Michael Hanscom

Guantanamo Bay, already one of the most disturbing aspects of the US military, might be getting a whole lot worse:

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.

Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.

The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.

The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.

The ever-growing parallels between some of the US’s current policies and another historical superpower keep getting freakier. We’re not quite there yet, and I hope we don’t reach that point, but there are enough similarities to worry me at times.

(via Tom Tomorrow)

Here’s something worth a grin:

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., has become a “major donor” to New York’s biggest gay rights organization, thanks to a gay comedian’s off-Broadway show.

Seth Rudetsky, who stars in the one-man show, “Rhapsody in Seth,” started the Sen. Rick Santorum Education Fund earlier this month by donating 5 percent of all ticket sales to the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) in the senator’s name.

The move was a response to Sen. Santorum’s widely published remarks that compared homosexuality to polygamy and incest. The comments ignited protests from gay groups and Democratic leaders, but most Republican leaders, including President Bush, backed him.

On Friday, the ESPA said donations from the Santorum fund reached “major donor” status (\$1,200 minimum), qualifying the named donor for the Empire Club. A letter thanking the senator and outlining the benefits of club membership was mailed and faxed to his office on Friday.

Sen. Santorum’s press office did not return calls for comment.

(via Atrios)

Another excellent speech from Sen. Byrd. Can we please get more politicians like this man in office?

The entire thing is so well worth reading, it’s hard to choose any snippet for a decent pull quote, but…

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein’s direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

Not satisfied with our current land-based campaigns to keep a grip on the rest of the world (whether they want it or not), it appears the US is looking to lock down space-based tactics also — and other countries don’t get a choice.

The nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time — not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide “persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation’s war fighters.” If allies don’t like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have “no veto power.”

“Insane,” was my first thought. Here’s an arms race that is bound to get dangerous quickly.

(via Ars Technica)