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9-11
Meta Index September 11 2001
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CIVIL LIBERTIES News:
 Secret
- Detainee's
- Torture
-  Criminal
-  Military
-  Intelligence
-  Government
-  Terrorism
-  Waterboarding
- War
Crimes -  Politics
-  Human
- Rights
-  Law
-  US
-  Money
-  History
-  Osama
bin Laden
- Religion
-  Afghanistan
-  Globe
"Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots: Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say." ... "When CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the [Republican President Bush] White House to get those secrets out of him." ... "The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads." ... "In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said." ... "Moreover, within weeks of his capture, [United States] U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the [2001 September] Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed." ... "Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan." ... "The application of techniques such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime -- prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction." ... "Abu Zubaida's revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports." ... ""We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former intelligence official said." (1, 2, 3, 4) -By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick with contributions by Julie Tate -WashingtonPost
 Pennsylvania
- Secret
- Corporate
- Government
- Crime
- Prison
-  Children's
- Rights
- Politics
"Court overturns hundreds of cases in court scandal." ... "The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court said it would overturn the convictions of hundreds of juveniles sentenced in the midst of the Luzerne County kickback scheme." ... "Calling it a "first step," the court wielded a little- used proceeding to throw out and expunge the case records of first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes who appeared before Luzerne County Juvenile Court Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. between 2003 and 2008." ... "In a report to the Court, a specially appointed judge, Arthur E. Grim, said his investigation uncovered "routine deprivation of children's constitutional rights to appear before an impartial tribunal and have an opportunity to be heard."" ... "Today's ruling, which authorizes Grim to overturn the cases, affects as many as 1,200 juveniles, he said. Their cases will be reviewed individually to determine if they meet the court's conditions." ... "Ciavarella and another former Luzerne County judge, Michael T. Conahan, have pleaded guilty earlier this year to taking $2.6 million in secret payments from the former owner of two juvenile detention centers." ... "The judges admitted that they helped the centers secure a county contract worth millions of dollars. Ciavarella routinely sentenced children to them." -By John Sullivan -Philly.com
 Hillary
Clinton -  Poll
-  Barack
Obama - US
-  China
- Human
Rights
"Poll: Clinton has high job approval." ... "Seventy-one percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday said they approve of how [Democratic President Obama's Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton is handling her job as America's top diplomat. Fewer than one in four disapprove." ... ""Nine in 10 Democrats approve of Clinton -- that's no surprise," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director. "But by a 50 percent to 43 percent margin, Republicans also think she is doing a good job at the State Department. That's an interesting result for a polarizing figure like Clinton."" ... "Clinton was met by large crowds and warmly received by world leaders on both trips, although "she met some criticism in Beijing [China's capital], where she was criticized for a lower-key approach that seemed to downplay the importance of human rights in the overall relationship with China," Labott said." ... ""Her aides said she wanted a new approach to dealing with China's human rights record, including less public criticism and more private discussions, which may prove more productive in changing Chinese behavior."" -By Paul Steinhauser -CNN
 Israeli
- Religious
- Terrorism
- Military
- War
Crimes - Politics
-  Land
- Palestinian
- Human
- Rights
- Investigation
"Israelis told to fight 'holy war' in Gaza." ... "Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a "religious war" against Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza [Palestinian territory], according to a soldier who has highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation." ... "The soldier testified that the "clear" message of literature distributed to troops by the rabbinate was: "We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land."" ... "After the offensive, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group called for the dismissal of the military's head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a brigadier general. It said that he had distributed to troops a booklet saying that it was "terribly immoral" to show mercy to a "cruel enemy" and that the soldiers were fighting "murderers"." ... "The longer transcript conveys a fuller sense of the debate involving graduates from the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory course." ... "The latest casualty figures published by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians, 236 fighters and 255 police officers." -By Donald Macintyre -Independent.co.uk 
Secret
- Criminal
- Torture
- War
Crimes - Prison
-  Psychological
-Terrorism
- Military
- Government
- 
-  Medical
- Human
- Rights
- Law- US
- Guantánamo
-  Cuba
"Former Gitmo Guard Tells All." ... "Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo [US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba] in the first years the facility was in operation. With the [Republican President] Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading." ... "Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here." ... "... Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned. This placed the prison guards under unjustifiable mental stress and anxiety, and, as any person familiar with the vast psychological literature in the area (think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance) would have anticipated produced abuses. Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison." ... "[Neely] describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized [Republican President] Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking." ... "Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture." -By Scott Horton -Harpers.org "Testimony of Spc. Brandon Neely." via "The Guantánamo Testimonials Project." ... "Testimonies of Military Guards." via humanrights.ucdavis.edu
Military
- Torture
- Prison
- Psychological
- Terrorism
- War
Crimes - Medical
- Human
Rights - Law
- US
- Guantánamo
Bay - Cuba
"Former Gitmo guard recalls abuse, climate of fear." ... "Army Pvt. [Private] Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business." ... "Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center's existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated [United States] U.S. Navy base." ... "His account, one of the first by a former guard describing abuses at Guantanamo, describes a chaotic time when soldiers lacked clear rules for dealing with detainees who were denied many basic comforts. He says the circumstances changed quickly once monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived." ... "Neely, [now] 28, describes a litany of cruel treatment by his fellow soldiers, including beatings and humiliations he said were intended only to deliver physical or psychological pain." ... "Only months had passed since the [2001 September] Sept. 11 attacks, and Neely said many of the guards wanted revenge. Especially before the first Red Cross visit, he said guards were seizing on any apparent infractions to "get some" by hurting the detainees. The soldiers' behavior seemed justified at the time, he said, because they were told "these are the worst terrorists in the world."" ... "He said one medic punched a handcuffed prisoner in the face for refusing to swallow a liquid nutritional supplement, and another bragged about cruelly stretching a prisoner's torn muscles during what was supposed to be physical therapy treatments." ... "He said detainees were forced to submit to take showers and defecate into buckets in full view of female soldiers, against Islamic customs. When a detainee yelled an expletive at a female guard, he said a crew of soldiers beat the man up and held him down so that the woman could repeatedly strike him in the face. " -By Mike Melia -AP via -Yahoo "The Guantánamo Testimonials Project." via humanrights.ucdavis.edu 
Barack
Obama -  John
Roberts - Politics
- Religion
- Race
- Civil
Rights - Justice
"Barack Hussein Obama: 44th president of the United States: Inauguration 2009." ... "A BIBLE WITH SIGNIFICANCE." ... "[Democratic President Elect] Barack Obama laid his hand on a Bible used in [Republican President Elect] Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration. The chief justice in 1861 was Roger Brooke Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision barring blacks from citizenship." ... "In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama said, “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.” There have been only 43 different men serve as president; [Democratic President] Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms." ... "At 47, Barack Obama is the nation’s fifth-youngest president. The youngest was [Republican President] Theodore Roosevelt (42), followed by [Democratic President] John F. Kennedy (43), [Democratic President] Bill Clinton (46) and [Republican President] Ulysses S. Grant (46)." ... "Barack Obama was one of 22 Senate Democrats to vote against Chief Justice John Roberts’ confirmation in 2005, so this was the first time a justice has sworn in a president who voted against him." -AJC
Torture
- War
Crimes - Government
- Military
- Terrorism
- Intelligence
- Detainees
- Medical- Human
-Rights
- Law
- Inpector
- US
- Guantanamo
Bay - Cuba
-  Saudi
"Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official: Trial Overseer Cites 'Abusive' Methods Against 9/11 Suspect." ... "The top [Republican President] Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay [Cuba] detainees to trial has concluded that the [United States] U.S. military tortured a Saudi [Arabia] national who allegedly planned to participate in the [September] Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."" ... ""We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution." ... "Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the [Republican President] Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured." ... "Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said." ... ""I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe," said Crawford, a lifelong Republican. "But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward."" ... "Crawford said she believes that coerced testimony should not be allowed. "You don't allow it in a regular court," said Crawford, who served as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces from 1991 to 2006." ... "In May 2008, Crawford ordered the war-crimes charges against Qahtani dropped but did not state publicly that the harsh interrogations were the reason. "It did shock me," Crawford said. "I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."" ... "The harsh techniques used against Qahtani, she said, were approved by [Republican President Bush's] then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld." (1, 2, 3) -By Bob Woodward with contributions by Julie Tate and Evelyn Duffy -WashingtonPost
 Bradley
Schlozman
- Political
- Government
-  Employees
- Election
- Civil
Rights - Enforcement
"Bush appointee saw Justice lawyers as 'commies,' 'crazy libs,' report says: [Republican President Bush appointee] Bradley Schlozman, who supervised civil rights and voting rights lawyers, broke the law by considering political affiliations in deciding who can serve, an inspector general's report says." ... "To Bradley Schlozman, they were "mold spores," "commies" and "crazy libs."" ... "He was referring to the career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights and voting rights divisions. From 2003 to 2006, Schlozman was a Bush appointee who supervised them." ... ""My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section," he said in an e-mail in 2003. "I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys," he confided to another friend." ... "He hoped to get rid of the "Democrats" and "liberals" because they were "disloyal" and replace them with "real Americans" and "right-thinking Americans."" ... "He appears to have succeeded by his standards, according to an inspector general's report released Tuesday. Among the newly hired lawyers whose political or ideological views could be discerned, 63 of 65 lawyers hired under Schlozman had Republican or conservative credentials, the report said." ... "The inspector general concluded Schlozman violated the civil services laws while at the Justice Department. While the president's appointees are entitled to run the department and set policy, they are prohibited from considering "political affiliations" in deciding on who serves in career positions in the federal government." -By David G. Savage -LAtimes
