Mushin-Sho

Announcing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld following the Republican Party’s heavy poll losses in the United States mid-term elections earlier this month, George W Bush described the Defence Secretary as "a patriot who served our country with honour and distinction." Within a week of his resignation, a criminal complaint was filed against Rumsfeld and other top US officials, charging them with war crimes.

"Our clients—people who were the victims of horrific abuse and torture—have not yet seen justice," Bill Goodman, legal director of the New York- based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents many of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The United States government has not only been unwilling to investigate and prosecute its high-ranking officials for the torture that they authorised and supervised, but it even attempted to immunise Americans from such prosecutions through the passage of the Military Commissions Act 2006."

Full article here 

Toward the semester’s close…

“Nevertheless, people whose duties occasionally make them yawn may be less boring than those who do their business by inclination. The latter, unhappy types, are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they longer know where their head is, and the extraordinary radical boredom that might be able to reunite them with their heads remains eternally distant for them”

“If, however, one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly….Were this passion—which shimmers like a comet—to descend, were it envelop you, the others, and the world—oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be…”