Bharat Rakshak

As Julian Assange emerged from his nine-day imprisonment, there were renewed concerns about the physical and psychological health of Bradley Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the diplomatic cables at the centre of the storm.Manning, who was arrested seven months ago, is being held at a military base in Virginia and faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison for his alleged role in copying the cables.His friends and supporters also claim they have been the target of extra-judicial harassment, intimidation and outright bribery by US government agents.
According to David House, a computer researcher from Boston who visits Manning twice a month, he is starting to deteriorate. "Over the last few weeks I have noticed a steady decline in his mental and physical wellbeing," he said. "His prolonged confinement in a solitary holding cell is unquestionably taking its toll on his intellect; his inability to exercise due to [prison] regulations has affected his physical appearance in a manner that suggests physical weakness."
Manning, House added, was no longer the characteristically brilliant man he had been, despite efforts to keep him intellectually engaged. He also disputed the authorities' claims that Manning was being kept in solitary for his own good.
"I initially believed that his time in solitary confinement was a decision made in the interests of his safety," he said. "As time passed and his suicide watch was lifted, to no effect, it became clear that his time in solitary – and his lack of a pillow, sheets, the freedom to exercise, or the ability to view televised current events – were enacted as a means of punishment rather than a means of safety."House said many people were reluctant to talk about Manning's condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, warrantless computer seizures, and even bribes. "This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf," House said.Some friends report being followed extensively. Another computer expert said the army offered him cash to – in his words – "infiltrate" the WikiLeaks website. He said: "I turned them down. I don't want anything to do with this cloak and dagger stuff."

Justice? You get that in the next world. Here you get law and order.

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The system began to fail Martin long before that night.

The system failed him when Florida’s self-defense laws were written, allowing an aggressor to claim self-defense in the middle of an altercation — and to use deadly force in that defense — with no culpability for his role in the events that led to that point.

The system failed him because of the disproportionate force that he and the neighborhood watchman could legally bring to the altercation — Zimmerman could legally carry a concealed firearm, while Martin, who was only 17, could not.

The system failed him when the neighborhood watchman grafted on stereotypes the moment he saw him, ascribing motive and behavior and intent and criminal history to a boy who was just walking home.

The system failed him when the bullet ripped though his chest, and the man who shot him said he mounted him and stretched his arms out wide, preventing him from even clutching the spot that hurt.

The system failed him in those moments just after he was shot when he was surely aware that he was about to die, but before life’s light fully passed from his body — and no one came to comfort him or try to save him.

The system failed him when the slapdash Sanford police did a horrible job of collecting and preserving evidence.

The system failed him when those officers apparently didn’t even value his dead body enough to adequately canvass the complex to make sure that no one was missing a teen.

The system failed him when he was labeled a John Doe and his lifeless body spent the night alone and unclaimed.

The system failed him when the man who the police found standing over the body of a dead teenager, a man who admitted to shooting him and still had the weapon, was taken in for questioning and then allowed to walk out of the precinct without an arrest or even a charge, to go home after taking a life and take to his bed.

The system failed him when it took more than 40 days and an outpouring of national outrage to get an arrest.

The system failed him when a strangely homogenous jury — who may well have been Zimmerman’s peers but were certainly not the peers of the teenager, who was in effect being tried in absentia — was seated.

The system failed him when the prosecution put on a case for the Martin family that many court-watchers found wanting.

The system failed him when the discussion about bias became so reductive as to be either-or rather than about situational fluidity and the possibility of varying responses to varying levels of perceived threat.

The system failed him when everyone in the courtroom raised racial bias in roundabout ways, but almost never directly — for example, when the defense held up a picture of a shirtless Martin and told the jurors that this was the person Zimmerman encountered the night he shot him. But in fact it was not the way Zimmerman had seen Martin. Consciously or subconsciously, the defense played on an old racial trope: asking the all-female jury — mostly white — to fear the image of the glistening black buck, as Zimmerman had.

This case is not about an extraordinary death of an extraordinary person. Unfortunately, in America, people are lost to gun violence every day. Many of them look like Martin and have parents who presumably grieve for them. This case is about extraordinary inequality in the presumption of innocence and the application of justice: why was Martin deemed suspicious and why was his killer allowed to go home?

Sometimes people just need a focal point. Sometimes that focal point becomes a breaking point.

