After a long day of emotional goodbyes, Troy Davis knelt in his prison cell and began to pray 15 minutes before he was scheduled to die. Then, a guard spotted him doing something a bit more unexpected: He was sleeping.
The Associated Press obtained documents that provide some insight into the final hours of Troy Davis’ life and they seem to be, in the main, relatively straightforward and somewhat bland, given all of the attention that Davis’ case has received: he met with visitors, he prayed, he slept, he ate a little bit, and he spoke with his attorneys.
What the documents — or perhaps the write-up about them to which I link above — do not adequately highlight is the torturous process of waiting for hours to find out whether or not he would actually be injected full of poison that night or whether his struggle with the legal system would continue. The only hints to this effect can be found in the statement that Davis “spent the next few hours on and off the phone with his lawyer awaiting news on his fate” and that Davis, who previously proclaimed that he would fast on the day of his execution, finally “asked the guards to bring in some food” more than an hour after his execution had been scheduled to take place.
These off-hand notes about Davis’ final hours only hint at something that none of us can really comprehend particularly well: What it must feel like to await official confirmation that your government has succeeded in finding a way to kill you.
| — | Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster (via azspot) |
vruz:
vruz: Unless you’re Dick Cheney. The whole business paid off handsomely for him.
Dick Cheney is back in the news again, as he becomes the latest member of the Bush administration to cash in on what should be cause for criminal investigation and likely prosecution.
This is a classic chickenhawk, who himself got five deferments to avoid fighting his generation’s war, and whose idea of recreation is to shoot birds that were raised as hunting fodder and released by the staff of an exclusive club, and who even in such a cruel, controlled environment still somehow managed accidentally to shoot a man in the face.
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This is a man who as regent and Lord Protector to the Lesser Bush oversaw the destruction of the U.S. economy, the evisceration of the Clinton budget surplus and the creation of the largest budget deficit in U.S. history, and was catastrophically irresponsible with what may have been the last chance to address the most important issue humanity has ever faced.
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But nothing so defined the Bush-Cheney era as issues of national security. And Cheney doesn’t want you to remember what really happened under his Protectorate on national security. And you can be certain that the traditional media won’t recount what happened under Cheney’s Protectorate on national security.
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When I was there, overseeing the invasion of foreign fighters, we heard it all the time. The Department of Defense compiled the statistIcs, and the Number One Reason foreign fighters came to fight in Iraq was because of the Waterboarding and Torturing of prisoners in American custody. Those Foreign Fighters came to Iraq, they made up 90% of the Suicide Bombers, and they killeds 100s if not 1000s of American Soldiers who are now buried in Arlington Cemetery.” ~ Matthew Alexander, Fmr. Senior Military Interrogator regarding Dick Cheney’s recent comment that he has no regrets about having tortured anyone, and would recommend waterboarding today, if the circumstances warranted it.
Preston Randolph and Dan Battaglia, Truthout:
“News reports from California’s Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide…
In 1977, American Indian activist Leonard Peltier was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier has now served more than 35 years in federal prison. His trial remains one of the most controversial in the history of the American judicial system.”
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During the Pelican Bay hunger strike that rippled into prisons across the country, a 66-year-old man with extreme medical needs, Leonard Peltier, was forced into “the hole” at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
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Since Peltier’s conviction, overwhelming information has been released confirming extreme misconduct by the FBI and the government prosecution’s withholding of evidence and use of coerced testimonies. It is obvious that Peltier, despite overwhelming reasonable doubt, was considered guilty before the trial began. […]
Unable to free the cub from its restraints, the mother hugged the cub and eventually strangled it.
It then dropped the cub and ran head-first into a wall, killing itself.
Not sure how anyone could expect that taking any remedy dependent upon such torture and bad kharma would insure their own health. Sickening.
