52 Things You’ll Only See In America
A great photo collection. See them all here.
And hey, I’m sensing a topic here. What about 52 things you’ll only see in the Netherlands? Suggestions and pictures welcome in the comments.
Archive for April 11th, 2011
Prominent US Legal Scholars Condemn Inhumane Treatment Of Bradley Manning
Obama’s shame is getting bigger and bigger. Yesterday, 250 of America’s most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning – the 23-year old soldier who was the original whistleblower to WikiLeaks. The signatories include Laurence Tribe of Harvard University, a foremost authority on US constitutional law, former professor of Obama, and backer of his 2008 campaign.
As featured extensively on the Internet (including this blog, see here, here, here and here) and lately also in the mainstream media, Manning is treated in ways that are cruel and inhumane, if not amounting to torture. He is permanently stripped of clothes during the night and public morning inspection; solitarily confined for 23 hours a day; permanently shackled during his one hour of outside-cell time; and under constant surveillance, even though he is not suicidal.
Manning’s treatment, clearly unlawful and unconstitutional, seems very much meant to intimidate future whistleblowers. All this is occurring under the watchful eye of Barack Obama. So no wonder the American legal establishment is (finally) starting to protest – including regarding the constitutionality of Manning’s treatment. Read the full letter here.
An excerpt:
Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.
(…)
The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, “the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”
Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. But he asserts that his administrative reports consistently describe him as a well-behaved prisoner who does not fit the requirements for Maximum Security detention.
(…)
The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.
If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is no excuse for his degrading and inhumane pretrial punishment. As the State Department’s P.J. Crowley put it recently, they are “counterproductive and stupid.” And yet Crowley has now been forced to resign for speaking the plain truth.
The Wikileaks disclosures have touched every corner of the world. Now the whole world watches America and observes what it does, not what it says.
President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions—and immediately end those that cannot withstand the light of day.
Some signatories: Brucke Ackerman, Jack Balkin, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Alexander M. Capron, Norman Dorsen, Michael W. Doyle, Randall Kennedy, Mitchell Lasser, Sanford Levinson, David Luban, Frank I. Michelman, Robert B. Reich, Kermit Roosevelt, Kim Scheppele, Alec Stone Sweet, Laurence H. Tribe, and more than 250 others. Check the full list here.
For more about this, read Glenn Greenwald. Also check the Bradley Manning Support Network. You can donate to Bradley Manning’s legal defence fund here.
Thanks, Blank!
Years In Retirement
Check out this graph (via Flowing Data). God, I’m happy not to work in the United States (yet).
The Presidential Power To Make War In The Nineteenth Century
We recently posted about the U.S. presidential power to make war without formal Congressional declarations of war (as is the case in Libya). Reviewing the history of the twentieth century – with the notable and, admittedly, important exceptions of World Wars I and II – this turns out to be more of a rule than an exception.
Matthew Yglesias takes it back even further, to the nineteenth century, demonstrating that then, too, American presidents often engaged in wars or military activitites without Congressional declarations of war, with Congress merely providing the funds. Thus demonstrating again Scott Lemieux’ thesis that Congress always more or less obliges with this part of executive policy, but that it has the power to halt military operations if it wants to – like in the case of South Vietnam under Carter.
- Edit: On second thought, is this really so peculiar to the US? I doubt whether the Dutch politionele acties in Indonesia in the late 1940s, which despite the name were decidedly military actions, involved a parliamentary declaration of war. Although it must’ve had parliamentary approval. Or the Falkland wars, for that matter. Does anybody have any information?
Not a lot of people know about the so-called “Quasi-War” fought between the United States and France during the John Adams administration, but I think it’s an important episode to recall for the purposes of ongoing debates about the Obama administration’s protestations that the ongoing war in Libya somehow really isn’t a war.
The point isn’t that Obama is right—he’s wrong—but that this is how the game’s always been played. From the administration of the second president ever, we were fighting an undeclared war on presidential authority. And of course Adams’ congressional opponents complained about it. And when they took over the White House, they certainly changed the basic orientation of American foreign policy. But they didn’t really change the practice around this declaration of war business. Instead the new undeclared war was one against Barbary Pirates. Which isn’t to say that congress wasn’t involved in the fight against the pirates. The key point was that congress appropriated funds to send the obtain and dispatch the ships. And from thence onward, despite the fact that we sometimes did get formal declarations of war (World War One and World War Two) and sometimes had a special congressional vote (Gulf War One and Gulf War Two) and sometimes had wars purely on executive recognizance (Civil War, Korea) that congress has always played an important role in the process as the institution that runs the appropriations process.
Which is to say that congressional authorization for the Lincoln administration’s prosecution of a war against the CSA took the form of appropriations and other measures to create the Union Army. And in the case of something like Libya, congressional authorization takes the form of the fact that we just this week had a giant political fight about appropriations in which nobody in the opposition leadership made the slightest gesture in the direction of a “rider” that would prevent the president from prosecuting that war or limiting his discretion in initiating new wars. This is what happens almost every year—Congress appropriates funds for a military, and does little to tie the president’s hands in terms of how he uses it. When congress wants to tie the president’s hands—as it did in the seventies when it stopped the Ford administration from continuing involvement in the defense of South Vietnam—congress gets its way. But most of the time Congress doesn’t want to tie the president’s hands.
Kevin Saunderson – Till We Meet Again (Carl Craig Remix)
This one was released in 2009, but I hadn´t heard yet. Very nice “rolling train techno” with a soulful twist. The original is a classic chicago house track by Inner City. Would love to hear this in a big room:
Prinses Ariane gaat naar school
Het is moeilijk om te benoemen wat me het meest verontrust aan dit filmpje. Is het de gestoorde “koetsjiekoetsjiekoe” outburst van de twee juffen, hoe nep het hele “event” is, het feit dat dit persoonlijke en emotionele moment voor een 4-jarig meisje in detail wordt opgenomen voor televisie en internet, of de wetenschap dat het in haar leven alleen maar erger zal worden. Waarschijnlijk het laatste. Kijk en huiver, of kijk eigenlijk maar helemaal niet en respecteer de privacy van een medemens.
Edit - Luckytv heeft er een mooie kijk op:
