quiz from Violindaine

[Relationship Status] - y
[Parents still together] - kinda sorta
[Siblings] – nope
[Pets] – nope

FAVOURITES
[Color] – red, green, blue...
[Number] – Three, seven, nine
[Animal] – Cats
[Book] – I have to CHOOSE?
[Flower] – irises, roses, cabbage roses, tulips
( more )

Seven meme from Moonstaff

Instructions: Go to your 'friends' page. Click on the name of the 7th person who posted. Go to his or her 'friends' page. Click on the name of the 7th person who posted. Repeat until you are 7 LJs from your own. (If you come across someone who doesn't have 7 entires on their friends page, pick the last one. If the seventh entry is a journal you have already visited on this trip, or a community, skip down to the next one and continue).

1. drakemonger
2. javagoth
3. breklor
4. theferrett
5. zoethe
6. geekjul
7. shawnj

About that seventh journal... ( q&a )

Guantanamo Bay currently holds over 400 prisoners.

Thought about Guantanamo Bay lately? Probably not. What's going on? Well, as Dahlia Lithwick at Slate points out, two studies have found that most of the people being held are mostly unlucky; a third found they're being treated badly while they wait. Some of it is a comedy of errors:

[One] detainee "confessed" following an interminable interrogation, shouting: "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." When the government tried to list this as a confession, his own interrogators were forced to break the outrageous game of telephone and explain it as sarcasm. A Yemeni accused of being a Bin Laden bodyguard eventually "admitted" to having seen Bin Laden five times: "Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." His file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden."

Where did these people come from? According to a recent Seton Hall study,

86 percent were captured either by the Northern Alliance or by Pakistan "at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies." []60 percent are accused of being "associated with" terrorists [...] based on having met with unnamed individuals, used a guesthouse, owned a Casio watch, or wearing olive drab clothing.

And no, this is not just the Bush Administration at work. As Lithwick notes,

Congress is willing to pass a bill stripping courts of habeas-corpus jurisdiction for detainees but unwilling to probe what happens to them. The Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush conferred seemingly theoretical rights enforceable in theoretical courtrooms. The right to challenge a government detention is older than this country and yet Guantanamo grinds on.

There are days where I really wish there was a quick fix for things like this.