War
Crimes - Human
Rights - Military
- Politics
- Israel
- Palestine
- 
"UN calls for war crimes probe into IDF shelling of civilian-occupied building in Gaza." ... "With fighting all around them, Israel Defense Forces [IDF] troops knocked on the door of the Samouni clan in Gaza City [Gaza, Palestine] last weekend and told them to leave, directing them to the building owned by a relative. Twenty-four hours later, three shells slammed into the structure where dozens of people were huddling, according to survivor accounts Friday." ... "A newly released United Nations report said 30 people died in the shelling, citing four unidentified survivors who spoke by telephone. It called the shelling "one of the gravest incidents" to happen since Israeli infantry and armored troops entered Gaza [2009 January] Jan. 4 to quell Hamas rockets on Israel." ... "Other accounts given to The Associated Press and an Israeli human rights group provided lower casualty figures, but all agreed that shells hit the large, unfinished warehouse-like building a day after Israeli troops told them to get inside it for their safety." ... "Allegra Pacheco, a senior UN [United Nations] official in Jerusalem [Israel's capital] who helped draft the report on the incident for OCHA, added: "We are not making an accusation of deliberate action" by the Israelis." ... "UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the UN report should be the basis for an investigation of "war crimes elements." Her spokesman, Rupert Colville, said the "war crimes elements" would refer to allegations that Israel impeded medical teams trying to care for wounded civilians and failed to care for those injured in the attack." ... "Pillay told an emergency meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that any harm to Israeli civilians by Hamas rockets was unacceptable, but it did not excuse abuses carried out by Israeli forces in response." ... "On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva accused Israel of "unacceptable" delays in letting rescue workers reach three Gaza City homes hit by shelling, where they eventually found 15 dead and 18 wounded, including young children too weak to stand." -Ha'aretzDaily
 Women
- Jobs
- Money
- Civil
Rights - Law
- Politics
-  California
"Courts using Ledbetter decision to ‘undermine civil rights principles across the board.’." ... "Tomorrow, the House is set to take up the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would overturn a Supreme Court decision that restricted a woman’s right to bring pay discrimination lawsuits. The House handily passed the bill last year, but Senate conservatives blocked it after [Republican] President Bush threatened to veto it. On a conference call organized by [California Democratic Representative] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today, Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, explained that the faulty Supreme Court decision has been stretched to cripple all kinds of anti-discrimination laws:" "GREENBERGER: So now we’ve got these judges taking the Ledbetter decision to absurd lengths and saying that the most entrenched and invidious discrimination — now that those who have the courage and the knowledge and the ability, for the first time to combat are out of time. It is an outrageous approach, an undermining of civil rights principles across the board. It’s now causing real misery, as was described not only for women and their families in pay…but for all victims of discrimination.""Check out the Center for American Progress’s Fair Pay Calculator, and learn more about the fight for fair pay, here. Firedoglake has more." -By Ali Frick -ThinkProgress.org
US
- Israel
- Palestine
-  Syria
-  Egypt
- Military
- Intelligence
- Terrorism
- Politics
- Poor
- Families
-  Food
- Health
- Human
Rights
"An Unnecessary War." [by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter] ... "I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza [Palestine area] by Israel could easily have been avoided." ... "After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action." ... "Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus [Syria's capital], we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank [Palestine area] and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza." ... "We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. [United Nations] special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day." ... "Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens." ... "After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government. " -By Jimmy Carter -WashingtonPost
 Russia
- Human
- Rights
- Politics
- History
"Rights activists denounce Russian treason bill: They say legislation backed by Putin is 'in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler'." ... "Rights activists Wednesday denounced new legislation backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that would allow Russian authorities to label any government critic a traitor, calling it a chilling throwback to times of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin." ... "The bill, which is expected to become law, would expand the definition of treason to include damaging Russia's constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That, activists said, would essentially let authorities interpret any act against the state as treason — a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison." ... ""It returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s," the activists, which included Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Civic Assistance director Svetlana Gannushkina, said in a joint statement." ... "Alexeyeva said a person who reports government abuses to an NGO — for example Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch — could be deemed to have harmed Russia's interests." ... "During Putin's eight-year presidency, the government has systematically rolled back Russia's post-Soviet political freedoms and that has shown no signs of stopping under Putin's successor and protege, Dmitry Medvedev." -AP via -MSNBC
Torture
- Prisons
-War
Crimes - Secret
- Military
- Government
- Intelligence
- Law
- Investigation
- Human
Rights - Politics
- History
-  McCain
- Ariz
-  Mich
- US
- Guantanamo
- Cuba
-  Iraq
- Afghanistan
- China
-   Korea
"Bipartisan Report: Rumsfeld Responsible for Detainee Abuse: Senate Committee Finds Officials Made Decisions That Led to Offenses Against Prisoners." ... "A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that [Republican President Bush's] former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay [Cuba], and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere." ... "In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. [ Senators] Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.[ Democratic-Michigan]) and John McCain (R-Ariz.[ Republican Arizona]), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military." ... ""The abuse of detainees in U.S. [United States] custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."" ... "The report is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics -- that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true." ... "The [Republican President Bush's] administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."" ... "A Defense Department spokesman noted that the Pentagon cooperated extensively with the Senate investigation and has taken numerous steps in recent years to ensure the humane treatment of detainees." ... "The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's employment of controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and the use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison." ... "The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the report said, was a memo signed by [Republican] President Bush on [February] Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Convention's standards for humane treatment did not apply to captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. As early as that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support that conclusion." ... "In July 2002, Rumseld's senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques -- borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE -- included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war." ... "The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says." -By Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung -WashingtonPost [PDF] "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into The Treatment of Detainees In U.S. Custody." ... “What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings” -- General David Petraeus via -WashingtonPost 
China
- Free
Speech - Human
Rights - Law
- Politics
- United
Nations - History
"China arrests a signer of a freedom charter: Literary critic Liu Xiaobo had joined more than 300 in endorsing the 'Charter 08' document." ... "China has arrested at least one prominent dissident and has questioned and possibly detained others who were among more than 300 signatories to a declaration demanding more freedoms." ... "Liu Xiaobo, a prolific literary critic who spent 20 months in prison for joining students in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, was arrested Monday night at his home in Beijing [China's capital]. Human rights organizations said the 53-year-old Liu was being detained on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power," a charge often used against government critics." ... "The arrest came in the run-up to today's 60th anniversary of the United Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a landmark document credited with inspiring the modern human rights movement." ... "The Chinese activists are using the anniversary as a peg to release what they are calling "Charter 08," a petition with recommendations for constitutional reforms that would make the ruling Communist Party more accountable." -By Barbara Demick -LAtimes
Terrorism
- Criminal
- Political
- History
- Corporate
- Religion
- Prison
-  Pat
Robertson - Abortion
- Gay
- Rights
- Law- California
-  Texas
- US
- Iraq
- Military
"Bush Awards Presidential Citizen Medal To Watergate Crook Chuck Colson." ... "Established in 1969, the Presidential Citizens Medal is the second highest honor for a civilian, recognizing Americans “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for the nation.”" ... "Today, [Republican] President Bush honored 24 recipients of this year’s award, including actor Gary Sinise and Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. Also included in that mix was Chuck Colson, “the first member of the [Republican President] Nixon administration to serve prison time for Watergate-related offenses.” Colson was President Nixon’s counsel from 1969-1973 and pleaded guilty in 1974 to obstruction of justice. Colson received a one to three year sentence, but served just seven months. David Plotz at Slate described Colson’s role in the Nixon administration:" "As special counsel to the president, he [Chuck Colson] was [Republican President] Richard Nixon’s hard man, the “evil genius” of an evil administration. According to Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, Colson sought to hire Teamsters thugs to beat up anti-war demonstrators, and he plotted to raid or firebomb the Brookings Institution. He eventually pleaded guilty to scheming to defame Daniel Ellsberg and interfering with his trial.""Since that time, Colson has become an evangelical prison reformer, running the nonprofit Prison Fellowship, which advocates for “privately run prisons and the delivery of all social services by faith-based groups.” However, according to author Allan Lichtman in “White Protestant Nation,” Colson has also remained involved in conservative politics:" "Colson brought together politically conservative Catholics and Protestands for a statement of common beliefs, advised conservative politicians including Texas [Republican] governor George W. Bush, and worked with Christian right leaders Pat Robertson and James Dobson on the development of political strategy. He disseminated conservative messages on sex roles, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, gay rights, and separation of church and state in his radio broadcasts and columns, reaching millions of Americans.""On October 3, 2002, Colson was also one of the co-signers of a letter from prominent evangelical leaders supporting an invasion of Iraq. More recently he has spoken out in favor of California’s Prop. 8, accusing the LGBT community of “anti-religious bigotry.”" -By Amanda Terkel -ThinkProgress.org
