maybe The Trial?

”The Trial (German: Der Prozess) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

you seem like you were a half-bright, eager to please undergraduate not too long ago – they never had you read Kafka at Rutgers?

Have you ever heard of a band called Black Flag? You could learn a bit about punk rock from them, maybe since you are so high profile you could share your nuanced views on lawless indefinite detention with Henry Rollins sometime, invite him to a public chat on your blog, tell him how tough you are, rebutting all challenges in the comments, you know, maybe you’d bond?

hey, Spencer Ackerman are you doing some parody, or spoof, of nebbishy liberal banality of evil type policy writing?

you’re not a lawyer, but are you a human being with any empathy, or something else?

what if these ’detainees’ to use your sterile, Orwellian terminology, actually never did anything wrong and were snatched up into this gulag for stupid, botched reasons?

where they were held incommunicado and likely tortured for 6 years for no fucking reason at all, even after many in the security apparat had concluded they were innocent?

Federal Judges are coming to these conclusions, and you breezily suggest that, due to their being dark-skinned foreigners, ”they’d have fewer rights in prison . . . and so forth.”

have you got the guts to go read Andy Worthington’s pieces about recent habeas reviews?

http://www.counterpunch.org/wo…..42009.html

http://counterpunch.org/worthington05192009.html

try to reconcile some of that with your smugness, Spencer Ackerman.

or better yet, hide in your bureacratese and don’t spare a thought for the cruelties these ’detainees’ have endured. After all if Dick Cheney and GW Bush have called ’terrists, thats good enough for Spencer Ackerman, right?

how very punk rock it all is.

Is the idea that holding people without charges on US soil would enable Europeans to do the same? I fail to see how that’s a good thing. If the idea is to persuade Europeans to take in freed detainees, how is this going to help?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence

Today was the 1st session with Obama and Volker’s advisory board, which was livestreamed. It was a very interesting discussion, with lots of different angles represented around the table. And Obama encouraged a real discussion. General consensus — have to price carbon, have to price it now, have to encourage certainty for future investment and get the structure settled so everybody can get to work on it. Then there were lots of points raised about what needed to be taken into account in attacking the problem, including features of legislation and warnings about various stuff that needed to be addressed to reduce program risks, costs etc. And Obama was a discussant and encouraged different views to be expressed.

How refreshing — people talking about real problems as adults and examining possible solutions. Costs and benefit tradeoffs. Risks and opportunities.

So how does Politico spin the meeting as? Obama challenged by handpicked photo-op puppets. Now, they patted the President on the head for actually encouraging divergent views to be expressed. But the whole story was spun from the headline: “Obama hears econ concerns on climate plan”. Well of course he did. That’s why he asked them to come talk with him.

Lord help us, make it stop!