Tender moments caught on Russian dash cams Kottke.org. “Default to kindness,” as Ian Welsh says.
Scientists map global routes of ship-borne invasive species BBC
Explosions shake Damascus, Syria blames Israel Reuters
Israel confirms airstrike inside Syria Al Jazeera. “Game changing” weapons, says Israel. Hmm.
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? Guardian. Duh.
The Find Every Terrorist at Any Cost Industry emptywheel
New York’s 9/11 museum to charge fee for admission LA Times. Sure. I mean it’s not like poor people were part.
Personal Remembrances of the Kent State Shootings, 43 Years Later Slate
A march on Washington with loaded rifles Salon
Gun Violence Since Newtown Bill Moyers. Handy map of the externalities.
Peace Agreement Signed on Everest Outside. Good luck with that.
How Austerity Pushed American Colonists to Revolt Bloomberg
UKIP: the victory of the ruling class Stumbling and Mumbling (RS)
Game for a laugh: The PFA awards furore was a joke – and Reginald D Hunter makes the most of it Independent (RS)
Passing the Buck: Siemens Blames Others for Delayed Deliveries Der Speigel
The Depositor Haircut London Review of Books. Cyprus.
Bitcoin vs. Ben Bernanke Online WSJ
The insufferable conceit Macrobusiness
More Bipolar Economic Reporting at the Washington Post CEPR
The amazingly consistent jobs recovery Neil Irwin, WaPo. The lead is the last sentence.
Better jobs reports don’t help this lost generation of unemployed young adults Guardian
Social Security and 2016 Corrente
Deep thoughts on civilisation from Jeremy “Hari Seldon” Grantham FT
Live Blog: Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Meeting WSJ. “[F]ortunately a lot of oil has been found very close to our railroad tracks. What better place to find oil.”
Workers’ Rights in Egypt Stalled Two Years After the Revolution Vice
Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality Financial Advisor. No points if you guessed Niall Ferguson; too easy. (Brad DeLong curates anti-Keynsian dog whistles and slurs.)
“There’s wrong, there’s very wrong and then there’s Niall Ferguson.” Washington Monthly
An Unqualified Apology Niall Ferguson
Patience, Practice and Presence: How Michael Pollan Fell in Love With Cooking PBS Newshour (see also Slate).
Hiring a Guide to the Medical Bill Maze Bloomberg
Luxury brands and ‘The Great Gatsby’ movie FT. And so we beat on….
Letter from Africa: Rites of the dead BBC
Advantage Pyongyang London Review of Books
Antidote du jour (furzy mouse):
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Suggested story: surprise, the Waco fertilizer plant only had $1 Million in insurance.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/attorney-texas-fertilizer-plant-that-exploded-carried-only-1-million-in-liability-coverage/2013/05/04/cccab504-b4e8-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html
The computer in the lobby of the Marriott where I’m staying is attempting to block my access to NC — perhaps because of “Naked” in the site name?
I dunno.
“Domian with Forbidden Contents” is the stated reason.
You subversive!
i searched around…seems they like to peek into your emails too (be full of care’ )
If you can’t say “F*ck” you can’t say, “F*ck the government.
lenny bruce
Maybe it’s due to the recent remarks here regarding Penny P getting the nod for Commerce Sec. She’s a Marriot heiress, no?
It wasn’t Ferguson’s first time.
Niall Ferguson’s History with John Maynard Keynes’ Gayness
Ferguson should be let go from Harvard.
Niall Ferguson is one of the great historical fiction writers of all time, carefully tailoring and rewriting history so that it conforms to his neoliberal ideology. Unfortunately, Ferguson is quite dishonest as he bills his historical fiction not as fiction, but as reality.
His attack on homsexuals comes at a strange time, since the organizers of the San Francisco LGBTQ Pride Parade have taken a hard turn to the right, rejecting the morality of the Civil Rights Movement and instead throwing their lot in with the neocon and neoliberal faithful which inhabit the Rubenite wing of the Democratic Party:
Thanks for that op-ed from the Advocate
As a gay person, I am just so angry at what Lisa Williams (who by the way is a Democratic Party aparichnik) and the SF Pride board did that I could spit.