 Dick
Cheney - KBR
- Corporation
- Military
- Laborers
- Human
Rights - Texas
- US
- Iraq
-  India
-  Nepal
-  Sri
Lanka -  Bangladesh
"Military contractor in Iraq holds foreign workers in warehouses." ... "About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. [United States] military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad [Iraq's capital] airport without money or a place to work." ... "Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR [formerly a Halliburton subsidiary, the corporation formerly run by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney], an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions." ... "The laborers said they paid middlemen more than $2,000 to get to Iraq for jobs that they were told would earn them $600 to $800 a month." ... "The conditions in which the men have been held appear to violate guidelines the U.S. military handed down in 2006 that urged contractors to deter human trafficking to the war zone by shunning recruiters that charged excessive fees." -By Adam Ashton -McClatchyDC.com
John
McCain - Terrorism
- Politics
- Women's
-Medical
- Abortion
- Rights
- Federal
- Law
- Enforcement
-  Colorado
- 2008
Election
"McCain Voted To Protect Domestic Terrorists Who Carry Out Violence At Abortion Clinics." ... "Referencing a recent New York Times article, [spokesperson for 2008 Election Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, Nancy] Pfotenhauer claimed that if McCain “hung out with somebody who had bombed abortion clinics” it would be a legitimate topic of discussion." ... "Pfotenhauer’s invocation of abortion clinic bombers in defense of McCain is ironic given that McCain has repeatedly voted against protecting Americans from domestic terrorists in the anti-choice movement. On multiple occasions throughout his career, McCain sought to limit the government’s ability to punish violent anti-choice fanatics by:" "– Voting against making anti-choice violence a federal crime. As the Jed Report notes, McCain voted in 1993 and 1994 against making “bombings, arson and blockades at abortion clinics, and shootings and threats of violence against doctors and nurses who perform abortions” federal crimes."-ThinkProgress.org
John
McCain - Corporate
- Government
- Disaster
- Politics
- US_Debt
- Healthcare
-  Social
Security - Rights
-  Book
- 2008
Election
"Naomi Klein: Financial crisis part of Bush 'shock doctrine'." ... "The bailout of Wall Street’s largest players by the federal government is another example of the [Republican President] Bush administration pursuing a corporate agenda at the expense of average Americans, a prominent author argued on Friday." ... "In a Friday night interview on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Naomi Klein said President Bush’s $700 billion proposal to rescue the financial sector stems from a profiteering streak that has dominated the last eight years." ... ""The disaster is far from over," Klein said. "The disaster was on Wall Street and they have moved the disaster to Main Street."" ... "Referring to the bailout, Klein said the "bomb has yet to detonate" and that the real crisis will strike when tax payers are overwhelmed when faced with the debt from the bailouts." ... "According to Klein, the bomb will detonate if Sen. John McCain becomes president and "rationalizes" that it is necessary to privatize government programs like social security and healthcare because neither the government nor Americans can afford them." ... ""The real disaster has yet to come; the real disaster is the debt that is going to explode on American tax payers," Klein said." ... "Klein’s book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," outlines how crises, real or perceived, have been used by governments, especially the United States under George W. Bush, to strong-arm a disoriented citizenry into accepting changes to its rights, and its government, that it wouldn't otherwise accept." -By David Edwards and Andrew McLemore -RawStory.com  WATCH:
Naomi Klein on Republican Bush's "Shock Doctrine"
US
- KBR
- Corporation
- Jordan
- Nepal
- Workers
- Human
- Rights
- Iraq
- Military
- California
"KBR, Partner in Iraq Contract Sued in Human Trafficking Case." ... "Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said." ... "As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal." ... "The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on behalf of the workers' families and the survivor, claims that the trafficking scheme was engineered by KBR and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, according to Fryszman." -By Dana Hedgpeth -WashingtonPost
KBR
- Lawsuit
- Human
- Rights
- Iraq
- Nepal
- Workers
- US
- Company
- Military
"KBR Suit Alleges 'Forced Labor' and 'Slavery'." ... "We've now looked through the lawsuit against KBR that we told you about this morning. The complaint (pdf) alleges that the company -- the biggest U.S. [United States] contractor in Iraq during the period at issue -- engaged in a human trafficking scheme whereby 12 Nepali men were brought to Iraq to work and were prevented from leaving. The men were then kidnapped by insurgents, and all but one were executed." ... "In sum: "Defendants' actions as set forth above constitute the torts of trafficking in persons, involuntary servitude, forced labor, and slavery."" ... "This is hardly the first time that KBR has been in hot water, of course. As we noted back in June, the company "was criticized in March for making troops sick by failing to provide clean water. And top military officials have given false statements to Congress to quell controversy over the company." In addition, at least two female former KBR employees in Iraq have alleged that they were raped or sexually assaulted by co-workers, and that KBR was less than aggressive in investigating their claims." -By Zachary Roth -TPMMuckracker .TalkingPointsMemo
 Jim
Adkisson - Jobless
- Politics
- Police
-  Tennessee
- Church
-Gays
- Women's
- Rights
- Desegregation- History
"US church 'killer' wrote of hate: A man accused of shooting dead two people in a Tennessee church was motivated by hatred of liberals and anger at being jobless, US police say." ... "The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church describes itself on its website as working for social change since the 1950s, including desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women's rights and gay rights." -BBC/News 
Jim
Adkisson - Political
- Terrorism
- Tennessee
-Out-of-Work-  Homeless
- Food
- Gay
- Churchgoers
- Women's
- Rights
- Children
"Police: Man shot churchgoers over liberal views." ... "An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire at a Unitarian church [in Knoxville, Tennessee], killing two people, left behind a note suggesting that he targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal policies, including its acceptance of gays, authorities said Monday." ... "[Jim] Adkisson, a 58-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his food stamps, had 76 rounds with him when he entered the church and pulled a shotgun from a guitar case during a children's performance of the musical "Annie."" ... "The Unitarian-Universalist church advocates for women's rights and gay rights and has provided sanctuary for political refugees. It also has fed the homeless and founded a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, according to its Web site." -By Duncan Mansfield -AP via -Yahoo
Barack
Obama - Faith
-Civil
Liberties - Law
- Economics
- History
- US_Debt
- Iraq
- Military
- US
- 2008
Election
"Why some conservatives are backing Obama." ... "The "Obamacans" that [2008 Election Democratic Presidential Candidate and Illinois Senator] Sen. Barack Obama used to joke about - Republican apostates who whispered their support for his candidacy - have morphed into a new phenomenon, or syndrome, as detractors like to call it: the Obamacons." ... "These are conservatives who have publicly endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, dissidents from the brain trust of think tanks, ex-officials and policy magazines that have fueled the Republican Party since the 1960s." ... ""The untold story of the [Republican President] Bush administration is the deliberate annihilation of the Reaganite, small-government wing of the Republican Party," said Michael Greve, director of the Federalism Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "A lot of people are very bitter about it."" ... "Many conservatives are aghast at the rise in spending and debt under the Bush administration, its expansion of executive power, and what they see as a trampling of civil liberties and a taste for empire." ... "Douglas Kmiec is former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the [former Republican Presidents] Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and now a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and a devout Catholic. Kmiec endorsed Obama earlier this year, despite his conviction that Obama "believes in a pretty progressive agenda."" ... "Kmiec said his support deepened after meeting with Obama and other faith leaders last month, during which the busy candidate spent 2 1/2 in a freewheeling discussion with people who differed with him." ... ""I think he's the right person at the right time to re-establish principles of constitutional governance that have been ill treated by the current administration, and to free us from the tar paper that we know is Iraq," Kmiec said, adding that many Republicans privately agree. "I think he's a man in the market for every good idea he can find, and he doesn't care what label it comes with."" ... "David Friedman, the son of late conservative icon and Nobel economist Milton Friedman, has also endorsed Obama." ... "[Conservative Bruce Bartlett:] "People don't understand that there has always been a small but very significant element of conservatives who have been against the war from day one and who, like me, also hate George Bush and think he's the most incompetent president in American history," said Bruce Bartlett, a supply-side economist who coined the term Obamacons. "The few people who are slavishly pro-Republican, live or die, slavishly pro-Bush like the Weekly Standard crowd, have gotten lot more publicity than they deserve."" -By Carolyn Lochhead -SFGate.com
US
- Afghanistan
-  Pakistan
- Military
- Terrorism
-Intelligence
- Illegal
-  Drug
- Money
- Human
Rights -  Reconstruction
- Police
"Pentagon report: Taliban regroups, likely to up pace of attacks in Afghanistan." ... "The Taliban has regrouped after its initial fall from power in Afghanistan and the pace of its attacks is likely to increase this year, according to a Pentagon report that offers a dim view of progress in the nearly seven-year-old war." ... "Noting that insurgent violence has climbed, the report said that despite U.S. and coalition efforts to capture and kill key leaders, the Taliban is likely to "maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008."" ... "The Taliban, it said, has "coalesced into a resilient insurgency."" ... "Vast problems — corruption, the illegal poppy trade, human rights abuses and slow progress in reconstruction — were detailed, as well as the struggle to train and equip the Afghan Army and police." ... "The report described a dual terror threat in Afghanistan that includes the Taliban in the south, and "a more complex, adaptive insurgency" in the east. That fragmented insurgency is made up of groups ranging from al-Qaida and Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's radical Hezb-i-Islami group to Pakistani militants such as Jaish-e-Mohammed." ... "Insurgents will continue to challenge the government in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the may also move to increase their power in the north and west, the report predicted." (1, 2, 3) -By Lolita C. Baldor with contributions by Robert Burns -AP via -StarTribune -Defenselink.mil Publications[PDFs]: "Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan." "United States Plan for Sustaining the Afghanistan National Security Forces." -Defenselink.mil/Pubs
McCain
-  Charles
R Black Jr - Foreign
- Money
- Politics
- Human
Rights - 2008
Election - Arizona
- US
- Pakistan
-  Angola
-  Philippines
