Greenwald's been sounding the erosion-of-our-civil-liberties alarm for years -- maybe now folks will pay attention

Glenn Greenwald's been truth-telling ever since I found him at Salon years ago. He was one of few real journalists willing to "tell the truth and shame the devil" -- and he spared no one, from the MSM puppets to the politricksters themselves. It was refreshing as hell!

Since he's always been unafraid to speak truth to power, I fully expected his swift, succinct and no-nonsense response to the detention and questioning of his partner, David Miranda at London's Heathrow airport. And in his, Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation, he doesn't disappoint:

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

I also expected this:



You'd think the UK would know by now, that the US will always quickly and most certainly throw them under the bus, particularly when it comes to anything Snowden (gotta keep up the appearance of steady, clean hands, even as they franticly flail about trying to catch this guy with hands not even approaching anything resembling "clean").  It's not like there isn't recent precedent to remind them.

When FUKUS et al., forced down the plane of a sitting president of a sovereign nation, the US said, "It wasn't me," then too, leaving its lackeys scrambling to make up lame excuses and having to apologize.  Why in the world would the UK give the US a "heads up" that they'd be detaining Glenn's partner if they'd not already colluded to do so?  Please.  And I guess we're to believe the US had nothing to do with this either:  UK ordered Guardian to destroy hard drives in effort to stop Snowden revelations:

UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian’s office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden...

Mr. "Earnest," stop insulting our intelligence.  Even Stevie Wonder can see Snowden's whistle blowing is the one constant in all of these criminal and jack-booted acts of intimidation.   Earnestly guy, this is what I think of your press conference:

The Changeling will go to great lengths to serve white supremacy -- and himself (forget about all those folk, who thought "Change You Can Believe In" meant just that). Mr. "To know him, is to love him" over there, is more than okay with allowing Shrub & Co. to skate, totally free from prosecution for all the murderous atrocities and attacks on civil liberties they committed during their administration yet he's pulling out all the stops to not only capture Snowden, but to intimidate anyone else associated with him?  How crazy is that?

Certainly his other motivation is the fact that anything leaked, will implicate him even more horribly since he chose to sell his soul to be the first Black deus ex machina.  Now, the real powers-that-be can continue to perpetuate the aforementioned atrocities and attacks at an even higher level through him.  And when the shit hits the fan, he'll be left holding the proverbial bag.  It's already happening.  He will suffer the repercussions of all these world-dominating actions for a lifetime -- and so will his daughters (but they'll be rich, that's all that matters I guess).  There's just something really insecure or worse, megalomaniacal about that to me.  He reminds me of the power-lusting, Martin Sheen character, Stilson, bent on creating "his destiny" by destroying the world in the movie "Dead Zone."  It didn't end well for him.

Like the others before him, he raised his right hand and took the following oath and didn't mean one word of it:

Presidential Oath of Office
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

In stark contrast, Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald, like Bradley Manning and others before them,  are doing way more preserving, protecting and defending the Constitution than those who routinely raise that right hand. Knowing this government's reach however, my prayers are with them.

New York Times reporter, Pete Maass recently published a comprehensive, day-late-and-dollar-short account of how it all got to this point. His, How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets reads like a spy thriller (he is, according to the piece, working on a book about surveillance and privacy, after all) -- you should check it out.

Related:
- NSA collected non-terrorism related emails
- What NSA Transparency Looks Like
- Miranda threatens legal action over detention, confiscation
- ‘More aggressive': Greenwald vows to publish more secrets after UK detains partner
- Latin America Condemns US Espionage at United Nations Security Council
- Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies

This, my fellow Americans, is what terrorism looks like -- recognize it? You should, since it continues in our names

Thank you so much Dr. Kohls.

~#~#~#~

The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Un-Censored Version
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

68 years ago, at 11:02 am on August 9th, 1945, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan. That bomb was the second and last atomic weapon that had as its target a civilian city. Somewhat ironically, as will be elaborated upon later in this essay, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan and ground zero was the largest cathedral in the Orient.

These baptized and confirmed airmen did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride. There was no way that the crew could not have known that what they were participating in met the definition of an international war crime (according to the Nuremberg Principles that were very soon to be used to justify the execution of many German Nazis).

It had been only 3 days since the August 6th bomb, a uranium bomb, had decimated Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped amidst considerable chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government had been searching for months for a way to honorably end the war. The only obstacle to surrender had been the Roosevelt/Truman administration’s insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan – an intolerable demand for the Japanese that prolonged the war and kept Japan from surrendering months earlier.

The Russian army had declared war against Japan on August 8, hoping to regain territories lost to Japan in the disastrous Russo-Japanese war 40 years earlier, and Stalin’s army was advancing across Manchuria. Russia’s entry into the war represented a powerful incentive for Japan to end the war quickly and they much preferred surrendering to the US rather than to Russia. A quick end to the war was important to the US as well. It did not want to divide any of the spoils of war with Russia.

The Target Committee in Washington, D.C. had made a list of relatively un-damaged Japanese cities that were to be excluded from the conventional fire-bombing (using napalm) campaigns that had burned to the ground 60+ major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. That list of protected cities included, at one time or another Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Kyoto and Nagasaki. These relatively undamaged cities were off-limits from incendiary terror bombings but were to be preserved as possible targets for the new “gimmick” weapons of mass destruction.

Scientific curiosity was a motivation in choosing the targeted cities. The military and the scientists needed to know what would happen to intact buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were exploded overhead. Ironically, prior to August 6 and 9, the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered themselves lucky for not having been bombed as much as other cities. Little did they know.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress that had been christened Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target. Bock’s Car’s plutonium bomb was in the bomb bay, code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.

The only field test (blasphemously code-named “Trinity”) of a nuclear weapon had occurred just three weeks earlier (July 16, 1945) at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lava rock that resulted from the heat of that blast (twice the temperature of the sun) can still found at the site today. It is called trinitite.

The reality of what had happened at Hiroshima was only slowly becoming apparent to the fascist military leaders in Tokyo. It took 2 – 3 days after Hiroshima was incinerated before Japan’s Supreme War Council was able to even partially comprehend what had happened there, to make rational decisions and to discuss again the possibility of surrender.

But it was already too late, because by the time the War Council was meeting that morning in Tokyo, Bock’s Car and the rest of the armada of B-29s was already approaching Japan – under radio silence. The dropping of the second bomb had initially been planned for August 11, but bad weather had been forecast, and the mission was moved up to August 9.

With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car arrived at the primary target, but Kokura was clouded over. So after futilely circling over the city three times, there was no break in the clouds, and, running seriously low on fuel in the process, the plane headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

The history of Nagasaki Christianity

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest catholic church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral (completed in 1917), but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the megachurch of its time, with 12,000 baptized members.

Nagasaki was the location where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549. The Christian community survived and prospered for several generations. However, soon after Xavier’s planting of the church in Japan, it became obvious to the Japanese rulers that Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests were exploiting Japan, and it didn’t take too long for all Europeans to be expelled from the country – as well as their foreign religion. All aspects of Christianity, including the new Japanese converts, became the target of brutal persecutions.

By 1600, being a Christian was a capital crime in Japan. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their new religion suffered torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity was extinct.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government – which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the growing Japanese Christian community had built the massive Urakami Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that the massive Cathedral was one of two Nagasaki landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site 31,000 feet overhead, he identified the cathedral through a break in the clouds and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 am, during morning mass, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching radioactive fireball that exploded 500 meters above the cathedral. Ground Zero was the persecuted, vibrant, surviving center of Japanese Christianity.

The Nagasaki Christian death count

Since the Cathedral was the epicenter of the blast, most Nagasaki Christians did not survive. 6000 of them died instantly, including all who were at confession that morning. Of the 12,000 church members, 8,500 died as a direct result of the bomb. Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school disappeared into black smoke or chunks of charred remains Tens of thousands of innocent Shinto and Buddhist Japanese also died instantly and hundreds of thousands were mortally wounded, some of whose progeny are still in the process of slowly dying from the trans-generational malignancies and immune deficiencies caused by the deadly plutonium.

What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, destroy Japanese Christianity, American Christians did in 9 seconds. Even today those who are members of Christian churches in Japan represent a fraction of 1% of the population, and the average attendance at Christian worship services is 30. Surely the decimation of Nagasaki at the end of the war crippled what at one time was a thriving church.

