I'm honored to participate in this blogathon for my friend, Jerry Northington, dK's own possum. But I must say, in the midsts of so many illustrious bloggers, and coming about a dozen diaries in to the blogathon, I wondered, OMG, what is my angle going to be?! And then I realized, that my angle is going to be the fact that Jerry Northington, a true netroots candidate, has no "angle"--he's not a player, or a positioner, he's not a power-lover or even a politician.

In fact, Jerry's bio at his campaign website opens with these words:

Jerry Northington is not a professional politician, yet he embodies many of the qualities we would like to see in our leaders.

Jerry Northington wants to improve the lives of his fellow citizens through politics, but he is not, and never will be a politician.

BAGHDAD — The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.

The attack on June 25 killed three people, a man and two women, as they drove to work at a bank at Baghdad’s airport. The attack infuriated Iraqi officials and even prompted the Iraqi armed forces general command to call the shooting cold-blooded murder.

It also bolstered calls from Iraqi politicians to pressure the American military to leave Iraq after this year, when a United Nations mandate expires, unless the United States agrees to permit its soldiers to be subject to criminal prosecution under Iraqi law for attacks on civilians.

Number 5 out of the Top 10 Executing Countries in 2007, per Amnesty International (PDF):

This is the first time that the International Criminal Court will bring charges against a sitting leader for genocide and crimes against humanity.

UNITED NATIONS, July 10 -- The chief prosecutor of the Internationals Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nation's Darfur region during the past five years, according to U.N. officials and diplomats.

Obama swung to the right! No, he didn't! Blah blah blah blah blah.

Obama has the same opinion has Feingold! Great!

No. Bad. They're both wrong.

Here's the real point: The passage of the so-called "Partial Birth Abortion Ban" was a loss for women's reproductive rights and a win for the Overtoning strategies of the right-wing, anti-women's rights folks.

The fact that Dems voted against it only because it didn't have a health exception for the woman also represents a victory for anti women's rights activists, because it shows that Ds bought into the basic "logic" of the need for such a ban.

They should have voted against it outright and absolutely, because it is unnecessary legislation and was just another piece of anti-abortion and anti-women's rights propaganda, and part of the multifaceted approach of the rightwing pro-misogyny forces.

He is moving to the center, so they say.

The pragmatists, so-called, recognize a strategic need for this move to the middle and, trusting Obama, applaud it; the purists so-called, wonder what we're going to win, if moving to the middle is needed to win.

For my part, I'm a pragmatic purist, an idealistic pragmatist, always concerned about falling into what the great writer Walter Benjamin called "left melancholy"--his take, I suppose, on the ways in which "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

The call for justice should never cease. While we hold slim hope of justice being done and BushCo and all the participants in the torture policy being held accountable, the call for justice should never fall silent.

The Center for Constitutional Rights keeps up the good fight, representing four former Abu Ghraib detainees in their suits against military contractors:

Four former Abu Ghraib detainees who were wrongly imprisoned, tortured and later released without charge are suing two U.S. military contractor corporations and three individual contractors, according to four separate lawsuits being filed today by their U.S. legal team.

A Saturday morning quickie. Just read this article in the International Herald Tribune: U.S. and EU near deal on sharing data and thought in light of the FISA news here, it might be of particular interest.

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement that would allow law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information - including credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits - about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

(h/t to GreyHawk for pointing to this story. GH's post at epluribus media.)

Yes, the FBI kept a "War Crimes" file about GTMO. So reports the NY Times in  Report Details Dissent on Guantánamo Tactics:

WASHINGTON — In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a "war crimes file" to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

Ordered closed down by whom exactly?

I'm in kind of a cranky mood. I don't have much to say about this article, and I'm sure many of you have already read it: Iraqi court rulings stop at U.S. detention sites.

BushCo are masters at trying to legitimize illegality. It is their terrifying, unjust, enraging M.O. We see it at home, and abroad, in the conduct of this so-called GWOT. It is S.O.P.

They create legal limbo for all kinds of our fellow human beings, most innocent of any crime. GITMO is a terrible, shocking example of being in and out of the law.

Earlier today, Brainwrap put up a diary sadly announcing that s/he would be unable to use the registration that had been purchased for Netroots Nation, and wanted to sell it to someone at the discounted, earlybird price of $175. Within minutes, there was a taker and everything worked out very well.