-  Zaire
now: Democratic Republic of the Congo -  Nigeria
-  Somalia
-  Kenya
"Terror Strike Would Help McCain, Top Adviser Says." ... "A top adviser to [2008 Election Republican Presidential Candidate and Arizona Senator] Sen. John McCain said that a terrorist attack in the United States would be a political benefit to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a comment that was immediately disputed by the candidate and denounced by his Democratic rival." ... "Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain's most senior political advisers, said in an interview with Fortune magazine that a fresh terrorist attack "certainly would be a big advantage to him." He also said that the December assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, while "unfortunate," helped McCain win the Republican primary by focusing attention on national security." ... "The comment reinjected the fear of terrorism into the campaign as both candidates had been shifting their conversation to the economy and $4-per-gallon gasoline." ... "The comments also returned the political spotlight to McCain's advisers and, in particular, to Black, who has drawn criticism for his long lobbying career and his representation of controversial foreign governments. McCain has been criticized for surrounding himself with top advisers who were lobbyists." ... "Black and his lobbying partners were at times registered foreign agents for a collection of U.S.-backed foreign leaders whose human rights records were sometimes harshly criticized, even as American conservatives embraced their opposition to communism. They included Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Nigerian [General] Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre, and the countries of Kenya and Equatorial Guinea, among others." (1, 2) -By Michael D. Shear with contributions by Karl Vick and Alice Crites -WashingtonPost 
China
- Hackers
- US
- GOV
- Lawmakers
- Human
Rights - Politics
- Military
-Intelligence
- Investigation
-  Va
-  NJ
-  Ill
"More congressional computers hacked from China." ... "More Members of Congress have had their computers infiltrated by hackers within China than initially suspected, a lawmaker has revealed." ... "[Representatives] Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va. [Republican-Virginia), Chris Smith (R-N.J. [Republican-New Jersey), and Mark Kirk (R-Ill. [Republican-Illinois]) admitted to having data removed from their Capitol Hill computers last week, but Wolf says there are more." ... "“I would suspect that the Foreign Affairs, Armed Services, Intelligence, (and) Appropriations committees would all be top targets,” Kirk said." ... "Wolf and Smith said they believe the hackers focused on them because of their continued objections to China’s human rights violations, and suspected that the hackers were looking for information on dissidents." ... "The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] asked the lawmakers not to speak publicly, fearing that if they did, they would be unable to track the IP addresses of the hackers, Kirk said." ... "“When you’re in the middle of a criminal investigation, you try not to alert the criminal of what’s happened so you can track it down,” he said." -By Jordy Yager -TheHill.com
War
Crimes - Criminal
- Politicians
- US
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Guantanamo
Bay - Cuba
- Military
- Intelligence
- Prison
- Torture
- Human
- Human
Rights - Law
- Medical
- Psychological
-  Science
"General who probed Abu Ghraib says [Republican President] Bush officials committed war crimes." ... "The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the [Republican President] Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account." ... "The remarks by [Major General] Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that [United States] U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices." ... ""After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."" ... "Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote." ... "The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date." ... "Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq." -By Warren P. Strobel -McClatchyDC.com 
Special
Report - Noteworthy
- US
- Guantanamo
Bay - Cuba
- Military
- Intelligence
- Torture
- War
Crimes - Prison
- Investigation
- Legal
- Rights
- Religious
- Terrorism
-  School
- Politics
"Guantanamo Bay detainees investigation." ... "An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the [September] Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the [United States] U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad."
Torture
- Crimes
- Unlawful
- US
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Guantanamo
Bay - Cuba
-Military
- Intelligence
- Prison
- Terrorism
- War
Crimes - Politics
- Human
-Rights
- Medical
- Psychological
- Science
"Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US." ... "About: Broken Laws, Broken Lives shows the human consequences of harsh and unlawful US interrogation practices. This landmark report reveals the excruciating pain and continued suffering of men who, never charged with any crime, endured torture at US detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay [Cuba]. Based on internationally accepted standards for clinical assessment of torture claims, the report documents practices used to bring about long-lasting pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end." -Physicians for Human Rights -BrokenLives.info
John
McCain - Corporate
- Military
- Government
-  Telecommunications
- Surveillance
- Amnesty- Politics
- Intelligence
-  John
Yoo - Torture
- Detainee
- Human
Rights - Enforcement
- Florida
- 2008
Election
"McCain tangled in flip-flop flap over wiretapping immunity." ... "A series of statements about immunizing telecommunications companies that violated federal wiretapping laws have become something of an embarrassment, and perhaps even a problem, for [2008 Election Republican] John McCain's presidential campaign." ... "The statements revolve around whether McCain, like [Republican] President Bush, supports legislation that could be voted on this month extending retroactive immunity to those companies and perhaps many more." ... "In 2005, at least, McCain was in favor of letting the courts decide whether AT&T and other telecos violated the law." ... "... [Late December 2007] McCain told the Boston Globe this: "I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is."" ... "But after McCain became the all-but-official nominee, his political principles appear to have become more malleable. He voted in February for retroactive immunity -- even though there were no explicit statements telling AT&T and other telecommunications companies that this is not a "blessing." There were no deals providing for "oversight hearings." And there certainly were no "provisions" to ensure this won't happen again." ... "Our story may have ended there. Except that campaign representative Chuck Fish (not an actual campaign lawyer, as has been incorrectly reported, but a surrogate) subsequently suggested that his candidate still wanted "hearings," which The Washington Post picked up on last week. McCain's campaign fired off a nastygram to the Post saying that their candidate's "position on immunity has not changed."" ... "Meanwhile, McCain was questioned about his position at a town hall meeting the next day -- he replied that Congress needs to "have hearings" -- which The Wall Street Journal dutifully reported. The fuss became enough to prompt the conservative National Review to begin questioning McCain's the-executive-can-wiretap-as-it-pleases credentials. Salon entered the fray too." ... "[Florida Democratic Representative] Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida, who is a member of the House Judiciary committee, sent us this statement on Wednesday:" "I am appalled by Senator John McCain's reaffirmation of support for the use of warrantless wiretapping on American citizens. Senator McCain has once again chosen to align himself with President George Bush, whose reprehensible spying program on Americans is a grave threat to our Constitutions guarantees of privacy and limited executive power. It is clear that Senator McCain, President Bush, and their Republican allies in Congress will continue to use scare tactics and fear mongering to claim that a president can simply chose to ignore America's laws... Senator McCain opposes a bipartisan House compromise bill that preserves appropriate court review of all surveillance of US citizens and gives judges the discretion to review all the necessary documents related to telecom lawsuits without offering blanket immunity.""Yet there's a more important issue here, which is why the neo-cons are pressing McCain to adhere to the Bush administration's line. And that's the administration's theory of the so-called unitary executive, which says that the president's use of military force cannot be reviewed by courts." ... "McCain's earlier statements -- especially where he says presidents must "obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress" -- seem to question the administration's interpretation. Beyond wiretapping, that touches on topics such as John Yoo's so-called torture memos, the applicability of the Geneva Convention to detainees, Bush's signing statements, and military commissions. Questioning the justifications for Bush's warrantless wiretapping means questioning the rest; no wonder McCain seems a little worried about where this may lead." -By Declan McCullagh -CNET [note: The conservative/Republican opinion magazine National Review supports lawless surveillance.]
John
McCain -Criminal
- Spying
- Secretly
- Military
- Government
- Intelligence
- Corporate
- Telecom
- Amnesty
- Terrorism
- Politics
- 2008
Election - Arizona
- Civil
Liberties
"McCain: I'd Spy on Americans Secretly, Too." ... "If elected president, [2008 Election Republican Presidential Candidate and Arizona] Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday." ... "McCain's new tack towards the [Republican President] Bush administration's theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies' cooperation with [Republican] President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, before he'd support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity." ... "As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation's telecoms work with U.S. [United States] spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty." ... "But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's." "[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]""The Article II citation is key, since it refers to [Republican] President Bush's longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration's analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001." -By Ryan Singel -Wired
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Media
- Politics
- Corporate
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Network
- 2008
Election -
-
-
-
- Torture
-
- Human
Rights -
- Consumer
-
- 
- Safety
- 
-
-
- Death
Penalty - "Okay,
Now I'm Bitter." [Mary Mapes on what
DISNEY/ABC didn't cover in the 2008 Election Democratic Presidential
Candidate debate in Pennsylvania with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama]
... "In Iraq, we've seen a rebound in suicide bombings and gotten the disquieting
information that Iraqi soldiers have been fleeing the battlefield in frightening
numbers." ... "Americans learned that detailed discussions of torture techniques
had been held in the [Republican President] White House -- our White House
-- and President Bush revealed that he knew this and approved." ... "[Home]
Foreclosure rates have spiked to frightening levels." ... "U.S. [United
States] shoppers were told that food prices in this country are rising
at a higher pace than at any time in the past 17 years." ... "The airline
industry floundered through dreadful days of groundings, amidst safety
concerns, economic ailments and passenger anger." ... "Oil prices are setting
new records almost every day and $4 a gallon gas is coming soon to a service
station near you." ... "The anguish over China's human rights record and
its handling of Tibet turned the Olympic torch relay into a cross between
Spain's Running of the Bulls and 3rd grade keep-away." ... "[2008 Election
Republican Presidential Candidate] John McCain, acting like a mean old
man trying to chase those pesky voters off his lawn, refused to endorse
a new GI bill that would help those currently serving our country get a
college education." ... "The Supreme Court issued a fractured opinion on
the death penalty that for the first time in years raises the real possibility
of a national debate on the value and morality of the ultimate punishment."