American terrorism - "you can dress it up" tomorrow, "but you can't take it out" - of reality

"In the church I come from - which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belong - we were counselled, from time to time, to do our first works over. Though the church I come from and the church to which most white Americans belong are both Christian churches, their relationship - due to those pragmatic decisions concerning Property made by a Christian State sometime ago - cannot be said to involve, or suggest, the fellowship of Christians. We do not, therefore, share the same hope or speak the same language. (emphasis mine)

To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road and tell the truth about it. Shout or testify or keep it to yourself but know whence you came." (emphasis his)

James Baldwin

"The Price of the Ticket"

First of all, I apologize to those of you who've been periodically returning for the end of the "Homegoing" series.  I so appreciate your patience and I assure you, Part 5 is forthcoming.  But since Part 4 - as is its wont - life just kept happening, mightily challenging many of my remaining realities and making "All My Bones Shake."

In the interim, I sporadically posted and/or commented elsewhere, as I watched the HN(Over-seer)IC  - partner with the usual imperialist suspects in raining down all manner of death-delivering armaments on a sovereign, African country with the intent of assassinating its leader; authorize and actually oversee the orchestrated murder (true or not - that visual was disturbing) of another, non-alabaster-skinned brother; play a shell game with brown brothers and sisters at the border, even as he and Brother-Ass-Coverer played a botched game of Fast and Furious - all, while totally ignoring what his privileged, string-pullers are doing to Blacks - here and in Haiti.

(An interesting, electioneering aside - my friend, Eric Sheptock left a message on my phone this morning (What?  It's Saturday!  And - I'm an hour behind him!  Let me tell you, voicemail is all anyone will get from me before noon, especially on a Saturday!), advising that the Changeling, himself, will be visiting the CCNV Homeless Shelter this morning.  Since our meeting during my first - and last - year of grad school in DC, he keeps me up on all things activism.  Now, you mean to tell me, that in two-and-a-half years, he couldn't make it the 1.5 miles to 2nd St., NW (I know that's the distance, because I lived off of 3rd St, NE while in school)  - to see about the homeless living in the shadow of the Big House??  Puh-leeze!  I returned his call once I got up and movin' - and got his voicemail.  I left him a message saying, "I know you're in the throes of Obama-love right now, but call me when you're done.")

Yes, all my bones have surely been shaking, signalling that it was way past time to do some of "my first works over."  And that's pretty much where my mind's been (and often still is).  And alas, I've been side-tracked yet again, with the convergence of these recent events, which prompted forced me to write this post on American terrorism before publishing Part 5:

• the planned, then postponed, MLK memorial dedication (about which I've written, here and here);
• the electioneering, "Zing, went the (AIPAC) strings of (the Changeling's) heart" on Palestine (which I'll address, yet again in an upcoming post);
• my blog-sister, Kitty, giving me the, available-this-month, heads-up on "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" (and the various and sundry, needin'-happy-darkies reviews of same, which also requires a separate post);
• the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11;
• and finally, this jolting piece of "do-our-first-works-over" proportions by HamdenRice entitled:  "Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did"

With the continued twisting of Dr. King's legacy, reducing him to a, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" kinda brother, HamdenRice rightfully puts American terrorism on blast.  Having been born in the Jim Crow South two years after Brown v. Board, raised there until 1974 and subsequently getting my "higher learning" at an HBCU there until 1978 - this piece really hit home:

The reason I'm posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King's legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream Not Yet Realized." I'm sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That's why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind. (emphasis mine)

Thank you HamdenRice!  Dr. King's legacy was never - EVER - color blind.  And the continued co-option of it as such - is merely, more white folk, trying to make white folk, feel comfortable with, and unnaccountable for, their seemingly irrevocable,  often-depraved and most assuredly fearful and insecure, "Divine Right"-thinking,  power-mongering, imperialist - terrorism.

