"The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide,..." "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."
"The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," she said. " Guantánamo evokes memories of Soviet repression."
"...Below you find a map of Cuba, with the exact location of the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba's southeastern corner. Cuba is an island with a surface of 110,860 sq km (sorry, I always have troubles with kloms/miles converting), or slightly smaller than Pennsylvania. The Naval Base comprises a small surface of some 45 square miles. The actual detention center consists of three camps, Delta, Iguana and X-Ray, which until now have received 775 detainees, of which as of today approximately 340 have been released (a couple of tens of them immediately returning to their jihad activities and ambushing an killing US and coalition troops) and a further 110 labeled "ready for release". That leaves around 325 inmates, of which some 70 will ultimately face trial, which means that it is only the status of the remaining 250 which remains unclear, read, they don't know how long they will be held. Generally, the highest number of detainees present at one time was around 500. For those sobbing and weeping over this horrendous fact I'd like to point out that German and Japanese POW's also didn't know how long they'd be held. However, public outrage over Obersturmbannfuehrer's Schweinkopf's sad fate shoveling horse shit in the desert of Nevada was less then because people realized a war was going on.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand below is a map of the former Soviet Union, surface 22 million kilometers or around 200 times Cuba, and the red specks represent the known prisoner complexes in the USSR. Keep in mind that one speck does not necessarily means one camp. The Mother of all Penal Networks would ultimately count 476 camps. The most notorious area of them all - at least the one known to the general public - was in Kolyma, in the desolate wastes of eastern Siberia. There, on a surface four times the size of France, around 100 camps were set up. The highest number of detainees held at one time is estimated at 5,000,000, or 10,000 times as many as in the "gulag of our times" - Americans are schoolboys. This peak was reached during the reign of Stalin, who actually used the Gulag system not only to get rid of political opponents but also as a means of keeping the populace in a permanent state of terror, a bit like George Bush is doing now.
AMERICA QUIET ON THE EXECUTION OF AFGHAN CHRISTIAN SAID MUSA.
February 18, 2011 6:00 A.M. By Paul Marshall
"A terrible drama is unfolding in Afghanistan: There are reports that Said Musa, whose situation I described at Christmas, will soon be executed for the ‘crime’ of choosing to become a Christian. (For background, see here.)
Musa was one of about 25 Christians arrested on May 31, 2010, after a May 27 Noorin TV program showed video of a worship service held by indigenous Afghan Christians; he was arrested as he attempted to seek asylum at the German embassy. He converted to Christianity eight years ago, is the father of six young children, had a leg amputated after he stepped on a landmine while serving in the Afghan Army, and now has a prosthetic leg. His oldest child is eight and one is disabled (she cannot speak). He worked for the Red Cross/Red Crescent as an adviser to other amputees.He was forced to appear before a judge without any legal counsel and without knowledge of the charges against him. “Nobody [wanted to be my] defender before the court. When I said ‘I am a Christian man,’ he [a potential lawyer] immediately spat on me and abused me and mocked me. . . . I am alone between 400 [people with] terrible values in the jail, like a sheep.” He has been beaten, mocked, and subjected to sleep deprivation and sexual abuse while in prison. No Afghan lawyer will defend him and authorities denied him access to a foreign lawyer.
Any and every human being who is imprisoned, abused, or tortured for the free and peaceful expression of their faith deserves our support, but Musa is also a remarkable person and Christian. In a letter smuggled to the West, he says, “The authority and prisoners in jail did many bad behaviour with me about my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. For example, they did sexual things with me, beat me by wood, by hands, by legs, put some things on my head.”
He added a thing much more important to him, that they “mocked me ‘he’s Jesus Christ,’ spat on me, nobody let me for sleep night and day. . . . Please, please, for the sake of Lord Jesus Christ help me.” (View the full letter here)
He has not, in fact, even appealed to be released, only to be transferred to another prison. He has also stated that he is willing to give his life for his faith. “Please, please you should transfer me from this jail to a jail that supervises the believers. . . . I also agree . . . to sacrifice my life in public [where] I will tell [about my] faith in Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, [so] other believers will take courage and be strong in their faith.”
Newspapers in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe have reported the story, but with, the exception of the Wall Street Journal and, of course, NRO, American outlets have not found it worthy of attention. The Journal reports that “Afghan officials have been unapologetic: ‘The sentence for a convert is death and there is no exception,’ said Jamal Khan, chief of staff at the Ministry of Justice. ‘They must be sentenced to death to serve as a lesson for others.’”
The U.S. government — reportedly including Secretary of State Clinton — and other governments have pushed for his release, but to no avail.
But the president has been silent, even as we fight a war that has among its goals the creation of a government that conforms to international human-rights standards.
An American president certainly needs to guard and shepherd his political capital, and should not speak out about every prisoner. But Musa himself has appealed to “President Brother Obama” to rescue him from his current jail. And when an obscure and aberrant Florida pastor, Terry Jones, threatened to burn a Koran, not only President Obama but much of his cabinet, as well as General Petraeus, weighed in on the matter.
