It's begun to snow again. What a shame. Monday it was quite warm, nearly 60 degrees. The following day, Tuesday, within the early hours of the morning there was a dramatic drop to make an entire afternoon composed of blizzardy winds, snow, and temperatures of around 15 degrees. Walking from building to building, my eyeglasses iced over, and my hair got matted down wet and iced from the snow. Yesterday it was okay, however, today the snow had begun to fall yet again. Therefore, I am stuck indoors today, listening to The Raconteurs. I don't really have a reason for putting them on, but they seem to be fitting . . . I guess. I'm actually not a big fan, or really any sort of a fan, of Jack White, but I'm forgoing that at this point, because I like Brendan Benson enough forgo it.
I'm still working on the Noam Chomsky book. I'm only a fourth of the way through, and it seems like I'm not making any progress. Once I got about thirty pages in it stopped making want to fall asleep and instead began to make me slightly angry. At that point he was pointing out that the legal advisers of Bush sent him a memo noting to him the legal definition of torture, so as the administration could use that little factotum as a defense legally to ward off claims and charges under the international law set by the Geneva Convention regarding war crimes and torture.
It states, "In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. As noted by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson: "According to the OLC, 'acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture. . . . Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.'" Levinson goes on to say that in the view of Jay Bybee, then head of the OLC, "The infliction of anything less intense than such extreme pain would not, technically speaking, be torture at all. It would merely be inhuman and degrading treatment, a subject of little and apparent concern to the Bush administration's lawyers."
The text goes on to the further state that Mr. Gonzales advised the President to rescind the Geneva Conventions as to "substantially reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Chomsky then goes on the broaden that the US called for the adoption of this more "interrogator-friendly" definition of the term so they could "justify the torture of detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere as well, it appears."
Furthermore, when I began to read that the Bush administration's 'tactful' legal advice from Gonzales was proven sound, due to the cause that in November 2004 they began a campaign with a preliminary bombing with the intent of driving out all but the adult male population out of Falluja. The text goes on to say: "While the preliminary bombing was under way, Iraqi journalist Nermeen al-Mufti reported from 'the city of minarets [which] once echoed the Euphrates in its beauty and calm [with its] plentiful water and lush greenery . . . a summer resort for Iraqis [where people went for] leisure, for a swim at the nearby Habbaniya lake, for a kebab meal.' She described the fates of these bombing attacks in which sometimes whole families, including pregnant women and babies, unable to flee, along with many others, were killed because the attackers who ordered their flight had cordoned of the city, closing the exit roads."
It goes on and on and on. I could go on and on and on. I suppose it is upon reading such things that I lose faith in the government, the administration, those that violate and manipulate law to prove and become to the benefit of their own unjust causes. In addition, I guess, if everybody read people like Chomsky, or even watched his lectures that on film if they're not into reading, everybody would realize their strong-seated ignorance to support a political cause for the reason of one being labeled "Democrat" or "Republican." Either party is as twisted as the other and neither deserve to have a place in the high office.
I'm still working on the Noam Chomsky book. I'm only a fourth of the way through, and it seems like I'm not making any progress. Once I got about thirty pages in it stopped making want to fall asleep and instead began to make me slightly angry. At that point he was pointing out that the legal advisers of Bush sent him a memo noting to him the legal definition of torture, so as the administration could use that little factotum as a defense legally to ward off claims and charges under the international law set by the Geneva Convention regarding war crimes and torture.
It states, "In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. As noted by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson: "According to the OLC, 'acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture. . . . Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.'" Levinson goes on to say that in the view of Jay Bybee, then head of the OLC, "The infliction of anything less intense than such extreme pain would not, technically speaking, be torture at all. It would merely be inhuman and degrading treatment, a subject of little and apparent concern to the Bush administration's lawyers."
The text goes on to the further state that Mr. Gonzales advised the President to rescind the Geneva Conventions as to "substantially reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Chomsky then goes on the broaden that the US called for the adoption of this more "interrogator-friendly" definition of the term so they could "justify the torture of detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere as well, it appears."
Furthermore, when I began to read that the Bush administration's 'tactful' legal advice from Gonzales was proven sound, due to the cause that in November 2004 they began a campaign with a preliminary bombing with the intent of driving out all but the adult male population out of Falluja. The text goes on to say: "While the preliminary bombing was under way, Iraqi journalist Nermeen al-Mufti reported from 'the city of minarets [which] once echoed the Euphrates in its beauty and calm [with its] plentiful water and lush greenery . . . a summer resort for Iraqis [where people went for] leisure, for a swim at the nearby Habbaniya lake, for a kebab meal.' She described the fates of these bombing attacks in which sometimes whole families, including pregnant women and babies, unable to flee, along with many others, were killed because the attackers who ordered their flight had cordoned of the city, closing the exit roads."
It goes on and on and on. I could go on and on and on. I suppose it is upon reading such things that I lose faith in the government, the administration, those that violate and manipulate law to prove and become to the benefit of their own unjust causes. In addition, I guess, if everybody read people like Chomsky, or even watched his lectures that on film if they're not into reading, everybody would realize their strong-seated ignorance to support a political cause for the reason of one being labeled "Democrat" or "Republican." Either party is as twisted as the other and neither deserve to have a place in the high office.
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