Uganda - and also Ireland and the Catholic Church

Here, have a today's round-up of updates on the Uganda situation, and a brief note on a brutal report on the Catholic Church child-molestation scandal and Pope Benedict's role in the coverup.

First, Uganda:

Enjoy Dancehall star Beenie Man's songs calling for the execution of gay men. The link also includes an April 19th newspaper's naming of various GBLT people ("TOP HOMOS IN UGANDA NAMED") which was followed by arrests, blackmail, and torture.

GayUganda reports on statements made Friday declaring GBLT people to be "cockroaches." He notes that during the Hutu genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda, this was the language used by the Hutu leadership: the Tutsi were "to go out and 'kill cockroaches.'" This extremely loaded language is being used by Rev. Michael Esakan Okwi of the Anglican Church in Uganda, lecturer at Uganda Christian University in Theology and Philosophy.

Scott Lively - author of The Pink Swastika and newtype holocaust denier who claims that Nazi regime was run by gay men, who also ran the concentration camps, and not Those Nice Germans - published a statement on the Uganda law he helped inspire, denying all responsibility and blaming everything on Fags of Old, as he does with literally every evil in human history. He can pretend this law goes "too far," but that's a load of crap; deaths from this law will be, in part, on his head. He, of course, claims anti-Christian persecution. You can see the effects of his hate literature here, as Ugandan anti-gay activists quote "The Pink Swastika" and other commentary from his lectures in Uganda.

Remember: this is what they would do everywhere they could.

Box Turtle Bulletin talks about how Uganda's oil developments are making foreign commentary against this bill less influential. Uganda's political leaders are apparently happy to listen to and stoke GBLT hate, but not opposing voices.

Finally, and importantly, it looks like Pope Benedict XVI personally, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was key to the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up the systematic molestation of children by priests, threatening bishops who came forward with information about molestation allegations with excommunication. Given that Pope Benedict's entire reaction to the Catholic Church's molestation scandal (and coverup he helped run) were to blame GBLT people for it, the lack of church commentary on Uganda's extermination bill seems likely to continue.

Meanwhile, back in the US...

Glenn Greenwald takes apart the military explanation of three simultaneous 'suicides' at Gitmo. If you don't remember the event, I refer you to Andrew Sullivan, here:

You may recall the somewhat bizarre response of the Pentagon to the news in June 2006 that three prisoners at Gitmo had somehow managed to hang themselves simultaneously in one of the most watched, patrolled and monitored prison sites in the world. The facts were bizarre: prisoners somehow had been hanging for two hours with rigor mortis when they were discovered; and their bodies were found to have a rag stuffed deep down their throats. But the strangeness and pathos of this event was only matched by the virulent anger of the Pentagon which immediately accused these defenseless and dead prisoners of "asymmetrical warfare" against the US.

Greenwald and Sullivan are both talking about a Seton Hall report on the military's farcical non-investigation of the incident. There's a lawsuit from the families, but the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to prevent the lawsuit from moving forward, arguing that there are no constitutional limits on what the executive can to do anyone outside the United States:

...the Obama administration has surprisingly endorsed the same legal positions as its predecessor, insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred...

Scott Horton of Harper's talks about the Obama administration's efforts to redeem John Yoo and block any prosecutions of "Justice Department lawyers who counsel torture, disappearings, and other crimes against humanity." Notably:

In the face of actual criminal investigations, the DOJ has behaved usually like a criminal accused, and intent on obstruction, not like a law enforcement agency. Criminal investigations involving the conduct of Yoo and his fellow torture-memo writers are underway at this moment in a number of foreign jurisdictions, most notably including the two pending criminal cases in Spain. It’s noteworthy that the U.S. Justice Department, presented with letters rogatory from the Spanish court probing into the torture of Spanish citizens at Guantánamo and the role played by DOJ lawyers in this process, elected not to respond. Attorney General Holder traveled to Europe at the outset of his term, promising European justice officials a new era of cooperation. But in the first significant test case, he has continued the Bush-era cover-up of potentially criminal misconduct deep inside the Justice Department.