Here's an article about how schools are run along the lines of prisons since the Columbine shootings.
Based on the assumption that schools are rife with crime and fueled by the emergence of a number of state and federal laws, mandatory sentencing legislation, and the popular “three strikes and you’re out” policy, many educators first invoked zero tolerance rules against kids who brought firearms to schools. In the aftermath of Columbine, exacerbated by a number of high-profile school shootings in last decade, and an increase in the climate of fear, the assumption that schools were dealing with a new breed of student—violent, amoral, and apathetic—began to take hold in the public imagination. Moreover, as school safety become a top educational priority, zero tolerance policies were broadened and now include a range of behavioral infractions that encompass everything from possessing drugs or weapons to threatening other students—all broadly conceived. Under zero tolerance policies, forms of punishments that were once applied to adults now applied to first graders. The punitive nature such policies are on display in a number of cases where students have had to face harsh penalties that defy human compassion and reason. For example, an 8-year-old boy in the first grade at a Miami Elementary School took a table knife to his school, using it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money. School officials claimed he was facing “possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery.”
In another instance that took place in December 2004, “Porsche, a fourth-grade student at a Philadelphia, PA, elementary school, was yanked out of class, handcuffed, taken to the police station and held for eight hours for bringing a pair of 8-inch scissors to school. She had been using the scissors to work on a school project at home. School district officials acknowledged that the young girl was not using the scissors as a weapon or threatening anyone with them, but scissors qualified as a potential weapon under state law.”
Time to break out the old copies of 'The Wall, I think. If this kind of thing is going to be education, then they sure as hell don't need this kind of treatment. If you read on it gets worse. 7 year old forced to the ground and the numbers of suspensions doled out are ridiculous. You sort of wonder what will happen to kids who grow through this and come to think of it as normal.
Bush Torture Memos
For some reason the much ballyhooed Bush Torture Memos have been made into pdfs where people can send around. I must be on the 6th degree of Kevin Bacon from the first person to send it out to the world, but somehow I've managed to get it thanks to Pleiades. I don't think I even asked for it, but bang, there it is.
It makes for chilling reading. The details found within are pretty bluntly put so there is no mistaking that the degree to which they had permission to hurt and coere people for information was delineated. It's not a bright moment in the history of the United States. Naturally,one imagines the Repuablicans are very updeat that the Obama administration let these documents out into the public domain, but tha's the funny thing. There's no mistaking that yes, they said yes to torture, and the language isn't even velied with bureaucrat-ese.
Here's an article about all this in Time.
Many Democrats and human-rights activists see the memos as damning evidence that the U.S. violated international law, and that officials should be held accountable. Many Republicans and national-security experts are dismayed at the decision to air the dirty laundry, claiming the revelations weaken the country's intelligence gathering capabilities and give an misleading picture of the efficacy of such interrogation tactics. (Read how waterboarding got out of control.)
The Obama Administration has already ruled out the prosecution of those who actually carried out the harsh interrogations, so long as they complied with the government-approved guidelines. And Obama treaded carefully on Tuesday, stressing to reporters, at the end of his Tuesday meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah, that he did "not want to prejudge" the outcome of the Justice Department's inquiry into the policy's legal underpinnings and that he would not want any inquiry to turn into a partisan witch hunt. "I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers out our ability to carry out critical national security operations," he said. But at that point it was too late. By not entirely ruling out the authors' prosecution — as his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had appeared to do over the weekend — the President had effectively unleashed the hounds.
What a drag. It's as if these people who okayed this stuff thought they were going to get away with it by dint of September 11. Who needs terrorism and terrorists when the CIA is given carte blanche to torture?
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