More billboards!

The godless heathen are spreading their message everywhere. I got an email from blog reader David about a billboard that he and fellow members of the NCW Freethinkers Meetup in eastern Washington state have put up.

NCWbillboard.jpg

David says that the region is very reactionary and religious and so this was quite a bold move on their part, even though the billboard does not directly undermine belief in god but only asks for the separation of church and state to be maintained. But I suspect that there are a lot of closet skeptics in that region as well, and this billboard will hearten them that they are not alone.

So well done David and the NCW Freethinkers!

More lies emerge about the bin Laden story

As is usual in these situations, information is now coming out that many of the details surrounding the killing of bin Laden, such as that he was armed and was killed in a firefight, were false, which makes his killing highly problematical. Other lies were that he used his wife as a shield and that he lived in luxury in a palatial mansion. No doubt this was part of a propaganda effort to discredit bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers by portraying him as a soft and cowardly hypocrite, not a warrior. It turns out that though the compound was large, the house itself was modest with not even air-conditioning, and much of the land was used to grow vegetables and keep chickens and a cow.

Another false story surrounded the photograph of Obama and his national security team staring intently at something. We were led to believe that they were watching a live feed of the raid on the bin Laden compound, perhaps even the shooting of bin Laden himself. Now that story has also been thrown into doubt since it has emerged that the feed went dead for about 25 minutes after the raid began. It turns out that even the photos that appeared in the next day’s papers of Obama speaking to the nation were staged after he had actually finished speaking.

At this point, all that I am willing to believe is that 80 commandos arrived in three helicopters of which one was destroyed, they killed bin Laden and two other people and wounded a woman, captured some computers and documents, and dumped his body into the ocean.

Attempted murder of Anwar al-Awlaki

For obvious reasons, it is generally considered a crime for any government to engage in extra-judicial killings, in effect executing people without giving them the benefit of a trial. The governments that are infamous for operating such death squads are looked upon as rogue regimes. There are some occasions where the killing may be justified, such as on a battlefield or someone who is violently resisting arrest. If such restrictions are removed, governments could (and would) send people around the world to kill anyone they perceive as an enemy. This is why the Obama administration created those lies in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden killing, that he was armed and resisted arrest and that he died in a firefight.

But in the euphoria that followed the bin Laden killing, the country seems to want to ignore the potential illegality of the act and the Attorney General has even promulgated the extraordinary doctrine that his killing was an “act of national self defense”, presumably to pre-empt any talk of illegality. In the Great and Glorious War on Terror, we have now given the US government the unilateral power to kill anyone it pleases and simply make up reasons why it is allowed to do so.

Those who raise concerns about such behavior are dismissed because it seems self-evident to many people that bin Laden deserved to die and they don’t care how he died. But, as Noam Chomsky points out, there is a real danger in giving the government this kind of freedom to kill people with impunity because governments never have enough power and will use any event to further chip away at all the restraints on them. The Obama administration was quick to take advantage of this freedom. Just a few days later there are reports that the government tried to kill the Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen with a targeted missile strike that missed him but killed two other people.

It is important to realize why this is so serious and has to be vigorously protested. al-Awlaki is a US-born citizen who is not a soldier and was not even on a battlefield when the attempt to kill him was made, since the US is not at war with Yemen, at least not yet though with the number of wars expanding this may just be a matter of time. Furthermore, he has not been accused of committing any actual crime. What he is accused of is inciting other people to attack US government targets, which by itself is not a crime. If it were, any number of militia movements in the US would have all their members in jail. Furthermore, these are just accusations and have only been made by the government to the media. As far as I know, there have been no formal grand jury indictments against him.

So what we have now is a situation in which the government has simply asserted the right to declare a US citizen guilty by press release, and then kill him anywhere in the world even if he is not on a battlefield. It so happens that al-Awlaki was in Yemen when the attempt to murder him occurred but this is a technicality. If the government is allowed this extraordinary leeway, what is to prevent it killing US citizens even in the US? If this power is left unchecked, it means that no one is safe from summary execution by the agents of the US government.

There is no question that the Obama administration will use the support generated by its killing of bin Laden to expand its power even further and there is no telling where this process will end up. This is why Democratic administrations are so dangerous to basic liberties. So many of the people who would have vociferously protested this assault on the basic rule of law if Bush or any other Republican were in office are now nowhere to be found or are making excuses for these actions or even glorying in showing that Democratic presidents can also be ‘tough’.

It is of course true that the US government has over its history ordered the killing of many people it considered inconvenient. The CIA has long been in the political assassination business. But the government knew that such actions were illegal and thus they were done covertly and officially denied. And there was always the remote possibility that someone could be held accountable for doing something illegal and this served as a check on more rampant abuses.

But that slim restraint been removed altogether and now government officials proudly announce their illegal attacks. Are we really willing to officially create rogue governments by giving them the right to murder you or me simply on the say so of some official in the government? The acid test is how we would react if a foreign government sent out death squads to the US to kill US citizens that it deemed as ‘enemy combatants’. As Chomsky says, “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

Glenn Greenwald has more on the al-Awlaki killing attempt.

Sarah Palin in India

After the last election when the interviews she gave to the media turned into debacles, Sarah Palin has avoided them, except for those where she knows she will get softball questions from friendly hosts on Fox News.