If the actions of a Florida pastor who threatened to destroy a book holy to Muslims deserved public and presidential attention, then the actions of the Afghan government, ostensibly a ‘democratic’ ally, to destroy something holy to Christians, a human being made in the image of God, also deserve public and presidential attention."
The insane cost of green appeasement:
- Successive federal governments have spent more than $5.5 billion over the past decade on climate change programs that are delivering only small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at unusually high costs for taxpayers and the economy.
It’s all been for exactly nothing. The precise cost of the 17 programs analysed is $5.62 billion, which equals the pre-tax average annual wages of nearly 90,000 Australians – every cent of it blown to hell.
• Greenoids and environmentalons who complain about public funding of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix should consider that, at just $50 million per year, the amount spent on green dreams would be enough to secure the event until 2123 – when, on current trends, the race will feature gravity-powered nerf karts.
• Australia’s great green waste is more than double the current insurance bill from the massive Queensland floods.
• It’s enough to pay Tim Flannery’s tax evangelism salary until he is more than 31,000 years old, by which time one or two of his predictions may have come true.
• Hand those billions over to Sydney city council and they’d be able to build 14,800 kilometres of cycle lanes for nobody to use.
• Speaking of wasted money, $5.62 billion would fund the entire ABC for nearly seven years. Or seven and a half years once Phillip Adams retires.
• With that kind of cash, the government could put boaties in hotels for 198 years.
Hilariously, green types are using universal past failures to justify the introduction of a carbon tax:
Andrew Macintosh, the associate director of the Australian National University’s centre for climate law and policy, said: ‘’Market-based measures like a carbon price will be far more effective than this sort of scatter-gun approach.’’
Then again, wouldn’t anything be more effective? So far we’re $5.62 billion for zero. Let’s try putting howler monkeys in an industrial centrifuge, or naming our children after shapes. Maybe interfaith staring contests will fix things. Hey, if you’re really crazy, we could always put a tax on fumes that plants eat.
UPDATE. Terry McCrann:
The “Julia” carbon tax will have to raise at least $10 billion a year and continually increasing. Every year. Forever.
Progress!
"Three major phenomena are depriving Australia of its rainfall..."
"The worst case scenario for Sydney is that the climate that's existed for the last seven years continues for another two years... In that case, Sydney will be facing extreme difficulties with water."
"Large cities are the most vulnerable of all structures to water deficit because you've got 4 million people who need water there just for everyday survival."
"If you think there's only a 10 per cent chance that this rainfall deficit's going to continue for another few years, you'd be pulling out all stops to preserve water. Because every litre you use now on your car, or your garden or whatever else, you might want to drink in a year's time."
SWITZERLAND REJECTS TIGHTER GUN CONTROLS
"Swiss voters have rejected proposed tighter controls on gun ownership, final results show. Twenty of the 26 cantons and 56.3% of voters rejected the plan, meaning the current system allowing army-issue weapons to be kept at home will remain.
Supporters of the tighter curbs wanted to have weapons kept in armouries and were demanding stricter checks on gun owners. Opponents said the move would have undermined trust in the army.
For the proposal to succeed, it required the support of the majority of both citizens and cantons. Geneva and Basel both bucked the trend by approving it, according to the Swissinfo website. But German- and Italian-speaking cantons outvoted the plan's supporters in the French-speaking west.
'Growing awareness'
The result is a blow to gun-control groups in Switzerland, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva reports, but supporters of the initiative said they had at least started a debate.
"We achieved a great deal by launching the initiative... There is a growing awareness of the risks of firearms," leading women's organisation Alliance F said in a statement quoted by Swissinfo."
"In Switzerland, some 1,300 people commit suicide yearly; in a quarter of the cases a firearm is used, a staggering figure for Europe".
"An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject."
"The Swiss are the most free and the most armed people of Europe."
"Former President George W. Bush's daughter Barbara is the latest relative of a prominent Republican to support gay marriage.
In May, her mother, Laura Bush, gave this answer to a question about gay marriage: "When couples are committed to each other and love each other, that they ought to have, I think, the same sort of rights that everyone has."
John McCain's daughter, Meghan, supports gay marriage, though her father's against it, and the lesbian daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney supports it too. Gay rights leaders have seized on the generational split as a sign that support for same-sex marriage can come from either party.
Breaking ranks with her father, Barbara Bush taped a short video supporting the push to legalize gay marriage in New York.
"I am Barbara Bush, and I am a New Yorker for marriage equality," the 29-year-old Manhattan resident says in the video on the Human Rights Campaign website. "New York is about fairness and equality. And everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love. Join us."
As president, her father supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage
A Yale graduate, Barbara Bush has started a global health nonprofit group and rarely speaks on public issues. Friends tell The New York Times she was surrounded by gay students at Yale and in the New York City design world in which she worked..."
