighting Chance, has met with several thousand hurricane survivors who were imprisoned at the time of the hurricane, and her stories chill me “I grew up in small town Mississippi,” she tells me. “We had the Klan marching down our main street. But still, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

   Safe Streets, Strong Communities, a New Orleans-based criminal justice reform coalition that Price also works with, has just released a report based on more than a hundred recent interviews with prisoners who have been locked up since pre-Katrina and are currently spread across thirteen prisons and hundreds of miles. They found the average number of days people had been locked up without a trial was 385 days. One person had been locked up for 1,289 days. None of them have been convicted of any crime.

   “I’ve been working in the system for the while, I do capital cases and I’ve seen the worst that the criminal justice system has to offer,” Price told me. “But even I am shocked that there has been so much disregard for the value of these peoples lives, especially people who have not been proved to have done anything wrong.” As lawyers, advocates, and former prisoners stressed to me in interviews over the last couple of weeks, arrest is not the same as conviction.   {snip}

   “We heard boats leaving, and one of the guys said ‘hey man, all the deputies gone,’ Nick relates. “We took it upon ourselves to try to survive. They left us in the gym for two days with nothing. Some of those guys stayed in a cell for or five days. People were hollering, ‘get me out, I don’t want to drown, I don’t want to die,’ we were locked in with no ventilation, no water, nothing to eat. Its just the grace of god that a lot of us survived.”    

   Benny Flowers, a friend of Nick’s from the same Central City neighborhood, was on a work release program, and locked in a different building in the sprawling OPP complex. In his building there were, by his count, about 30 incarcerated youth, some as young as 14 years old. “I don’t know why they left the children like that. Locked up, no food, no water. Why would you do that? They couldn’t swim, most of them were scared to get into the water. We were on work release, so we didn’t have much time left. We weren’t trying to escape, we weren’t worried about ourselves, we were worried about the children. The guards abandoned us, so we had to do it for ourselves. We made sure everyone was secured and taken care of. The deputies didn’t do nothing. It was inmates taking care of inmates, old inmates taking care of young inmates. We had to do it for ourselves.”   {snip}

   State Department of Corrections officers eventually brought them, and thousands of other inmates, to Hunts Prison, in rural Louisiana, where evacuees were kept in a field, day and night, with no shelter and little or no food and water. “They didn’t do us no kind of justice,” Flowers told me. “We woke up early in the morning with the dew all over us, then in the afternoon we were burning up in the summer sun. There were about 5,000 of us in three yards.”

   Nick was taken from Hunts prison to Oakdale prison. “At Oakdale they had us on lockdown 23 hours, on Friday and Saturday it was 24 hours. We hadn’t even been convicted yet. Why did we have to be treated bad? Twenty-three and one ain’t nothing nice, especially when you aint been convicted of a crime yet. But here in New Orleans you’re guilty ’til you’re proven innocent. Its just the opposite of how its supposed to be.”     {snip}

   “We have a system that was broken before Katrina,” Price tells me, “that was then torn apart, and is waiting to be rebuilt. Four thousand people are still in prison, waiting for this to be repaired. There’s a young man, I speak to his mother every day, who has been in the hole since the storm, and is being abused daily. This boy is 19 years old, and not very big, and he has no lawyer. His mother doesn’t know what to do, and without her son having council, I don’t know what to tell her.”

   • 

     Arcturus on March 12, 2006 at 4:44 pm

     link

   • 

     DuctapeFatwa on March 12, 2006 at 5:22 pm

     I think. There may be people who do not know about this, nor the forced labor, and from the article it appears that some of these people are being told that “an arrest is not the same as a conviction.”

     That is simply not the case in the US. Somebody may have a piece of paper that says all kinds of things, but these kidnap victims, just like the others being tortured in various US facilities around the globe, live in a more reality based situation, where pieces of paper are not really relevant.

     • 

       Arcturus on March 12, 2006 at 7:51 pm

       BE my guest! run with it . . .

       (I’ve no proprietory interest 🙂

       & am about to spend some time with my wife)

       • 

         DuctapeFatwa on March 12, 2006 at 8:13 pm

         or the next day… I have written so many words lately that my fingers are tired.

   • 

     sjct on March 12, 2006 at 5:52 pm

     If you know anything about the US criminal injustice system, you know for a fact that almost everyone arrested is assumed to be guilty and treated like a piece of crap. Speedy trial, ha! By the time most people see a judge for sentencing many have already done more time for their crime than the mandatory requires. When someone has been in a county jail for 9 months and they’re offered a plea bargain for time served, they often take it whether they’re innocent or not. And if you dare to hold out for a trial, well, the cops will just lie and fake evidence to convict you for being uppity.

     The exceptions to these generalities are people who can afford smart lawyers.

7. 

   Militarytracy on March 12, 2006 at 4:55 pm

   I changed flesh to something called “muslin”.  Mucho better……now I’m pouncing my way to Tuscany.  I keep telling myself it is worth it……I keep looking at the one wall that is done and it is worth it…….but God so much pouncing….and those cheater sponge rollers just do not do the same job as hand done pounce.  I guess my break is over and it is back to pouncing! No runs no drips no skips just Pounce Pounce Pounce.  Where’s Tigger when you need him?

   • 

     sjct on March 12, 2006 at 5:58 pm

     work well, too. Just smush em up into a wrinkly mass and dab, dab, dab to remove paint where you don’t want it. Those sponge rollers are a total rip-off. The absolute best for applying a dappled antique finish are sea sponges… big, natural ones.

     • 

       CabinGirl on March 12, 2006 at 6:42 pm

       I used saran wrap to apply the paint the last time I did something like that.

       Those natural sponges are the best, though.

       • 

         sjct on March 12, 2006 at 7:16 pm

         is they’re free! Last time I did a wall like that, I didn’t save up enough of them so I ran up to the grocery store and they gave me massive stack of them for nothing.

         I did a cool thing with saran once: I put on a light base coat, rolled on a darker top coat, laid saran as smooth as I could — which wasn’t very smooth at all, of course, since it sticks to itself — and then peeled it off. It left this water-marked effect, just the barest trace of the darker color in a wrinkly web.

         • 

           CabinGirl on March 12, 2006 at 7:23 pm

           That sounds interesting.  I used the saran to do marbling on a wooden high chair for the boys when they were babies; I just did the seat, tray, and footrest to look like green marble, and stained the rest of the chair.

8. 

   idredit on March 12, 2006 at 6:34 pm

   Big Banks are reported fearing minimum credit card payments

   They may suffer….reduced revenues.

    Pass me that box of facial tissue, I need to mop up a tear or two.

9. 

   keepinon on March 12, 2006 at 7:16 pm

   Hello and best wishes to Susan Hu.