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Post by Liberator on Jan 4, 2010 13:48:40 GMT
Frightening! "If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong." Continues at The Nation
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Post by Ben Lomond on Jan 4, 2010 16:05:57 GMT
"America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilisation."..... John O'hara.
Sometimes I think he had a point!
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Post by Liberator on Jan 4, 2010 16:08:52 GMT
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Post by mikemarshall on Jan 4, 2010 20:24:17 GMT
I have always been an admirer of America. At times the whole nation appears to slide into some kind of collective folly and at others it produces astonishing creativity and resourcefulness.
I have found Americans to be polite, kind and considerate, far more so than my own people. Yes, of course there are bad Americans, selfish, cruel, rude and offensive, but such people exist in every nationality.
Lin and I have often talked of moving to the United States and even though I now fear that it is something that is unlikely to happen, it remains for me a land of promise and a place to be admired rather than to be hated and scorned.
Sadly, the American attitude towards crime and punishment, which had been improving for many years, slid backwards into barbarism under Clinton and descended even further into the abyss under Bush. To date, Obama has shown no sign of being willing to take any sort of tough decision to reverse the process of enslaving thousands of people by stealth.
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