(Source: paxamericana, via hummussexual)
Occupational Hazards
FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit
The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.
The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.
While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.
DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police.
“ Today, the promise of “gay rights” for Palestinian goes something like this: The United States will protect your right to not be detained because as a gay, but will not protect you from being detained because you are Palestinian. As a queer, you have the right to love and have sex with whomever you choose safely and without discrimination, but you do not have the right to be un-occupied, or to be free from oppression based on your political beliefs, actions, and affiliations. As long as it is Arabo-Islamic culture and its manifestation through (Palestinian) law that is oppressing you, we are here for you. If you are being oppressed by Israeli colonial policies, you’re on your own. As long as you confine your politics to your sexuality, and you speak as a queer subaltern in a language of rights that we understand (because we wrote it) we are here for you. One is tempted to call the production of such a narrow and reductive framework through which queers are to become politically legible an exercise in homophobia.
Maya Mikdashi, ”Gay Rights as Human Rights: Pinkwashing Homonationalism”
(Source: jadaliyya.com)
In honor of Barack Obama’s newfound respect for human rights in his recognition of gay marriage, Predator Drones will now be painted pink.
Dropping fabulous bombs everywhere.
lmfao.
Well, that just about sums it up, then.
(via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
[shown above] Ruhal Ahmed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, in an interview in which he discusses Omar Khadr. Ahmed stammers,
“I think he was a strong kid.
I think, you know, being much older, much older than him, I did feel that, sometimes, I needed to look out for him and I think so did the other prisoners around him feel the same. But obviously, being in Guantanamo, you can’t really look out for one another.
Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s difficult you know, today I’m here, and I’m, I’m thinking of, thinking of him and he’s still in prison and he’s still, still a kid. I don’t know really what I would say to him. It doesn’t seem, it doesn’t seem fair that he’s still there and, and I’m here.”
Khadr, a Canadian, was taken into US custody at the age of fifteen, tortured and refused medical attention because he wouldn’t attest to being a member of Al Qaeda, even though he was shot three times in the chest and had shrapnel embedded in his eyes and right shoulder. As a result, Khadr’s left eye is now permanently blind, the vision in his right eye is deteriorating, he develops severe pain in his right shoulder when the temperature drops, and he suffers from extreme nightmares.
Ahmed, who was imprisoned in the cell next to him for some time, reported that Khadr would return from interrogations (where he would be tortured) crying and would huddle in a corner of his cell with his blanket over his head.
Shafiq Rasul, another former Guantanamo Bay detainee, stated that although Khadr was forced to mature due to his harsh treatment and torture, he still had the mentality of a child. Guantanamo Bay’s Muslim chaplain James Yee confirmed this by reporting that Khadr had been given a Mickey Mouse book in a surprising act of kindness by one of his interrogators, and that he slept with it clutched to his (injured) chest. Muneer Ahmad, one of Khadr’s first attorneys, reported that at their first meeting at Guantanamo, Khadr asked for nothing other than colouring books, car magazines and pictures of big animals and played with the attorney’s ink pens and digital watch.
Khadr has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, and is now 25 years old.
If you want to know more about Omar Khadr, please check this out. Omar has himself said: “… if the world doesn’t see all this, to what world am I being released to? A world of hate … and discrimination.” He’s right, it is a world full of hate & discrimination, a world full of hatred towards everyone who isn’t white, Christian & straight.
(via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
