[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Joy Vriens]

Richard P. Hayes wrote:

> Just how it is known that the people being held are in fact vicious al-
> Qaeda killers is a problem that may remain unsolved, since I have a
> feeling that one of the amenities the soldier gentleman had in mind was
> a fair trial. It would not have surprised me at all to hear him say "We
> cannot give criminals a fair trial, because the only people who deserve
> a fair trial are innocent law-abiding people, but criminals are guilty."
> Well, he might not have said that, if it happened he had listened to Bob
> Dylan singing (sort of) "to live outside the law you must be honest."

The world is a bit mad and paranoid at the moment. The world has always 
looked at the US for an exemple, including when it shouldn't and this is 
such a time. E.g. I read about two incidents, one in London, one in 
Paris, where innocent citizens were arrested on grounds most vaguely 
related to "terrorism" (The last UN convention failed to give a 
definition, so we still don't know what the hell terrorism is...). You 
can read about the London incident here. 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4292342.stm In brief it's about 
an old time member (82 years old) of the Labour party shouting 
"nonsense" during Jack Straw's speech about the "good reasons" for 
invading Iraq.
"Questioned about why Mr Wolfgang had been briefly *arrested under the 
Terrorism Act*, Mr Blair said: "My understanding is that his delegate's 
credentials showed he had been ejected before and he had to wait while 
that was checked out."
See and admire what it takes to be arrested under the Terrorism Act...

> Being an unrepentant liberal professor with alleged leftist leanings, I
> feel it is my prerogative to assign my students a few chapters from
> Peter Singer's excellent book "The President of Good and Evil." It is
> full of delicious inconsistencies in the thinking of the man who is
> currently living in the White House. (Look, if we can refer to the noise
> that Bob Dylan makes as singing, we can refer to the synaptic exchanges
> in GW Bush's reptilian cortex as thinking.)

I am afraid that getting rid of GW Bush and his administration won't be 
enough. It can't become worse though.

Joy