Friday, May 8, 2009

Labies & Genitalmen... the Perak State Disassembly!

Courtesy of Malaysiakini.tv, 8 May 2008

1Malaysia, under Bossmah. Malaysia Boliau!

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Scenes from the Perak State Assembly

The usurper chief minister Zombrie attempts to bribe the elected Speaker with bananas...

"Hey, you can have a whole plantation!" he says, eliciting an audible snigger from the State Assembly Secretary, a relic of the colonial past.


But the brave Speaker, Prince Siva, repudiates the sleazy Zombrie, trusting in Black Power (Makkal Sakthi) to win the day...

Without warning Zombrie's monkey minions grab hold of Prince Siva and unceremoniously drag him from his seat...

Aided by plainclothes orcs, the unruly primates evict the legitimate Speaker from the august State Assembly and install a pathetic usurper in his place.


TAK NAK!
The rakyat will never forget this despicable act of thuggery and grotesque travesty of democratic principles!

[photos courtesy of Malaysiakini]


The Reign of Robber Barons Is Almost Over!


WARNING TO MUSA HASSAN:
Heart Attack #2 approaching at maximum speed.
And this time your lease will NOT be renewed!

ALL SENIOR POLICE OFFICERS:
Be advised herein that those of you who slavishly implement
the ugly scare tactics of the corrupt and evil Umno/BN regime
will go soulless to your graves.

So be it!


Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Birthday Cake confiscated, 3 arrested; Wong remanded for 3 days; Prayers for Perak without Mat Sabu: 1MALAYSIA BOLEH!

Courtesy of Malaysiakini.tv, 6 May 2009

Three activists were arrested this morning for attempting to deliver a cake commemorating the 31st birthday of Altantuya Shaariibuu to the Prime Ministers Office in Putrajaya. [From Malaysiakini]

WALSKI: Butter Cake To Be Charged With Sedition



BERSIH'S WONG REMANDED FOR THREE DAYS NOW
Malaysiakini | May 6, 09 10:44am

The police today succeeded in extending the remand order for polls reform group Bersih spokesperson Wong Chin Huat to three days. He is now expected to be released late on May 8.

Kuala Lumpur magistrate Naziah Alias had originally granted a one-day remand order this morning but the police went to the court again to seek an extension.

And this evening at 6pm, they got their wish - the remand is now for three days.

The police had originally asked for a four-day remand order.

Earlier this afternoon, Wong's lawyers Latheefa Koya and Amer Hamzah Arshad told journalists that they would press for his release today after Naziah's granting of a one-day remand.

“The court upon deliberating and hearing arguments from both sides, has decided to grant a one-day remand and he should be released by this evening,” said Amer.

“We will liaise with the IO (investigating officer) and secure his release as soon as possible.”

Latheefa said she hoped that Wong would be released by 6pm.

“(But) they (the police) can always ask for an extension - that means they will have to file another application.”

Wong in handcuffs and lock-up uniform

Earlier today, Wong was brought to the court complex in handcuffs and dressed in the compulsory orange police lock-up uniform.

The Kampar-born Wong had been wearing black for the past 80 days to mourn the "death of democracy" in Perak, his home state.

His family members and DAP leader Lim Kit Siang managed to see Wong in the court lock-up.

They said that he appeared in good spirits and urged his supporters to wear black as well.

They also said Wong had told them that the police have not recorded any statement from him.

He was arrested at 8pm yesterday under the Sedition Act at his home in Taman Sri Sentosa in Kuala Lumpur and then taken to the Commercial Crimes Investigation Department (CCID) headquarters for questioning.

He was later whisked away to an undisclosed location about 12.18am. His whereabouts were kept secret.

CCID chief Koh Hong Sun yesterday said that Wong was being investigated under Section 4(1) of the Sedition Act.

If found guilty, he could face a jail term of up to three years.

Wong's arrest was linked Bersih's campaign - dubbed as 1BlackMalaysia - for the public to wear black tomorrow to protest the Perak government takeover by Barisan Nasional.

Wong had issued the call yesterday on behalf of Bersih, the Coalition for Free and Clean Elections.

Poll reform group Bersih spokesperson Wong Chin Huat was arrested under the Sedition Act tonight (5 May 2009) by a team of police officers at his home in Taman Sri Sentosa in Kuala Lumpur.

PAS LEADER MAT SABU ARRESTED
Malaysiakini | May 6, 09 4:21pm

PAS vice-president Mohamad Sabu was arrested by the police at about 3pm today near the Harakah office in Jalan Pahang Barat, Kuala Lumpur.

It is believed that he was arrested over his plan to hold mass prayers tomorrow in Manjoi, Ipoh, over the Perak state assembly sitting.

The Masjid Al-Ittihadiyah, where the prayer session will be held at 5am, is about two kilometres from the assembly building.

The prayer session is expected to draw a large number to oppose the Barisan Nasional's power grab in the state.

Mohamad was arrested by about 10 plainclothes policemen just as he was leaving a restaurant to go to the Harakah office.

PAS Youth chief Salahuddin Ayub was with him when he was arrested.

Salahuddin told Malaysiakini that he heard Mohamad shouting that he was being arrested just as he left the restaurant.

He and another PAS member immediately rushed back to try and free him. A scuffle took place.

Salahuddin also said the police did not show any arrest warrant when they nabbed Mohamad. It is learnt that he has been taken to the Sentul police station.

"They also did not identify themselves. They just arrested him and took him away," he said.

He said he has informed PAS lawyer Hanipa Maidin about this.

Salahuddin also did not rule out the possibility that the police action could be an attempt to stop Mohamad's prayer session.

