Where is the Deterrent?
Here is the Deterrent by R. Merial Martin Following years of fighting terrorism in the U.S.A. and worldwide, the fight to maintain crime levels has been neglected. Crime is at its highest levels in the U.S., and Vice President Mokski has been unable to convince the president to build a deterrent to crime. There are three mysterious attempts to assassinate the president. Unfortunately, the Maryland governor and close friend of the president is framed and brought to trial. The president’s testimony convicts his friend and causes him to have a major stroke, which ultimately results in his resignation. Mokski becomes president and orders the building of a compound that will be a deterrent to crime. Laws and constitutional amendments are changed. Governor Booth is placed in the compound before he can be cleared by his attorney friend, Webb. All jails and prisons are emptied and shut down as all long-term prisoners are transferred into the compound. Will Webb and Booth weave everything together to somehow get Booth out so that together they confront the true conspirators?
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posted by r. merial martin @ 9:10 AM
2 Comments:
What deterrent?
In light of Texas' two executions scheduled next week, here' s an interesting fact-bite: even though Texas executes more murderers than the next half dozen states combined, Texas' murder rate went up 8.6 % statewide from 2002 to 2003 alone. Overall, violent crime declined slightly over that period, according to the new Texas correctional population projections (pdf) by the Legislative Budget Board that I'm just starting to go through, but not much.
That's consistent with other information I've seen. Ann cites stats from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the agency that operates Texas prisons: "Texas' incarceration rate has been 51% higher than the national average, but in spite of that the crime rate has been 24% higher than the national average." Meanwhile, the prisons are bursting at the seams, and will be officially overcrowded after March. Texas is on a path to incarcerate nearly 15,000 more people each year by 2010, if current trends continue, said LBB. About 77,000 new inmates entered Texas prisons last year alone, most for non-violent offenses.
All this supposedly in an effort to keep us safe. But given the evidence one must ask, where's the deterrent?
- posted by Gritsforbreakfast @ 2:38 PM
DETERRENT takes places in 2011 and foretells the following government actions. (Irony? or is Deterrent, the novel, our true future?)
CIA operating SECRET Prisons
By Dana Priest
Updated: 7:57 a.m. ET Nov. 2, 2005
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
Growing concerns
But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.
Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.
Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
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