... "And we are in the middle of what is clearly the most important, most
consequential election of my lifetime -- and I'm no spring chicken." ...
"Instead, I sat in front of my TV open-mouthed, listening to a hodgepodge
of juvenile questions about flag jewelry, the possibility of a "dream"
ticket, elderly radicals, Charlie Gibson's personal tax concerns and ministers
who emote too much. What, no time for a question about Cindy McCain's purloined
pork chop recipe?" -By Mary Mapes
-HuffingtonPost.com
China
- Military
- Police
- Terrorism
- Religious
- Censorship
- Oil
- Sports
- Human
Rights - "As
world watches Tibet, China's Muslim Uighurs face growing repression."
... "Almost unnoticed amid the wide-scale protests by Tibetans over the
past month is the social unrest among the 8 million or so Muslim Uighurs
in China's resource-rich far western territory." ... "Recently, hundreds
of Muslim women in black veils gathered outside the market in this oasis
city [Khotan, China] in an impromptu protest. Some carried signs demanding
an independent state." ... ""I saw the demonstration myself. There were
500 to 700 women in black, waving placards for East Turkestan," said Wu
Jiangliang, a hydroelectric company employee." ... "China handled the unrest
forcefully, ensuring the stability of a region rich in oil, coal and minerals.
Police moved quickly to quell the March 23 protest, arresting numerous
women and shooing others away. It drew only minor notice." ... "China also
has broken up what it said were two terrorist rings that intended to disrupt
the Beijing [China's capital] Summer Olympic Games and thwarted what it
said was a terrorist attempt last month on a commercial airliner." ...
"But as state officials employed a firm hand against restive Uighurs, pronounced
WEE-gers, they also publicly demonized those behind the social unrest.
Critics now say that while the state has stabilized ethnic areas, the harsh
language may exacerbate tensions." ... ""The problem is that China's policies
are alienating," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for
Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. "They are efficient in that political
repression works. But they increase ethnic tensions."" -By
Tim
Johnson -McClatchyDC.com
Jack
Abramoff - 
Bob
Schaffer - Criminal
- Money
- Politician
- Vacation
- Colorado
- US
- Mariana
Islands
- 
Textile
- Factory
- Immigration- Human
Rights - Law
- 2008
Election - "Abramoff
ties cloud [Bob] Schaffer's '99 fact-finding trip."
... "Just before boarding a plane to the [Northern] Mariana Islands in
1999, [Colorado Republican Representative] then-Congressman Bob Schaffer
announced he was embarking on a fact-finding mission to get to the bottom
of repeated allegations of labor abuse in the American protectorate." ...
"What he didn't say was that the trip was partly arranged by the firm of
now-jailed [Republican] lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who represented textile
factory owners fighting congressional efforts to reform labor and immigration
laws on the islands and who was being handsomely paid to keep the islands'
cherished exemptions." ... "Schaffer and his wife stayed for free at a
palm-studded beach resort and, besides factories, also toured historical
sites and met with clients of Preston-Gates, Abramoff's firm, according
to a copy of the trip's agenda archived in Schaffer's congressional papers."
... "In a recent interview with The Denver Post, the Republican candidate
for Colorado's open Senate seat described the protectorate's guest-worker
program as a "model" lawmakers could use as they overhaul the U.S. [United
States] immigration system." ... "It has left Schaffer defending a guest-worker
program criticized in more than a decade of government reports and journalistic
exposés; and it links him to what Abramoff later boasted was an
incredibly successful lobbying effort to quash reform by cashing in on
ties to key House Republicans, including those on the House Resources Committee,
on which Schaffer sat." ... ""Given that many Republican members, including
Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and Conrad Burns, have lost their seat or gone to prison
based on their association with this criminal, it's pretty remarkable that
Schaffer seems to be proud of his association with these sleazy Abramoff-sponsored
junkets," said Taylor West, a spokeswoman for Schaffer's [2008 Election]
Democratic opponent, Mark Udall." ... "At heart of the issue is the islands'
massive textile industry, which is exempted from the U.S. minimum wage
as well as most American immigration laws. The Northern Marianas economy
is built on thousands of workers from China, the Philippines and Bangladesh,
some of whom pay labor recruiters as much as $7,000 to land a job on U.S.
soil." ... "A class-action lawsuit filed the year Schaffer toured the islands
alleged that many of those workers lived in slum conditions, housed seven
to a room in barracks surrounded by barbed wire designed to keep the workers
in. Workers in some factories labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week,
the suit alleged — without pay if they fell behind set quotas." ... "A
U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were
forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited
for factories but forced into the sex trade instead." ... "Said Matthew
Miller, spokesman for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee: "The fact
that (Schaffer) sided against the human rights of those workers, not just
then, but still today, shows he was more interested in doing the bidding
of the people who set up the trip than in actually investigating abuses.""
-By Michael Riley -DenverPost.com
Bob
Schaffer - Jack
Abramoff - Criminal
- Money
- Politician
- Abortion
- Child
- Labor
- Female
- Textile
- Factory
- Immigration
- Human
Rights - Law
- History
- US
- Mariana
Islands
- 2008
Election - Colorado
- Vacation
- "Fashhhionating."
... "Earlier today we noted
that the [2008 Election] Republican Senate candidate from Colorado, Bob
Schaffer, told the Denver Post that America should adopt an immigration
and guest labor policy modeled on that of the Mariana Islands (aka the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) -- whose guest worker program
is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution,
sex trafficking, beatings, female workers kept in shacks with no plumbing
surrounded by barbed wire and other fun stuff [sarcasm]." ... "TPM Reader
AK
points out that the folks at ProgressNowAction have done
a little digging. And it seems that that back in 1999, when Schaffer
was serving in Congress, he went on one of those junkets to the Islands
put together by none other than disgraced lobbyist and now-federal inmate
Jack
Abramoff." ... "Those of you with a clear recollection of the details
of the Abramoff scandal will remember that one of Jack's biggest clients
was the
group of sharks who ran the Marianas sweat shops." ... "They had a
great thing going because they were able to slap Made In The USA
labels on clothes and other items made in Saipan [Northern Mariana Islands
capital] by female guest workers imported from other parts of East Asia
to work in sub-Third World labor conditions. That is, when the guest workers
weren't busy getting beaten, raped or coerced into having abortions. Jack's
job was to find politicians willing to travel with him on junkets to the
Marianas, hang out at the casinos and come back to the states and say how
well the labor conditions actually there seemed to be." ... "In any case,
it was just one of these junkets with Abramoff that then US Rep. Bob Schaffer
took back in 1999, which, as it happens, was a year after the release of
the Department of Labor report
that confirmed the 15 year old sex slave's account." -By
Josh Marshall -TalkingPointsMemo.com
Watch
TPMtv Video update: "...
Colorado senate candidate Bob Schaffer (R) says we should remodel
our national immigration policy on that of the Mariana Islands -- a program
notorious for child prostitution, forced abortions, beatings, slavery,
twelve hour days and sex trafficking. Now it turns out he went on a Jack
Abramoff junket to the islands and came back saying it was A-OK!"
-By Josh Marshall -Veracifier
John
C Yoo - Torture- War
Crimes - Criminal
- Military
- Intelligence
- Law
- Language
- Politics
- Terrorism
- Government
- Prisoners
- Human
Rights - California
- 
Indiana
- "Permissible
Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail." ... "Thirty pages
into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations
in 2003, senior [Republican President Bush's deputy Office of Legal Counsel]
Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked
by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's
eyes poked out?" ... "Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water,
corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting
an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?"
... "These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. [United States] law prohibiting
maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what
could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The
specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which
"body part the statute specifies."" ... "But none of that matters in a
time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming
and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's
ultimate authority as commander in chief." ... "It [Yoo's memorandum] repeats
an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic
cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure
or serious impairment of bodily functions."" ... "Yoo, who is now a law
professor at the University of California at Berkeley [California], also
uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to
the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search
and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant
in a time of war." ... "Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel
have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned
to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language. Yoo's
2003 memo has evoked strong criticism from legal academics, human rights
advocates and military-law experts, who say that he was wrong on basic
matters of constitutional law and went too far in authorizing harsh and
coercive interrogation tactics by the Defense Department." ... ""Having
81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding
language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about," said Dawn
Johnsen, an OLC chief during the [Democratic President Bill] Clinton administration
who is now a law professor at Indiana University [Indiana]. "He is saying
that poking people's eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress's
ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document."" -By
Dan Eggen -WashingtonPost
John
Yoo - 
Alberto
Gonzales - Surveillance
- Military
- Government
- Terrorism
- Intelligence
- Politics
- Secret
- Law
- History- Liberties
- "Memo
Justified Warrantless Surveillance." ... "For at
least 16 months after the Sept. [September] 11 terror attacks in 2001,
the [Republican President] Bush administration believed that the Constitution's
protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. [United States]
soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism." ... "That
view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. [October]
23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows
that view." ... "The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the
[Republican President Bush] White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant
attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel
at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion
on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity." ... "The
37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday
in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released
by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by
the American Civil Liberties Union." ... ""Our office recently concluded
that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,"
the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use
of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.""
