Habeas what-us?

Oy.

At one end of a converted trailer in the U.S. military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, a graying Pakistani businessman sat shackled before a review board of uniformed officers, pleading for his freedom.

The prisoner had seen only a brief summary of what officials said was a thick dossier of intelligence linking him to al-Qaida. He had not seen his own legal papers since they were taken away in an unrelated investigation. He has lawyers working on his behalf in Washington, London and Pakistan, but at Guantánamo his only assistance came from an Army lieutenant colonel, who stumbled as he read the prisoner's handwritten statement.

As the hearing concluded, the detainee, who cannot be identified publicly under military rules, had one question. He is a citizen of Pakistan, he noted. He was arrested on a business trip to Thailand. On what authority or charges was he even being held?

"That question," a Marine colonel presiding over the panel answered, "is outside the limits of what this board is permitted to consider."

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Evolution Edition

No one ever saw a Negro, Mongol, or Indian, born from any but his own species. Has any one heard of an Indian child born from white or black parents in America, during more than two centuries that these races have been living here? Is not this brief and simple statement of the case sufficient to satisfy any one, that the diversity of species now seen on the earth, cannot be accounted for on the assumption of congenital or accidental origin?

--Josiah Clark Nott, Types of Mankind, p. 58.

As I remarked to my brother when I read this, it's exactly the same logic bandied about still by creationists who try to deny evolution: "You never see a dog give birth to a cat, or a cat to a kangaroo. Therefore evolution isn't true." I was just amused to see it applied to proving that the races of mankind were different species.

I should probably note that Nott wasn't a Biblical literalist; in fact, he railed against the Bible and people who used passages from it to defend monogenism. However, though he didn't accept Bishop Usher's chronology exactly, he didn't deviate from it much, and believed that humanity was only several thousand years old. Therefore, the fact that races were distinct several thousand years ago was proof that they were fixed and permanent, and couldn't have all evolved from common ancestors. After Darwin published, and the span of humanity went from thousands to millions of years, Nott found evolution and monogenism more palatable. As William Stanton says in The Leopard's Spots,

Nott himself recognized the damage done by the Darwinian time scale and told a friend that he "would not have published" Types of Mankind "if the pre-historic period of men had been so firmly established" then "as it is at the present day."

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I, um... I don't think so

Now we know the real threat to gays. It's not AIDS, or Christians, or Muslims--it's themselves.

The young man, in this interview, confirmed what many Jamaicans have known all along but which some human rights and gay rights groups have tried to convince the world was the opposite - that most of the murders of gay men in Jamaica are committed by their lovers.

"Let me tell you something, all the violence of the number of gay men who have been killed in the last two to three years has not taken place because of hate crime. It's passionate crime, a jealous situation," he says, pointing out that some of the cases, including the killing of gay rights activist Brian Williamson, were cold-blooded murder.

Why is this, you may ask? Because gay people are mentally damaged, of course!

"Our love is unusual. It's not normal, and the passion, it's a passion for somebody.we don't even want our partner to have a best friend, to even be close to somebody, the moment we realise we start assuming. We say, 'You a talk to dis one and you a cheat pon mi', so insecurity, lack of confidence and trust. In rational sense, I have acknowledged in this gay life, there is never somebody you must call a hundred per cent yours, never."

And their evidence for this blatant lie? Well, first they have the above testimony, given by some random 22 year-old gay man. Of course, they keep him anonymous and the only credentials he has that might give him any reason to be trusted on this is that he has gained a "foothold ... in the gay community." After quoting Gareth Williams, "programmes co-ordinator and co-chair of the local gay rights group, Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG)", as saying that's a bunch of bull, they refute him with the following statistic: three gay men have allegedly been killed by lovers in Jamaica over the course of four years. They also cite a case from 1985 as evidence, but the men charged (and acquitted) of the crime were two men that the victim had picked up that night. They don't even say if the victim's lover was eventually found guilty of the crime, or even if he had a lover.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Insane Edition

I had been planning on doing a post on a different topic entirely, but I came across this in my book today and couldn't resist writing about it.

In 1840, the sixth census of the United States included for the first time information about the "insane and idiots" of the country. After perusing the data, a remarkable trend was found:

[W]hile there was no appreciable difference between the incidence of insanity among the whites of the North and those of the South, the incidence among Negroes of the Free States was 1 in 162.4, whereas in the South it was only 1 in 1,558. In the North the ratio of insanity between Negroes and whites was 6 to 1. In the South it was 3 to 5.¹

Nor was this all. The census showed that in the free state of Maine every fourteenth Negro was afflicted with mental disease or defect, in Michigan every twenty-seventh, in New Hampshire every twenty-eighth, in Massachusetts every forty-third. In contrast, in the deepest South, where slavery was most firmly entrenched, the rate of mental handicap among Negroes ranged from one to 2,117 in Georgia to only one in 4,310 in Louisiana. Finally, New Jersey, with the lowest Negro insanity rate among the free states of the North, had twice the rate of its neighbor Delaware, just below the Mason and Dixon line, which had the poorest showing of all the slave states!²

