...and nobody's getting a trip to Disneyland. (That's where we went on my eighth birthday.)
No such luck for the dozens of innocent men still stuck on a Caribbean island, deprived of their rights, their families, their homes and their health.
Today, on the eighth anniversary of Guantanamo opening as a black hole of a prison for people we're paranoid about, the still-detained prisoners can look forward to a nice round of torture, and it's not an E-ticket ride.
Gitmo-the-prison does wrong in our names. Wrong legally, wrong ethically, wrong morally. It leaves a spiritual stain on our collective conscience.
It is beyond counter-productive. We are waterboarding ourselves in the foot there.
Worthington's exhaustive research showed 93% of those detained were proven innocent. That's 725 men, with 725 families, all stung by grievous harm and injustice.
...a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.
Stop it now. Stop it before another idealistic young man tries to do us grievous harm and injustice.
(Photo credits: Painting of Khmer Rouge waterboarding from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; LIFE Magazine Disneyland photo)
Today I discovered it'll cost ya to give someone a bus ticket. And not just the price of the fare.
There will be an extra fee for your generosity, if you charge someone else's ticket on your credit card.
The Gift Ticket Fee.* If the traveler is NOT the card holder, the card holder gets to pay that fee too, on top of the fare.
My round trip = 250 miles each way.
Total cost $58, advance purchase.
Except for that Gift Fee. That'll be ANOTHER $18, please.
My witty friend Lynn says it's highway robbery. Whoa! Yes, exactly where the stick-up happens.
People who take the bus are largely poor, rural, or otherwise disadvantaged. Perhaps they have no alternative but travel by bus, no other way to get from here to there.
Bad dog, Greyhound! For sticking it to your captive customers.
A non-refundable gift ticket fee is applied to each Will Call transaction where the credit card holder purchasing tickets is not traveling on that trip.
1. El estúpido. This belongs in the dictionary to illustrate "racial profiling", starring los pendejos del Servicio Forestal.
Ya know how the Forest Service wants us to be their eyes and ears and nose out in the forest? It's the Smokey Bear* thing, "Only you can prevent forest fires." Good deal. My family has a house in a national forest, and I always appreciate watchfulness. But not this kind.
DENVER (AP) — A federal warning to beware of campers in national forests who eat tortillas, drink Tecate beer and play Spanish music because they could be armed marijuana growers is racial profiling, an advocate for Hispanic rights said Friday. . . .
. . . The U.S. Forest Service quickly retracted the warning. . .
. . . Michael Skinner, a law enforcement officer with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado, said warning signs of possible drug trafficking include "tortilla packaging, beer cans, Spam, Tuna, Tecate beer cans," and campers who play Spanish music. He said the warning includes people speaking Spanish. . . . [and] this may or may not represent criminal activity, but are indicators, and he urged any campers who encounter long-term campers meeting the profile to "hike out quickly" and call police.
OK. So now Smokey says, "Only you can become a brownshirt." And indulge yourself in racist paranoia and rat out your brown brothers (can I get an 'amen' for the brown-brown irony there?), the ones that you find in the forest.
You know, the ones saying, "Guey, más espam, por favor." Gimme a break! Sure, the megazillion-dollar-deadly-serious-way-too-successful drug cartels are going to stash a couple campesinos on a Colorado mountain. With a case of Spam, some cervezas and a copy of Jerry Garcia's wife's book.
Oh yeah, and a boom box to play their reggaeton music. Real loud.
(note: click on the book, then click 'Quick American Archives', see a big list of books of related topics. Far out, man.)
Excuse me, but I think you can probably grow pot anywhere from Vail to Veracruz, most of which is mountains in Mexico, and the Forest Service wants us to stake out Colorado mountains for them? Huh?
Nope, those drug cartels are way way too organized and industrial for that stuff. They are fatally serious agribusiness with a real lucrative crop.
To catch the people hiding in the forest growing dope, they should be profiling guys named Mountainsong Peace Herb, 50-something, long long grey beard, silly grin, white skin, red eyes. Listening to "Strawberry Fields" on the boombox. Hey, you could follow him back from Burning Man! Whoa. It's happening tonight!!! Y'all should follow everyone home from Burning Man.
2. El horrible. This one from yesterday, on the border where I grew up. This is how the drug cartels work, on a massive scale. Right out in the open, in your face, gun you down. Import weed by the ton. Et cetera.
