The cover of a new book about Hammer films — and yes, I’ve added it to my Wish List.
This Makes Me Very Happy
Wandering Star
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a few weeks — a video from W00tstock, featuring Kid Beyond, who uses a microphone and a loop/effects pad to do an AMAZING live cover of Portishead’s “Wandering Star.”
Linked here, for the RSS-fail-tacular inevitable Facebook screw-up on the embedding.
Disgusting.
You need to read this, and then forward the information to as many people as you can.
This story reveals just how far this country has fallen, and its being downplayed by the corporate media (the New York Times, for example, buried it in their “US News” section (not the front page, and not even the lead in US News).
Short version:
Maher Arar, a Canadian/Syrian citizen, was detained while returning home during a layover at JFK. He was held for two weeks incommunicado, without access to counsel, and then “rendered” to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months. He was innocent — never once involved in any terrorist act or group. Everyone involved now admits that.
Canada publicly apologized for their role in these events, and paid Arar $9 million in restitutions, publishing a statement that concluded that Arar was completely and categorically innocent.
The US, of course, has never admitted any wrongdoing, and has insisted that courts were barred from examining the case because it involved “state secrets.”
Yesterday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Arar’s civil case against the US, saying that even if the government violated Arar’s rights as well as laws that ban participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him, because “providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns.”
In other words — even if they’re guilty of wrongdoing, too bad.
It gets much worse. Read the linked article.
Spread this around. We’ve got to pull this country back from the pit that the last administration drove us into — and that the current administration seems too timid to address.