*While attempting to move detainees from “communal to single-cell living,” guards at Guantanamo Bay encountered resistance from some prisoners and opened fire.
“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired. There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees,” the military said its [sic] statement.
[ht The Hill]
The move — ordered “to ensure the health and security of those detainees” — appears to be an effort to break the detainees’ hunger strike. Hence the resistance.
Or is it?
If Business Insider’s Robert Johnson has anything to say about it, detainees’ decision to question their “resort treatment” might all be part of a sophomoric ploy to get attention – an attempt by detainees to land their own reality TV show: So You Think You Can Resist Food?
*According to the British market research agency ComRes, only 25 percent of Britons think that taxpayers should pay for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and 60 percent are opposed to public finances going toward paying for the ceremony [ht The Guardian].
Lefty filmmaker Ken Loach encapsulated the “no state funeral” camp’s argument when he said: “Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted.”
*In other news, an unpublished memoir alleges that Thatcher personally approved of an ultimately failed attempt to engineer a putsch in Equatorial Guinea.
Her son Mark “was convicted in a South African court of involvement in the attempted 2004 coup.”
[ht The Observer]
*Josh Gerstein reported that proposed rules on whistleblowers are causing infighting at the White House.
The Justice Department and Defense Department are arguing that federal employees like commissary managers and accountants, who don’t have access to classified information, can be demoted or effectively fired without recourse to the usual avenues of appeal if their jobs are designated as “sensitive.” The ripple effect of that — critics say it would effectively strip huge numbers of federal workers of civil service protections by treating them like those who have access to the nation’s most vital secrets — could hollow out legal protections that have allowed whistleblowers to speak out with less fear of being fired.
*House Republicans might have no problem denying that climate change is anthropogenic, but they seem to have a problem publicly explaining why.
According to POLITICO Pro, House Energy and Commerce subcommittee chair Ed Whitfield mistakenly led Bobby Rush to believe that he had scheduled a panel “on the science of climate change.”
“[I]f I led you to believe that, I think I was mistaken,” Whitfield said to Rush, per [POLITICO Pro’s Erica] Martinson, noting that the GOP is more focused on jobs. “[B]ut our staffs will be working together to try find a format to move forward to address your concern on this issue.”
Democrats have been begging the GOP to host a hearing on climate change consistently for a year. Whitfield told reporters earlier this week that he personally has no problem debating climate change “but that’s not my decision to make.”
