Tuesday 29 December 2009

OUT, BRIEF CANDLE



One o clock in the morning here and there is no sign that our friends and bankers, the Chinks, are about to stay the killing of some poor nutter, tried for his life in a procedure lasting all of thirty minutes. Makes my blood run cold, that execution shit, always has, even if the condemned is guilty, as he sometimes is, but there is something especially horrid about how the Chinks go about it.

I never joined anything in my life and I can't bear those career abolitionists, apart from Clive Stanford, the dead man's brief, they are all over the radio, just now, gobby bints from Reprieve, or some such, but at execution times I'd light a candle, or something, anyway, some little ritual, just me, and for whomever the bell tolls. But we're steeped in it, now, blood, torture, whatever protects the wealth and positions of Power, that'll do. Oh, brave, new world.

Here, in New Presbyteria, the son of the fucking manse, Brown, is strangely silent on this one, usually so keen to dictate his demands to a world even more indifferent to his haunted wants than is his own cabinet, Brown has left it to some last-minute Bunkerite who no-one has ever heard of to go through the motions, telling China what is The Right Thing To Do. Not even BananaBoy, whose brief this is, has raised his inbred, babyface over the parapet, better employed nobbling the UK Courts on behalf of President Hillary Trousers.

We read and are told that, once, there was a time of gunboats, that once, Her Britannic Majesty's passport counted for something among the Savage; I don't know if it's true, doubt it, actually, seems to be plenty of historical atrocity perpetrated against memsahibs and Sisters of Mercy and tobacco planters and now there is no longer even a myth, the grandstanding Jihadimonster saws-off our heads on camera and ugly, angry, pushy chinks shoot us in the back of the neck, no doubt billing the relatives for the cartridge, like they do; ugly, angry, pushy chinks, tooled-up, shove us around on the streets of London, policing their Olympic Games procession and nobody says fuck all; Brown, outside Number Ten, spasticking himself to attention, mincing and gulping, like some furtive, retarded, ungainly Mandarin courtier, as Chink arranges the photo-opp. Ah, so; courage; courage, his counterfeit virtues ghost-written by the vile, the stooges, the horrible fucking bastard. We saw his courage, then, his dignity on behalf of the nation which didn't elect him, as he allowed the Chink to angrily gesture him into position.

His self-exculpatory prefix or suffix, grows longer - all this shit, which started in America; all this shit, which took the whole world by surprise and nobody could have predicted; all this ruinous shit, none of it is my fault, indeed, I am the only man who can fix it, all this shit; without me, all this shit would be even worse; all this weather shit, we have made a start, it's shit but it's a start and as I saved the world's economy I can save the environment, which isn't my fault; all this shit in Afghanistan, the more bodies come home in boxes or in wheelchairs, it just goes to show that we are winning, the enemy is doing so badly that they are reduced to killing us, well, not us, exactly, and we owe a great debt to Tommy Atkins, only not as much as we owe the Bank of China.

And there's the rub, as Doctor Who might say. NewLabour governs, if it governs at all, not from any national or regional or class base, or in accord with any values tradition; even the cock-waving man of the people, Prescott, applauded the abolition of Clause Four, but from whichever jargonised sophistry is in fashion, focused-on by imported or home-grown psephologist-retailers, members of the SpAd Army, an unprecedented horde of freeloaders and rentboys paid and pensioned by thee and me to spin the truth so dizzy it gave up and slunk away. Much of it was warmed-up Clintonalia and now they ape the dreadful Obama and his insufferable, platitudinous I-Know-Bestisms,as though Brown hisself was the first I Have A Dream Nigger Premier, instead of being an unelected, bullying, blackmailing cabalist, good for fuck all. So, in an entirely unprincipled gang of thieves and slags and pimps and charlatans it was unsurprising that the then Home Seckatry, Blind Boy Blunkett, voiced his delight at the apparent suicide of Doctor Harold Shipman; trashy, populist, tabloid and improbably, tragically priapic as well as being deeply dishonest and corrupt, Blunkett, like so many recent cabineteers, carnivalised the weighty business of government and imitating his beloved, fawned-upon masters, Tony and Imelda, whored the offices of state as they had never been whored whilst, fired-up by a forest of chips on his shoulder, he gleefully dismantled rights, customs and traditions which the Labour movement, among others, had fought hard to establish; on leaarning of Shipman's death Blind Blunkett famously said he wanted to call for a bottle of taxpayers' champagne, doubtless to drink in bed with someone else's bicycle wife, in celebration, as though such was conduct befitting the home secretary of the United Kingdom. Having a retarded, bent blind man shit in your face is a humiliation which would have seen other peoples on the streets, here, though, instead, grown-ups anxiously awaited the next Harry Potter book.

