REDEYE 10/14/15

Slavery imbedded in Constitution
NYT, 9/18 — To the Editor….
Prof. Sean Wilentz’s essay arguing that the Constitution was not built on slavery…is profoundly mistaken….
…The text of the Constitution as ratified…clearly…sanctions slavery, in the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause….
…By allowing Southern states to count their slaves…for purposes of representation while denying those slaves…civil or human rights, the Constitution granted slaveholders magnified political poser, while creating an incentive to acquire more slaves….
Race-based slavery was this nation’s original sin….That sin could not be expurgated “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
U.S. military arms commanders who sexually abuse boys
NYT, 9/21 — Kabul, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley told his father [that] from his bunk he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it….” [His] father…urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way….
…American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene….
…Instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them…and placing them as the commanders of villages….
“…we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people…” said Dan Quinn, a former…captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did….”
After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.
Shades of 9/11: Petraeus
allies with al Qaeda
le Canard ȇnchainé, 9/9 — …Daesh [ISIS] is not just fighting [Syria’s] Bashar’s army, with the hope of flying the black flags of the Islamic State from Damascus. It must also fight Al-Nosra (a subsidiary of Al Qaeda)….Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are furnishing arms and subsidies to this curious terrorist coalition. And David Petraeus, the former great leader of American forces in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and the former boss of the C.I.A., has just invited the United States to ally itself with these good people, in an interview published on August 31 on the…website “The Daily Beast.”
If this general of lost wars it to be believed, this is price for vanquishing Daesh: hand in hand with Al Qaeda….
U.S.-backed coalition commit genocide
NYT, 9/13 — Hajja, Yemen — The airstrike clammed into L-Sham water-bottling plant…killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading….
…And it was far away from a military facility…[to] explain the strike as a tragic mistake….
Of the many perils Yemen’s citizens have faced…,with starvation looming and their cities crumbling under heavy weapons, none have been as deadly as the coalition airstrikes….A Saudi-led aerial campaign…has become so broad and vicious that critics accuse the coalition of collectively punishing people living under Houthi control.
…Coalition strikes have ripped through markets, apartment buildings and refugee camps….Human rights groups say such airstrikes amount to war crimes. More than a thousand civilians…have died in the strikes, the toll rising steadily with little international notice or outrage….
…The strikes are crystallizing anger…against Saudi Arabia and its partners, including the United States. The Obama administration had provided military intelligence and logistical assistance to the coalition, and American weapons have been widely used….[including] American-manufactured cluster munitions in the fields of Yemeni farmers….The United States is finalizing a deal to provide more weapons to Saudi Arabia, including missiles for its F-15 fighter jets….
…Locals joke grimly that the coalition has run out of buildings to hit….
The majority of civilians have been killed by coalition warplanes drooping American munitions ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds….
… “They are targeting the whole population,” said Adam Mujahid Abdulla, a 20-year-old survivor….The bomb that struck his house killed seven members of his family….
…Another airstrike sliced through a building of shops and apartments….In the rubble people dug out the remains of…the local barber. “They only found his legs….
The strike’s victims included…a 12-year-old girl who…had been visiting her 85-year-old grandmother….
GM kills for profit
NYT, 9/20 — With tough talk that its actions belie, the [U.S.] Justice Department announced…that it was bringing criminal charges against General Motors for “concealing a potentially deadly safety defect” and “misleading consumers regarding the safety” of GM vehicles, which caused or contributed to at least 124 deaths….
GM admitted it knew as early as 2004 that many of its vehicles contained defective ignition switches — and…had concluded by 2012 that the defective switches could cause airbags to fail. Yet Gm did not recall the 2.6 million affected vehicles until nearly two years later and instead hid the fatal safety defects to increase sales….
All charges against GM will be dropped…and no company officials have been charged with crimes based on GM’s deadly concealment scheme….
…The United States attorney…insisted that GM deserved credit for it “fairly extraordinary” cooperation….
…In case after case…the Justice Department has treated the worst corporate criminals like first-time drug offenders, agreeing to dismiss or not bring charges if the companies clean up their acts.
How the FBI deliberately frames innocent people
The New Yorker, 9/21 — Joseph (the Animal) Barboza was a murderer for hire… [and] ultimately confessed to seven murders….
Barboza became a prized informant: he served as a [U.S.] government witness….When authorities began looking into a 1965 murder that Barboza had participated in, his contacts at the FBI engineered a scheme to protect him. Barboza was never prosecuted;…instead, he took the stand as the government’s star witness and implicated four innocent men in the murder. His FBI handler…boasted…about the ease with which the bureau had set up four “pigeons” for a crime they did not commit. All four men ended up with life sentences. (They were cleared of the murder in 2001, by which time two of them had died in prison.)