There’s quite an amazing documentary where Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers who was on the ground and came upon the aftermath of the “Collateral Murder” incident (the video of which Manning has now admitted he released to Wikleaks) concludes:
Another part of the video, with the close-up photos of the wounded children in the van that was shot up in the “Collateral Murder” video, was also heart-wrenching:
According to McCord, he had seen far worse incidents of the slaughter of children than this, along with unfathomable callousness on the part of some of his fellow soldiers in regards to the children. In the end, McCord and two other soldiers featured in the video couldn’t take it any longer. For anyone with a scintilla of compassion, empathy, and conscience, these incidents, along with the heartlessness of some of their fellow soldiers (like the Sergeant Shirfield who McCord describes), just eats them up alive from the inside.
McCord’s statement about having witnessed far worse incidents than that recorded in the “Collateral Murder” video is consistent with Manning’s testimony to the court-martial court. Manning’s testimony was recorded and released to the press illegally, because the judge conducting the tribunal had ordered Manning’s testimony to remian secret. Manning testified that he gave Wikileaks another video that showed an incident even more disturbing than the “Collateral Murder” video from Iraq. Of the Iraqi “Collateral Murder” video, Manning said he was alarmed by the pilots’ “delightful blood lust” in the video as they conducted an air strike that killed 12 innocent Iraquis and wounded two children. Afterwards, Manning said in his testimony to the court, the pilots congratulated each other on their ability to kill and maim people so effortlessly.
Manning testified the other video showed an airstrike in the Garani Village in Farah Province, northwestern Afghanistan. In it between 100 and 150 civilians, mostly women and children, were murdered by a US aerial weapons team. He said that the incident was similar to that shown in the “Collateral Murder” video, but it was “even more disturbing” than the Iraqi event.
We seem to have come full circle back to the Vietnam era. As Martin Luther King put it: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
“There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press,” King continues, “that will praise you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There’s something wrong with that press!”
And even more shame on the city of San Francisco itself. There was a time, not that long ago, when someone like Manning would have been made honoary mayor. But the City has fallen into the same slime pit as DiFi herself. My wife and are so glad we moved to Maine.
Yes. That way he can spend more time writing an authorized biography for Kissinger.
I wonder what values Kissinger saw in Niall to decide he’s the right guy to write Kissinger’s bio?
Wow is Ferguson really writing an authorized biography for Kissinger? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, it does fit.
It’s coming out in 2014. Yes, It’s authorized. How nice!
Why wait? Try reading Robert Kaplan’s “The Statesman” in May’s Atlantic. Apparently,those critical of Dr.Kissinger merely acknowledge their own inability to “…measure themselves against him.” I had to put it down and read the piece on spearfishing instead.
Ferguson is a hack scumbag, who left the UK to feed upon the rich fatty vein of US right wing grifterdom. If people like Danesh Dzouza can make a carreer out of it, then he, the great anglo-scot historian, can plunder that hoard with his eyes closed. In the UK he had a reputation for inaccuracy and bias, but he figured that wouldn’t matter too much in the US, as he was telling the rich what they wanted to hear.
Unfortunatelly for him, he’s sloppy and lazy, so he keeps f*cking up. You can’t be homophobic in front of investors any longer, that’s so 2000, all the wall street queers are out of the closet by now.
And if you’re going to lie about Obama in a newsweek story, do it smartly, like genuine right wing economists have done, not crudelly so Brad de long can tear it to pieces..
He’ll be kicking himself, because he knows he’s damaged the brand again, and those big money invitations won’t come as frequently.
I bet the United Kingdom is glad to rid itself of it’s third-rate intellectuals. Especially when they eventually land in the United States.
That’ll show those damn yankees. Y’har, har, har!
Raises the IQ of both nations so it’s a win-win.
That’s a great link. Oddly, or not, I don’t see anything in Ferguson’s “apology” about running the same riff for 14 years.
Somebody should ask Ferguson if he believes that Keynes should have been chemically castrated, like Alan Turing.
Ferguson will have absolutely no trouble at Harvard. If he does, the rest of the Ivy League is open to him.
My somewhat limited experience with historians from Harvard et. al. has been remarkably consistent. When they hear I’ve from the farm states they’re anxious to inform me that Harry Truman’s presidency was entirely explained by his feelings of social inferiority to the Eastern Establishment Brain Trusters Roosevelt brought to Washington.
Beside being a non sequitur in the conversation, it’s rather presumptions judgement that political events are exclusively personality driven. The idea that quailing before the sneers of graduates explains more than events or interests gives a lot of importance to academics. Being insulated from the real world in a pit of office politics might narrow a person’s vision to gossip and scheming, but most people operate on bigger issues.