LIEGE: PLANS FOR EUROPEAN HALAL HUB AT AIRPORT.
"The management of Liège Airport (Belgium) is planning to develop a European hub at the airport, dedicated to processing halal foods. The project is supported by the Walloon Region and the Walloon agency for exports and foreign investments (AWEX), La Libre Belgique reported Saturday.
The move is meant to diversify the activities of the Liège Airport partnership. A mission led by Jean-Claude Marcourt, the Walloon minister of Economy and Foreign Affairs, at the end of February or beginning of March to Asia, will clarify the project."
"OBAMA LOVES REAGAN"
The managing editor at TIME Magazine, Richard Stengel, attempts to explain their latest cover; an image of Reagan with his arm around Obama:
"The cover is Why Obama Loves Reagan. It's a Photoshopped image of the two men together. They never actually met, but I'd like to think they'd have a good time if they were sitting down at the White House together and it's basically how Obama from even the 1980s started looking at Reagan as a transformational politician - not in terms of substance, but in terms of style with someone he would model himself after, and that has happened over the last 20 years.
GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK! DEPARTMENT
Obama HATED Reagan - he even wrote about it in his book Dreams From My Father:
"When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds . . ."
Further on, Obama criticizes Reagan for "verbal legerdemain"; accusing Reagan of duplicity in the gap between his optimistic words and the actions of his administration.
This attempt by the Left to repackage Obama as the new Reagan strains the imagination; one of Obama's stated reasons for wanting power was to do away with what Reagan had accomplished. Obama has nothing in common with Ronald Reagan. If Reagan were alive today watching all this, he'd puke at what's being done to his legacy and to the great work he did as President.
Everybody knows that liberals all hate Reagan, they all despise Reagan, to a man. A singular, constant objective of the Left always has been to revise Reagan history; during Reagan's time in office they berated his economic policy - trickle-down; "a rising tide lifts all boats" - their catch phrase for it was 'Voodoo Economics'. Never mind that his policies actually worked, and led to a twenty-eight year economic boom, unparalleled in the history of the entire world.
Reagan fought the Communists when the rest of the world had resigned itself to turning their collective back to the Red Threat, drop trousers, bend over and grab the ankles. He alerted on the arm shipments into the Western Hemisphere from Communist sources, and in Grenada and Nicaragua he did something about it. What did the Democrats do to admire and support this Cold Warrior? They attempted to destroy him for domestic political gain - Iran-Contra - and a lot of good, decent mens' careers were ruined in the process..."
"The only good conservative is a dead conservative.
That, in a nutshell, describes the age-old tradition of liberals suddenly discovering that once-reviled conservatives were OK after all. It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes and moperers.
Over the last decade or so, as the giants of the founding generation of modern American conservatism have died, each has been rehabilitated into a gentleman-statesman of a bygone era of conservative decency and open-mindedness.
Barry Goldwater was the first. A few years ago his liberal granddaughter produced a documentary in which nearly all of the testimonials were from prominent liberals like Hillary Clinton and James Carville. Almost overnight, the man whom LBJ cast as a hate-filled demagogue who would condemn the world to nuclear war became an avuncular and sage grandfather type. Down the memory hole went one of the most despicable campaigns of political demonization in American history. Even Sarah Palin hasn't been subjected to an ad in the New York Times signed by more than 1,000 psychiatrists claiming she's too crazy to be president (though I don't want to give anybody any ideas).
Then there was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, the magazine I call home. For more than four decades, Buckley was subjected to condemnation for his alleged extremism. Jack Paar (the Johnny Carson/Jay Leno of his day for you youngsters) was among the first of many to try to paint Buckley as a Nazi. Now, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times book review section, who is writing a biography of Buckley, insists that Bill's life mission was to make liberalism better.
But it's Ronald Reagan who really stands out. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama's State of the Union address as "Reaganesque." Time magazine recently featured the cover story "Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan." Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn't run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today's Republican Party.
....
On the other hand, what is not welcome is an almost Soviet airbrushing of the past to serve liberalism's current agenda. For starters, if liberals are going to celebrate Reagan, they might try to account for the fact that they fought his every move, alternating between derision and slander in the process. As Steven Hayward, author of the two-volume history "The Age of Reagan," asks in the current National Review, "Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the 'evil empire' speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative?" Hayward notes that historian Henry Steele Commager said the "evil empire" speech "was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all."
....
While the encomiums to Reagan & Co. are welcome, the reality is that very little has changed. As we saw in the wake of the Tucson shootings, so much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present. It's an old game. For instance, in 1980, quirky New Republic writer Henry Fairlie wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he lamented the rise of Reagan, "the most radical activist of them all." The title of his essay: "If Reagan Only Were Another Coolidge ..."
Even then, the only good conservative was a dead conservative."
