News

The Wonderful World of Outsourced Torture

Dec 14, 2005
The more we learn of the Bush administration's pervasive outsourcing of torture, the more sensible it seems as a policy. Evidently, our intelligence people, tainted as they are by the squeamish morality of Western civilization, are just not fully up to the task of getting prisoners to tell us what the administration wants us to hear.

Examining the Death Penalty

Dec 14, 2005
On Dec. 2 Kenneth Boyd was executed by the state of North Carolina, becoming the 1,000th person to be executed since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling Gregg v. Georgia reinstated capital punishment in the United States.
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Propaganda? What Propaganda?

Dec 13, 2005
"There is no U.S. footprint" is the proud boast of one of the Pentagon's propaganda contractors, and it prompts the questions: Why not? What are they ashamed of? One thing is that most of us in this democracy did not know we were paying for this vast official propaganda operation until we read it in Jeff Gerth's excellent investigative piece in The New York Times. A truly free press is our most valuable export, and its reputation should not be undermined by the Bushies' addiction to government propaganda.

The Frist File

Dec 8, 2005
Was Frist playing doctor when he pushed legislation for medical reform or just lining his pockets? Get background on the accusations of Medicare fraud, conflict of interest and insider trading facing Sen. Bill Frist.

Texas Roundup

Dec 6, 2005
No get-out-of-jail-free card for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay A Texas court upheld a felony indictment for DeLay on charges of money laundering in connection with a 2002 Texas election A separate indictment for criminal conspiracy was dismissed .

Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Torture

Dec 4, 2005
Condi Rice is so tired of Old Europe and its human rights complaints. Big deal, so the CIA is using Soviet era torture camps in Eastern Europe to stash "war on terror" prisoners. Don't those fusspots in the EU understand that our use of torture is fundamentally different because we are the good guys and that Eastern Europe has been liberated? That outmoded European slogan of "friends don't let friends use torture" is so over.