That diary got me thinking about NN and how much I'm looking forward to it. yK last year was one of the best experiences I've had and I look forward to seeing everyone again and meeting new people I didn't meet last year. So here's a Roll Call diary. Are you coming to NN? Do you mean to, but haven't registered yet? Well, register now!

The convention is very expensive this year, however, even more so than last year, and that is very concerning. Currently the registration is $375, but it will go up to the full price of $450. Yowza! I've got a suggestion after the jump. Don't know how feasible it is, but maybe ... ?

Khartoum has been relatively untouched by the civil wars and genocide around it. The capital of the Sudan has now been breached by fighting for the first time. Now Darfur rebel leaders are claiming that they are going to try and take Khartoum and topple the government.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Darfur rebel commander said on Saturday his JEM group had entered Khartoum and was aiming to take power in Sudan.

Khartoum was placed under an overnight curfew after fighting in the west of the capital on Saturday. It would be the first time a rebel group has entered Khartoum ...

The Darfur Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels said they had taken control of Omdurman which lies on the opposite bank of the River Nile from Khartoum.

"We are now trying to control Khartoum. God willing we will take power, it's just a matter of time," senior JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr told Reuters by telephone.

"We have support from inside Khartoum even from within the armed forces."

We all know that Burma is in a terrible crisis because of the devastation of Cyclone Nargis. Tens of thousands are confirmed dead. It may be hundreds of thousands. Millions are displaced and at risk of death due to lack of clean water and food. The first reports of cholera  are coming.

And now the World Food Programme of the UN has suspended aid, because the junta impounded the first shipments.

Well, our primary campaign season is almost, thankfully, over. There is, of course, an efflorescence of diaries devoted to analyzing the end game. Some very interesting, some very funny, some probably better left as a comment in a diary or just not posted at all. :)

But there is some great and important work being done here that is scrolling south. One of my favorite things about being involved in this delicious, crazy-making, thought-provoking, wonderful, puzzlement-inducing, glorious community, is being a part of Diary Rescue.

Yes, we are thrilled that our long and increasingly ugly primary process is drawing to a close, and that the prospect of a unified and strong Democratic party is increasingly possible and likely. We are thrilled to be on the verge of a major electoral victory in November.

But isn't part of what defines us as Democrats and progressives, lefties of various stripes, that we exit a narrow American exceptionalist view of world, that we understand all of our strengths and weaknesses in a global context?

There has been a major, major catastrophe in Burma. Our rec list has not one word about this. In addition to the need to help through donations, there are major human rights and internationalist issues to address: the question of humanitarian intervention.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent non-profit organization devoted to protecting freedom of the press worldwide. Without freedom of the press, there can be no freedom for citizens, no true democracy.

We decry the erosion of our free press here, an erosion unfortunately perpetrated by the willing complicity of the media with the government. Here, the press has moved further and further away from its true task and responsibility--to animate our democracy with truthful reporting and penetrating analyses. Now the press for the most part seems to just be another corporation with something to sell.

In many parts of the world, however, journalists struggle to fulfill the true responsibilities of the free press--they struggle to exercise freedom in situations of true governmental repression, open and covert, and they even lose their lives for it.

From the NY Times: Letters Give C.I.A. Tactics a Legal Rationale: In response to a congressional request, the Department of Justice has written a letter claiming that it is sometimes legal to torture. Well, the NY Times hesitates to use the actual word T.O.R.T.U.R.E. Here's how they say it, you know, in language that befits the grey lady. Ahem.

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

"Otherwise be prohibited under international law." Translation: Illegal.

A wise young woman whom I've never met, spoken with, or corresponded with, but whom I feel like I know, once said: "All you have to do to qualify for human rights is be human." In those 13 words, she elegantly summed up both the ultimate meaning of the claim for human rights and the origin of their breach. The very articulation of human rights traces their prior transgression. Without humans wronged, there is no need for a claim of human rights

The claim for human rights is a simple proposition: "I am human." But this claim depends upon recognition and accord. The one who violates the rights of the other does so precisely because this claim of humanity is not recognized or falls on deaf ears.

Thus the paradox of human rights: There where they need to be asserted, they are precisely denied. When I most need to say "I am human," I cannot. I need you to say my I, the I that is being violated, negated, erased.