|
||||
|
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end, To be stuck inside of Mobile With the Memphis blues again. “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” The trouble with illusions is that you aren’t aware you have any until they are taken away from you. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow PP has posted the decision by Judge Max Gors on J.A.I.L.’s challenge to the Attorney General’s ballot explanation on their measure. I won’t repeat it in full but do want to look at its content and analysis. Two things come to mind: (1) I told you so and (2) If the public is foolish enough to pass Amendment E, Judge Gors may be J.A.I.L.’s first target. Gors ruled on five issues, four raised by South Dakota J.A.I.L.er-in-chief Bill Stegmeier. The first was one raised by the State, which argued that Stegmeier delayed too long in bringing suit by waiting until the last day for certifying ballots when he’d known about the explanation since at least July 13. Gors rejected that challenge. Noting that Stegmeier first wrote to AG Larry Long to request a change in the language of the explanation, Gors said, “Stegmeier should not be faulted for first attempting to resolve the matter short of litigation.” I think that approach not only fair but voters deserve a decision on the merits. As noted before, Stegmeier’s main complaint was that the ballot explanation said the amendment extends to “[c]itizens serving on juries, school boards, city councils, county commissions, or in similar capacities, and prosecutors,” as well as judges. After noting that the amendment defines judge to include anyone else claiming judicial immunity, Gors pointed out that in a previous mailer to Madison area residents Stegmeier said that J.A.I.L. applied to “any governmental employee (of any stripe, shape, or flavor).” The judge concluded Stegmeier “cannot claim a better version of the facts” now than before. I wonder if the conflict between what Stegmeier said in the lawsuit and what he said in Madison has ever been pointed out before? (That’s my first, “I told you so.”) Yet Judge Gors did not base his decision on that alone. “The question, however, is not what Stegmeier thinks or says, but whether judicial immunity applies to persons other than judges,” he wrote, going on to itemize the wide range of positions to which judicial immunity might apply. He concluded
(That’s my second, “I told you so,” for which I could provide any number of links.) Stegmeier also complained that the ballot explanation used the word “volunteers” to describe those who would sit on the grand jury. Gors calculated that even if everyone who signed the petitions to get J.A.I.L. on the ballot volunteered to serve on the special grand jury, they would still make up only 10 percent of the special grand jury pool. He said, “Use of the term ‘volunteers’ implies that the special grand jury envisioned by the proposed amendment is a group of hooded vigilantes riding the range with rope looking to hang the first judge they find. This is patently not true.” As a result, he instructed Long to replace “volunteers” with special grand jurors. (While I don’t give “volunteers” the same broad reading as Judge Gors, this is another “I told you so.”) Stegmeier also complained about the ballot explanation using the word “strip,” indicating that it was an “Oooohhh-word.” Gors said, however, that the description was “entirely accurate.” (“I told you so” number 4.) At the hearing, J.A.I.L. complained that the ballot explanation did not say that the amendment would come into play only if the decision-maker’s actions were “deliberate.” Gors response to that argument is on the mark:
Remember, one of the things J.A.I.L. has harped on most recently is that J.A.I.L. can be used to attack the exclusion of witnesses or evidence. Any such decision is, of necessity, a deliberate one. As Judge Gors pointed out, it is impossible to accidentally exclude or allow evidence or dismiss a lawsuit. At the hearing, Stegmeier also asked Judge Gors to require the explanation use the term “accountability.” Judge Gors really put the hammer down:
This will be my last “I told you so.” I have said all along that J.A.I.L. is nothing but an effort to not only attack the judiciary but to create a fourth branch of government made up of 13 individuals accountable to no one but themselves. J.A.I.L. is not about accountability. As Stegmeier’s stories and versions of J.A.I.L. change for sake of expedience, the last thing J.A.I.Lers want is for them to be held accountable. No doubt J.A.I.L. will appeal. That’s fine. That’s their right and it will give us a final answer. Besides, you gotta love J.A.I.L. paying a lawyer and using the courts. Like I said before, although the J.A.I.L.ers keep saying people should be for J.A.I.L. because lawyers oppose it, this shows how J.A.I.L. is a full employment act for lawyers. And, of course, if the Supreme Court affirms Gors, they could join him as the targets of the first J.A.I.L. complaint should Stegmeier and crew successfully deceive the public about the piece of excrement they’re trying to sell. Finally, just to pre-empt comments or speculation by Stegmeier, Bonnie Russell or the rest of the J.A.I.L.house crew, I had no connection or involvement in the litigation and certainly not with the decision. In fact, the first I saw or heard of the decision was on PP’s blog tonight. But if it makes Stegmeier and crew feel any better, Judge Gors ruled against me in a couple matters in a motion hearing I had with him last Friday