By Steve Rhodes
Posting will be sporadic through the holiday weekend as we try to clear some things off our desk. Drinking and depression will also be sporadic as we try to clear some things off our desk. Finally, we hope to destroy the desk.
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Preckwinkle Kills Project Shield.
“The system was . . . ill-conceived, poorly designed and badly executed,” said Mike Masters, Cook County director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Or as Carol Marin and Don Moseley write:
“Born out of the 9/11 attacks, Project Shield was a federally funded urban initiative to equip 128 municipal police departments in Cook County with cameras in squad cars and at stationary locations capable of sending live video back to command centers in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
“The only disaster, it turned out, was Project Shield itself.”
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How many post-9/11 “homeland security” measures could we say the same of? When will we learn?
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If only the White House and Congress had the courage to shut down the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. I’m hardly holding my breath on that one, of course. Barack Obama loves the security state.
Consider Glenn Greenwald’s response to Thursday’s decision by the Obama administration to complete its whitewash of American-made torture:
“Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: ‘We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.’
“Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote [that] “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
“Thanks to the Obama DOJ, that is no longer in question. The answer is resoundingly clear: American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation’s history – the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime – will be fully immunized for those crimes.
“And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party’s control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens’ torture at American hands.
“All of those efforts, culminating in yesterday’s entirely unsurprising announcement, means that the U.S. Government has effectively shielded itself from even minimal accountability for its vast torture crimes of the last decade. Without a doubt, that will be one of the most significant, enduring and consequential legacies of the Obama presidency.”
Happy Fourth of July!
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Bollocks.
Posted on July 1, 2011