Friday, July 1, 2005
"Criminal suspects are treated better..."Read what The Heretik has to say about "Harmful Material." 3:03:41 PM | Human Rights Watch and the ACLU have released a report about material witnesses who have been held by the government without due process: "These men were victims of a Justice Department that was willing to do
an end run around the law," said Jamie Fellner, director of Human
Rights Watch's U.S. Program. "Criminal suspects are treated better than
these material witnesses were."
[...] Witnesses were typically arrested at gunpoint, held around the clock in solitary confinement, and subjected to the harsh and degrading high-security conditions usually reserved for prisoners accused or convicted of the most dangerous crimes. Corrections staff verbally harassed the detainees and, in some cases, physically abused them. The report found that one-third of the 70 confirmed material witnesses were incarcerated for at least two months. Some were imprisoned for more than six months, and one actually spent more than a year behind bars. According to the report, the Justice Department apparently used the material witness statute to buy time to conduct fishing expeditions for evidence to justify arrests on criminal or immigration charges. When there was no such evidence, the Justice Department simply held the men under the material witness law until it concluded that it had no further use for them or until a judge finally ordered their release. And Dick Durbin had to apologize for his remarks. Give me a break. We're going to need our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end of all this. If we're lucky, we'll get one. The future grows more dim every moment. 
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Friday Baja BloggingIn honor of Bouphonia's Friday Nudibrach Blogging
that has brought me so much pleasure the past few months, I'm offering
Friday Baja Blogging, with images from the beaches near San Quintin in
Lazaro Cardenas, about five hours south of the US border. 12:12:05 PM | These come from a beach near five sleeping volcanoes on a bay that stretches into the penninsula from the Pacific Ocean. The beach is covered in beautiful stones, many striped. I'm trying to document them before they are gone. Stone poachers have taken over the beach to package the rocks and sell them to Crate and Barrel, among other retailers. Soon, I worry, there will be few stones left. The photos are "found object" pieces. I don't move the stones or manipulate the images. They are exactly as I found them.  Baja holds a lot of wonderful memories for me. I met my dear friends Fred and Selma there. S is an amateur astronomer so he brings his telescope with him when we visit. During the leonid meteor showers, we take out an air mattress and sleep outside with the meteors jetting over us through the milky way. There is little light pollution to cloud the view. It's spectacular. In some ways these stones are like stars. They hold the universe in them.
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Last update: 8/24/05; 8:18:42 PM .