afternoon. Ironically, Stegmeier wants a judge to help him make it easier to sue judges. Stegmeier must have more confidence in the courts than he lets on in his public statements and his proposed constitutional amendment. Memorandum Decision, Stegmeier v. Nelson Within months of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon held a special screening of the film Battle of Algiers, supposedly to show how and why France failed in its struggle against Algerian urban guerilla warfare and terrorism. Later, others wondered about the film’s depiction of torture and its impact on American policy in light of Abu Ghraib and the practice of “rendition.” Now comes a written work that made the French aware of what was happening in Algeria. Sadly, the book may remain all too relevant today. The Question, released for the first time in the U.S. in nearly 50 years, details the arrest and torture by the French military of Henri Alleg, a French journalist living in Algiers. Alleg, a Communist who supported Algerian independence, shocked the French nation. The slim volume was written in 1957 in an Algiers prison four months after the torture ended, smuggled out of prison and published in France the next year. It was the first book to be banned in France for political reasons in two centuries. It retains its power today. This new release contains the original text and the original preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. It adds not only a foreword and introduction by Americans who have written on U.S. policies and Guantanamo Bay but also a new afterword by Alleg. The methods used on Alleg were brutal. In his first session alone, Alleg is electrically shocked on various parts of his body, including his genitals; waterboarded; beaten; and various parts of his body, including his groin, burned. When he is finally taken to a cell, he is thrown into it with his hands handcuffed behind his back.
With passages like these, Alleg portrays how, whether by mindset or acclimation, those conducting the torture seemed to become immune to it. Thus, when Alleg later is tortured some three floors underground, one of his main persecutors wants him gagged. But it’s not because Alleg’s screams might be heard. Rather, Alleg is gagged because his torturer finds the screaming of his victims “disagreeable.” Similarly, when Alleg is later taken to the infirmary, the doctor does not tend to his wounds but, rather, supervises the administration of “truth serum.” Yet Alleg also shows how affects more than the victim or interrogator. He writes of a young paratrooper who came into his cell and praised those in the French Resistance who died from torture rather than reveal information.
Sartre also takes note of this. He points out that rather than wondering if they would talk if their fingernails were pulled out, the question facing the young military men became, “If my friends, fellow soldiers, and leaders tear out an enemy’s fingernails, what will I do?” It is this aspect of such practices that really becomes the ultimate question and makes The Question more than a story about the French military in Algeria. Alleg’s new afterword says French specialists in “muscular interrogation” provided training to governments around the world, including Latin America, South Africa and the United States. Likewise, a new introduction by James Le Sueuer, a history professor who has written on the French-Algerian conflict, states that French officers who oversaw the use of torture and summary executions in Algeria trained U.S. military personnel on counterinsurgency theory and France “actively sent its professional torturers as official military advisors to the American military.” The reports of the use of sleep deprivation and waterboarding in interrogations in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib photos seem familiar enough to some of the techniques Alleg describes that they may speak to an Algerian legacy. Yet it is doubtful The Question will stir in the U.S. what it did in France. Unquestionably, some of the book’s impact came from Alleg being a French citizen being tortured by the French military. Similarly, Alleg was a journalist, not a combatant or terrorist who posed a direct threat to the French military or the public. As such, his situation is far different than someone who may possess knowledge of upcoming attacks, which seems to have been the focus of the U.S. debate on interrogation practices. Moreover, since Alleg’s book is far from the first to detail barbaric treatment of prisoners and certainly not the last, it provides a sad commentary on mankind and human nature. Still, as Alleg points out, it is important that citizens know what is done in their names. I have survived so much pain and so many humiliations during this time that I would not bring myself to talk once again of those days and nights of agony if I did not believe that it would serve a purpose, and that by making the truth known I might do a little towards bringing about a cease-fire and peace Henri Alleg, The Question Don’t know why but intriguing stuff kept popping up this week. With the TBR list growing and nice weather supposedly on the weekend horizon, I plan to spend it reading outside and (except for anything pressing) leave you with a variety of linkage:
Sometimes I wish I had a little book that had all the answers to all of the questions I ask “Better Than You,” The Uninvited, Artificial Hip |
        |
|||
|
Copyright © 2026 A Progressive on the Prairie - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||