... "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo
is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the
National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP." -By
Pamela Hess and Lara Jakes Jordan -AP
via -SFGate.com
John
Yoo - Gonzales
- 
Cheney- 
Addington
- War
Crimes - Criminal
- Torture
- Military
- Intelligence
- Terrorism
- Political
- Law
- Secret
- Government
- History
- Civil
Liberties - California
- US
- Guantanamo
- Cuba
- Iraq
- Prisons
- "John
Yoo's war crimes." ... "As the result of a FOIA [Freedom
of Information Act] lawsuit the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] filed
and then prosecuted for several years, numerous documents relating
to the [Republican President] Bush administration's torture regime that
have long been baselessly kept secret were released yesterday, including
an 81-pagememorandum
(.pdf) issued in 2003 by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo
(currently a Berkeley [California] Law Professor) which asserted that the
President's war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized
the use of torture:"[""It depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." Yoo wasn't just a law professor theorizing about the legalization of torture. He was a government official who, in concert with other government officials, set out to enable a brutal and systematic torture regime, and did so." ... "Since the Nuremberg Trials, "war criminals" include not only those who directly apply the criminal violence and other forms of brutality, but also government officials who authorized it and military officials who oversaw it. Ironically, the Bush administration itself argued in the 2006 case of Hamdan -- when they sought to prosecute as a "war criminal" a Guantanamo detainee whom they allege was a driver for Osama bin Laden -- that one is guilty of war crimes not merely by directly violating the laws of war, but also by participating in a conspiracy to do so." ... "That legal question was unresolved in that case, but Justices Thomas and Scalia both sided with the administration and Thomas wrote (emphasis added):"
""[T]he experience of our wars," Winthrop 839, is rife with evidence that establishes beyond any doubt that conspiracy to violate the laws of war is itself an offense cognizable before a law-of-war military commission. . . . . In [World War II], the orders establishing the jurisdiction of military commissions in various theaters of operation provided that conspiracy to violate the laws of war was a cognizable offense. See Letter, General Headquarters, United States Army Forces, Pacific (Sept. 24, 1945), Record in Yamashita v. Styer, O. T. 1945, No. 672, pp. 14, 16 (Exh. F) (Order respecting the "Regulations Governing the Trial of War Criminals" provided that "participation in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish" various offenses against the law of war was cognizable before military commissions).""It isn't pleasant to think about high government officials in one's own country as war criminals -- that's something that only bad, evil dictatorships have -- but, pleasant or not, it rather indisputably happens to be what we have." ... "Yoo wasn't acting as a lawyer in order legally to analyze questions surrounding interrogation powers. He was acting with the intent to enable illegal torture and used the law as his instrument to authorize criminality." -By Glenn Greenwald -Salon
John
McCain - Race
- History
- Civil
Rights - Arizona
- Tennessee
- "McCain's
Memphis Visit Raises Past Opposition To MLK Day."
... "This Friday, [2008 Election Republican Presidential Candidate and
Arizona Senator] Sen. John McCain will head to Memphis, Tennessee to commemorate
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." ... "The stop, which
is part of the senator's extended biography tour, is a complimentary gesture
both to the African American community and to King's legacy. But is also
threatens to resurrect an inconsistency McCain has had on one of the more
symbolically important civil rights issues: whether or not to create a
holiday commemorating Martin Luther King." ... "In 1983, McCain voted against
passing a bill to designate the third Monday of every January as a federal
holiday in honor of King. Four years later, then-Arizona Governor Evan
Mecham rescinded Martin Luther King Day as a state holiday, saying it had
been established through an illegal executive order by his Democratic predecessor."
... "McCain said he thought Mecham was correct in his decision." ... "Two
years after that, McCain's viewpoint began to change, but only gradually.
In 1989, he urged lawmakers to make Martin Luther King Jr. day a state
holiday, but said he was "still opposed to another federal holiday."
-By
Sam
Stein -HuffingtonPost.com
US
- China
- Military
- Government
- Sports
- Human
Rights - Religious
- History
- California
- India
- "Bush
Silent, but Others Speak Out on Tibet Crackdown."
... "China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tibet is having powerful
political reverberations in Washington, where the [Republican President
Bush] White House is weighing how far to go in condemning the Chinese government,
even as it defends President Bush’s decision to attend the Summer Olympics
in Beijing [China's capital]." ... "Mr. Bush has long said the United States
and China have “a complex relationship,” and that complexity was on full
display this week. While his administration has called for an end to the
violence, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, phoned her Chinese
counterpart to urge restraint, Mr. Bush himself has remained silent." ...
"In the meantime, the presidential candidates are speaking out, as is the
[California Democratic Representative and] speaker of the House, Nancy
Pelosi. On Friday, Ms. Pelosi visited the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader,
the Dalai Lama, at his headquarters in Dharamsala, India — and poked a
finger in the eye of Beijing." ... "Describing the clashes in the past
week between Chinese security forces and Tibetan demonstrators as “a challenge
to conscience of the world,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said,
“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against
China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority
to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world.”" ... "If it
seemed like a direct challenge to Mr. Bush, he did not take the bait."
... "The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since 1959, when China
crushed an uprising in Tibet, his homeland. He has been pressing, without
success, to return to China to advocate for greater cultural and religious
freedom for his followers." -By Sheryl
Gay Stolberg and Somini
Sengupta -NYTimes
John
McCain
- Torture
- Politics
- Military
- Intelligence
- Prisoners
- Human
Rights - 
Maryland
- Arizona
- US
- International
- 2008
Election - "Republicans
uphold Bush veto of anti-torture bill." ... "[Republican]
President George W. Bush's fellow Republicans in Congress on Tuesday upheld
his veto of a bill to ban the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] from subjecting
enemy detainees to interrogation methods denounced by critics as torture."
... "Waterboarding has been condemned by many U.S. lawmakers, human rights
groups and foreign countries as a form of torture." ... "House Majority
Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said Bush's veto had degraded
the country's moral standing, undermined its international credibility
and could expose U.S. military and intelligence personnel to the treatment."
... "[2008 Election Republican Presidential Candidate and Arizona Senator]
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was tortured while a prisoner
in the Vietnam war and is now his party's presumptive presidential nominee,
opposed the bill [that would have outlawed torture]." (1, 2)
-By Thomas Ferraro with contributions by Jeremy Pelofsky
and Alan Elsner -Reuters
Secretive
- Government
- Domestic
Spying - American
- Peoples
- Communications
- Travel
- Finances
- 
Electronic
- 
EMails
- 
Internet
- 
Searches
- Databases
- Civil-Liberties
- Law
- Terrorism
- Politics
- Investigation
- International
- Military
- Intelligence
- TIA
- "NSA's
Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data."
... "Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism
program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to
search for suspicious patterns [the TIA program: the Total Information
Awareness program]. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans'
privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." ... "But the data-sifting
effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to
foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system." ...
"The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering
has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts
have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications,
travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs
brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks." ... "Congress now is
hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S.
surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired
last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of
Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications
and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting
government surveillance." ... "Largely missing from the public discussion
is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected
through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic
and foreign intelligence gathering." ... "According to current and former
intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records
of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card
transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called
"transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its
sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious
patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs
across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance
Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and
overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected."
... "The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering
programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came
to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track
telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital
Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international
banking clearinghouse to track money movements." ... "The effort also ties
into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose
existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say." ... "Two
current officials also said the NSA's current combination of programs now
largely mirrors the former TIA [Total Information Awareness] project. But
the NSA offers less privacy protection." -By Siobhan
Gorman -WSJ.com
Illegal
- Corporate
- Government
- Surveillance
- Terrorism
- Investigation
- Consumer
- Finances
- Telephone
- Internet
- Data
- Intelligence
- Politics
- Rights
- History- 
Audit
- 
Vt
- "More
FBI Privacy Violations Confirmed." ... "The FBI [Federal
Bureau of Investigation] acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans'
telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth
straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at
tracking terrorists and spies." ... "Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing, [FBI Director Robert] Mueller raised the issue of the FBI's controversial
use of so-called national security letters [NSLs] in reference to an upcoming
report on the topic by the Justice Department's inspector general." ...
"An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal
records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data
than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last
year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many
national security letters were requested by more than 4,600." ... "National
security letters, as outlined in the USA Patriot Act, are administrative
subpoenas used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the
FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks,
credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records
about their customers or subscribers without a judge's approval." ... "Speaking
before the FBI chief, [Vermont Democratic Senator and] Senate Judiciary
Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. [Democratic-Vermont], urged Mueller to be
more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper
use of national security letters."" ... ""Everybody wants to stop terrorists.
But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and
we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of
command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like
to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just
because they want to."" -By Lara Jakes Jordan
-AP via -SFGate.com
Government
- Spying
- Intelligence
- Law
- Politics
- Civil
Liberties - "Top
court won't review Bush domestic spying case." ...
"The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a legal challenge to the warrantless
domestic spying program [Republican] President George W. Bush created after
the Sept. 11 attacks." ... "The American Civil Liberties Union had asked
the justices to hear the case after a lower court ruled the ACLU and other
groups and individuals that sued the government had no legal right to do
so because they could not prove they had been affected by the program."