From the "no running water" to the "much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns" - the writer's background in Virginia sounds very similar to my own South Carolina upbringing.  But I was never sarcastic about what Dr. King had accomplished, because like his father, I personally understood Dr. King's herculean, and ultimately fatal-for-him efforts to try and end (at least as we knew it) "...the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south."  And while he wasn't 100% successful in that regard (as the terror continues, even today) - what he accomplished was, in fact, a far cry from giving "this great speech" and marching.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus...It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

Though I get his meaning in the first sentence, I do have a small quibble with it - having lived it.  While the "main suffering in the south" indeed, "did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain or ride in the front of the bus" - I think he misses the soul-murdering effects (especially on children) of those, absolutely intended and daily attacks on our dignity; of always seeing one's parents or one's self, being considered some unclean, inhuman animal after which no "civilized" person, in their right mind, would drink.  It does something to your psyche, believe me.

And that back-of-the-bus thing?  Ditto.  I remember riding home from my Black, Catholic school in the 60s, minding my own damned business in the back of the bus (despite the Supreme Court-ordered mandate to desegregate, many southern states ignored it until the Freedom Rides - and they started getting fined), when an older white boy from the white Catholic high school, running up and down the aisle with his friends - stopped, looked at them laughing and then - hawked up a big, green glob of snot, and spat on me.  I froze, first in roiling anger and disgust, but within seconds, as I watched it run down the right strap of my green, plaid jumper uniform - embarrassment and yes, fear, quickly took hold.  Even though we were s'posed to be free, I knew I couldn't retaliate because:  1) all eyes from the "white section" were on me, 2) he was white and way, bigger than me, and 3) I was afraid of what the repercussions would be at home, or at school if I hit his ass.  So I stayed put, fighting back the tears until my stop.
 
I needn't have worried about the home front though.  My, by-then-divorced Mama, struggling to ensure we got the "best education" possible - wasn't havin' it.  When I came in the door crying, she called me in the kitchen to ask what was wrong.  And between those choking sobs (during which you can barely catch your breath), I pointed to the glob, now crusty from being exposed to the air, and said, through a fresh flod of tears, "One of those white boys from Bishop England (he was wearing their uniform) spat on me!"   She asked me, her voice rising, "Then what did you do?!"   Hoping to, at least, keep my ass out of the sling, I responded, "Nothin' - cuz I know I'm not s'posed to be fightin'."  She got mad as hell, saying, "I'm gonna call that damned school, cuz nobody's spittin' on my child and gettin' away with it!"  She did - they did nothing.  I was in the 6th grade!  And while I felt so loved and protected by her efforts, I not only got, how little the emotional well-being of a little Black girl mattered to white folk - I saw, how my Mama's standing up for me meant even less to them.

So while the writer is dead-on with the second sentence about lynching, I think it extremely important we not forget how effective, long-standing, emotional terrorism is as well (Baldwin also wrote about that!).

So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.

Seeing as I "knew what racial terrorism was like back then" (to include the KKK purportedly meeting upstairs over the Edward's 5-and-dime around the corner from our rented house downtown; my Grandmama's house being mysteriously burned to the ground out on the Island; my Daddy having to engage in many of those "humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people" - at times, in the presence of his children and particularly his son), and - because I "can make a convincing case" that I definitely "still feel it today" here, in "the belly of the beast" - I think I'm qualified to say, unequivocally, that the dream was not accomplished.

And while the knowledge of racial terrorism remains a reality for plenty of us, these days it seems, making a "convincing case you still feel it today" is purely relative and matters not in the big picture (unless of course, you unwaveringly know, like the Freedom Riders of old, what you're "willing to ride (and die) for").

Once the beating was over, we were free.

A hundred times - Yes!   In our hearts, souls and minds, we were freer than we'd ever been before, from American terrorism, which propelled us even further toward our rightful place as citizens in this country we built, by the sweat of our brow.  But, if one takes the statement literally - Fannie Lou Hamer might have been the last Black woman, sterilized without her knowledge and consent (she was not), nor would she have had to deliver this speech (video) to the DNC in 1964; the descendants of Henrietta Lacks (video), some medically uninsured, wouldn't STILL be waiting for some kind of recompense for the universal use, and profitting from, of her HeLa Cells which have saved countless lives; Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, along with a host of others, would have lived well into their old age; there'd have been no need to fight for Affirmative Action; we would not currently have, the highest unemployment and imprisonment rates that we do; we would not today, have a toothless Congressional Black Caucus (some of whom are ex-Freedom Riders!), getting rich like the white fat cats (both legally and illegally), while their constituents still live in poverty and poor housing; etc., etc, etc.