The idea of universal suspicion without individual evidence is what Americans find abhorrent and what black men in America must constantly fight. It is pervasive in policing policies — like stop-and-frisk, and in this case neighborhood watch — regardless of the collateral damage done to the majority of innocents. It’s like burning down a house to rid it of mice.

As a parent, particularly a parent of black teenage boys, I am left with the question, “Now, what do I tell my boys?”

We used to say not to run in public because that might be seen as suspicious, like they’d stolen something. But according to Zimmerman, Martin drew his suspicion at least in part because he was walking too slowly.

So what do I tell my boys now? At what precise pace should a black man walk to avoid suspicion?

And can they ever stop walking away, or running away, and simply stand their ground? Can they become righteously indignant without being fatally wounded?

Is there anyplace safe enough, or any cargo innocent enough, for a black man in this country? Martin was where he was supposed to be — in a gated community — carrying candy and a canned drink.

The whole system failed Martin. What prevents it from failing my children, or yours?

I feel that I must tell my boys that, but I can’t. It’s stuck in my throat. It’s an impossibly heartbreaking conversation to have. So, I sit and watch in silence, and occasionally mouth the word, “breathe,” because I keep forgetting to.

ramana wrote:

Justice? You get that in the next world. Here you get law and order.

William Gaddis

After the George Zimmerman verdict, there is no need for KKK. Its live and doing well in America with Obama being elected they can do what they want.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS’S achievements were so great that people have been willing to believe almost anything about him, no matter how fantastic.

Nothing is better known, for instance, than the story that Columbus convinced people the world is round, not flat.

“Before Columbus proved the world was round,” the Encyclopædia Britannica reported in an advertisement for the publication in 1961, “people thought the horizon marked its edge.” Continued the Britannica: “Today we know better.”

“Indeed we do,” one critic has remarked. The authority of the Encyclopædia Britannica notwithstanding, it was Aristotle who proved the world is round, pointing out during an eclipse that the earth casts a spherical shadow on the moon. Plato popularized the concept. By Columbus’s day it was taken for granted. The story giving Columbus credit for the discovery did not even surface until after he had died.

The person mainly responsible for the myth was Washington Irving. An obscure writer had mentioned it before, but it was Irving who popularized the story in a dramatic and embellished account. The story appeared not in one of Irving’s works of fiction but in what was billed as a biography of Columbus.

In Irving’s account, Columbus, in need of funds for his trip to the Indies, goes for help to the sages of the University of Salamanca, whom he tells about his “theory” that the world is round and that the best way to go east is to sail west. The “simple mariner” argues for his theory with “natural eloquence,” in a plea, “as it were,” for “the cause of the new world.” Unfortunately Columbus is turned down, the sages being deaf to this entreaty for the exercise of reason and light. Irving laments the outcome but observes: “What a striking spectacle must the hall of the old convent have presented at this memorable conference!”

As prizewinning historian Samuel Eliot Morison remarks, the story is “pure moonshine.” Although Columbus did meet with the professors of Salamanca to try to obtain backing for his trip, the “sphericity of the globe was not in question.” According to Morison, “the issue was the width of the ocean.” The professors thought Columbus had underestimated the width of the ocean. They were right. 1

Of explorers who came later, two deserve mention, the rivals Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. Both men have been credited with discovering the North Pole, but the truth is neither man may have done so.

Peary’s claim that he discovered the Pole on April 6, 1909, is accepted by almost everybody. Almost everybody has included: President Theodore Roosevelt, who upon hearing the news exclaimed, “Bully for Peary!”; the Congress of the United States, which in 1911 commended him for “his Arctic explorations resulting in reaching the North Pole”; and the National Geographic Society, which as recently as 1983 ran a harsh editorial blasting a made-for-TV movie that dared to dispute his claim. Most reference books credit Peary with the discovery; few even hint that the matter’s in doubt.

Yet it is in question, as it has been from the very first. Originally doubts surfaced because Peary announced his claim several days after Cook had made his announcement. As one writer notes, it seemed odd indeed that a goal which had eluded hundreds of men for centuries had suddenly been achieved by two men almost simultaneously. Later, at congressional hearings, Peary seemed vague about details of the trip, and in several places he contradicted his own writings on the subject, repudiating claims in his own book that several photographs showed him standing at the North Pole (shadows in the pictures proved they couldn’t have been taken when he said they had).