There’s scholarship and there’s window-peeping. Granted, there’s little journalism in the US these days, just lots of window-peeping, but that’s another story. We were brought up to expect more from juried papers in prestigious journals, and it’s hard to shake off that apparent sham. Sales patter sticks around.
Anyway, a gossip guy in a gossip place seems good enough for this lot.
Regarding the Corrente link, in Warren’s defense, she did sign onto Bernie and Tom Harkin’s joint resolution opposing Social Security cuts: http://www.harkin.senate.gov/press/release.cfm?i=341523.
The list of signers (along with Harkin and Sanders: Senators Mark Begich (D-AK), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Al Franken (D-MN), Kirsten Gilibrand (D-NY), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D – OR), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D – HI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
I’m guessing that the red state Dems like Begich and Hagan realize that defending Social Security is still a winning issue. Good for them.
As the post says, “[Warren] has not said that she would oppose cuts to Social Security under any circumstances whatsoever.” And that’s what she should do.
Actually, what she should do is call for benefits to be increased and eligibility to be lowered. Then some of us old codgers could get out of the work force and free up some jobs for the young people. Eschaton, at least, is doing the right thing here.
Finally, the real point of the post is Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t issued a Sherman statement, and a lot of people think she’s running. So her silence is perplexing. Or not!
And even if Hillary’s not running, you’d think that common human decency would cause her to speak up. She has won a good deal of deserved praise for being forthright on women’s issues, and those impacted by Chained CPI are disproportionately female. So WTF?
My own guess is that this is another indicator of just how solidly the elites are lined up behind social security cuts.
Exactement.
Like.
re, the amazing consistent job recovery—a commenter remarked: Labor force participation rate 63.3% lowest rate since the 70’s….Retirement is most of that, BTW
a resourceful commenter replied:
“Sorry to burst your bubble. Here is the demographic composition of the US by age:
All ages 306,110
.Under 5 years 21,265
.5 to 9 years 20,870
.10 to 14 years 20,020
.15 to 19 years 20,886
.20 to 24 years 21,525
.25 to 29 years 21,382
.30 to 34 years 20,202
.35 to 39 years 19,255
.40 to 44 years 20,587
.45 to 49 years 21,989
.50 to 54 years 21,965
.55 to 59 years 19,554
.60 to 64 years 17,430
.65 to 69 years 12,160
.70 to 74 years 9,254
.75 to 79 years 7,088
.80 to 84 years 5,719
.85 years and over 4,957
****
As can be clearly seen, there are 20 million people from 15-19 entering the workforce, but only 12 million in the 65 age group that is at retirement age.
Care to revise your statement???”
While not agreeing with the original comment (“Retirement is most of that, BTW”) your figures are not a complete refutation.
.15 to 19 years 20,886
…
.60 to 64 years 17,430
.65 to 69 years 12,160
There are plenty of retirees in the 60-64 group. Some of them are involuntary retirees so the analysis is not straight forward.
I am a GE pensioner who was pushed out the door at 56 along with all but one exempt employee at my factory in their mid-fifties. I was offered about 10K/yr till 62 to “volunteer” and I took it knowing the alternetive was being “rightsized” without compensation. So the retirement profile is more than the 65-70 age group.
Jim
I should have stated that the 10K/yr “sweetener” I was offered was an addition to a reduced defined benefit pension plan (closed to new GE hires from Jan’13) – not total income. I should also have stated that retiring early was the best decision I ever made (other than marrying my wife of course).
Jim
Good Catch Larry, while that was not my post at the site…i am interested in the demographic numbers. the 15-24 and the 60-69 are overlapping…but its the 15-24 (imo)that will lead us to a dangerous point of no return.
im following up here
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/04/labor-force-participation-rate-update.html
here (w/detailed graphs
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/10/understanding-decline-in-participation.html
and here
http://www.bos.frb.org/employment2013/papers/Erceg_Levin_Session1.pdf
anything you see to add, consider or correct would be muchas appreciated…aby
You know, I wondered about that. According to Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and Brad DeLong, the participation rate has dropped to 58.5%, not 63%. 63% was what it was at the end of the Clinton Presidency.
Moose fingers, but no camel toe? Clever.
