When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing. Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, and to determine whether they constituted an ongoing threat to the US. This appeared to be a maddeningly arbitrary system, but it led to the release of hundreds of the prisoners.
March 3, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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President Obama has failed his mandate. It’s not a happy thing to have to say. Many won’t agree, desperately fending off the obvious. The campaign sloganeering, well, it turned out to be just that. All the worse that so many had hoped otherwise. Obama has been embarrassingly supine in dealing with the know-nothings. The end game of which is what, exactly?
The amount of private military contractors deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan is rarely reported on in the US mainstream press, but a Congressional Research Service investigation into this revealed that a record high 69 percent active duty soldiers are in fact private mercenaries. Although the administration is yet to disclose how many private mercenaries will be deployed in the latest surge, it is believed that the 69 percent ratio will remain in tact.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate “mainstream” media make quite a pair. We’re hearing a very “balanced” debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?
November 19, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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Political activist Noam Chomsky says that although President Obama views the Iraq invasion merely as “a mistake” or “strategic blunder,” it is, in fact, a “major crime” designed to enable America to control the Middle East oil reserves.
November 3, 2009 | Filed under
Nation |
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The 15th anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media here. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty.” For example, the organization said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.
October 27, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
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Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to published reports.
October 19, 2009 | Filed under
World |
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Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
October 17, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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On Oct. 11, thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and straight people who support full equality in all 50 states marched on Washington. Many of them were part of a new generation of activists who reject the ping-pong, state-by-state fight for rights after Proposition 8 passed last year, and who are impatient with the slow [...]
October 15, 2009 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
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The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.
October 13, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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