More disturbing was the pristine condition of Peary’s diary, which suggested to some that he had prepared it after the fact. “It is a well-known fact that on a long Arctic journey,” said Congressman Ernest W. Roberts, “ablutions even of the face and hand are too luxurious for the travelers. Pemmican [Indian food made of mixed fat and berries] is the staple article of food. Its great value lies in its greasy quality. How was it possible for Peary to handle this greasy food and without washing his hands write in his diary daily and at the end of two months have that same diary show ‘no finger marks or rough usage’…?”

Most disturbing of all was Peary’s claim to have traveled an average 26.7 nautical miles a day, a feat, says one historian, “un-equaled in the history of polar exploration. By comparison, Cook never claimed to have advanced more than 15 miles a day.”

Cook’s claim that he discovered the North Pole on April 21, 1908 (which he announced in September 1909, five days ahead of Peary), is unprovable. As he limply explained to critics, he left most of his records in a trunk in Greenland and couldn’t substantiate his account. In a later magazine article, he conceded that neither he nor Peary could ever say with certainty that either had reached the Pole because of deficiencies in the measuring instruments.

Belief in the superiority of Peary’s claim was based in part on a misleading and vicious campaign directed against Cook. Most serious of all the charges was the allegation that Cook had previously lied about his claim to have scaled Mount McKinley in 1906. The charge was based on the sworn affidavit of his partner on the trip, Edward Barrill, who said he and Cook had fabricated the story. Barrill stuck to his affidavit but later admitted he’d been paid several thousand dollars for drawing it up.

Claims on Peary’s behalf were exaggerated by self-interested partisans posing as impartial observers. The most impartial observer of all seemed to be the National Geographic Society, which early on appointed itself arbiter of the Peary-Cook dispute. Unknown to the general public, however, the society had underwritten much of the cost of Peary’s trip and had an interest in seeing it succeed. When other institutions around the world seemed poised to award Cook the credit for discovering the North Pole, the society promptly issued a circular imploring them to hold off until after Peary’s claims could be examined in detail— by the society. It then awarded Peary the honor after conducting, according to Howard Abramson, merely a cursory examination of the evidence. 11

It may be that some legislatures in the days of the founders were more corrupt than those in the era of Boss Tweed. In 1795 all members of the state legislature in Georgia, save one, accepted bribes in exchange for their votes in a giant land swindle. Some legislators were given slaves. Most were rewarded with parcels of land ranging up to seventy-five thousand acres apiece. Voters turned out the swindlers at the next election and forced the new legislature to abrogate the land deal, which involved the sale of thirty-five million acres of western lands claimed by Georgia. In the nineteenth century the crooks had the last laugh. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the grant of land was a binding contract that couldn’t be broken regardless of the circumstances under which it had been negotiated. In 1814 Congress awarded more than four million dollars in compensation to people with claims to the land. 2

ramana wrote:There is theory in US criminal law called "Theory of Jury Nullification". The attorneys in any jury case should be aware that the jury could be driven by some larger priniciple that they will turn in a verdict contrary to the facts by seeing the facts to fit the larger idea.

In Zimmerman case the stand your ground self defense was the higher principle for the Florida jury constantly bombarded with news reports of crimes by colored individuals.

So when a verdict is returned contrary to expectations then this could be at work.

Shocking as the extent of political corruption under the founders may be, it can still be explained away as the work of only a relatively few bad apples (except perhaps in Georgia). More troubling may be the well-nigh universal attitude among the founders toward democracy. Historian Charles Beard writes that most of the drafters of the Constitution viewed “democracy as something rather to be dreaded than encouraged.” Well into the nineteenth century, he insists, “the word [“ democracy”] was repeatedly used by conservatives to smear opponents of all kinds.” Even so stout a defender of the people’s rights as Jefferson never publicly identified himself as a democrat. Throughout his long life he preferred to call himself a republican, and he used that term even after many of his own supporters had begun to call themselves democrats.*

So controversial was the word “democrat” that it does not appear in any of the famous documents associated with the birth of the country— not in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or any of the state constitutions.

