We now have the precedent of secret detention that might make banana republics envious

That's not all. We now have the precedent of secret detention that might make banana republics envious. Some 5.000 young men, mostly students, have been “interviewed” by the FBI for no other reason than they may not be citizens or they are of Middle Eastern origin. Another 1.200 people were detained, and held indefinitely and secretly, most for no reason other than minor immigration violations that would have been ignored in the past. Of the immigration violations that would have been ignored in the past. Of the immigration and Naturalization Service detainees , 11 percent were imprisioned more than six months before being released or deported. About half were imprisoned for more than three months.
In a highly critical report, the Justice Department's own inspector general found that while imprisioned at the federal detention in Brooklyn, detainees feced “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse” as well as “unduly harsh” detention policies, including 23-hours-per-day lockdown, 24-hours-per-day cell lighting, a communications blackout, and excessive handcuffing, leg irons and heavy chains. The report also criticized the FBI for making “little attempt to distinguish” between immigrants who had possible ties to terrorism and the vast majority who did not, including many swept up by chance.
It is un-American to incarcerate a large group of people when there is no credible reason to think they are dangerous.
Even worse, some detainees, have been subjected to secret deportation proceedings. Soon after the September 11 attacks, immigration courts from coast to coast began conducting scores of hearing in secret, with cout officials, forbidden even to confirm that the cases existed.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

The Bin Laden family has also gotten on the Carlyle gravy train in 1994.

Until 1994, you headed a company called CaterAir, which was owned by the Carlyle Group- The same year you left the soon-to-be-bankrupt CaterAir, you become governor and quickly oversaw the University of Texas – a state institution – make an investment of $10 million in the Carlyle Group. The Bin Laden family has also gotten on the Carlyle gravy train in 1994.
The Carlyle Group is one of the nation's largest defense contractors, among their many other lines of work. They don't actually build weapons themselves. Rather, they buy failing defense companies, turn them around by making them profitable, and then sell them for huge sums of money.
The people who run the Carlyle Group are a Who's Who of past movers and shakers, everyone from Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, Frank Carlucci, to your dad's secretary of state, James Baker, to former British Prime Minister John Major. Carlucci, the head of Carlyle, also happens to sit on the board of directors of the Middle East Policy Council along with a representative of the bin Laden family business.
After September 11, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence.
Your first response, Mr Bush, was to ignore it, hoping , I guess that the story would just go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the bin Laden investment. Your army of pundits went into spin control. They said , we can't paint these bin Ladens with the same brush we use for Osama! They have nothing to do with him! They hate and despise what he had done! These are the good bin Ladens.
And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of those “good” bin Ladens – including osama's mother, a sister and two brothers – with Osama at his son's wedding party just six and a half months before September 11. It has been reported in The New Yorker that not only has the family not cut ties to Osama, but they have continued to fund him as they have been doing for years. It was not secret to the CIA that Osama bin Laden had access to his family fortune (his share is estimated to be at least $30 million), and the bin Ladens, as well as other Saudis, kept Osama and his group. Al Qaeda, well funded.
Mr. Bush, weeks went by after the attacks on New York and the pentagon, yet your father and his friends at the Carlyle Group refused to buckle in their suport for the bin Laden empire.
Finally, near two months after the attacks, with more and more people questioning the propierty of the Bush family being in bed with the bin Ladens, your father and the Carlyle Group were pressured into giving the bin Ladens their millions back and asked them to leave the company as investors.
Why did it take so long?
Tomake matters worse, it turned out that one of bin Laden's brothers – Shafiq – was actually at a Carlyle Group businee conference in Washington, D.C., the morning of September 11. The day before, at the same conference, your father and Shafiq had been chatting it up with all the other ex-goverment Carlyle bigwigs.
Mr Bush, what is going on here?
You've gotten a free ride from the media, though they know everything I have just written to be the truth ( and, in Fact, I have taken it from the very same mainstream new sources they work for). They seem unwilling, or afraid to ask you a simple question: WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?
In case you don't understand just how bizarre the media's silence is regarding the Bush-bin laden connections, let me draw an analogy to how the press or Congress may have handled something like this if the same shoe had been on the Clinton foot.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

Do you enjoy being ruled by the Republican-Democratic Party?

Do you enjoy being ruled by the Republican-Democratic Party? Are you proud to live a life of fear, insecurity and panic? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations taken away for a bank? Do you want a regime that is turning the United States into a police state and giving Christianity a bad name? Are you proud to live under a government that harbours hundreds of terrorists in Miami? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme capitalism and religious conservatives? The capitalists have robbed your country of your equality and justice. They have destroyed your national parks and rivers and corrupted the media, your elections and your personal relations. They rule by threat of unemployment, hunger and homelessness based on the advice of a god called the market. They insist that their form of organizing a society and remaking the world is the one only form, the true form, the divine form. They see themselves as morality experts, even though they are ignorant. They bomb, they invade, assassinate, torture, overthrow, commit injustice, keep you and the world in poverty and claim it is in the name of God.
From the book 'Rogue State' by William Blum