Re: “…Kent State Shootings”
This Project Censored article has a good rundown on facts generally ignored by the mainstream press. There were undercover Agent Provocateurs at work in Kent during the protests.
—“In 2010, compelling forensic evidence emerged showing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were the lead agencies in managing Kent State government operations, including the cover-up.”—
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/kent-state-was-it-about-civil-rights-or-%E2%80%A8murdering-student-protesters/
Excellent link to Project Censorsed. Thanks.
Thanks for the great stuff on Kent State impunity ops by criminal US government officials.
I suppose that was a rhetorical question, Will American leadership cross the line to kill American protesters again? Gee… ask Robert Roche, knuckle-dragging hitman of the Oakland PD Tango Team, whether he’ll get a mulligan on his cowardly sneak attack on Scott Olsen and all US Marines who keep their oath.
Good for the Kent State Truth Tribunal, going over the head of the disgraced and discredited US judiciary. But the ICC is still very diffident about holding US government criminals to account, and these particular murders would be a weak case for the ICC: crimes against humanity must be widespread and systematic. The murders were clearly US plan and policy, but were they numerous enough to pass the threshold? Even if you threw in MLK, RFK, and all the other US dissident murders, maybe not. Government murder of unarmed dissidents does not amount to armed conflict. At any rate, the current bunch of ICC prosecutors doesn’t have a very good batting average.
Rather than going to the International Criminal Court, they could submit a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and a complaint to the Human Rights Council, and if it’s not too late (review of the US is scheduled for October), inject the petition into the UN’s NGO hierarchy for submission to the Human Rights Committee. The crimes are best treated as breaches of CCPR Article 6. Once they’re recognized by independent legal experts, they can be tied back to the wars of aggression for which they were committed. Then the ICC can take a crack at it.
Why is NC perpetuating the myth of improving employment? Did you read Hugh’s Employment Report? Did you read the comments?
Hugh’s Report has unemployment ticking down by .1 to 12.6%.
That is merely disappointing but when you consider the ‘technicals’: a drop in hours and still lower participation, it is a yet another disaster for this ‘Recovery’.
PS The best interpretation that I have read/heard was that employes may be hiring more part-time workers to avoid costs of Obamacare (which attempts to explain both the increase in jobs and the reduced hours).
If you’re responding to the Irwin article’s headline, did you click through and read?
The amazingly consistent jobs recovery
WaPo
Oh gee, we could certainly hope for more, but hey, we’re making slow progress :)
No mention of people falling off the roles or the rise of part-timers, etc.
Better jobs reports don’t help this lost generation of unemployed young adults
Guardian
Takes “better jobs report” as a given. Then bemoans that young people are not participating.
When people are falling off the roles and full-timers are replaced by part-timers and contract workers, then its easy to show progress in unemployment.
Among the comments in Hugh’s post is one that says that the reduction in hours is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. How does that represent improving jobs picture?
Also:
When deficit hawks liken government budgeting to a household, NC readers are quick to point out that that is not true.
But when we use the SAME unemployment measure for normal times and a depression, no one bats an eye. Despite the clear bias.
Furthermore, AFAIK the way we measure unemployment hasn’t changed in generations. It was set up when we still had anachronisms like lifetime employment, unions, and industry.
Until multinational corporations become national(ized) corporations operating in the citizen’s interests, this is the world that they will create and dominate for the benefit of a few billionaires and trillionaires.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-04/taxodus-playing-global-tax-avoidance-game
Here’s a slightly longer interview with Michael Pollan: http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/858.Michael_Pollan?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=2013-05&utm_content=pollan
Pennsylvania judgesentencedto 28 years in prison for sellingteens to prisons
http://www.examiner.com/article/pennsylvania-judge-sentenced-to-28-years-prison-for-selling-teens-to-prisons
How long do you think this guy will last if they let him out into the general prison population?
10 minutes.
FYI: All your telephone calls and voice mails belong to us:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
I find this somewhat hard to believe frankly. If this is the case — that all of our phone calls are recorded and not just the details of the call, the sheer amount of data would overwhelm any storage system almost immediately. Voice data requires orders of magnitude greater storage capacity than mere logging of a few bytes of transactional data. Also, if this was true phone taps would be totally unnecessary. I think what happens is that all calls are scanned but the only voice recordings that are stored are ones that match certain algorithmic patterns of “suspicious” activity and/or where certain key words are spoken. I think this was even discussed at the time of the initial revelations from the NYTimes that were suppressed until after Bush was re-elected.
