"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jan 11, 2011

Getting it right by getting it wrong

"'It should be an outrage, where we kill more people in America on a daily basis, on a yearly basis than most of the countries combined . . . and this is unacceptable," Daley said, adding that America is a 'killing machine' because of guns." 

Source. 

***

"A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks shows that the US military covered up the killing of dozens of civilians during a cruise missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009.

The secret cable from January 2010 corroborated images released earlier this year by Amnesty International, implicating the US in the use of cluster bombs. The cable was sent by Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh to US General David Petraeus, saying his government would 'continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours'...

...'The cable appears to confirm Amnesty International's finding that the Abyan strike was carried out by the US military, not Yemeni government forces,' Philip Luther, a Deputy Director for Amnesty International, said.

On December 17, 2009, an alleged al-Qaeda training camp in Abyan was hit by a cruise missile, killing 41 local residents, including 14 women, 21 children, and 14 alleged al-Qaeda members."

Source. 

"CHICAGO, Nov. 14 — Chicago police officers are the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and the Police Department is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seriously than the national norm, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported Wednesday."

Source.


"Robin Petrovic, a college English teacher, was out dancing at a popular Chicago nightclub, the 'Funky Buddha Lounge,' when she got into an altercation with the bouncer and called police for help.

But according to Petrovic, the officer who showed up -- James Chevas, a 12-year veteran -- turned on her when she refused to sign a blank incident report and tried to write down his badge number.

'He picked me up and threw me face down into the ground. And since my hands were handcuffed behind my back, I couldn't break my fall at all, so I just landed on my face,' she told CNN...

...Between 2002 and 2004, for example, more than 10,000 complaints -- many of them involving brutality and assault -- were filed against Chicago police officers.

Yet only 18 of them resulted in any meaningful disciplinary action, according to Craig Futterman, a lawyer who uncovered these statistics while researching a client's claim.

Futterman's client, Diane Bond, sued the city of Chicago and a handful of officers, accusing them of beating and sexually abusing her.

'[The officer] took me in the bathroom, locked the door, had me unfasten my bra, then he had me shake my bra, he had me pull my pants down stick my hand in my panties and do like this while he looked on,' Bond said."

Source.

1 comment:

Randal Graves said...

Oh, I'm sure she was asking for it.