OVO

Wikipedia: Missing in action [LINK-ZUM]

Missing in action is a status assigned to a member of the armed services who is reported missing following combat. The person in question may have been killed, wounded or captured by the enemy. [...] In May of 1991, the Minority Report of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee concluded that "any evidence that suggested an MIA might be alive was uniformly and arbitrarily rejected... " A resolution to create a Senate Select POW/MIA Committee, introduced by U.S. Senator Robert C. Smith, was passed in the Senate months later. Senator John Kerry was eventually named chairman, and was joined on the committee by Senator and former POW John McCain, who had been a strong opponent of the creation of a Senate Select POW/MIA Committee. Six live sighting investigators hired by the committee unanimously concluded that the live sighting intelligence through 1989 showed Vietnam and Laos were still holding American prisoners. [...]

In 2006, the National Alliance of Families found 1992 documents discussing the admission by Vietnam of capturing a number of missing Americans. The National Alliance contacted the families they could locate, and found that the Vietnamese admissions had been concealed from the families by the U.S. government. The U.S. and Vietnamese governments had given every indication to the families that the men had been killed in their loss incidents. However, at least one MIA, San Dewayne Francisco was reported to be alive by a North Vietnamese newspaper which was confirmed by radio transmissions by Francisco immediately after his aircraft crashed. A bill including criminal penalties for deliberately withholding POW/MIA records in violation of the law unanimously passed the House of Representatives in the 1990s. However, penalties were stripped from the law due to the efforts of former POW John McCain.

[Article continues at link.]

Labels: fight, prison

Anonymous: The Right to be Here [LINK-ZUM]

I'm not an anarchist. At least I wasn't one of the kids running around the Xcel Energy Center in black handkerchiefs during the St Paul RNC. Nor did I store my urine in a bucket for a week to throw on delegates, and I didn't break any windows either. But, I was one of the people detained by police on Monday. One of my co-workers even saw me on the Channel 11 news, zip-tied like a hog, being led away walking backwards by two riot police. I'm assuming that he knew me well enough to reason I wasn't there with violent intent, but asked nonetheless why I went to downtown St Paul that day. I thought about it for a second, but couldn't give a good answer to why I'm now in an FBI database. "I wanted to take pictures" and "I wanted to see it for myself" was what I managed. Then he asked why I was arrested. I had a much clearer answer for that. [...]

I thought about the original question my co-worker asked, "Why did you go down there?" and when the next coworker asked I had a much better answer. Thinking about the huge lines of police and being humiliated on TV, I answered, "Because I had a right to be there." They looked at me like I was an idiot for getting involved. I don't know how to explain that either, but I believe it in my core. I didn't go to protest, or for any other reason but for the right to be there. And the fact that nobody seemed to "get it" made it all the more important. After thinking about it more, that's the scariest thing to me now: [your] government can arrest you for walking down the street, and nobody seems to care.

[Article continues at link. Tyranny needs no Leader, no Symbol, no Force, tyranny needs only indifference. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: prison

Trevor Blake on Books: Papillon by Henri Charriere [LINK-ZUM]

Autobiography. Henri Charriere was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. This average man was placed in a situation far more dangerous than he was ready for, but through acts of cunning and physical strength he survived. Every attempt to imprison his body or crush his will failed. He never gave up. This average man wrote a book of his life experiences that became popular and which served as the subject of a popular film. I recommend both the book and the film.

The possibility that life for the average person could suddenly become much more difficult than anything that person has known before is always with us. Only by making ourselves strong in times of peace can we have a chance of turning adversities into opportunities. What Charriere survived gives me a healthy sense of perspective when I start to get wound up about the minor difficulties in my day-to-day life.

Wikipedia on Papillon.
Nine minutes from the film Papillon.

Labels: biographic, books, film, prison

Adam Liptak: 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says [LINK-ZUM]

For the first time in the nation's history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report. Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars. Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.

[Article continues at link. One quick way to reduce this horrible statistic by a quarter would be to end prohibition. And while we're at it, we could decriminalize the other victimless crimes. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: books, prison, prohibition

Ed Pilkington: Life without hope [LINK-ZUM]

In the US, there are 2,270 prisoners who were sentenced as children to life without parole. They will die behind bars. [...] Michigan is one of 41 states in America that allows children under 18 to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. The US is among a tiny minority of countries (Somalia is another) that have refused to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that expressly forbids the practice. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, only three other countries - Israel, South Africa and Tanzania - mete out the sentence and they have collectively just 12 prisoners serving it.

[How do the crimes and sentences of these children compare to the crimes and sentences of Nazi war criminals? Karl Donitz, second Reichsprasident of the Third Reich following Hitler's suicide, was sentenced to 10 years. Konstantin von Neurath, found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war-crimes and crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 15 years. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and found guilty of crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 20 years. Albert Speer, found guilty of the use of slave labor, was sentenced to 20 years. Nothing can bring back the men and women murdered by children serving life sentences in US prisons. But life in prison for children cannot be the only answer to this problem. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: fascism, prison, slavery

Trevor Blake: On September 11 [LINK-ZUM]

Robert, September 11, The date which will live in infamy:
Now it has been six years. The global jihad proceeds apace, with well over 9,000 deadly attacks carried out in the course of those six years by believers in the proposition that "Islam must dominate, and not be dominated." Yet we are no closer as a society to recognizing how exactly to combat this foe, and our responses flail wildly -- witness this report that prisons have removed Jewish and Christian books from their libraries so as to allow them, within today's suffocating multiculturalist ethos, to remove also books advocating jihad violence and Islamic supremacism. [...] Six years after 9/11, the jihad proceeds apace, and the UN investigates... Islamophobia.

Want to end Islamophobia? End violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. I guarantee that Islamophobia will then vanish utterly.

Adrian Morgan, Six Years After The Wake-Up Call:
It is now exactly six years to the day that the world woke up to the true horror and the evil of Islamism. [...] Since that time, some people seem to have forgotten what created that day of slaughter and the loss of innocence. Conspiracy theorists, taking denial to the furthest degree, still try to capitalize on those tragic and gut-wrenching acts of Muslim terrorism to blame the CIA, the US government, anything to suggest that followers of a barbaric, bloodthirsty, punitive religion invented by a genocidal 7th century caravan-raider could never have committed such a dastardly plan. The wake-up call was made, but too many people prefer to forget, or to minimize the reality. Islamists try to rule through fear. They violently silence a few brave people and the rest of us hide in the shadows, fearful that if we too speak out, or if we are identified as enemies of Islamism, that we too will be silenced by violence.

David Charter, Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith:
A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam. The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance. The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee's founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.

[Articles continue at links. Let every day be one day closer to the withering away of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and all religions. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: 9/11, islam, prison, theocracy

Glenn C. Loury: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? [LINK-ZUM]

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States - with five percent of the world’s population - houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

[I have never, no not once, 'used drugs.' Nonetheless, in memory of Peter McWilliams, I say open the prisons and let the victims of the drug war go. That would be a good start at solving the problem of over-imprisonment in United States. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: prison

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