Saturday, December 15, 2007

Surprise! Mukasey Covers Up Torture

By Robert Parry
December 15, 2007

Last month, Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California joined Republicans to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General, even though he refused to acknowledge that the simulated drowning of waterboarding was torture.

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada helped the Bush administration, too, by rushing a floor vote on Mukasey before rank-and-file Democrats could get organized and push for a filibuster.

Read on.

Special Prosecutor Needed on Torture

By Brent Budowsky
December 15, 2007

Waterboarding is torture. Torture is a crime.

Read on.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Review of 'The Great Debaters'

By Lisa Pease
December 14, 2007

Denzel Washington directs and stars in “The Great Debaters,” a film inspired by the true story of the Wiley College debating team from Marshall, Texas, that, under the guidance of professor, poet and labor activist Melvin B. Tolson, rose to national prominence.

Read on.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death

By Robert Parry
December 13, 2007

U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.

"A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.

Read on.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Another Day of Infamy

By Mary MacElveen
December 12, 2007

I still remember the phrase that was used in determining the outcome of that case, that “no irreparable harm” comes to George W. Bush. I have often thought of that phrase and have remarked: Well what about the rest of us?

Read on.

Is America 'Better Than That'?

By Ray McGovern
December 12, 2007

The Post’s Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, which describes Kiriakou’s experience in interrogating suspected terrorists, raises in an unusually direct way an abiding question: Should the United States of America be using forms of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition?

Read on.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

America's Judicial Coup

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
December 12, 2007

During the Iran-Contra investigation in the 1980s, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh likened the Reagan-appointed federal judges in Washington to “the strategic reserve of an embattled army.”

When President Ronald Reagan’s political troops were under the gun of legal accountability, the judges could be counted on to jump into the trenches and find some legal excuse to pull the endangered operatives to safety.

Read on.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry
December 11, 2007

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Read on.

America as a Prisoner of Primacy

By Carl Conetta
December 10, 2007

We might call it "exceptional" as well, except that the troubles which beset U.S. policy do not end at Iraq's borders. The policy wreck is a more general one. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan has run aground, too.

Read on.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Why the Democrats Could Lose

By Robert Parry
December 9, 2007

National Democrats are upbeat about their chances in Election 2008, citing George W. Bush’s unpopularity and the weirdness of top Republican presidential candidates bogged down in squabbles over who has the right religious outlook or who is the most hostile to illegal immigrants.

But the smug Democratic hierarchy may be inviting defeat, again, by ignoring the fact that many Americans want leadership that appeals to them on the higher plane of principle. Instead, Democrats often treat Americans more like consumers than citizens, selling them new social programs rather than articulating an uplifting national cause.

Read on.