Julian Assange is the big media story, but the unsung hero, the person suffering the most is probably Brad Manning.  Unfortunately, while Manning suffers in solitary confinement, as he has for the past 7 months, and we scour the leaked material for which he might be responsible, the subject of Manning’s torturous, stringent, long term confinement are noted with horror and contempt, but is anything being done to challenge them?  Put another way, where is the Great Writ, the writ of habeas corpus, for Brad Manning?

Tonight Eastern Standard Time will begin.  Again.  And that, around here, is the dreaded beginning of horrible Winter.  This, after all, is Upstate New York.  I’m nestled against the Massachusetts border.  And the beginning of Eastern Standard Time fills me with utter dread.

What stands between me and actual, below zero winter?  First, deer hunting season.  A very few hunters, fewer by far than a decade ago, will stagger drunkenly into the woods before dawn and send the grotesquely overpopulated deer into an unparalleled panic and frenzy.  They’re already crazy because they’re in rut.  The deer will then run into the roads and into cars.  Why don’t they avoid the cars?  Two reasons: first, they think the roads are made of ice, so they’re afraid of running on them.  And second, there really is a  reason for the phrase “a deer in the headlights.”  This doesn’t begin explain why deer run into the sides of passing cars.  And it doesn’t explain why the shoulders of all of the roads are filled with deer eyes reflecting headlights and waiting for an unfortunate moment to run into the road.

Haiti, ravaged for centuries and suffering long before its enormous, destructive earthquake, now braces for a huge cholera epidemic.  The cholera epidemic on Saturday had already killed more than 200 and there are more than 2600 reported cases.  Today the news is still bad.  The NY Times reports:

Diarrhea, while a common ailment here, is a symptom of cholera. And anxiety has been growing fiercely that the cholera epidemic, which began last week in the northwest of Haiti, will soon strike the earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.

This evening President Obama apologized to Guatemala’s President for human STD experiments conducted on Guatemalan prisoners, army trooops and mental hospital inmates.  Earlier today, Secretary of State Clinton and Health Secretary Sebelius tendered similar apologies.  The news of the experiments, which had been kept secret from the subjects and Guatemala’s government, has evoked a firestorm of criticism in Guatemala.

The events in question took place 64 years ago, and they were an egregious, secret series of human rights violations, that were “clearly unethical”.

Can you hear that? That’s me, howling. It’s not complicated why. Last night I started to write a blog post, in fact, this blog post. I had maybe 500 words typed into the box and then I moved the mouse and the next thing I knew, poof, there was nada, zilch, nothing. All gone. Totally vaporized. That’s when I started howling. I continue even now.

The blog post, well, this blog post is/was about state killing. There have been two horrendous, macabre executions in the last weeks. Let me briefly recall them for you before I move on to what I think might be my point.

As long as there is a death penalty in the United States, as long as the government persists in the barbaric practice of having the state kill those convicted of the most egregious murders, as long as the government continues to kill by lethal injection, there will continue to be egregious, shameful, disgraceful, inhuman, unfathomable executions.

Last week it was the Virginia execution of Teresa Lewis, a woman with a 72 IQ who was not the shooter in the double murder that led to her execution on Thursday.  The two male gunmen each received life in prison.  Little, whose guilt was never in doubt, pleaded guilty, waived her right to a jury trial on punishment, and to her then attorney’s surprise, was sentenced to death by a judge without a jury.  The judge said she was the “head of the serpent.”  I wrote that if this execution was justice, justice was an ass.

And now Georgia plans on executing Brandon Rhode on Monday.

The New York Daily News reports:

Teresa Lewis died by lethal injection on Thursday night, the first woman in Virginia to be executed in nearly a century.

Lewis was prounounced dead at 9:13 p.m. as a small crowd of supporters stood outside in protest.

Though lawyers for Lewis waged a public campaign for the Gov. of Virginia to intervene, there was no 11th hour reprieve for the 41-year-old woman, who was sentenced to death for plotting the 2002 murders of her husband and stepson.

Lewis reportedly spent her last day meeting with her immediate family, a spiritual adviser, and supporters at the prison where she was executed.

For her last supper, she requested a meal of fried chicken breasts, peas with butter, a slice of German cake or a piece of apple pie, and a Dr. Pepper, according to SkyNews.

And so a woman with the IQ of 72 is killed by Virginia, and those who actually fired the shots that resulted in the double murders received life sentences.

If this is justice, the law is an ass.

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and docuDharma and dailyKos

Virginia plans to execute Teresa Lewis on Thursday evening at 9 pm.  There’s no question she was deeply involved in two murders nine years ago, that of her husband and of her son.  But you have to ask why she’s being killed when the two men who actually fired the weapons received life sentences.  And you have to wonder what the point of killing someone with an IQ of 72 might be, even if you’re not ordinarily appalled at the prospect of lethal injection.

The crime in this case is horrendous. There’s no question that it merits at the very least long term imprisonment. The New York Times provides the following about the crime:

I posted the following on September 4, 2005 at The Dream Antilles and I cross-posted it in various places.  Five years later, there’s really very little I can add to this, so I am re-posting it: