"Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?"
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
An excerpt from Outpost 13's adaptation of JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. Uploaded with permission from the filmmakers. More information at ballardian.com/outpost-13-atrocity-exhibition.
Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.
Narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn. Images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others.
Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass
"The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area."
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
Via

The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet

Hypereconomics

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

WikiLeaks cable shows Anwar Awlaki responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people in Yemen -- oh, wait: is.gd/JnBfAC

This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street protests spreading

Obama, Clinton & Fred Shuttlesworth (Selma 2007)

Via

WTF???

Via

Judge Refuses to Sanction CIA for Destroying Waterboarding Videos

A federal judge won’t hold the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of detainee interrogations that included the use of a torture technique known as waterboarding, ruling instead Wednesday that the spy agency merely committed “transgressions” for its failure to abide by his court order. Punishing the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of New York ruled, “would serve no beneficial purpose.” (.pdf)
Hellerstein wrote that CIA officials responsible for producing the tapes in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit might “not have been aware of the videotapes’ existence before they were destroyed.” The judge also said officials who ordered the tapes’ destruction in 2005 might not have been “aware of court orders requiring identification or production of the videotapes.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the long-running FOIA case and asked for a contempt finding, had requested that Judge Hellerstein order depositions and discovery to ascertain if CIA officials destroyed the 92 videotapes of post 9/11 interrogations of terrorism suspects after they had notice of court orders to produce them.
The judge declined.
“I will not allow additional discovery,” the judge said. He added that the CIA has admitted that some of the videos showed the CIA using waterboarding torture techniques. Footage on one tape, he said, had shown an interrogator who “continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.” The Obama administration has declined to prosecute CIA officials for torture, citing legal memos that authorized the techniques.
Hellerstein said because of the tapes’ destruction, the CIA “improved protocols for the retention of records potentially relevant to an investigation or a judicial, congressional, or administrative proceeding.”
The judge said the tapes’ destruction “exposed serious flaws” in the CIA’s document-retention procedures, and he noted that the CIA in August “adopted new document preservation and destruction protocols to insure against similar transgressions in the future.”
Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney, blasted Hellerstein’s ruling.
“While today’s decision recognizes that the CIA violated a court order when it destroyed the torture tapes, we are profoundly disappointed by the court’s unwillingness to label as contempt what it describes as the CIA’s ‘dereliction.’ We also strongly disagree with the court’s finding that the CIA has ‘remedied’ the destruction,” Abdo said in a statement. “The truth is that the CIA destroyed evidence of torture, and the destruction of this evidence has made it harder to hold high-level officials accountable for the abuse that they authorized.”
The CIA in 2007 admitted to destroying the tapes of interrogations of alleged al-Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A special prosecutor last year found that CIA officials should not be charged for the tapes’ destruction.
A year before the tapes were destroyed, Hellerstein ordered the CIA “to produce or identify all responsive documents” in response to the ACLU’s request for “records concerning the treatment of individuals apprehended after September 11, 2001, and held by the United States at military bases or detention facilities outside the United States.”
Hellerstein ordered the CIA to pay the ACLU’s legal expenses.
David Kravets @'Wired'

:)

_struct David Johnson

That's a fucking big balaclava. RT @VictoriaPolice : Pedestrian struck by car in Balaclava bit.ly/rnYtn1

John Pilger: The smearing of a revolution

The high court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.
However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a temporary surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor-in-chief
of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".
This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on his extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted black people by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.
Under the US constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama said that "whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". His embrace of George W Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange is that military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice-President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist".

Petty and perfidious

Should Assange win his high court appeal, he could face extradition directly to the US. In the past, US officials have synchronised extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like their predatory military, US jurisdiction recognises few boundaries. As Manning's suffering demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt.
In a letter addressed to the Australian government, Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who now acts for Assange, wrote:

Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions . . . it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and . . . his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.

These facts, and the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, have been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, perfidious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime, yet held isolated and under house arrest - conditions not even meted out to a defendant who is facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife...

Continue reading

@'New Statesman'

prodnose Danny Baker

David Cameron wants everyone to pay up their credit cards. Well can't the banks do that for us? I mean, we bailed them out...

Bianca Chang - Recent Works, June 2011

Stop-motion builds and photos of recent works created for Sydney's A4 Paper Festival 31st May - 5th June presented by the Paper Convention. All photos by Jacob Ring.