The chief objection to the word was its long association with the Cromwellian revolution in England, where it was used by conservatives to stigmatize political action by the “rabble.” Among prominent eighteenth-century Americans, only Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, both self-professed radicals, seemed willing to use the word positively. According to Beard, neither James Madison nor Andrew Jackson ever publicly identified himself as a democrat. The party of Jefferson and Jackson did not even come to be known as the “American Democracy” until 1844. Before then the party referred dually to the “Democratic faith” and to their “Republican fellow citizens.” The word “democrat” was held in disrepute for so long that Americans generally began calling themselves democrats only in the twentieth century. Beard writes that the idea that the United States “is first and foremost a democracy” wasn’t firmly established until Woodrow Wilson turned the war against Germany into a war for democracy. “In the circumstances,” observes Beard, “even Republicans could scarcely repudiate [the term] without acquiring a subversive tinge.” 3

That the founders believed in equality is no more true than they believed in democracy. The Declaration of Independence may say it, but the founders didn’t believe all men are created equal. They apparently believed all men are created equal in the eyes of the law, and that was all. They did not believe men are socially or economically equal and didn’t believe they should be. As colonial historian Jack Greene puts it, “No idea was farther from their minds. When they talked about equality in a social or economic sense, they meant no more than that each man should have an equal right to achieve the best material life he could within the limits imposed upon him by his ability, means, and circumstances.” Put another way, the all-American founders didn’t believe in the all-American concept that any all-American boy can grow up to be President. 4

Misinformed as many people are about the founders, most are aware that the Founding Fathers never wanted the general public to elect Presidents directly. Less well known is that the founders didn’t particularly want the electoral college to make the decision either— and didn’t think it would. The expectation was that in most cases the electors would deadlock, throwing the contest into the House of Representatives. James Madison predicted that would happen nine times out of ten. George Mason, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, put the odds at forty-nine out of fifty. 5

Finally, there’s the question of his attitude toward blacks. He disliked slavery, but he wasn’t an abolitionist. Although he opposed the extension of slavery, he believed that to save the Union, slavery ought to be left untouched where it was, and although he is known as the Great Emancipator, his Emancipation Proclamation didn’t end slavery since it applied only to the states that had rebelled, where Lincoln didn’t have any authority. Moreover, though he had the support of many radicals, he was critical of radical abolitionists like John Brown and supported Brown’s execution. After Elijah Lovejoy, the antislavery editor, had been killed by a proslavery mob, Lincoln made a little joke out of his death in an insensitive speech to a Worcester, Massachusetts, audience: “I have heard you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day.”

No aspect of Hitler’s Germany has possibly received more attention than the treatment of the Jews, but myths remain. When at the end of the war Edward R. Murrow conducted a well-publicized radio tour of the Nazi death camps, it seemed everybody finally became convinced of their existence. The wonder is that it took so long. Evidence that Jews were being slaughtered by the millions had been abundant and overwhelming for years.

The news did not just trickle out in the waning hours of the Nazi empire. The first slaughter took place in 1941, when about half a million Jews were killed by mobile Nazi murder units. In July word of the deaths reached the American Jewish press and was reported in New York City’s Yiddish dailies. In October 1941 The New York Times carried an article on the machine-gunning of thousands of Jews in Poland and the Ukraine. In the summer of 1942 a German industrialist, at risk to his life, leaked word to the Allies of Hitler’s systematic plan to exterminate the Jews. In the months following, mass meetings were held in New York and several other cities to protest the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” One magazine published an article unequivocably entitled “Murder of a People.”

The news of the Holocaust did not, however, make big news during the war. A historian who has made an exceptionally detailed study of the matter says that “the mass media treated the systematic murder of millions of Jews as though it were minor news.” Even The New York Times routinely published stories on the Holocaust deep on the inside pages. It was on page twelve, in four short column inches, that the Times reported the extermination of four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in 1944.

The mistaken public impression that news of the Holocaust did not come until after the war is thus easily explained: It wasn’t until after the war that the news made the front pages. Less understandable is why that was so. Perhaps genocide on such a scale was so unprecedented that journalists couldn’t quite believe it was true. Putting the story on the back pages gave it less credence. Too, they may have remembered the stories of German atrocities in World War I that turned out, after the war, to have been nothing more than war propaganda. No one likes to be taken in twice.

The prevailing belief that the American people would have tried to do something to stop the Holocaust and would have tried to save the Jews if the situation had been understood is possible but doubtful. (Elie Wiesel: “Was the free world aware of what was going on? Surely not; otherwise it would have done something to prevent such a massacre.”)

