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By Dominic Lieven
$23.73
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By Joe Conason — For anyone who followed the story of how and why Sarah Palin fired her state’s public safety commissioner, last week’s release of a legislative investigation that found she had violated state ethics statutes was anticlimactic.
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worldbiography.net
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Two recently disclosed memos from 2003 and 2004 show the Bush administration giving CIA torture techniques, most famously waterboarding, an explicit executive nod after worries arose in the intelligence community about the legality of the treatment of detainees.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Bruce Fein — Would the Republican VP nominee vote for herself? During her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin said “we have to fight for” and “protect” our freedom, but her party and the policies she seems to support have crippled American liberty.
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telegraph.co.uk
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The Bush administration is reportedly angry at a decision by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, who ruled the detention of 17 Chinese Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was unfounded, citing a seemingly archaic document that prohibits indefinite detention without cause—the U.S. Constitution.
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Carolyn Eisenberg takes a close look at Melvyn Leffler’s “For the Soul of Mankind” to ask whether our current troubles are rooted in a history that continues to haunt us.
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By Eugene Robinson — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates.
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John McCain, a lobbyist and fixture of Congress for more than 30 years, nominee of the incumbent party and self-proclaimed foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, tried to convince Americans Thursday night that only he could bring real reform to that wretched place called Washington. Updated
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In Jonathan Mahler’s new book, George W. Bush emerges as the most lawless president in American history, the first to usurp the law as a matter of policy.
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By William Pfaff — The Bush administration has lived by a strategy of tension, and will go out of office bequeathing the wars it has started and the ill will it has created to its successors, to compromise those who come after.
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The Beijing Olympics are proof that the rule of China’s Communist Party has been validated. Yet human rights abuses continue. What’s really going on? What kind of country is China becoming? Two new books help provide answers.
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AP photo / Steven Senne
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By Chris Hedges — If I had to choose between George W. Bush, naked and neighing on all fours while being ridden around the Oval Office by a spurred cowgirl Condoleezza Rice, or enduring his shredding of domestic and international law to wage an illegal war and bilking of the country on behalf of his corporate backers, I could learn to stomach a wide array of sexual escapades.
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Tens of thousands of the desperately depressed sign up every year in the U.S. to have electricity-induced grand mal seizures even though nobody has ever figured out why the treatment works or how severe the associated brain damage is. The good news: You no longer have to be awake, and muscle relaxants now keep your bones from breaking.
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Washington’s role in Mexico’s drug war, from the $400 million in annual military aid to the U.S. security contractors teaching torture techniques to Mexican police, is often ill-reported in the mainstream media. Canadian journalist Avi Lewis and the “Inside USA” television crew look critically into the conflict that has killed 1,800 people so far this year alone.
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Fighting between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas has led to human rights abuses in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. A Palestinian human rights organization recently drew similar conclusions. Both sides have admitted to at least some of the findings of the report.
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By Eugene Robinson — I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation’s great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the United States government. But that’s precisely what he did.
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soberaniachile.cl
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Former Argentine army officer and current scumbag Luciano Benjamin Menendez finally got what should have happened to him 30 years ago: a life sentence in jail for the kidnap, torture and murder of anti-dictatorship activists in 1977.
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AP
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Ah, good intentions, with which that famous path was paved: According to Justice Department documents obtained and released by the ACLU on Thursday—albeit heavily redacted—CIA interrogators were authorized to use waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that they believed “in good faith” would not “have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering.”
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Tab, The Calgary Sun —
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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Discussing the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, former Attorney General John Ashcroft said he didn’t think waterboarding constituted torture and that the technique produced “very valuable” reports. He was testifying on the Bush administration’s interrogation rules.
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Former Attorney General John Ashcroft fumbled as he was point-blanked about the goings-on at Guantanamo Bay during his tenure at the White House, claiming he had “limited recollection” of the events he was there to testify about and claiming he “wasn’t an expert in this arena when I was in office.” Updated
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By Marie Cocco — Steven Wax’s new book provides an insider’s view of some of the most hideous practices our country has allowed since the 9/11 attacks. And that’s without giving accounts of torture and abuse of detainees.
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U.S. Navy / Petty Officer 1st Class Shane T. McCoy
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One man’s torture, it seems, is another’s “coercive management technique.” For decades the United States has maintained that American prisoners were tortured by the Chinese during the Korean War. Now it turns out that at least some of the interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay were lifted directly from an American study of China’s Korean War era practices.
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When Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded, he might have thought he’d last longer than 17 seconds, but, as the columnist put it, “everything completely goes on you when you’re breathing water.”
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Last week Rep. John Conyers tried to get a straight answer out of John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer who argued that the president had a legal right to order torture. The spectacle of Yoo equivocating over whether the president could have someone buried alive is something to behold.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley
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By Stanley Kutler — John McCain and Barack Obama’s differences over the Supreme Court’s recent Guantanamo decision speak volumes about the two candidates and their competing visions for America.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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With statements such as “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong” guiding our government’s thinking during the formation and implementation of interrogation techniques, it’s no wonder Carl Levin and others were outraged in the Senate on Tuesday.