Elections and this thing called democracy 2

Thus a nation with hordes of hungry, homeless, untended sick, barely literate, unemployed and/ or tortured people, whose loved ones are being dissapeared and/ or murdered with state connivance, can be said to living in democracy” its literal Greek meaning of “rule of the people” implying that this is the kind of life the people actually want – provided that every two years or four years they have the right to go to a designated place and put an X next to the name of one or another individual who promises to relieve their miserable condition, but who will typically, do virtually nothing of the kind; and provided further that in this society there is at least a certain minimum of freedom – how much being in large measure a function of one's wealth – for no one's to express one' views about the power that be and the workings of the society, without undue fear of punishment, regardless of whether expressing these views has any influence whatsoever over the way things are.
It is not by chance that the United States has defined democracy in this narrow manner. Throughout the Cold War, the absence of “free and fair” multi party elections and adequate civil liberties was what marked the Soviet foe and its satellites- These nations, however provided their citizens with a relatively decent standard of living in terms of unemployment, food, health care, education, etc., without omnipresent Brazilian torture or Guatemalan death squads. At the same time, many of America's Third World allies in the Cold War – members of what Washington liked to refer to as “The Free World” - were human rights disaster areas, who could boast of little other than the 60 second democracy of the polling booth and tolerance for dissenting opinion so long as it didn't cut too close to the bone or threaten to turn into a movement.
Naturally. The only way to win Cold War propaganda points with team lineups like these was to extol your team's brand of virtue and damn the enmy's lack of it, designating the former “democracy” and the latter “totalitarianism”.
From the book 'Rogue State' by William Blum

Elections and this thing called democracy 1

During the Clinton administration, the sentiment has been proclaimed on so many occasions by the president and other political leaders , and dutifully reiterated by the media, that the thesis “Cuba is the only non-democracy in the Western Hemisfere” in now nothing short of received wisdom in the United States.
Les us examine this thesis carefully for it has a highly interesting implication.
Throughout the period of the Cuban revolution, 1959 to the present, Latin America has witnessed a terrible parade of human rights violations – systematic, routine torture; legions of “disappeared” people, government supported death squads picking off selected individuals; massacres en masse of peasants, students and others groups, shot down in cold blood. The worst perpetrators of these acts during all or part of this period have been the military and associated paramilitary squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Haiti and Honduras.
Not even Cuba's worst enemies have charged the Castro government with any of these violations and if one further considers education and health care – each guaranteed by the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the “European Convention for the Protection of Humans Rights and Fundamental Freedoms” - “both of which, “said President Clinton, “work better (in Cuba) than most other countries”, then it would appear that during the more than 40 years of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best humans rights records in all of Latin America.
If, despite this record, the United States can insist that Cuba is the only “non-democracy” in the Western Hemisphere, we are left with the inescapable conclusion that this thing called “democracy” as seen from the White House, may have little or nothing to do with many of our cherished human rights. Indeed , numerous pronouncements emanating from Washington officialdom over the years make plain that “democracy”, at best , or at most, is equated solely with elections and civil liberties. Not even jobs, food and shelter are part of the equation.
From the book 'Rogue State' by William Blum

The bin Ladens

The bin Ladens are one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction firm virtually built the country , from the roads and power plants, to the skyscrappers and government buildings. They built some of the airstrips America used in your dad's Gulf War, and they renovated the holy sites at Mecca and Medina, Billionaires many times over, they soon began investing in other ventures around the world, including the United States. They have extensive business dealings with Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the Fremont Group – a spin-off of energy giant Betchel. According to The New Yorker, the bin Laden family also owns a part of Microsoft and the airline and defense giant Boeing. They have donated $2 million to your alma mater, Harvard University, $300,000 more to Tufts University, and tens of thousands more to the Middle East Policy Council, a think tank headed by a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles freeman. In addition to the propierty they own in Texas, they also have real state in Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep on our pants.
Unfortunately, as you know, Mr. Bush, Salem bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1988 (his father, Mohammad, also died in a plane crash in 1967) . Salem's brother's – there are around 50 of them, including Osama – continued to run the family companies and investments.
After leaving office, your father became a hihgly paid consultant for a company known as the Carlyle Group. One of the investors in the Carlyle Group was none other than the bin Laden family. The bin Ladens put a minimum of $2 million into the Carlyle Group.
From the book 'Dude,Where's My Country' by Michael Moore

Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander

Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1.30 in the morning.
“What ? he said confused.
“Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. He woman has a gunshot wound.”
“Al right,” Jonasson said wearily.
He felt groggy although he had slept for only half an hour. He was on the night shift in A.&E. at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. Since he had come on duty at 6.00 p.m., the hospital had received four victims of a head-on collision outside Lindome. One was pronounced D.=.A. He had treated a waitress whose legs had been scalded in an accident at a restaurant on Avenyn, and he had saved the life of a fur year old boy who had arrived at he hospital with respiratory failure after swallowing the wheel of a toy car. He had patched up a girl who had ridden her bike into a ditch that he road repair department had chosen to dig close to the end of a bike path; the warming barriers had been tipped into the hole. She had fourteen stitches in her face and would need two new front teeth. Jonasson had also sewn par part of a thumb back on to a enthusiastic carpenter who had managed to slice it off.
By 12.30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients, and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6.00 in the morning, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light.
Nurse Nicander handed him a cup of tea. She had not been given any details about the incoming cases.
Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Göteborg.
He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squalls down towards he helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of view and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup.
From the book “The girl who kicked the hornets’ nest.”By Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland