Tag: I do not Have a Tag That Properly Describes My Disgust

Keeping Us Safe from the Most Dangerous Criminals

It’s a good thing we have police officers to defend us against double amputee wheelchair-bound schizophrenics armed with pens:

A Houston police officer fatally shot in the head a schizophrenic, wheelchair-bound double amputee threatening people with a pen at a group home for the mentally ill after authorities said the man advanced on the officer’s partner, police said.

[…]

Claunch, who lost an arm and a leg in a train accident, trapped one officer with his wheelchair in the corner of a room “where he couldn’t get out,” said a Houston police department spokesperson who declined to be identified. The double amputee was “advancing towards” the officers and “refusing to show his hands.”

According to police accounts reported in the media, including by KTRK, Claunch attempted to stab the officer with an object that turned out to be a pen.

Officer Matt Marin, “in fear of the safety of his partner and the safety of himself, discharges his duty weapon, striking the suspect,” Silva said.

The unnamed Houston police spokesperson said later Sunday that Marin himself was not cornered, unlike his partner, when he shot the wheelchair-bound man in the head.

You’re telling me that a wheelchair-bound man with one arm and one leg armed with a pen warrants deadly force? This situation couldn’t have been resolve by having the officer’s partner pull the wheelchair back? One of the officers couldn’t have just flipped the wheelchair over? Hell they could have used those Tasers they’re so fond of employing whenever somebody gets rowdy and stood a lesser chance of killing the man.

Of course nothing will come of this. The officer that shot the man will likely receive a paid vacation until this fiasco blows over. Once the dust settles the officer will be found innocent of any wrongdoing and will return to work where he can kill another mentally ill individual.

Getting Things Done

If there’s one thing the United States is good at it’s killing people overseas:

29 dead in a little over a week. Nearly 200 gone this year. The White House is stepping up its campaign of drone attacks in Yemen, with four strikes in eight days. And not even the slaying of 10 civilians over the weekend seems to have slowed the pace in the United States’ secretive, undeclared war.

But remember, they hate us for our freedom.

Bang Up Job America

Obviously the Middle Easterners hate Americans for their freedom:

A U.S. drone strike targeting al Qaeda suspects in Yemen killed 13 civilians, including three women, three security officials in the restive Middle Eastern country said.

A United States drone killed 13 civilians and didn’t even manage to hit the target. Let that sink in for a moment, 13 innocent individuals were snuffed out by a United State drone. How would the average American react if 13 innocent people in their country were killed by a Yemen drone strike? They would probably demand war with Yemen as payback. Guess what? People in the Middle East aren’t any different than people in America, when their fellow people are murdered they want to make those responsible for the murders pay.

What compounds the issue is the reaction:

“This was one of the very few times when our target was completely missed. It was a mistake, but we hope it will not hurt our anti-terror efforts in the region,” a senior Yemeni Defense Ministry official told CNN. The official asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Yup, that’s it, the strike was merely a mistake. The only thing that’s actually important, according to the sociopath quoted, is that the anti-terror efforts in the region aren’t hurt.

Go ahead, explain to me how the Middle Easterners hate America because of its freedom and not because of the mind boggling number of hellfire missiles it rains down upon them.

Why I Ignore “No Guns Allowed” Signs at Movie Theaters

Many of the movie theaters in the Twin Cities area are posted. Thankfully those signs have very little legal weight in Minnesota, they basically tell patrons if their gun is spotted they’ll be asked to leave and if they refuse to leave the police will be called and the gun carrier will be cited for trespassing, because I ignore them. Why? Because of horrible situations like this:

A lone gunman dressed in riot gear burst into a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., at a midnight showing of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises” and methodically began shooting patrons, killing at least 12 people and injuring at least 50.

The suspect, James Holmes, 24, of Aurora, was caught by police in the parking lot of the Century 16 Movie Theaters, nine miles outside Denver, after police began receiving dozens of 911 calls at 12:39 a.m. MT. Police said the man appeared to have acted alone.

Witnesses in the movie theater said Holmes crashed into the auditorium through an emergency exit about 30 minutes into the film, set off a smoke bomb, and began shooting. Holmes stalked the aisles of the theater, shooting people at random, as panicked movie-watchers in the packed auditorium tried to escape, witnesses said.

[…]

Holmes was wearing a bullet-proof vest and riot helmet and carrying a gas mask, rifle, and handgun, when he was apprehended, according to police. Holmes mentioned having explosives stored, leading police to evacuate his entire North Aurora apartment complex and search the buildings early this morning.

A body armor clad individual tossed a smoke bomb (which is later referred to as tear gas) into a crowded theater and walked the isles picking off panicing people. It was basically the worst scenario one could think up whether you carry a gun or not. Getting a clean shot off at the bad guy in a smoke filled theater with panicing people isn’t an ideal situation. On top of that the guy was wearing body armor and most of us carry handguns which aren’t known for their stellar ability to penetrate body armor. Of course there is always the possibility that the shooter would do the common act of suicide upon meeting armed resistance but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Still, I’d rather be armed in a situation like that than unarmed. The scenario that played out at that theater sucked but it would suck a whole lot more if one was unarmed.

Either way I’m sure we’ll see gun control advocates dancing in the blood soon enough. Nothing gives a gun control advocate a hardon like dead people. They’ll probably be pounding the war drums trying to get gun control, body armor control, and tear gas control legislation out of this tragedy. Fortunately people don’t seem to listen to the gun control crowd anymore so they’ll huff and puff but likely accomplish nothing.

Let me conclude by saying my heart goes out to the patrons of that theater and their families. We live in a messed up world where boogeymen do exist. They’re, thankfully, rare but almost always come out of nowhere when you least expect it.

Surprising Nobody, the Department Stands Behind the Officers’ Actions

So many mistakes were made in this raid that I’m not sure where to begin:

In the early-morning hours, deputies knocked on 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott’s door without identifying themselves as law enforcement officers. Scott answered the door with a gun in his hand.

“When we knocked on the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun at deputies, and that’s when we opened fire and killed him,” Lt. John Herrell said. “Even though this subject is not the one we were looking for when he opened the door. He was pointing the gun at the deputy and if you put yourselves in the deputy’s shoes. They were there to pick up someone who was wanted for an attempted homicide.”

Officials said the deputies did not identify themselves because of safety reasons.

The police were chasing a homicide suspect who parked his motorcycle in the parking lot of an apartment complex and disappeared. In their infinite wisdom the police assumed the suspect ran into one apartment and went pounding on the door at 1:30 in the morning without so much as announcing who they were. Being a startled chap, the person living in the apartment grabbed a gun and answered the door. Upon opening the door the resident was greeted by gunfire from the officers.

In order, I’d say the first mistake was made when the police decided to play eeny meeny miny mo to decide which apartment the suspect had gone into. The second mistake was made when the police started pounding on the randomly selected door without announcing that they were, in fact, police officers. Mistake three was made by the resident, who opened the door (although this may have been irrelevant as I’ll explain in a second). Finally, the fourth mistake was made by the police who decide it was entirely OK to gun down the resident of the randomly selected apartment.

I mentioned that the fact the resident opened the door may have been irrelevant, this is because things may not have changed if he didn’t. Had the resident not opened the door the officers would have likely kicked the door in and came storming in. Upon seeing the armed resident the officers would likely have shot him dead as target identification did not seem high on their priority list. I won’t fault the resident for arming himself, I’d do the exact same thing if I heard people banging on my door at 1:30 in the morning (although I wouldn’t answer).

As far as I’m concerned the police are entirely at fault in this case. They had no way of knowing if they had selected the correct apartment, never announced they were police officers, and made no attempt to identify the person who opened the door before they opened fire. Lieutenant John Herrell tried to justify the officers’ actions by stating the resident was pointing a gun at them. That excuse doesn’t fly when the officers not only selected the apartment by little more than random chance but failed to even announce they were police officers. They claim that their failure to announce was done for “safety reasons” (meaning officer safety only) but that also doesn’t fly. Individuals joining the police department know what they’re getting into, it’s an unsafe job, and there are responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is alerting residents that you’re police officers so they know that the random people banging on their door at 1:30 in the morning aren’t thugs looking to commit murder (and even if you do announce that you’re police officers you can’t assume that the resident(s) will believe you, criminals have been known to impersonate police officers before). The job of police officers, at least they claim, is to protect and serve not kick own doors and gun down anybody they see who is armed. Because of this it’s imperative that officers identify their targets. A man holding a gun when answering his door because random people are banging on it at 1:30 shouldn’t be surprising or treated as a threat of violence in of itself. If the resident had made verbal threats towards the officers or shot at the officers it would be a different game.

From where I’m sitting this looks like a pretty cut and dry case of murder. If the resident had made threats towards the officers or shot at them I’m sure that knowledge would have been divulged to justify the officers’ actions. As it sits the only justification being given is the fact the resident was holding a firearm, which shouldn’t be treated as unusual considering the circumstances.

Possible Violations of the Geneva Conventions

Only the most ruthless and vile nation would violate the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, right? If that’s the case then we can likely include the United States on the list of ruthless and vile nations:

Prisoners inside the U.S. military’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay were forcibly given “mind altering drugs,” including being injected with a powerful anti-psychotic sedative used in psychiatric hospitals. Prisoners were often not told what medications they received, and were tricked into believing routine flu shots were truth serums. It’s a serious violation of medical ethics, made worse by the fact that the military continued to interrogate prisoners while they were doped on psychoactive chemicals.

That’s according to a recently declassified report (.pdf) from the Pentagon’s inspector general, obtained by Truthout after a Freedom of Information Act Request. In it, the inspector general concludes that “certain detainees, diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions being treated with psychoactive medications on a continuing basis, were interrogated.” The report does not conclude, though, that anti-psychotic drugs were used specifically for interrogation purposes.

The claim that the drugs were being administered to treat “mental health conditions” is likely nothing more than a mechanism to get around the Geneva Conventions. One thing the Geneva Conventions prohibit is the use of drugs to interrogate prisoners [PDF]:

The essence of coercion is the compulsion of a person by a superior force, often a government, to do or refrain from doing something involuntarily. The intentional application of an unlawful force that robs a person of free will is coercive. However, circumstances that cause a person to reevaluate a course of action, even if deception is instrumental, may arguably be non-coercive pressure. Under the interpretation set forth in FM 34-52, “physical or mental torture and coercion revolve around the elimination of the source’s free will.”46 These activities, along with “brainwashing,” are not authorized, it explains, but are not to be confused with the psychological techniques and ruses presented in the manual. FM 34-52 includes in the definition of mental coercion “drugs that may induce lasting and permanent mental alteration and damage.” This appears to reflect a change from earlier doctrine, which prohibited the use of any drugs on prisoners unless required for medical purposes.47

Footnote 47 has more specific details:

47 See Stanley J. Glod and Lawrence J. Smith, Interrogation under the 1949 Prisoners of War Convention, 21 MIL. L. REV. 145, 153-54 (1963)(citing JAGW 1961 / 1157, 21 June 21, 1961).

In an opinion by The Judge Advocate General of the Army reviewing the employment of [“truth serum”] in the light of Article 17, it was noted that Article 17 justly and logically must be extended to protect the prisoner against any inquisitorial practice by his captors which would rob him of his free will. On this basis it was held that the use of truth serum was outlawed by Article 17. In addition, its use contravenes Article 18, which states in part : “. . . no prisoner of war may be subject to . . . . medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental, or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.” The opinion declared that “. . . the suggested use of a chemical “truth serum” during the questioning of prisoners of war would be in violation of the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.” From this opinion it seems clear that any attempt to extract information from an unwilling prisoner of war by the use of chemicals, drugs, physiological or psychological devices, which impair or deprive the prisoner of his free will without being in his interest, such as a bonafide medical treatment, will be deemed a violation of Articles 13 and 17 of the Convention.

The 1987 version of FM 34-52 suggested that the use of any drugs for interrogation purposes amounted to mental coercion. FM 34-52 ch. 1 (1987).

Administering drugs for interrogation isn’t allowed under the conventions but administering drugs for medicinal reasons is a humanitarian action. Thus it’s easy to get around the Geneva Conventions if you want to interrogate prisoners with drugs, you merely have to claim the prisoners have mental conditions and administer the drugs for strictly medicinal reasons. As these prisoners are being held in a secret prison where no third-party doctor can come in and examine the prisoners any diagnosis of mental disorders is unverifiable. Isn’t that convenient?

They Have to Keep the Voters Happy

At the beginning of this year I discussed the state of North Carolina’s plan to pay the victims of its forced sterilization program $50,000 each. Although I found the story disgusting before it has managed to get worse:

Victims of forced sterilisation in the US state of North Carolina will not get compensation, after a payout plan failed in the state Senate.

A plan to give $50,000 (£31,800) to each victim passed the House but was rejected in the Senate. Republicans said the state did not have the funds.

[…]

“The state has no money anyway and the teachers would like to have a pay raise, and state employees would like to have a pay raise and you’re dealing with a $250 million shortfall in Medicaid,” Senator Austin Allran said.

It must be nice being the state. First you get to forcefully sterilize those you don’t approve of, then you get to control the court that determines how evil your actions were, and then you get to throw that court decision out the window because you need to buy votes in the upcoming election.

How are they buying votes with this action? Easy, they openly mentioned that there are state employees who would like to have raises. In any private business if a court decision lead to a payout that hampered employee raises it would me the employees would simply have to go without raises that year. The state doesn’t have to worry about such minor details because they can choose to ignore court rulings and give their employees pay raises so those same employees don’t vote the current crooks out of office.

This is how the system works, what’s politically convenient is allowed to happen and what’s politically inconvenient is stopped from happening.

Cooking the Books

Yesterday I mentioned a long New York Times article that tried to make Obama look like a man who can make the tough decision. It was eight pages so I didn’t read it word for word but I did miss a rather interesting fact:

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined “militant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”

From the article:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Wow… I’m really at a loss for words. This is absolutely twisted. In order to make people think the war is going better and America holds some kind of moral high ground Obama is counting any military-age males in a strike zone as militants. If a hellfire missile is launched from a drone and kills five 18 year-old males who were entirely uninvolved in hostilities with out country Obama will strut around and brag about the five militants he put in the ground.

Read the last line of the excerpt, any military-age male is considered guilty until proven innocent. What kind of double standard is that? Haven’t we always been told people are assume innocent until proven guilty in America? Isn’t that supposed to be one of the pillars of our so-called justice system? Suddenly the rules are changed simply because a person was blown up by a hellfire missile instead of arrested by police and tried?

This is the kind of twisted shit the state does to propagandize its people into supporting war. The current administration isn’t stupid, they remember how things went once word got out about the number of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War. People stopped believing the bullshit being fed to them by the state and started demanding the war end.

We were never at war with Eurasia, we were always at war with Eastasia.

I’m Sure He Deserved It

The war on drugs not approved by the state is one of the most vicious acts the state has taken. We have an almost unfathomable number of people rotting in prisons because they were found guilty of a decree (not a crime, a crime requires a victim). Worse yet, the state also finds it acceptable to punish the innocent:

The DEA left a student in a holding cell without food, water, or a bathroom for five days. Daniel Chong slept over at a friend’s house after celebrating April 20th, a day that marijuana users set aside to smoke pot. The DEA raided the house the next day and took him and eight others down to a local DEA office to answers questions. After he was told he was free to go, he was placed into a holding cell.

Chong screamed and pounded on the walls for help, but no one came to let him out, even after hearing people enter and exit the building. Since he was left without water, he was forced to drink his own urine and ate a white powdery substance found in his cell that turned out to be methamphetamine.

An innocent man locked in a cell for five days without food or water… but the jailers managed to toss some methamphetamine. What next, are they doing to charge him with using the meth? I wouldn’t put it past the state honestly. His kidnapping also lead to his attempted suicide:

After all of this, he tried to take his own life by breaking his own glasses, swallowing part of the glass and trying to carve his arms with the glass. When the agents finally discovered him, he was unresponsive and was sent to intensive care.

Yup, this is the war on drugs ladies and gentlemen. Your tax dollars are being used to bring violence against nonviolent individual.

Empty Apologies

I’m sure you’ve heard about the rampage that ended in the death of 16 Afghanistan civilians:

Sixteen Afghans, including women and children, were killed in their homes by a rogue US soldier in a pre-dawn rampage on Sunday, plunging relations between the two countries into a new crisis.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the slaughter as unforgivable.

‘When Afghan people are killed deliberately by US forces, it is murder and terror and an unforgivable action,’ Karzai said in a statement.

The American soldier entered the homes of civilians in the southern Kandahar province and killed 16 people including nine children and three women, the statement said.

But it’s OK, Obama called and apologized:

US President Barack Obama has phoned his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai to express condolences over the massacre of 16 villagers in Kandahar.

[…]

Mr Obama vowed to hold accountable anyone responsible for the “tragic and shocking” incident.

I’m sure the phone call went something like this:

Obama: Hey, I heard about the rampage that left some of your people dead, super sorry about that.

Karzai: Sixteen innocent people were slaughtered, nine of them children, and all you can say is ‘I’m sorry?’

Obama: Fine, I’ll do a token inquiry.

Karzai: An inquiry? How about you get out of my fucking country!

Obama: Yeah, about that. See, the thing is we really don’t feel like the time is right for use to leave. I’m sorry this happened and everything, and I can’t say it won’t happen again, but I’ll certainly give somebody a stern talking to about this. Talk to you later.

After which Obama hung up the phone, laughed his ass off, and told Biden, “That guy thinks I care, what an idiot!” This is the result of war and it is why it should be avoided at all costs. I think the horrors of war were realized well enough by the founding fathers since they required congressional approval before the United States would raise an army and enter a war. Sadly the founding fathers didn’t realize how spineless fucks would end up populating the congress and give the president dictator-like powers to send American people overseas to die without so much as a challenge.