... "The civil liberties group also asked the nation's highest court to
make clear that Bush does not have the power under the U.S. Constitution
to engage in intelligence surveillance within the United States that Congress
has expressly prohibited." ... ""It's very disturbing that the president's
actions will not be reviewed by the Supreme Court," said Jameel Jaffer,
director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "Allowing the executive
branch to police itself flies in the face of the constitutional system
of checks and balances."" (1, 2)
-By James Vicini with contributions by Lori Santos
-Reuters
John
McCain
- Torture- War
Crimes - Criminal
- Terrorism
- Military
- Intelligence- Law
- Politics
- Human
Rights - Ariz
- "Did
McCain Flip-Flop On Torture?" ... "This week, [2008
Election Republican Presidential Candidate and Arizona Senator] Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz., voted
against an intelligence
bill that stated:" ... ""No individual in the custody or under
the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality
thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject
to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United
States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.""
... "Andrew Sullivan, who has written admiringly of McCain's anti-torture
position in the past, describes
himself as "heartbroken."" ... ""I simply cannot see any explanation
for this except politics - that McCain feels the need to appease the Republican
far right at this point in time,...McCain has indeed been a leader in preventing
the military from torturing terror suspects, and in banning waterboarding.
But by leaving this lacuna in the law, he gives this president the space
he wants. As president himself, of course, McCain would surely instruct
the CIA to uphold the American way of interrogation, and not to adopt techniques
once used by the Gestapo and prosecuted by the US as war crimes. But we
now know that there will be one difference between Obama and McCain in
November. One will never tolerate torture; the other just did."" -By
Jake Tapper -ABCNEWS.com
Political
- Terrorism
- Corporate
- Government
- Telecom
- Amnesty
- Surveillance
- Intelligence
- Secrecy
- Consumer
- Internet
- History
- "Bush
Spy Bill Stance Called Fear-Mongering: [Republican
President Bush] President: U.S. Could Face Attacks That Would Make 9/11
"Pale By Comparison"." ... "President Bush, in remarks meant to spur House
Democrats into accepting a controversial new bill that would expand the
government's ability to spy on Americans, warned that the country faced
terror strikes that would make September 11 "pale by comparison."" ...
"In response, critics of the new bill accused Mr. Bush of "fear mongering,"
and of trying to deflect attention from the bill itself. Its most controversial
provision would prevent Americans from suing phone companies that helped
the administration spy on them since the [Republican President Bush] White
House surveillance program was instituted in 2001." ... "Mr. Bush has made
immunity from civil prosecution for the telecoms a must-have element for
revamping the nation’s surveillance laws, repeatedly saying he would veto
any bill that does not exempt telecoms from lawsuits." ... "The House-passed
version does not include telecom immunity. This past week, the Senate approved
a similar version which includes a provision that protects telecoms from
civil lawsuits." ... "There are approximately 40 lawsuits now brought by
citizens and consumer groups against companies that enabled the government
to illegally eavesdrop on Americans' phone and Internet communications."
... "Opponents of the administration's program, which engaged wiretaps
against any and all Americans without obtaining court-ordered warrants,
say the telecoms' participation was illegal. They say that, given the Bush
administration's penchant for secrecy, lawsuits against the telecoms are
the only way to obtain disclosure about the facts from the government."
... "Information being sought includes details about the origins of the
program. The administration admitted that the sweeping domestic surveillance
originated in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. However, declassified
documents obtained by the National Security Archive and testimony that
is part of these lawsuits suggest the National Security Agency program
was put into place shortly after Mr. Bush was inaugurated, long before
9/11." -Contributed to by David Morgan
-AP -CBSNews
China
- 
Sudan
- Sports
- Politics- US
- 
Entertainer
- Human
- Human
Rights - Oil
- Military
- "China
loses Spielberg over Darfur." ... "Scott Jagow:Steven
Spielberg will have nothing to do with the Summer Olympics in Beijing [China].
Yesterday, Spielberg withdrew as an artistic advisor for the opening and
closing ceremonies. The director says he can't be associated with China's
policies toward an African nation in conflict." ... "Bill Marcus:
China's a big oil customer of Sudan. China also supplies Sudan with weapons.
That's why Spielberg says he quit. He said China should do more to help
end the human suffering in Sudan's Darfur region." ... "Human rights activists
say Spielberg's move sets a moral standard." -By Scott
Jagow and Bill Marcus
-Marketplace via
-PublicRadio.org
United
States - Torture
- War
Crimes - Criminals
-
- Human
Rights - Politics
- 
Mexico
- "U.N.
says waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture."
... "The controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding and
used by the United States qualifies as torture, the U.N. [United Nations]
human rights chief said on Friday." ... ""I would have no problems with
describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture,"
the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news
conference in Mexico City [Mexico]." ... "Violators of the U.N. Convention
against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal
jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from
other nations, Arbour said." -By Mica Rosenberg with
contributions by Patricia Zengerle -Reuters
Secretive
- Iraqi
- Religious
- Law
- Terrorism
- Women
- Torture
- Executions
-
- Human
Rights - Police
- Politics
- "Violations
of 'Islamic teachings' take deadly toll on Iraqi women."
... "The images in the Basra [Iraq] police file are nauseating: Page after
page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their
faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture." ... "The
women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or
because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups
want to enforce." ... ""Fear, fear is always there," says 30-year-old Safana,
an artist and university professor. "We don't know who to be afraid of.
Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security.
I don't know who to be afraid of."" ... "Her fear is justified. Iraq's
second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups.
As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year -- 79 for violation
of "Islamic teachings" and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to
IRIN [Integrated Regional Information Networks], the news branch of the
U.N.'s [United Nation's] Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs."
... "Amnesty International has raised concern about the increasing violence
toward women in Iraq, saying abductions, rapes and "honor killings" are
on the rise." ... ""Politically active women, those who did not follow
a strict dress code, and women [who are] human rights defenders were increasingly
at risk of abuses, including by armed groups and religious extremists,"
Amnesty said in a 2007 report." -By Arwa Damon
-CNN
Terrorism
- Politics
- Rhetoric
- Psychology
- US
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
- Military
- Law
- Foreign
- Intelligence
- Surveillance
- Noteworthy
- Civil
Liberties - "Bush
legacy: Setting a standard in fear-mongering." ...
"When I [Richard A. Clarke, former leader of the National Security Council's
counterterrorism efforts,] left the [Republican President] Bush administration
in 2003, it was clear to me that its strategy for defeating terrorism was
leaving our nation more vulnerable and our people in a perilous place.
Not only did its policies misappropriate resources, weaken the moral standing
of America, and threaten long-standing legal and constitutional provisions,
but the president also employed misleading and reckless rhetoric to perpetuate
his agenda." ... "This week's State of the Union proved nothing has changed."
... "Besides overstating successes in Afghanistan, painting a rosy future
for Iraq, and touting unfinished domestic objectives, he again used his
favorite tactic - fear - as a tool to scare Congress and the American people.
On one issue in particular - FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)
- the president misconstrued the truth and manipulated the facts." ...
"Let me be clear: Our ability to track and monitor terrorists overseas
would not cease should the Protect America Act expire. If this were true,
the president would not threaten to terminate any temporary extension with
his veto pen. All surveillance currently occurring would continue even
after legislative provisions lapsed because authorizations issued under
the act are in effect up to a full year." ... "Simply put, it was wrong
for the president to suggest that warrants issued in compliance with FISA
would suddenly evaporate with congressional inaction. Instead - even though
Congress extended the Protect America Act by two weeks - he is using the
existence of the sunset provision to cast his political opponents in a
negative light." ... "For this president, fear is an easier political tactic
than compromise. With FISA, he is attempting to rattle Congress into hastily
expanding his own executive powers at the expense of civil liberties and
constitutional protections." -By Richard A. Clarke
"former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council"
-Philly.com
Stephen
Colbert - Hillary
Clinton
- Barack
Obama
- Civil
Rights - History
- 
Humor
-
- Writers
- Union
- Entertainment
- 
Song
- Religion
- Medical
- University
- 
South
Carolina - Business
- 2008
Election - Politics
- "Colbert's
Civil Rights MLK Day Writer's Strike-Busting Writerless Show — In Song."
... "[Stephen Colbert,] After paying his respects to Monday's debate
and busting out a pretty darn good Tom Cruise imitation, Colbert made a
segue which, in retrospect, was brilliant: Moving from [2008 Election Democratic
Presidential Candidate Hillary] Clinton and [2008 Election Democratic
Presidential Candidate Barack] Obama's bickering over who loved
Reagan more to the evidence provided by Tom Brokaw's book, Boom!
Voices of the Sixties, which, in addition to quoting Hillary Clinton
discussing how [former Republican President] Ronald Reagan finessed
the balance of his role "beautifully" on page 404, contains an early segment
devoted to the Reverend Andrew Young, the "last surviving member
of Martin Luther King's inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership
Council," and lifelong, steadfast civil rights activist. Colbert got to
that — eventually — after first introducing a documentary-style segment
(in the style
of Brokaw's "1968" documentary, complete with soundtrack) about the
Charleston Hospital workers union strike of 1969, which was settled by
the young, er, Young, who negotiated with a vice president of the associated
Medical University of South Carolina — "the only administrator willing
to meet with Young was the newly-appointed vice-president of the medical
college, who had taken up the position just days before the strike was
called." The two worked behind the scenes to finally end the strike — and
on the hundredth day, they came to an agreement, awarding raises to the
striking workers." ... "That administrator? James Colbert — Stephen's
father." -By Rachel Sklar
-HuffingtonPost.com
"A-It's
All About Stephen."
