ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

The Pentagon has announced charges against six Guantanamo Bay prisoners over their alleged involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.

There are already international policies in place to deal with such things. Also, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the accused, has been waterboarded, i.e. tortured into confessing to these crimes. The BBC mentions that fact but they make no mention of the fact that there are international institutes in place for prosecuting these crimes.

Also! They are actually being charged with hijacking and attacking civilian objects - they are being charged as if they were the ones who flew the planes into the Trade Center towers. Not just conspiracy to do such, but they are being charged with the full crime that they may or may not have directed others to commit.

The US is seeking the death penalty, to silence them once and for all. Kind of how it sent Jose Padilla to jail for enough years that everyone who could be convicted of torturing or railroading him into jail for crimes he didn’t commit will be long gone. More on Jose here. He was arrested for one thing and convicted for another after 3 years of solitary confinement and probably torture, though terms of his sentence prohibit him from speaking with the media. They had sought the death penalty for Padilla.

Opponents argue that inmates are often not rendered fully unconscious by the first drug in the cocktail as they are supposed to be before the second drug, a paralytic, is administered. They suffer when they are conscious while the paralytic and the third drug, which burns as it enters the system, are given.

Well, we have fancy fucking brain monitoring equipment, we can scan their brains for signs that the suffering system is active or not and how much it is, and we can actually find out, instead of just guessing whether or not these people are dying ‘in peace’ or whatever it’s supposed to be.

Why not offer an option of mental reconditioning against whatever crime it is they have committed? Like build into them an aversion of young people, if they are convicted pedophiles, or an aversion to weapons and violence if they are violent offenders. We have therapy programs for drug users that seek to instill in them a conviction that drugs are ruining their life and their only hope is to quit forever and go to meetings. Why don’t we have PA or MA (paedophilia anonymous or murderers anonymous)?

It might strike many as a paradox, but Mr Crenshaw believes that in a culture that values human life above all, the right to take that life away is an essential tool of justice.

Either life is sacred, or it is not. But in our culture, it’s not the killing that counts, it’s who you’re killing that counts. Innocent Iraqi’s are okay, because we’re pursuing the ‘terrorists,’ first-world babies, even the products of rape or ones that would kill their mothers in childbirth are not (babies that die as collateral damage in Iraq are cool too. The U.S. military does not do body counts… unless they’re ‘militants’ they’re hoping on scoring some media points with. Look at us, we got the bad guys. Rawr.). Murderers, even ones that may have been falsely convicted, are cool. As long as you get someone, even if it wasn’t the right person, you have justice for the family because they feel a sense of vindication when the ‘murderer’ dies.

Now, in this case, the death penalty was overturned twice before he was finally convicted in 1990. There is no physical evidence linking him to the scene of the crime, but he was convicted anyway. DNA evidence, which has exonerated many, many death row convicts, even ten, twenty years after their crimes were committed, will not be allowed in this case, because Alabama politicos have been hot-nuts to have this guy killed for the last twenty years, and don’t want to appear as wrong-headed blood-thirsty bastards if he was truly exonerated, as his daughter believes DNA evidence will show him.

Some more choice quotes:

Alabama’s governor has made it clear he wants Arthur to die as soon as possible, and that the current furore over the chemicals used to deliver the ultimate punishment is an annoying distraction.

…

“What do we have to do? Put a mask over them and just take away their oxygen? I want justice,” she [Miriam Shenane] said, in her office in the state capital, Montgomery.

…

Tommy Arthur’s daughter, Sherrie Arthur Stone, was still a teenager when her father was first sentenced to death.

For years, she thought he was probably guilty, and deserved the jail time he spent earlier in his life.

But now she is convinced of his innocence, fuelled largely by her disillusionment with a judicial system she views as callous and incompetent in Alabama.

Articulate and earnest, but clearly scarred by years of legal and emotional battle, she stopped living in the state a long time ago.

“I was basically told by investigators, if I didn’t leave the state, I’d be found dead on a back road,” she told the BBC.

“They clearly want to murder my father, which is what this is going to be. It’s not going to be an execution, it’s going to be a murder.”