It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done.

No, it wasn't any of those acts that freed our hearts, souls and minds, but we'll just have to agree to disagree with what Hillary Clinton (whom I used to admire) said.  As Joseph A. Califano Jr., Lyndon Johnson's special assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, said in 2008 - "It Took a Partnership."

All that being said however (I know, I was kinda full) - I salute HamdenRice, for not allowing the white-wash to continue by putting his finger smack-dab on the pulse of Dr. King's achievements.

Look, I know this piece is link-heavy, but I thought it was necessary to illustrate how Black folk have endured a shit-load of American terrorism - and continue to.  Read them at your leisure but please - do, at least, watch the videos.

But, we are certainly not alone.  Even those immigrants who came here on the ship, instead of in the belly of it (and who insist, now, "On Being White and Other Lies,") - have also suffered at the hands of that pesky, American exceptionalism with which, I suspect, we will be inundated tomorrow on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I stumbled upon a six-part series on You Tube awhile ago entitled, "Violence:  An American Tradition."  I'm posting Part 1 - but as the disclaimer says on each part, "Caution:  Contains scenes that may be disturbing to young or sensitive viewers" - because it, and the other five parts - are not for the faint of heart!:



I've been trying not to watch much TV at all these days, and I'll certainly not be watching any between now and tomorrow.  Because, I know I won't be able to stomach all the government/Hollywood hypocrisy, mourning the almost 3,000 killed, while literally and figuratively laying waste - to many, many millions more, both here and abroad.

Though it's McVeigh's ghost in Norway, Puppet-in-Chief spews company line

Finian Cunningham of Global Research so hit the nail on the head here:

The US President said of the attacks:  “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring.  We have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks.”

And with Juan Cole driving the point home in his, White Christian Fundamentalist Terrorism in Norway, and Charlie Brooker of the Guardian bringing up the rear today, with his, The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture- it'll be interesting to see how the ventriloquists and their dummy spin - his swift, albeit, "open mouth-insert foot" insinuation.

Bill Moyers, a rare and dying breed of journalist - on Gaza

Liberty City 6 - will the third time be a charm?

Last Wednesday here in South Florida, Asst. U.S. Attorney Richard Gregorie made clear his plan to try the Liberty City 7, er 6 yet again. They were seven, but the jury in the first trial acquitted one of them (here are the recent details with links to all of the background "news you can use" articles beginning in July of 2007 when the government first "uncovered" this terrorist plot: 'Liberty City 6' To Be Tried For Third Time).
Like those oh, so elusive WMDs that precipitated our occupation of Iraq, draining both our human and monetary capital, this farce is yet another exercise in fear-mongering. Somebody tell me how these damn-near homeless, assuredly greedy yet undeniably gullible Black men, could perpetrate this massive act of terrorism in America with no guns, no explosives, no knowledge of making said explosives, no apparent prior connection to Al Qaeda and most importantly - no damn money???
But for Mr. Batiste saying on tape he wanted to "kill all the American devils" coupled with the urging of the FBI informant who offered these men $50,000, hiking boots and a camera (he bought them a camera to take surveillance photos of buildings that al Qaeda wanted blown up) if they would pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda, no one, I repeat NO ONE, would give two shits about the likes of Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Agustin and Rotschild Augustine and Lyglenson Lemorin, the seventh of the group who was found not guilty in the first trial. Hell, Louis Farrakhan's been talking about "American devils" since his rise to power in the Nation of Islam and nobody's ever charged him with terror conspiracy. And I certainly need not go into the Church Committee's final report on the FBI's COINTELPRO shenanigans to point out why all this prosecution is so much entrapment bullshit.
Two juries to date have said the government has no evidence to show that these men were ever a real terrorism threat - TWO! Yet the government, after having spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 - $8 million taxpayer dollars, plans to go ahead and spend a minimum of $1 mllion more - with the same evidence used in the prior two trials! I guess the prosecutor's decided if he tries this case over and over and over again, it will make it so.

UPDATE: The third trial's been set for January 6, 2009. See CNN's "Wannabes or terrorists? Third jury may decide"