I am old now and of a race which could read before it went to school and when I was young the cool thing was for kids to be reading books written for adults. Some teachers put me in detention for reading Salinger instead of J. Meade Faulkner, others didn't. But now midnight bookshops throng with wordy fuckwits, desperate for the latest episode, claiming they read this voodoo shit to encourage reading among their verminous little consumers. I never heard such rubbish as the various Potter apologias. And while they so indulge we lose habeas corpus and welcome double jeopardy.

No wonder then, after the depradation of such jurists as Blunkett and Schmidt and Shirtsleeves Reid, that the judicial murder of one of our own by a tyrannical foreign power excites so little governmental ire. And he's a wog, anyway, probably deserves it, most of them do. Preacher Brown has stuff to say about almost anything that might possibly hint at a connection to the preoccupations of normal people; like all politicians he feigns an interest in football and in the children which he has so catastrophically fathered with Sarah-George, his official wife - I'm a young parent, too, uh uh uh uh uh uh uh, so, vote for me - he claimed, once, to enjoy breakfasting to the Arctic Monkeys, whoever they may be and in his Man From C&A sports jacket and flannels he strolls the riverbank with Sarah-George just like any pair of long-term psychiatric patients being eased back into the community; clunking his nailbitten Claw of Doom on any nearby surface, squaring-up his papers twenty times a minute; dribbling, gulping, his DryWank Jawdrop portending major facial surgery, grinning his Domestos Grin like an imbecile at every camera, mad Gordon offers his sol-you-shuns and his precictions for every sporting fixture, every desperate, starstruck contest in the sewerworld of Cruelty TV, gibbering as though taking a break from a crazed, frenzied masturbation marathon, brave Gordon, a normal son, a normal husband and parent beguiles us with his interests in the mundane, the prosaic, here is not some deranged megalomaniacal, one-eyed, nail-biting, snot-eating, cowardly freak and bully who burnt all the money and turned everything to shit on the never-never; no, here is the man who ended the boom part of boom and bust, the man with no nails, the prime minister of sinister, a man who couldn't count the change in his pocket twice and come to the same figure but fuck me, he knows what the people like, EastEnders. And Strictly, whatever that is.

But on the matter of a UK citizen being murdered, well, we've been here before, haven't we, least said soonest mended. the vicious gerontocrats in Peking are valued allies in the war on the people, I mean Terror, and among our most important fellow tyrants, sorry, trading partners and it's not for me to interfere in their internal crimes against humanity. I have my own to get on with with, here.

Maybe Brown's cowardly, McCavity silence bespeaks a painful self awareness, better late than never, although much too late to remedy his crimes. Maybe the mad bastard, maelstroming his way through sol-you-shuns and stratagems and plotting the tripartite festival of competitive lying which will be the election knows, at last, that aside from a How Low Can He Stoop, clinical curiosity, nobody, least of all the Chinks, nobody on Earth gives a fuck about what he says.

It's four-fifteen now and skymadeupnewsandfilth has reported fifty-three year-old Mr Shaikh's execution. And that British pretend premier, Gordon Snot, has condemned it. In the strongest possible terms.

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MORE EMPIRE BURLESQUE

On one of the Beeb's end-of-year gabfests the other day, Gavin Essler was chatting with some fellow but alien journalists, an Arab, a Kraut and a New York Timeser among them; one of those Reithian, Nation Shall Speak Shite Unto Nation events; I'll let you be on my programme, if I can be on yours.

