Although the Supreme Court has restricted the use of the death penalty to cases of murder, the governor of Oklahoma has signed a bill for the execution of repeat child molesters.
There are no Iraqi military hospitals; wounded Iraqi soldiers must somehow pay for their own medical care.
Three Guantanamo inmates hang themselves. All were former hunger-strikers who had been forcibly fed (at least according to the Sunday Times of London, the only paper with this detail). Doubtless the Pentagon will describe them as using methods “consistent with Al Qaeda training” and just looking for attention.
Indeed: after writing that, I found that Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the US Joint Task Force Guantanamo, has described the suicides thus: “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” (horrified emphasis added).
The Pentagon still won’t release their names and doubtless if they left notes those will be suppressed too. Even in death they are un-persons whose thoughts and feelings must be silenced, their actions explained only by Harry “Harry” Harris and his ilk. The Pentagon says that the detainees “are not common criminals” and that the corpses were treated “with the utmost respect,” because if there is one thing Guantanamo is all about, it’s respect.
Speaking of respect, today was World Naked Bike Ride day. Because, according to one organizer whose word I will have to take for this, “When you get a lot of naked people on bikes, people tend to smile at you.”
The, ahem, bottom picture is from Prague, I think the top picture is from Britain.
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