Month: April 2012

Israel’s Interior Ministry has announced that they are banning German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass from entering Israel, despite the fact that Grass never suggested he wanted to visit in the first place.

Termed Germany’s “most famous living writer,” Grass spawned a flurry of outrage last week by releasing a poem criticizing Israeli threats to attack Iran and suggesting Germany should stop sending nuclear submarines to Israel, which might be involved in carrying out an attack.

Israeli officials insisted that the poem was proof that both Grass and a broad swath of Western intellectuals are anti-semites, and said that Grass had published the poem before Passover explicitly to accuse the Jews of “ritual murder.”

Though Israeli officials have issued angry statements condemning a large number of people for opposing war on Iran, the sheer volume and shrillness of the statements in Grass’ case are unusual, and don’t seem to be dying down, with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman saying Israel holds “ill will” toward Grass and other “cynics.”

Unveiled over the weekend and dismissed as an April Fool’s Day joke, Russia’s announcement of a zombie-creating “superweapon” is all too real, insists Premier Vladimir Putin. The zombification ray is being developed by scientists as a more “politically acceptable” alternative to nuclear weapons, as well as a nifty new form of crowd control.

While we’ve probably got your attention by now, it is at this point we need to discuss the semantics of the matter, and what we mean by “zombie.” The gun is not, naturally, creating Romero-style zombies, which would be worse than useless as a form of crowd control. Instead, it is aiming for the ability to enthrall the living (along the lines of the Bela Lugosi-era Dracula). In short, it is not undead related, but a mind control ray.

Still, great fodder for a dystopian novel, but is it real? The details on how the weapon putatively works are light, but they are referred to as “directed energy” weapons, something the US has already begun rolling out. The leap from shining a hot (not necessarily visible spectrum) light on someone’s arm until they go “oww” to full-fledged mind control appears to be a long one indeed.

But not, necessarily, an unimagined one. The Air Force has been angling for mind control (or at least dumbening) weapons for years now. Russia has been working on it too, naturally.

The claim that they have (or are close to having) broken the barrier to full scale mind control by way of electromagnetic waves could well be a massive bluff. The story, however, has a mind of its own, and that will be even harder to control, and the term “zombie creating superweapon” alone is likely to make the story more pernicious than any movie zombie plague.

My piece in today’s news section on former CIA officer John Kiriakou and his ongoing trial should be read and followed up with this interview he had with Truthout’s Jason Leopold. After watching it, it seems even more utterly absurd that this man should be facing trial and not his former colleagues in the CIA and their colleagues in the Bush administration.

American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero on the upcoming trial of detainees suspected of participating in the 9/11 attacks:

The Obama Administration is making a terrible mistake by prosecuting the most important terrorism trials of our time in a second-tier system of justice. Whatever verdict comes out of the Guantánamo military commissions will be tainted by an unfair process and the politics that wrongly pulled these cases from federal courts, which have safely and successfully handled hundreds of terrorism trials,” Romero said.

“The military commissions were set up to achieve easy convictions and hide the reality of torture, not to provide a fair trial. Although the rules have been improved, the military commissions continue to violate due process by allowing the use of hearsay and coerced or secret evidence. The American people have already waited far too long for justice for the 9/11 attacks, and the administration’s use of the military commissions means that justice will never truly be achieved, in the eyes of our nation or the rest of the world.

As news of the forthcoming military trial has made headlines in recent days, there has been a predictable distortion disseminated, which is old but now being renewed. As the ACLU post says “In April 2011, the Obama administration reversed a 2009 decision to try the men in federal court and decided instead to try them at Guantánamo using military commissions that have been broadly criticized.” There is an implication that Obama was forced to adopt a two-tiered system of justice because Congress made him. In one sense – regarding this specific trial which includes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others – that is true. But even then, Obama had not objected to military trials in principle: he had already adopted a system of military courts and indefinite detention for many other Guantánamo detainees. And anyways, a principled stand in favor of real due process in civilian courts would have been just that – and would not have been compromised by the political winds.

At the time of the Obama administration’s renewed embrace for military trials, Glenn Greenwald noted that there is “absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.” Actually, that is not precisely true. One other reason to embrace a two-tiered justice system is to satisfy and submit to –  and thus become party to – a blind, hysterical, mob clinging to delusional fears about giving due process to suspected terrorists.