Every now and then, when the authorities at Guantánamo want to demonstrate how well catered for the prisoners are, a story emerges that purports to demonstrate how well-stocked the prison library is, and how the prisoners are enjoying a range of titles, including J.K. Rowling’s best-selling series of Harry Potter novels. The first time I [...]
On August 12, the US administration’s intention to proceed with the war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, was temporarily delayed when Khadr’s military lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courtroom in Guantánamo [...]
A federal grand jury last week indicted retired pitcher Roger Clemens on charges he lied to Congress. In February 2008, Clemens, a seven time Cy Young winner, voluntarily met with a House committee and testified he didn’t knowingly use steroids or human growth hormones. The only evidence against Clemens appears to be the testimony of [...]
Toward the end of The Tillman Story, a riveting new documentary about football/war hero Pat Tillman and his family’s reaction to the circumstances of his death in Afghanistan, Vietnam war veteran Stan Goff describes the film as “an opportunity for reality to break through.” Goff is referring to largely unknown reasons why top military officials [...]
Although U.S. officials have attributed the torture of Muslim prisoners in American custody to a handful of maverick guards or limited to a few “high-value detainees,” such criminal acts were widely perpetrated, likely involving large numbers of military personnel, a book by a survivor suggests. According to Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany [...]
TPR contributor Jeffrey Kaye is featured in this forthcoming documentary. Doctors of the Dark Side exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal — how psychologists and physicians devised, supervised and covered up the torture of detainees in U.S. controlled military prisons. Writer/Director Martha Davis (Interrogation Psychologists) spent four years investigating the controversy. Lisa Rinzler (Pollock), [...]
New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, in his column Monday, is right to expose the attacks on Social Security as being the work of right-wing ideologues eager to destroy a government program that works, backed by cowardly Democrats who want to show their fiscal “responsibility” by getting tough with future pensioners.
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology (CEP) has issued a press release on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA), currently underway in San Diego, California. CEP announces that it has sent a letter (PDF) to Carol Goodheart, current APA president, charging the APA with “its own complicity in supporting and [...]
Crossposted from The Political Carnival. Time to vent a little, this time about the rise in very public, very unrestrained emotions that are infringing upon– and therefore reducing the opportunity to have– reasoned, rational discourse. The most recent example of this is the so-called “mosque at Ground Zero”, which in fact is a multi-functional Islamic [...]
The Obama administration is a welcome change from the Bush–Cheney years. Against severe Republican opposition, President Obama has kept campaign promises to reform health care, curb Wall Street excesses, create a federally-funded stimulus program to help bring the nation out of the recession, and to remove American troops from the needless Iraq war, which has already cost Americans more than $740 billion and 4,400 lives. He has also pledged to eliminate the Bush–Cheney tax cuts for the rich, while not raising taxes on the middle- and lower-classes.
