Friday, April 24, 2009

Camera Obscura: Farragut High Zombies Unleashed

Randall Brown at the Knoxville News Sentinel wisely provides the information about a group of East Tennessee high school students who have written, produced and filmed their very own zombie movie. Students at Farragut High, I salute you.

If you'd like to see the movie (I would!!), "Lock(ed) In" will play at 7:30 p.m. today in the Ferguson Theater at Farragut High School. Admission is$5 for students and seniors, $8 in general.

Check out the website and trailer for the movie right here.

I'm hoping they release a DVD version too!

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Dangerous Times For Pizza, Less Dangerous For Torture

Judicial guidelines, 2009 version:

Farting on a sandwich and making cheese boogers, that is a felony.

Torture, not a punishable crime.


Tuesday, April 21, 2009

More Tortured Logic Endorsing Torture Itself

"The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club."

Conservative leaders like Karl Rove claim talking about whether or not the government sanctions torture is the worst thing ever. Yeah, Mr. Rove, talking about the evil one does in life sure brings about trouble, huh?

For me, when anyone has to educate an adult in this nation who is a political leader or advisor about why torture is bad, that is a sure sign that adult just does not need to be a leader or advisor to anyone. I've written before about the problems and inherent conflicts between use of torture and the basics of American democracy.

Now we get this defense of the indefensible:

"
You see, where other human beings might just tell us anything under being tortured, the exotic Muslim requires torture for disclosure. Our legal obligations are nullified by the biological imperatives of "those people." First we had "torture works." Then we had "they deserve it." Now we have "they need us to do it."

Zubayda, of course, gave up all the useful intelligence he ever would before he was tortured. Which sort of puts a crimp in this whole theory.

The torture apologist thrives on secrets, on playing on your fear of the unknown. You don't know that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times actually didn't prevent "a hole in the ground in Los Angeles." So Thiessen explains today that the redacted parts of the memos -- you know, the ones that were edited to protect the identity of CIA interrogators -- actually contain all the information that proves torture worked, which is why they were redacted.

The justifications for torture provided in the memos themselves are not a good faith evaluation of the torture program's effectiveness, since the writers of the memos are self-evidently trying to justify the use of torture. In other words, the memo writers have a reason to overplay the program's effectiveness, because they are conscious that what they are doing is illegal. There's only one way to know what happened, and that's through the release of the rest of the torture works memos. So let's do it.

But let's take a step back a moment. The Right has focused the torture debate on KSM because they are banking on the idea that KSM is so terrible that no one could possibly sympathize with him. As long as the torture debate is centered around whether or not we should torture one particular, terribly evil person, the right remains the sentimental favorite. But let's take a moment to consider what Thiessen and others are arguing in the long term: that we must torture and that for our own security, we must keep it secret. We currently live in a country where the president can detain anyone indefinitely without trial on suspicion of terrorism. Torture apologists want to add to that authority the ability to torture people that they detain without trial, without anyone actually knowing about it.

In order to try someone you've tortured, you'd have to make coerced confessions admissible in court. But of course, the reason we don't do that is because there's no way to know if a coerced confession is real, or if it's the result of being waterboarded or stuffed in a small box. So anyone you've tortured, you have to keep locked up forever, because if you release them, you risk that these methods -- which torture apologists explain must remain secret -- will get out.

You see where this is going. There's absolutely no way to reconcile the use of torture with a functioning, democratic society."