Government leaders did in fact know— and did nothing. They told Jewish groups that pressed for action that the only way to save the Jews was to win the war and that they were doing that as quickly as possibly. When FDR was asked to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz, the military said it couldn’t spare the planes to do the job, even though bombers were hitting targets just fifty miles away. David Wyman, the leading expert on the American response to the Holocaust, says the government could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews without harming the war effort if it really wanted to, but it didn’t want to. American leaders, particularly in the State Department, says Wyman, did not want to face the possibility that the Jews, if rescued, could end up in the United States. He says American Jewish leaders themselves didn’t vigorously pursue plans to rescue the Jews because they were preoccupied with dreams of building a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 32

The chief confusion about the atomic bomb has to do with the decision to drop it on Japan. Paul Johnson, like many popular historians, contends it was a necessity, disagreeable as it may have been, because it undoubtedly saved lives. The claim is that but for the bomb, the United States would have had to invade the Japanese islands and at frightening cost; the military estimated at the time such an effort might cause up to a million American casualties and perhaps as many as ten to twenty million Japanese deaths. (The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed fewer than half a million people all told.) Skeptics are assured the Japanese intended to fight to the last man, as indicated in a secret document approved by the Japanese Supreme Council on June 6, 1945, which revealed the government’s intention to “prosecute the war to the bitter end.” Further, it’s said that Japan had made plans to dispatch ten thousand so-called suicide planes and, in a desperation move, was prepared to field a civilian militia of thirty million.

Yet doubt remains, not least because the United States government itself concluded after the war we hadn’t needed to drop the A-bombs. In 1946 the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, after an exhaustive study, found that the Japanese were about to surrender when the bombs hit. “Based on detailed investigation of all the facts,” says the survey, “and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” On June 20, 1945, the emperor and leading members of the Supreme War Direction Council had secretly decided to end the war. John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of the survey team, says that nothing more insurmountable than the “usual bureaucratic lags” kept the Japanese from suing for peace immediately. 33

The often-repeated allegation that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was horrid in light of the known effects of radiation is misinformed. No one knew anyone would die of radiation. Not even those who created the bomb in the first place knew that. When the Japanese began reporting that victims were dying of radiation poisoning, scientists insisted the Japanese must be lying. The scientists had told the United States press that the radioactive effects of the bomb would be minor. They refused to believe they were wrong. One colonel reacted angrily to a Tokyo commentator’s lament that the people of Hiroshima were “doomed to die of radioactivity.” Said the colonel: “That’s kind of crazy. I would say this: I think it’s good propaganda. The thing is these people got good and burned— good thermal burns.”

Only slowly did scientists become convinced of the accuracy of the initial reports. Years later one of the leading experts in the Manhattan Project, Dr. Norman Ramsey, recalled in an oral memoir how surprised everyone was by what happened. “The people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosion casualties…. The region over which there would have been radiation injury was to be a much smaller one than the region of so-called 100% blast kill…. Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first.” As one historian concluded, “The men who made the Bomb did not know what it was.” 34

...
Kyodo reported on the 68th anniversary of the bombings.

Quoting recently declassified documents by the US National Archives and Records Administration, it said the British government officially expressed its support for using the new weapon against Japan at the Combined Policy Committee meeting in Washington on July 4, 1945.

Britain referred to atomic bombs as Tube Alloys (T.A.), a codename it used for wartime research on nuclear weapons that was also used to refer to plutonium, Kyodo said.

According to the documents, British Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson told the meeting chaired by US Secretary of War Henry Stimson that the British government "concurred in the use of the T.A. Weapon against Japan."

"The Governments of the United Kingdom and the United States had agreed that T.A. Weapons should be used by the United States against Japan, the agreement of the British Government having been communicated" by Wilson, it said.

The committee was established based on the Quebec Agreement made in August 1943 by the United States, Britain and Canada on coordinated development of atomic weapons.

Britain's official agreement on the use of atomic bombs came after US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at their September 1944 meeting in New York that an atomic bomb might be used against Japan when it was developed, the documents show.


Shortly after the July 1945 committee meeting, the United States conducted the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico.


The first operational atomic bomb was dropped by the US on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later, another Japanese city Nagasaki was pounded by the atomic bomb.

PTI

abhishek_sharma wrote:A Nation Unhinged: The Grim Realities of “The Real American War”

PHOENIX — A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday.

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us” when they took their two small children and her father-in-law and set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.