Just my opinion - Demonization of alleged terrorist by the Atlanta Journal Constitution

When I was at Georgia Tech in the late 50s, the indoor sport in the dormitory was terrorizing the Resident or the other students with actual explosives, set off using a time-delay fuse made from a cigarette. The "Cherry Bomb" was popular, and the silver cylinder called, if I remember right, an "M4". A stupid business - someone could have been badly injured. One student was cut by cherry-bomb fragments. Fortunately, the fad faded without any serious damage. Looking back 50 years, I find it hard to believe I was such a nitwit - we did not even have the excuse of a political motive. But our crime was far more real than anything Ahmed is said to have done - these were real explosives, and they were set off with malice aforethought. Not much malice it's true - the only motive was the fun of stirring things up - but I suppose there were students who found the noise annoying. So I am puzzled as to why the AJC, after a year or two of covering the Ahmed story with a stock photo, suddenly on Sunday, Jan.20 2008, decided to depict him as a pulp-magazine villain using a bad caricature.

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Just my opinion - Secret military tribunals

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Under which I can only conclude that any appointed or elected official or military officer, having sworn to uphold the Constitution, and then instigating or participating in "secret military tribunals" is guilty of treason.

Not only have the 6th-Amendment rights of the prisoners at Guantanamo been illegally abrogated - they are tortured as well. This appalling image was scanned from the Dec.3 1903 issue of a British newspaper, The Guardian:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 18, 2003
2:04 PM
CONTACT: Center for Constitutional Rights
David Lerner 212/260-5000
Nancy Chang 212/614-6420

DOJ Inspector General Report Confirms Abuses of Arab and Muslims Detained by INS after 9-11 - Center for Constitutional Rights Applauds DOJ Office of Inspector General Report for Exposing Abuse of 9-11 INS Detainees at Brooklyn Detention Center

NEW YORK - December 18 - Today, the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Justice has issued a report that provides a wealth of details substantiating allegations made by the Center for Constitutional Rights in a lawsuit filed in April 2002. The suit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, is pending in the Brooklyn federal court, and was brought on behalf of a class of Arab and Muslim from South Asian and Middle Eastern countries with no ties to terrorism who were arrested in the wake of 9-11 by the INS on immigration charges – some as minor as overstaying one’s visa for a few days – and held without justification for months on end in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. None of these detainees were arrested on terrorism charges.

The IG reviewed hundreds of videotapes, many of which MDC officials had failed to provide in response to earlier requests, and he interviewed MDC officials, Bureau of Prison officials, and other federal officials. His report, which supplements an earlier report issued this summer, documents an ugly course of systematic brutality and verbal abuse directed against the 9-11 detainees by MDC officers and supervisors. Detainees reported that they were slammed against an American flag T-shirt that was hung on the wall and that it was bloodied. In addition, the report reveals that MDC corrections officers, including some supervisors:

· Slammed detainees into walls

· Bent and twisted the hands of detainees, wrists and fingers

· Lifted restrained detainees off the ground by their arms

· Stepped on their leg restraint chains

· Left several detainees cuffed and shackled for seven hours in a cell

· Strip-searched detainees without any correctional justification

The IG also reported that conversations between detainees and their attorneys were recorded and videotaped from September to February 2002. He concluded that audio-taping these attorney visits violated the law and interfered with the detainees’ effective access to legal counsel.

Nancy Chang, Senior Litigation Attorney for Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the attorneys litigating the Turkmen suit, stated that “All Americans should be grateful to the Inspector General for his tenacity in uncovering evidence that had previously been withheld from him concerning the horrific treatment of Muslim and Arab detainees by MDC prison officials following September 11. These detainees were targeted based on their religion and ethnicity alone, and the emotionally charged atmosphere following the tragedy of September 11 cannot serve as an excuse for this brutality.

IMPEACH GEORGE BUSH!
The U.S. has employed torture, including torture to death, rape and sexual assault and humiliation, as approved and ordered policy from Afghanistan and Guantanamo to Iraq, inflicted on thousands of prisoners, many, if not most, without any evidence of wrongful conduct. An admitted 37 human beings have been murdered while being held in captivity by the United States under these conditions. We know not how many more. All the mounting evidence makes clear that this program of torture and death is not aberrational conduct of rogue or undisciplined soldiers but is rather the policy adopted at the highest levels of the Bush/Rumsfeld chain of command. All this in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the laws of all nations and common human decency.

Now we learn that King George has arrogated to himself - in direct violation against the constitutional prohibition of illegal searches - the power to spy on anyone, anywhere. How long will it be before such procedures are used to attack his political opponents? If these warrantless searches find no ammunition, what will keep his minions from inventing something?

With the approval of Congress and no outcry from corporate media, the Military Commissions Act (MCA), signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, ushers in military tribunal law for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media have given false comfort that we, as American citizens, will not be the victims of the draconian measures legalized by this Act — such as military roundups, torture, life-long detention without court trial— articles below disclose verbiage in the MCA that allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA did away with habeas corpus rights for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an “enemy of the state.” The judgment on whom is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely at the discretion of President Bush. “And once that happens,” says Thom Hartmann, “you no longer have the right to challenge your detention. You don’t have the right to a lawyer, or to a trial, or to a jury. You don’t have the right to talk to anybody; you have no rights whatsoever. That’s what no habeas corpus means. They can put you in prison and torture you for the rest of your life.”

As to the effort by Rep. Doug Ose (R-Calif.) to increase the FCC's infamous seven dirty words to eight (by doubling up on versions of "asshole").

No grammatical novice, Ose wants to ban noun forms as well as "verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms" of the words too terrible to speak. Ose is pissed--excuse me, peeved--that U2 frontman Bono got away with saying "fucking" during the Golden Globes Award broadcast a while back.

Noted First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere is quoted in story saying, "There's no conceivable way that an approach like that could survive constitutional review....This is one of the reasons why radios and televisions have on-off switches."

Ose's bill, H.R. 3687, is filled with the dirty language he wants to ban from the airwaves. You can search for it here. Here's the text in full:
To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting `(a)' before `Whoever'; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

`(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

Didn't Ose take an oath to uphold the Constitution? Has he read the 1st Amendment?