To be sent to Perak on remand

Mohamad's arrest comes just 24 hours after the arrest of activist Wong Chin Huat last night for urging the public to wear black tomorrow to protest against what is happening in Perak.

Wong, arrested last night for alleged sedition at his house in Taman Seri Sentosa, Kuala Lumpur, was taken to court today where a one-day remand order was issued.

Mohamad's wife Normah Alwi told Malaysiakini that a police officer informed her this afternoon that her husband will be sent to Slim River in Perak on remand.

"The event has not even taken place yet, why the arrest?" asked an outraged Normah.

It is believed that a police report was lodged against Mohamad in Slim River.


CONGRATULATIONS, MR PINK LIPS!
WELL DONE, KERISMUDDIN!

Bye bye, Barisan Najis!

IT TAKES SO LITTLE NOWADAYS TO BE ARRESTED


HAPPY 31st BIRTHDAY, TUYA!

IN MEMORIAM
Altantuya Shaariibuu (6 May 1978 - 20 October 2006)


Tuesday, May 5, 2009

ARE WE GETTING ALONG... OR NOT?

FOR THE BIRDS
A Pixar short feature by Ralph Eggleston

THE DOG, THE CAT & THE RAT
If they can do it... why not we? Visit Barbara Marx Hubbard's Humanity Ascending site!


BONUS FEATURE:
Dustin Hoffman tells the story of "The Flea's Vacation"
on the Graham Norton show...

RPK SINGS LIKE A BIRD ON THE WIRE

Raja Petra Kamarudin's is the voice millions of decent Malaysians love hearing - especially when he sings about misdeeds in high places. Now that RPK is out of harm's way, he's been singing even more melodiously from his hidden perch. Rather than my reproducing his latest post here, why not read it right now at Malaysia Today?

Believe me, you won't be disappointed, folks! Here are some random images to titillate your imagination and jog your memory...

Altantuya's baby...

Visiting Rome...

Where the 28-year-old beauty was mercilessly blown up...

Private investigator Balasubramaniam Perumal blew the whistle... and vanished!













The Most Feared Woman in the country, a
grieving father, and the guy who insists he never met "that Mongolian woman..."

Thanks, bro, for doing what nobody else has the balls to do!

RPK: Mystery of the Missing Confession

Malaysiakini: RPK reveals his 'source' on Altantuya allegations

RPK's infamous June 18 2008 statutory declaration
(click on image to enlarge)



Monday, May 4, 2009

DOGS STARVING TO DEATH ON MANGROVE ISLAND ~ URGENT ALERT!

About 300 stray dogs were rounded up by Pulau Ketam residents and deported to an isolated island to fend for themselves. Over half of them are already dead and the remaining ones may not live long. A rescue mission is being mounted and your help is needed. Please read the full story here.


The residents of Pulau Ketam sent some 300 stray dogs to exile on a remote island where the harsh conditions almost certainly guarantee a horrible death. Of the 300 dogs sent there, more than three-quarters are presumed to be already dead. I traveled to the island with Sabrina Yeap of Furry Friends Farm and managed to save only one dog on this reconnaissance trip. We did see several other starving and dying dogs along the mangrove shore.

I am mounting an urgent rescue mission to capture and transport the remaining survivors back to Sabrina's Furry Friends Farm animal shelter. But time is running out and there might be only skeletons and carcasses left to collect on our next trip. Boat hire is expensive there. It is a tourist area and it has already cost me a few hundred ringgit for boat hire alone, so far. The rescued dogs cannot be transported on the regular ferries.

Almost nobody will lift a finger to help without a fee. This is understandable. The locals are already shaking their heads in disbelief that there are outsiders who want to save the animals they so casually discarded. Instead of pointing fingers and antagonising them, we need their co-operation to help save the unfortunate creatures. In the process, we also hope to educate the islanders on better treatment of animals. It would be an impossible mission if we didn't win their hearts.

If you are unable to help directly, please help by forwarding this appeal to other compassionate folks who you feel might be able to make some monetary contributions.

Apart from boat hire, we need money to buy cages, to pay people to help catch them, to hire land transport to send the rescued animals to veterinary clinics, pay for vet fees, send the recovered ones to the shelter and to feed and house them for life. I can go on!

Kind folks are asking how they can donate. Funds can be banked in or transferred to: Furry Friends Farm account CIMB 1457-000-1182-05-6. You can also transfer via PayPal to tvsmith@gmail.com


Fellow bloggers, you can also help by publicizing the desperate plight of these hapless canines. Embed a poster from here and link to http://www.mycen.com.my/rescue

We are aware it is a monumental task and appreciate all forms of support, assistance, suggestions, encouragement and your prayers.

Thank you and don't forget to view the pictures of the dogs in order to appreciate their plight.

Visit also Furry Friends Farm's Blog / Website

TV Smith
3 May 2009



NOTE: TV Smith is the owner of Malaysia Central (a pioneering local search directory and news portal), a well-known blogger, photographer, videographer and ubiquitous man-about-town. An old friend of mine, TV Smith is a one-in-a-million kind of guy and I salute his noble efforts on behalf of these unfortunate canines who have been left to die a slow and hellish death by people who have yet to understand the meaning of compassion - and yet claim to be worshipers of Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy.

The true measure of civilization is the way a community deals with social outcasts like immigrants (legal or otherwise), stray dogs, and the transgendered. So long as barbaric laws exist that allow our government to detain people without trial or imprison people for sexual acts "against the order of nature," Malaysia remains classified as an Uncivilized Feudal State of Well-Dressed Primates.

Will Bush & Cheney be indicted?


The Banality of Bush White House Evil

By FRANK RICH
New York Times | April 25, 2009

We don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.


On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah (right), who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.


As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.


In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.


But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.


Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.


Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.


[Illustrations courtesy of David Dees]