the citizen-viewer

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark of The Guardian report on the single most devastating phenomenon happening to Cambodians now in Country for Sale.

Sang Run was out in his boat at 7am when disaster struck his village. He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run’s neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One - a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach - had been erased.

Read the story

see also: this

“Never before has this happened,” said Anthony Bykerk, the secretary general of the International Society of Olympic Historians, of the protests surrounding the Olympic torch. “This is the first time that the torch relay has ever been an element of protest — it’s usually a very big celebration.”

While protests and political agendas have often come to the forefront during and leading up to Olympics, said Bykerk, the events of the past couple of days — and the San Francisco incident — are especially troubling.

“This is worse because now they are protesting against the torch relay, which has nothing to do with politics but is supposed to be a symbol of unity — not used as protest,” said Bykerk. “If these people want to protest against the human rights question in Tibet, they should have done it 50 years ago.”

…lazy citizen-viewer lets Mitch Benn do the work.

Sue Gazdo, director of the Republican National Committee’s Membership Service, writes to offer citizen-viewers the priceless opportunity to buy this:

It’s Paddy, “the newest member of the Republican National Committee’s family of elephants.” He “proudly sports his Republican colors with the official Republican National Committee logo.”

She further urges us to “Bring Paddy home as a gift for your favorite Republican, child or grandchild, or to display in your own office.”

For real.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

From the New York Times article on the U.S. Senate vote to expand government spying powers and give telecoms companies immunity for helping the government illegally listen in on the citizen-viewers:

There was a measure of frustration in the voice of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, as he told reporters during a break in the daylong debate, “Holding all the Democrats together on this, we’ve learned a long time ago, is not something that’s doable.” (full article)

Joining the Republicans in abandoning the rule of law were the following Democrats and alleged Democrats:

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Webb (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)(but see this)

Helpful hint to the Dems: Find someone who can do the job.

Pennsylvania’s governor, Ed Rendell, explains why he’s the last major politician who still publicly backs giant slot machine parlors in Philadelphia:

A recent report revealed Pennsylvania slot machines are the most profitable on the East Coast, according to New Jersey casino officials.

After the results were tallied for earnings in fall 2007, The Pocono Downs was rated the most profitable. Philadelphia Park came in third, and Southwest Pennsylvania’s Meadows and Chester were fourth and fifth respectively.

Governor Rendell is thrilled at the recently released figures.

“I always knew gambling would be popular here especially with our older people who like slots,” said Gov. Rendell.

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In case the citizen-viewers have been inattentive today, the CIA has admitted (ahead of a New York Times article) destroying hundreds of hours of tapes of their interrogation of suspected Al Qaeda operatives they held.

The CIA’s defenders are claiming that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities — and the safety — of the interrogators. If the CIA is incapable of blurring the perpetrator’s faces on the tape, then we’re paying them way too much.

No, the real reason is pretty obvious. They didn’t want somebody to see the ugly, illegal, inhuman acts they were committing. Because even the ravening mobs out there, the listeners to Bill O’Reilly, the watchers of Rush Limbaugh, might be disgusted — many of them anyway — by the actual sight of a human being jerking helplessly as he feels himself drowning, helpless in the grip of his torturers. His American torturers.

So they destroyed the tapes.

The operative concept here is a legal one, omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem. It means “all things are presumed against the wrongdoer,” and is applied in cases where evidence is destroyed. It is assumed that those destroy evidence are those who know that the evidence would incriminate them.

President Bush’s spokesperson says that Bush can’t recall if he was told that the tapes would be destroyed and doesn’t remember if he saw them. If he had any interest in the question, he would find out, and if someone failed to tell him, he would have their head.

But that kind of accountability has never been demonstrated by this administration. Instead, they have the heads of people like acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, who had himself waterboarded to see whether it was torture or not — and the law into the hands of people like Michael Mukasey, who said he didn’t know if it was or not.

Now he will never see those tapes. For him, and for the mobs, the torture we are guilty of committing will remain an abstraction. The screams will echo only within the walls of the CIA’s torture chambers, and in the broken psyches of the human beings that suffer by our hand.