The brutality of a massacre at Juárez drug rehabilitation center in which 18 people were killed shocked a city already plagued with record-breaking violence.
A motive for the attack was under investigation, but it appeared to be linked to feuding drug trafficking groups.
The sad part:
Chihuahua state public safety secretary Victor Valencia said such drug centers are sometimes fronts for criminal gangs and one narcotics expert said the slayings are unlikely [to] make much of a difference in the overall balance of power in the drug war. [emphasis added]
They lined up 19 "men ranging in age from 17 to 51" against a wall and shot them with AK-47s. It's cartel-on-cartel violence. La Linea vs La Familia. Juarez vs Sinaloa. Some victims may have been Aztecas gang members. They coincidentally run drug-treatment centers. (Did you know we have gang members in the Army? Oh, that's another story.)
Go ahead, read this story of violence in Juarez. Learn that Sinaloa Familia bring religion into their drug gang cult. Click here. Look at the raw video footage from the carnage. No audio, only the street sounds of Juarez at night as gurneys load slowly into ambulances.
Death, big and bloody. It's what's happening on the supply side of our demand for drugs. Think about it, particularly if you use the kind we can't grow domestically. The high-dollar kind that people in Mexico are fighting a war to supply you with. Check into the Betty Ford Center. You probably won't get gunned down there. ------------------------------------------------- *footnote re Smokey: He was a real bear cub found after a fire in the national forest where my family has a home. Marketing made him a legend and made babyboomers aware of fire safety in the wilderness. Smokey is buried at his museum 165 miles north of Juarez in Capitan NM.
"contempt of cop" That's the explanation I heard from a commentator on NPR. The offense is offending a cop. Hurting his or her feelings by not being nice. But since that one's not on the books as a real crime, the cops have to arrest the perp for something else, like disorderly conduct.
On 7/16/09 at 12:44 PM, 58-year-old Henry Gates of 17 Ware St. Cambridge, MA was arrested for Disorderly conduct after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.
I guess it's good to know that the police these days are so sensitive that things like talking back to them in Massachusetts and oooops, maybe even making gestures, scary scary gestures like at the Rainbow Lounge incident, yes, that things like that are so hurtful to the big tough cops, they just have to arrest somebody.
OK, I blame the moms of today. They must not have taught their children well. They must have left out "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Hmmm. Maybe that could be in the remedial sensitivity training curricula for cops.
My absence from the blogosphere is caused by my struggle with a local issue with wide repercussions in civil rights. The cops and the TABC and the gays and the bar raid here.
It happened a month ago at the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth. It was gay bashing. Literally. At almost the same hour as the original riot-provoking raids at the Stonewall Inn 40 years before. Go figure.
I want to rant and rave and blog about it--and the healing that's started in the aftermath. But now the cops in Cambridge are the ones being hit with an ugly stick. They are looking bad ugly, after arresting Henry Louis Gates. Again, both sides probably involved men behaving badly. Both sides. Bad bad behavior.
Let's check the Cambridge cops' website. Nice pix. Nice-looking folks also. Nice badges. Click the photos to go to their webpage. And see the top item on their page--the press release about their peccadillo. At least nobody went to the hospital. This time.
Serving the public as a cop is a horrible difficult dangerous job. I wish we could fully staff the force without attracting the folks who want to be cops for all the worst reasons.
photo: Mark Stehle / AP Kelbin Carolina demonstrates Thursday in front of the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., in response to allegations that the swim club blocked a group of minority children from joining weekly swims at the pool.
Kelbin's sign says it perfectly. Something happened last week--either mispoken/misunderstood comments or outright racism--in Huntingdon PA, at a swimming pool, at a private club, to little children, where people with Jim-Crow attitudes swim.
(I first heard about it Friday at one of my favorite blogs, Hasta Los Gatos Quieren Zapatos. Those hermanas come up with an amazing variety of compelling news, and their own views can make you stop and think.)
A stock photo (?) from their blog illustrates the situation. What's wrong with this picture? NOTHING. Well, nothing to my eye. It looks like the kids on my block playing.
When the hurtful words they heard were how their presence would "change the complexion" of the club, would you want to take your complexion of color back to that same sinkhole of bigots?
A Quaker, politically active. Semiretired now that I got old enough to get survivor's benefits. So now I don't "do", I'm semiretired.
Recently I said this to a friend, "That's so American, to identify our self--our very selves--as the answer to 'what do you do?' Me? I dream, I create, I love, I survive. And I don't worry. blah blah"