A commenter at Daily Kos responded at length. I can’t judge the veracity of the entire comment, but I can affirm one point: phone calls would not be stored efficiently using MP3 or AAC files. Instead, modern audio technology for telephone calls would create audio files that are almost an order of a magnitude smaller than the same audio stored as an MP3 or an AAC file.
First, look at the sampling rates for different types of audio (in kHz):
• Telephone (narrowband): 8
• VoIP (wideband): 16
• CDs and MP3s: 44.1
• DVDs (fullband): 48
• Blu-Ray: 96+
Traditional narrowband telephone calls have an even lower sample rate: between 300 Hz and 3.4 kHz. This means the original, uncompressed digital audio for telephone calls starts out containing much less information than the uncompressed audio coming off a CD, even if the CD stores only voice (e.g. an audiobook).
Next, take a look at the graph halfway down the page at Mozilla to see how the amount of data increases as you go from narrowband (telephone) audio to fullband (DVD) audio, for various types of audio compression. Also note how bloated AAC and MP3 are for narrowband, since they are technically incapable of storing anything less than fullband or just-below fullband quality, respectively. That is why the IETF, Mozilla, Microsoft (through Skype), Xiph.Org, Octasic, Broadcom, and Google collaborated to develop a new royalty-free audio codec named Opus, which is capable of efficiently transmitting narrowband audio. Narrowband audio stored with Opus compression will create files almost an order of magnitude smaller than narrowband stored in MP3 files.
According to a series of tweets Matt Blaze posted this afternoon, “Tim Clemente was discussing a conversation *after* the suspects photos (phone in hand ) had been published. Easy to get regular CALEA tap.”
If true, any taps may have been authorized by the long-established (Clinton-era) law, and if they can get what they need that way they don’t need more wiretapping authority.
Bloomberg on Austerity in the EU. The American colonists were a bunch of profligate slavers, smugglers and fanatics. But it was not fair to tax us without representation. So how’s that logic work when you apply it to extralegal/extranational trade tribunals? Today we have a new twist: Corporate ultra representation without taxation.
And that moose – when you encounter a moose like that on the trail and he/she has that look, get thee behind a tree.
Re: telephone calls being recorded and stored
Before there was TIA there was Carnivore and narusInsight… this has been going on a long time. I used to know a woman whose nephew worked on carnivore and said back then they were really scooping up everything/everybody.
Project Echelon (run by the US in cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) was considered a conspiracy theory back in the 1990’s. The European parliament affirmed its existence in 2001.
Nowadays, people seem mostly sanguine about their phone calls being intercepted by intelligence agencies, even when they are not suspected of, or being investigated for, any crime. It is the new normal. In 10 years, having the government permanently store all of our electronic communications will be the new normal.
Scientists are working on “printing” replacement organs. With this digitization of biology, I expect people will be able to manufacture their own WMD. (By comparison, “3d-printed guns” are a non-threat.) In order to keep wackos from misusing this technology, I’m afraid “privacy” will have to go out the window.
I know that’s awful. But, what else do you suggest, why do you think it’s better, and is it practical/realistic?
Continental-Scale Temperature Variability during the Last Two Millennia (ncdc.noaa.gov)
Does anyone have access to the full article?
The link at the bottom of the article is not it?
I’m hesitant to sign up for another site ;)
Thank you for the links to:
– Russian video. Goodness never goes out of style.
– Kent State. Unforgettable.
The Rus like cats too:
Кот и пылесос, and Сонный кот (Sleepy cat), via Reddit.
In the Wapo article on the consistency of job creation, jackrabbit above catches the two big misses. First, large numbers of workers have not been leaving the labor force. They have been defined out of it, which is a very different thing. Second, the article states that most job creation which has occurred has been in the services sector. What it does not say is that most of these jobs are crap.
It does not explore how crap jobs being created at a glacial pace is supposed to fuel a return to “growth” in either the short or long term. Nor does it address the fact that wages for most workers remain flat to falling. Nor does it question the whole notion of “recovery”. As Saez and others have shown, the recession never ended for the 99%, only the 1%. For the 99%, there has been no recovery. Irwin is not being more realistic by saying that the recovery is going to be a long, hard slog. He is being deceitful that there is a recovery at all.