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By Marie Cocco — The forceful language of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s decision in the case granting detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp the right to contest their confinement in federal court is the voice of a Supreme Court majority that is fed up.
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By Eugene Robinson — It shouldn’t be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can’t have individuals taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they’ve been unjustly imprisoned—not even on grounds of mistaken identity.
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By Marie Cocco — You cannot find a more complete and compelling indictment of the Bush administration than the Ohio representative has presented in his 35 articles of impeachment.
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defectiveyeti.com
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Scott McClellan is making an important stop on Capitol Hill as he continues his book tour to tout that obscure memoir he wrote about being Bush’s press secretary. According to The Huffington Post, McClellan has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the Valerie Plame identity leak case and possibly other entries in the list of Bush’s Greatest Hits during McClellan’s time as presidential spokesman.
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AP photo / Brennan Llinsley
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A military lawyer for a Guantanamo detainee says it was standard operating procedure to destroy evidence of torture (or harsh interrogation techniques, as some call it) in order to “minimize certain legal issues.” Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler is concerned that, because of the policy, he will not be able to challenge the alleged confessions of his client, who was detained at the age of 15.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees appeared in court at the U.S. naval base’s Camp Justice for an arraignment that effectively sets the legal wheels in motion for the war crimes trials of Mohammed and his alleged 9/11 co-conspirators.
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Memoria Popular
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The case of Victor Jara, the famous folk musician murdered by dictator Augusto Pinochet’s army in 1973, will be reopened due to new evidence provided by the musician’s family. Human rights groups see Jara’s case as important in keeping attention on Chilean human rights abusers who for the past 35 years have avoided jail time.
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An Egyptian blogger, Karim el-Beheiri, who was arrested with two former co-workers from Mahalla’s Misr Spinning and Weaving company (all three were fired after their arrest) on April 6 and released Sunday, said he and his colleagues were shocked, beaten and denied sustenance during their ordeal behind bars.
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Flickr / SqueakyMarmot
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World leaders are about to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but leading human rights organization Amnesty International says they should first apologize for failing to tackle widespread abuses around the world. The group’s annual report cites 81 countries for torture or maltreatment and chastises the United States for setting such a poor example.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of a 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture.
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gizmodo.com
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By Nick Turse —
Those who haven’t seen this summer’s biggest blockbuster (so far, at least—this weekend’s “Indiana Jones” sequel may well change that) “Iron Man” and are planning to hit the multiplex might want to take a gander at this review. The article points out how “Iron Man” is the latest in a string of “pro-military” movies served up for youngsters’ consumption—even as two disastrous wars rage on overseas.
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press.princeton.edu
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Sheldon Wolin’s new book offers a controversial but ultimately convincing diagnosis of how America’s democracy has succumbed to an unacknowledged totalitarian temptation.
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By Marie Cocco — Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, if we were to seek a portrait that is emblematic of the way the U.S. has tried—and failed—to bring those responsible for the heinous plot to justice, we would have to produce a photograph of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
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Shane T. McCoy / U.S. Navy
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By Robert Scheer — Ah, yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.
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Stephen Colbert is a feisty one, but he might have met his match in Huffington Post editrix Arianna Huffington, who came to his Thursday show sassy in lace and camera-ready with quips like, “You know what it’s like for John McCain to be endorsing torture? It’s like you becoming the president of the Grizzly Bear Fan Club.” In the nick of time, Colbert stole the show back from Huffington with his comeback to her best McCain zinger.
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mcclatchydc.com
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Sami al-Haj, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was released Thursday evening after spending almost seven years in U.S. custody, six of those as an inmate at Guantanamo Bay. Haj was never charged with any crime, nor was any evidence against him ever revealed.
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AP photo / Bullit Marquez
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The Center for Investigative Reporting —
Two investigative reports uncover the Bush administration’s efforts to suppress legal proceedings against high-ranking Chinese officials—former Trade Minister Bo Xilai and Beijing’s Olympic Organizing Committee President Liu Qi—accused of torturing religious group members.
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Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films is behind this ad targeting Condoleezza Rice for her role in the Bush administration’s torture policy. The 30-second spot is set to air following Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia.
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Arizona Department of Corrections
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that lethal injection cannot be included under the constitutional amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment, clearing the way for the lifting of state moratoriums on executions that were installed last September.
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By Amy Goodman — The American Psychological Association is in the midst of its own heated presidential campaign. The central issue is whether APA members should be banned from participating in “harsh interrogations.”
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More shocking details are emerging from the 2003 81-page memo by former Justice Department senior lawyer John Yoo, who determined that the commander in chief can order poking out of eyes, slitting of body parts and throwing acid at prisoners, and none of that would constitute torture because it would not result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”
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Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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Another Memorial Day in This Endless War
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