For Just One Day

ABC News is reporting that Lithuania supplied the CIA with facilities for a secret prison in which eight War on Terra prisoners were interned, interrogated, and tortured.

The black site was located on the outskirts of Vilnius, the nation’s capital. Lithuanian officials are said to have agreed to host the facility as part of a campaign to improve relations with the United States. CIA black—or secret—prisons have previously been identified in Thailand, Poland, Afghanistan, Romania, and Morocco. Like the black sites in Romania and Poland, the Lithuanian facility was shut down in 2005, after the Washington Post reported that War on Terra prisoners were suffering in secret confinement in Eastern European prisons.

The Lithuanian government denies the report, while the CIA has blasted it as “irresponsible.”

“The CIA does not publicly discuss where facilities associated with its past detention program may or may not have been located,” said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “The dangers of airing such allegations are plain. These kinds of assertions could, at least potentially, expose millions of people to direct threat. That is irresponsible.”

The CIA apparently still doesn’t get that it is the serial abuses of George II’s War on Terra, and not the public airing of those abuses, that “expose millions of people to direct threat.”

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Builders of states, architects of revolution: these are usually idealists, who believe that what they create shall be different, better, other, more, than all that came before.

If wishes were horses . . . .

John Winthrop, Puritan prelate of the Massachusetts Bay Company, promised to plant on the shores of North America a beacon for all the world: “the eyes of all people are upon us,” he said, and “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Yet before his people could even properly feed themselves, they were busy hanging one another for adultery.

Nearly 400 years later, the animatronic Ronald Reagan proclaimed that Winthrop’s fabled American city had taken on a glow—we were now “a shining city on a hill.” To which William Burroughs was heard to grumble: ”America may well be the hope of the world. It is also the source of such emotional plagues as drug hysteria, racism, Bible belt morality, Protestant capitalistic ethic, muscular Christianity, that have spread everywhere, transforming this planet into an annex of Hell.” My own observation, expressed at the time, was that the only American city I could see with much of a shine, there during Reagan’s time, was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then all aglow from the near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility.

In a 1972 interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir confessed her deep disappointment with the reality of the Jewish state.

You’ll think me foolish, naive, but I thought that in a Jewish state there wouldn’t be the evils that afflict other societies. Theft, murder, prostitution. I thought so because we had started out so well. Fifteen years ago in Israel there were almost no thefts, and there were no murders, there was no prostitution. Now instead we have everything, everything. And it’s something that breaks your heart[.]

So too, Iran. 

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In American history and mythology, the name Robert Ford is covered in infamy. Because, like a coward, he waited until the bandit Jesse James had diverted his attention elsewhere, and then shot him in the back. Even those who had urged and appreciated James’ death found Ford’s act unpalatable. Americans then did not have much use for cowardly back-shooters. Shooting unawares an unarmed man in the back, no matter who he might be, did not comport with the image of who we thought ourselves to be.

Times change, and so, I guess, have we. On August 4, some Bobby Ford sitting in an air-conditioned aerie on some military base somewhere in the United States pushed a button, and, thousands of miles away in Pakistan, another black-bearded bandit, Baitullah Mehsud, was blown in half, as he lay abed receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. Nobody in the States seems to be in much of a ferment over this: how easily we have become accustomed to these aerial predators, though they seem most adept at transforming weddings into abattoirs. Killing a person as he receives medical treatment, that was also once considered, here in the Western world, “not cricket,” but I guess that’s over too. Besides Mehsud, the drone strike also snuffed out the lives of one of Mehsud’s wives, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, and eight other people. But those sorts of folks we just write off, these days, with the Orwellian term “collateral damage.” Give the original Bobby Ford some credit: at least James knew Ford was in his house, and Ford didn’t compound his crime by reducing the rest of the people in the place to bits of bones and bloody jelly.

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This is the time to take a break from all the politics of the day and enjoy some science news. New discoveries. New takes on old knowledge. Over the fold are some of my favorite selections the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today’s tidbits include zombie ants doing all the work for a fungus, struggles continue for the giant particle collider, brain “exercises” may delay memory loss in dementia, new microchip technology performs 1000 chemical reactions at once, a new imaging technique reveals structure of 300 million year old spider ancestors, and stem cell research may make lab mice redundant. Follow down the yellow brick road for one more session of science education and entertainment. Read entire article.

Here we are again. Friday and time for a science break. New discoveries. New takes on old knowledge. Over the fold are some of my favorite selections the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today’s tidbits include earthquake protection with “invisibility cloak”, 3-D brain mapping for removal of a large tumor, making concrete from rice husk ash, a contact lens to deliver eye drugs, and chimpanzees die of simian AIDS contrary to popular belief. Follow down the yellow brick road for one more session of science education and entertainment.

Read entire article.

Here we are again. Friday arrived and the time for a science break is upon us once again. New discoveries. New takes on old knowledge. Over the fold are some of my favorite selections the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today’s tidbits include cells “talk” to one another when in trouble, a new insect species discovered on Balearc Islands, rural life in ancient Egypt, a new targeted treatment for prostate cancer, dynamic DNA, linc-RNA’s serve as genetic air traffic controllers, and a new step in water desalinization. Follow down the yellow brick road for one more session of science education and entertainment.
Read entire article.

Mother Jones has the story of medical personnel mistreating detainees in a recent issue. The post is a real condemnation of both the actions of medical personnel including physicians and the failure of the system to deal with the surrounding issues.

But even as the nation debates disbarment for the Bush administration lawyers who green-lighted torture, the medical profession has dealt reluctantly, if at all, with its own involvement.

Doctors were complicit in the torture strategy from the start. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a directive allowing interrogators to withhold care in nonemergency situations—men with injuries including gunshot wounds were denied treatment as a way to make them talk. (The directive was soon revoked, but the practice continued.)

Read entire article.

The news around the world concerning torture or not under the Bush administration continues to make the headlines every day.  The Obama adminstration faces a round of tough decisions as facing our checkered past continues to be an issue. No matter the future the skeletons are out of the closet today.

From the Justice Department comes news Attorney General Eric Holder

is considering whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation practices involving the CIA, and is expected to make a decision in a few weeks

Read entire article.

Welcome to our Sunday Service. Officiating today will be the Right Reverend John Mellencamp, assisted by Pastor Karen Fairchild. Open your hymnals to “A Ride Back Home.”

Let us sing.

One for Lord Bat. And for Alexa.