On the subject of troughing MPs, the Yank, some hairy babyboomer, now metamorphosed into that which he once professed to hate, gluttonous and know-it-all bombastic, was of the opinion that it was all down to their salaries being so terribly low, only sixty-thousand pounds, who would work for that? Hang about, Effendi, said Ahmed, that's quite a lot of money. To most people. But the consensus among the assembled madeupnewsandfilthers was that it was peanuts and that it was no wonder that blah blah blah, the politico-media nexus which Col. von Fawkes of ThePizzaHouseOfBlood rails against and which we chide here for its filth and fiction, especially that of Mr Rupert Corpse and his merry band - Gove, Portillo, Clarkson, Jenkins, Aaronobitch and scores of other smiling fascists - and which operates a loyalty scheme open exclusively to journos and politicians, entirely to the detriment of the populace, there it was, on the telly, for all to see. Sixty thousand pounds, all expenses paid and free to work at any number of other jobs; not very much money.

Oh, yes, Polly Mascara was there, smug and pious and unlovely as ever, a hack, forever demanding her right to manage the poor on behalf of the rich, ie herself; despite her strident, blue-stocking, life-long support for thieving, warmongering filth like Brown, Blair and Mandelstein, despite her unfailing ability to misread the signs, misinform her readers and despite her couching her affection for Oxbridge patriarchy in the glib rhetoric of equal opportunities, none in the Street Of A Thousand Arseholes has yet outed this ghastly, pampered shrew for her towering hypocrisy, none save Richard Littlecock, the blustering plague dog of Murdoch's Fleet Street - once tabloid meant tablet-like, potent, quick-acting, remedial, now, thanks to shitbags like McKenzie and Morgan, Littlecock and that brawling baggage, wotsername, Wade, tabloid means shit, bad medicine, vicious, lying cruelty.

The tax-avoiding Guardian/CP Scott Charitable Trust, enables the editor, Alan Arsebridger to pay himself half a million a year and Polly about a hundred and fifty. It does make MPs look like second-raters but it makes most of us look like beggars. Fuck 'em, anyway. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the Mail on fucking Sunday; not one of them could see Ruin marching down the Threadneedle Street. Waste of fucking paper in real life and a pollutant in cyberspace.

Here, although the author is unduly optimistic about Blair being nicked, is something from the States, fit to be called journalism. Business, American style.

American-Based Guantánamo

posted Monday, 28 December 2009

American-Based Guantánamo

Thomson Correctional Center, The New Guantánamo

Relocating Guantánamo

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises--the closing of the Guantanamo prison.

But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two US senators, a US representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty.

It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”

The vast majority have been released after years of abuse. The 100 who are slated to be removed to Illinois have apparently been so badly abused that the US government is afraid to release them because of the testimony the prisoners could give to human rights organizations and foreign media about their mistreatment.

Our British allies are showing more moral conscience than Americans are able to muster. Former PM Tony Blair, who provided cover for President Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, is being damned for his crimes by UK officialdom testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.

The London Times on December 14 summed up the case against Blair in a headline: “Intoxicated by Power, Blair Tricked Us Into War.” Two days later the British First Post declared:

“War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid.” In an unguarded moment Blair let it slip that he favored a conspiracy for war regardless of the validity of the excuse [weapons of mass destruction] used to justify the invasion.

The movement to bring Blair to trial as a war criminal is gathering steam. Writing in the First Post Neil Clark reported:

“There is widespread contempt for a man [Blair] who has made millions [his reward from the Bush regime] while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law.”

Clark notes that the West’s practice of shipping Serbian and African leaders off to the War Crimes Tribunal, while exempting itself, is wearing thin.

In the US, of course, there is no such attempt to hold to account Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the large number of war criminals that comprised the Bush Regime. Indeed, Obama, whom Republicans love to hate, has gone out of his way to protect the Bush cohort from being held accountable.

Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people.

The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.

Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of US civil liberty.

Americans don’t seem to mind that “their” government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago--simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.

According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both US and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court.

Apparently, the brave citizens of the “sole remaining superpower” are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.

With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed.

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