You can imagine what people did with this knowledge. John Calhoun, then ex-vice president and Senator, triumphantly declared:

Here is the proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to him to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death.³

Furthermore,

The census and other authentic documents, show that in all instances in which the states have changed the former relation between the two races the condition of the African, instead of being improved has become worse.⁴

And Edward Jarvis, who debunked the erroneous findings of the census, wrote in summary that

[t]hroughout the civilized world, the statement has gone forth that, according to the experience of the United States . . . slavery is more than ten-fold more favorable to mental health than freedom . . . The slaves are consoled with the assurance that although another man's will governs them, yet their minds are not bound with insane delusions, nor crushed in idiocy, as are those of their brethren who govern themselves . . .⁵

This is really just a variation of a common theme--blacks weren't ready for freedom, they were suited to slavery, they were happy as slaves, it was best for them to be kept as slaves. And people attempted to show that they were better off as slaves by showing that they were more prone to disease or criminality as free men. But I think this is the first time I'd heard of people putting forth that freedom would make them more prone to insanity.

1. William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-59, p. 58
2. Albert Deutsch, "The First U.S. Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Use as Pro-Slavery Propaganda", in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1944), p. 472
3. Ibid., p. 473
4. Ibid., pp. 477-78
5. Ibid., pp. 474-75
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Shocking, no?

James Dobson, of Focus on the Family,
is
a
liar.
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No more Mr. Nice Prison Guard

Apparently, Guantanamo will soon no longer be the pleasure spa it's been up 'til now:

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

Why the change? Because the people imprisoned there are even more vicious than before--or so we must assume, as they'll never be charged with anything.

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. "They're all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants," Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, "I don't think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist."

Admiral Harris, who took command on March 31, referred in part to the recent departure from Guantánamo of the last of 38 men whom the military had classified since early 2005 as "no longer enemy combatants." Still, about 100 others who had been cleared by the military for transfer or release remained here while the State Department tried to arrange their repatriation.

[Shortly after Admiral Harris's remarks, another 15 detainees were sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly returned to their families.]

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Quick Post Before My Last Final Edition

Now:

Marriage has nothing to do with race.

Then:

Marriage is clearly a matter in which race difference has a natural and specific operation....

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*hyperventilates*

Aaaah!

In July 2006, Warner Bros. announced that the first DVD of the U.S. version of Whose Line? would be released on September 26, 2006. It is the first volume of the first season, and two versions have been released. One is a "family-friendly" DVD, which contains the episodes as they were broadcast on ABC, and an uncensored DVD, which holds material more suitable for mature viewers that did not reach the air. Both releases are made up of the first ten episodes of the first season, plus outtakes. Currently the DVD is selling rather well, with the uncensored DVD reaching as high as #22 on Amazon.com's Top Sellers in DVD sales.

Why was I not informed of this!?

Nnng. Russian final in two hours, and I'm thinking about homoerotic improv.
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I'm really not a liar, redux.

Two weeks ago I wrote about Charles Carroll, concluding

Perhaps worst of all is that this work was fairly well-received, from all accounts. I recall reading one contemporary account that called the book the Bible of the poor man, it was so common; unfortunately, I cannot seem to find this quote (and I have spent quite a while looking).

I finally found the quote:

It is difficult to determine what, if any, influence Carroll's ideas enjoyed. In 1909 an observer suggested that The Negro A Beast had "become the Scriptures of tens of thousands of poor whites," who maintained its doctrines "with an appalling stubbornness and persistence." Another reported four years earlier that the book was "said to be securing a very wide circulation among the poor whites of the cotton states."

From Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930 by I.A. Newby.

Newby continues, however,

These opinions, however, are mere surmises, and, since both observers found Carroll's views repulsive, they were inclined perhaps to overstatement. The suggestion that Negroes are beasts of the field was so totally at variance with popular interpretations of the Bible that it probably had little influence among any group, even in the deep South. Carroll was never cited by popular writers, and few racists seem to have read his works.

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Tee-hee.

In my on-going quest to find racist spiels so as to compare past arguments against miscegenation to current arguments against gay marriage, I picked up today from InterLibrary Loan a speech, "A Christian View on Segregation". This was a statement made by Reverend G. T. Gillespie, D.D. (what does that D.D. stand for anyways?) in 1954 (several months after Brown v. Board, incidentally). Later it was disseminated by the Citizens Council of Mississippi as a small, 16-page leaflet.

The copy I have is bound in some sturdier, cardboard cover with an interesting design. But I was very amused when I got to the end and found a stamp proclaiming "Gaylord: Gaylamount ® Pamphlet Binder".
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