But on a recent trip to India to give a speech, she agreed to an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of India Today, perhaps not realizing that other countries also have real journalists. That interview did not go that well, either.

How the face evolved

Your Inner Fish is a book by Neil Shubin, the leader of the team that in 2006 discovered Tiktaalik, the 375 million year old transitional fossil between fish and land animal. The book shows how the basic morphology (i.e., form and structure) of human bodies can be traced back to our fishy ancestors.

The BBC has nice report (with a short video) on how some of our features, especially the face, came about. In particular, it explains the presence of the philtrum, the little groove on our upper lip just below the nose that has no obvious function.

Steroid Jesus

An odd problem that Christianity faces in the US is that Jesus is seen as basically a wuss. All that turning-the-other-cheek stuff does not sit well with a country that has a Chuck Norris mindset. This may be partly the reason that churches tend to be predominantly elderly and female.

To appeal to men, I have written before about how some Christian groups have developed worship services that involve all manner of manly activities.

But this may not be enough. What Jesus additionally needs is a physical makeover to make him less effeminate and more appealing to the testosterone-heavy crowd and this billboard that purportedly appeared in Myrtle Beach, SC may be one strategy.

steroidjesus.jpg

Reports of this billboard date back to the mid-2000 period but I have not been able to confirm that it is real.

Of course, no post on manliness is complete without a video of the Village People singing their hit song Macho Man.

Ethics of atheists

Via Machines Like Us, I came across this article by researchers Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman that challenges the view among some religious people that atheists have poor ethics.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious. [My italics]
…
As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

Atheists may not be the most ethical people around but we can make a strong case that we are much more ethical than a certain prominent Christian theologian who likes to claim that without a god there can be no objective morality, and then proceeds to justify genocide and rape because his god commanded it.

If that is where objective morality takes you, then I am really glad to be a moral relativist.

The WikiLeaks model expands, sort of

WikiLeaks put the mainstream media in a bind. They benefited hugely from all the information that was released but at the same time they were embarrassed by using as a source a news organization that the US government hated.

Now the Wall Street Journal has started its own website aimed at getting whistleblower information in the same way as WIkiLeaks. But since they see themselves as ‘good’ journalists (i.e., subservient to the US government and oligarchy), they have inserted a clause saying that they will share any information with the government and other authorities. Hence their approach will likely fail.

But what this does reveal is what I have been saying all along, that the WikiLeaks model is the future of journalism.

Sanitizing the truth about Guantanamo

Chris Floyd reports on how the New York Times buried those facts in the latest WikiLeaks release on Guantanamo to hide the details that were embarrassing to the US.

Almost as sickening as the atrocities themselves, however, is the way the release has been played in the New York Times, whose coverage of the document dump will set the tone for the American media and political establishments. The Times’ take is almost wholly devoted to showing how evil and dangerous a handful of the hundreds of Gitmo detainees were, and to justifying Barack Obama’s betrayal of his promises to close the concentration camp. We are treated to lurid tales (many if not most of them extracted under torture, but who cares about that?) of monsters seething with irrepressible hatred of America, and so maniacally devoted to jihad that they inject themselves with libido-deadening drugs to ward off any sexual distractions from their murderous agenda.

There is almost no mention in the Times coverage of the many innocent people — including children — who spent years in the concentration camp, athough the main story about the documents does note, in an eyeblink, the case of one prisoner who was falsely imprisoned on the word of an Afghan official trying to hide his own complicity with insurgents. (Damn treacherous furriners!)

He points out that the international press had no difficulty discerning the real story in the same dossier, as this except from the Guardian shows:

The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence.

Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about “suspicious phone numbers” found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of “his possible knowledge of Taliban…local leaders”

The documents also reveal … Almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses. Many went on hunger strike or attempted suicide.

The full Guardian dossier on this latest release also has an analysis by Julian Glover who says:

The leaked files published by the Guardian and the New York Times reveal horror that lies only partly in the physical things that were done to inmates – the desperate brutality of heated isolation cells, restraining straps and forced interrogation.
…
But what is given new prominence by these latest Guantánamo files is the cold, incompetent stupidity of the system: a system that tangled up the old and the young, the sick and the innocent. A system in which to say you were not a terrorist might be taken as evidence of your cunning.
…
It didn’t work, much of the time. These files show that some of the information collected was garbage and that many of those held knew nothing that could be of use to the people demanding answers from them. Far from securing the fight against terror, the people running the camp faced an absurdist battle to educate a 14-year-old peasant boy kidnapped by an Afghan tribe and treat the dementia, depression and osteoarthritis of an 89-year-old man caught up in a raid on his son’s house.

Other cases are just as pathetic. Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, was imprisoned by the Taliban as a possible spy, after being found wandering through Afghanistan as a Muslim convert. In a movement of Kafkaesque horror the Americans held him in Camp X-Ray simply because he had been a prisoner of its enemy [My italics]. “He was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics,” the files record.
…
At times, I have feared that obsessing over the injustices of Guantánamo Bay has become a surrogate for a wider hatred of America. Read the files, and you’ll realise that obsession is the only possible humane response.

I would have said that what happened and is still happening at Guantanamo should be the nation’s everlasting shame, if I didn’t feel that we had lost the capacity to feel shame.