On a another topic, re a decline in weekly working hours equaling a decline of 600,000 jobs in the economy, this works both ways. Two points: One, working hours have been bouncing around the 34.4 hours/week range for a couple of years. Two, we are not talking 600,000 real jobs but job (as in “as if”) equivalents. I was just surprised that no one used these numbers to brag about increased “productivity”, the economy doing as much with 600,000 fewer workers.
I also saw references in the comments to the age and the labor force. First, according to the Census’ American Community Survey estimates, in 2011, the year when boomers began to hit 65, the 45-64 age group comprised 26.5% of the US population. The cohort which would eventually replace them, the 0-19 year olds makes up 26.6% of the population.
The problem comes, however, from the distribution of age groups in the labor force. In 2010, for example, 45-64 year olds were 38.5% of the labor force while those 16-24 were 13.6% of it. The 16-24 group as it gets older increases its participation in the labor force, but this mismatch raises a host of questions. How many boomers will retire once they hit 65? Will their retirement open up their positions to younger workers? You see it isn’t that a 16 year old would take over the 65 year old’s job. It would be that the 45 year old might move into it, the 25 to 29 year old move into his/hers, and the teen or 20-24 year old moving into that one.
The point here is that in terms of population, the labor force may not increase (except for immigration) in the next 20 years, but the population is there for the jobs. The problem is in the distribution, and given our current kleptocracy, it will not be managed well or for the benefit of workers.
thank you Hugh for expanding on this dire subject…i based my last comment, regarding the younger and middle ages moving into their markets, upon these generations helping the aging generations thru retirement years. We are experiencing cuts to healthcare, commodity inflation (regardless of fed statements), etc…these pressures on the younger generation will further hinder their ability to help aging parents.
It is obvious there will be no cohesive government policies to help us negate this crisis…its becoming surreal real fast.
Hugh, I’m glad that you weighed in on this.
It’s very disturbing that the media is all too eager to see the glass half full. The 4th Estate has become a mouthpiece.
When you consider that the Fed has been pumping $85b of QE since September of last year, ostensibly to improve unemployment, then a report like this should be raising red flags and get a more critical analysis.
Bradley Manning’s lawyer is just another good cop sending him up the river. “There is no question that he broke the law. That’s not something that his lawyers are contesting either.” What the fck kind of defense is that? “Yeah, he’s guilty.” That’s the Sirhan Sirhan defense, where your blackmailed lawyer throws the case and puts you away.
Army Field Manual 27-10 requires military personnel to stop war crimes like those war crimes documented in the records that Manning made public. Manning’s action, even in violation of the UCMJ, was a necessity, a choice of evils, a recognized defense in military law. When the Nuremberg Charter is at issue, international law supersedes the UCMJ. So Manning’s ostensible crimes were not civil disobedience at all but resistance to government crime.
The so-called defense is comparing Manning’s infractions to war crimes in the abstract – but not to the war crimes that he reported and denounced. The greater evil of the war crimes he reported, that’s Manning’s frickin defense. If Manning said something to undercut that defense, obviously it’s inadmissible because it was exacted under torture.
The Soviets woulda been embarrassed to put on a show trial like this: CIA censorship and eavesdropping, a joke defense. But when CIA says jump, US courts give em double-dutch.
I keep waiting for someone to say in court that Bradley Manning HELPED the United States. Friends don’t let friends commit war crimes. Recognizing a problem is the first step to fixing it, but all we get from the govt is that it’s treason to look openly at facts and share information and outrage. In America. Different story in Nuremberg.
When Jose Padilla’s case against Rumsfeld was tossed, it was the craziest ruling. Court accepted that Padilla had been tortured and that torture was illegal, but then it found a doughnut hole for the years where it was authorized and happened to him. So the law never changed, except it took a leave of absence from 2001 to 2004, said Judge and Torture Memo Author Bybee’s fellows on that court. (I deleted word justices. I just couldn’t say it.) And they mentioned the constitutional test “shocks the conscience” in passing, yet never applied it. Constitution on vacation too. So Rumsfeld and the chain of command up and down remain unaccountable. And I just saw Bidder 70, and the judge in Tim DeChristopher’s case not only kept key information away from the jury but also told them they were not to use their consciences, were not to question anything the judge told them, were not to reach for wisdom, just… crap out. And they did. So DeChristopher went to prison for two years for thwarting an illegal auction (jury couldn’t hear that) and defending home land, while BP… no one went to jail.
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