Alberto
Gonzales
- 
Pete
Domenici - 
Heather
Wilson - Criminal
- US
Attorneys - Politics
- Hatch
Act - Federal
- Law
- Civil
Rights - 2006
Election - 2008
Election - 
New
Mexico - 
Minnesota
- "Attorneys
probe deepens." ... "The federal investigation into
the firing of nine U.S. attorneys could jolt the political landscape ahead
of the November [2008] elections, according to several people close to
the inquiry." ... "Washington’s attention has been diverted from the scandal
since the August resignation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, and
has focused instead on Democrats’ efforts to hold White House officials
in contempt for ignoring congressional subpoenas to testify on Capitol
Hill about the firings." ... "But recent behind-the-scenes activity in
several investigations suggests that the issue that roiled Congress in
2007 could re-emerge in the heat of the [2008] election year. Two inquiries
by the House and Senate ethics committees are examining whether several
congressional Republicans, including one running for the Senate this year,
improperly interfered with investigations." ... "As potent as the congressional
probes might be, they appear to be far narrower than a sprawling inquiry
launched by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG)
and the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)." ... "Investigators
from these offices have been questioning whether senior officials lied
to Congress, violated the criminal provisions in the Hatch Act, tampered
with witnesses preparing to testify to Congress, obstructed justice, took
improper political considerations into account during the hiring and firing
of U.S. attorneys and created widespread problems in the department’s Civil
Rights Division, according to several people familiar with the investigation."
... "The internal Justice Department probe cannot bring charges but can
refer findings to a U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia or a special
prosecutor, who could then pursue a criminal investigation." ... "[Former
New Mexico U.S. Attorney David] Iglesias’s case is in the crosshairs of
all three investigations. Testifying before Congress, he alleged last year
that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) pressured
him to accelerate an investigation of a Democratic politician in New Mexico
ahead of Wilson’s tight [2006] reelection bid. Iglesias said he did not
plan to bring charges before the November elections, and was fired in December
2006." ... "In a sign that the investigation has widened beyond the nine
fired attorneys, Justice last summer interviewed Thomas Heffelfinger, U.S.
attorney in Minnesota, who resigned before it was revealed that he was
targeted for dismissal." -By Manu Raju
-TheHill.com
John
Edwards
- Justice
- Health-Care
- 
Environment
- Economic
- Poverty
- People
- Political
- History
- 2008
Election - "Martin
L. King, III [eldest son of Martin Luther King] letter to The Honorable
John E. Edwards. [PDF]" ... "Dear Senator Edwards:"
[2008 Election Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards] ... "It
was good meeting with you yesterday and discussing my father’s legacy.
On the day when the nation will honor my father, I wanted to follow up
with a personal note." ... "There has been, and will continue to be, a
lot of back and forth in the political arena over my father’s legacy.
It is a commentary on the breadth and depth of his impact that so many
people want to claim his legacy. I am concerned that we do not blur
the lines and obscure the truth about what he stood for: speaking up for
justice for those who have no voice." ... "I appreciate that on the major
issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed
the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have
almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this [2008] election."
... "You know as well as anyone that the 37 million people living in poverty
have no voice in our system. They don’t have lobbyists in Washington
and they don’t get to go to lunch with members of Congress. Speaking
up for them is not politically convenient. But, it is the right thing
to do." ... "I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic
justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all
candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the
issue of economic justice in America." ... "From our conversation yesterday,
I know this is personal for you. I know you know what it means to
come from nothing. I know you know what it means to get the opportunities
you need to build a better life. And, I know you know that injustice is
alive and well in America, because millions of people will never get the
same opportunities you had." ... "I believe that now, more than ever, we
need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice
in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves
to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes.
My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society.
He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and
strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts,
we can change minds, and we can change lives." ... "So, I urge you: keep
going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight
for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a
believer in my father’s words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father
would be proud." -By Martin L. King, III
via -JohnEdwards.com
Tim
Russert
- Hillary
Clinton - Barack
Obama
- Civil
Rights - History
- Politics
- 2008
Election - Illinois
- "Russert
falsely claimed to show "exactly what President Clinton said," aired truncated
quotes from both Clintons." ... "Summary: After
falsely asserting that he was showing viewers "exactly what [former Democratic]
President Clinton said," referring to January 7 comments Bill Clinton made
about [2008 Election Democratic Presidential Candidate and Illinois Senator]
Sen. Barack Obama, Tim Russert played a truncated quote from Clinton. In
addition, Russert read a quote from The New York Times that truncated
[2008 Election Democratic Presidential Candidate] Hillary Clinton's statement
about civil rights, omitting her reference to President Kennedy." -MediaMatters.org
Hillary
Clinton
- Language
- Race
- Civil
Rights - Law
- History
- Media
- Politics
- 2008
Election - "New
York Times Keeps Running Truncated Version Of Hillary's Quote About
Martin Luther King." ... "For the second time, the
[The New York Times] paper has run a truncated version of something
[2008 Election Democratic Presidential Candidate] Hillary Clinton said
about Martin Luther King that has become a major campaign issue -- even
though the full transcript has been available for days." ... "But as Josh
[Marshall, editor and publisher of TPM Media,] pointed
out on TPM the other day, here's Hillary's actual quote from the interview:
US
- Iraq
- 
Blackwater
- Government
- Politics
- Human
Rights - Law
- Michigan
- "Blackwater
USA steps up lobbying efforts." ... "Private-security
contractor Blackwater Worldwide, which protects U.S. [United States] government
officials in Iraq and faces scrutiny over its role in the shooting deaths
of Iraqi civilians, has ramped up its lobbying representation on Capitol
Hill." ... "Law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice was tapped by
the company, whose chairman is Erik Prince, a Holland [Michigan] native.
They've been hired to lobby the government on contracting and other issues,
according to the form posted online Tuesday by the Senate's public records
office." ... "The company has attracted considerable congressional scrutiny
and criticism from the Iraqi government and human rights groups for its
involvement in several dozen shooting incidents." ... "Prince, a former
Navy SEAL, is a Holland native whose family fortune was made in the auto
parts industry. His sister, Betsy DeVos, a former chairwoman of the Michigan
GOP [Grand Old Party=Republican], is married to Dick DeVos, a Republican
and Amway Corp. heir who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2006."
-AP via -MLive.com
John
Edwards
- Barack
Obama
- Politics
- 2008
Election - 2004
Election - 
Iowa
- 
New
Hampshire - Working
- People
- Investment- Civil
Rights - Lawyer
- Drug
- Oil
- "Obama
borrows from Edwards." ... "After beating [2008 Election
Democratic Presidential Candidate] John Edwards in Iowa on Thursday, [2008
Election Democratic Presidential Candidate] Barack Obama has decided to
join him -- repeatedly poaching his opponent's themes, language, and even
jokes." ... ""We shouldn't just be respecting wealth in this country --
we should be respecting work," Obama told an overflow crowd in a [New Hampshire]
high-school gym today." ... "Edwards's 2004 presidential campaign was centered
around the idea that the [Republican President] Bush administration had
launched a "war on work" through tax cuts that offer incentives for investment
over labor. "Hard work should be valued in this country, so we're going
to reward work, not just wealth," Edwards said in accepting his party’s
vice-presidential nomination at the Democratic’ convention in Boston. In
this campaign, he has sharpened his populist rhetoric, railing against
greedy corporate CEOs who are waging war on working people and the middle
class." ... "Since arriving in New Hampshire Friday, Obama has borrowed
Edwards's favorite verb by bragging that he had "fought" as a community
organizer and civil rights lawyer, and conceding that "insurance companies
and drug companies will not give up their profits" -- which Edwards asserts
repeatedly to ridicule Obama's talk of conciliation. Obama repeatedly invoked
those interests, as well as "big oil and big insurance," common villains
in Edwards speeches." -By Sasha Issenberg with contributions
by Foon Rhee -Boston/Globe
John
Edwards
- Barack
Obama
- Hillary
Clinton
- Iowa
- Manufacturing
- Jobs
- Family
- Health-Care
- Environment
- Human
Rights - US
- China
- Corporations
- Iraq
- Military
- Indiana
- 
Idaho
- Illinois
- Homes
- Consumers
- 2008
Election - "Behind
the Edwards Surge: Right Message at the Right Time."
... "To a far greater extent than [2008 Election Democratic Presidential
Candidates Barack] Obama or [Hillary] Clinton, [John] Edwards has struck
at the heart of issues that should matter most in the race to replace not
just [Republican President] George W. Bush, but the Bush agenda of corporate
giveaways, job-crushing free trade deals, war profiteering in Iraq, and
subprime mortgage profiteering in Indiana, Idaho, Illinois and, yes, Iowa."
... "Edwards summed up his increasingly aggressive and powerful anti-corporate
themes with a declaration: "What makes America America is at stake: jobs,
the middle class, health care, preserving the environment in the world
for future generations."" ... ""But all those things are at risk. And why
are they at risk? Because of corporate power and corporate greed in Washington,
D.C. And we have to take them on. You can't make a deal with them. You
can't hope that they're going to go away. You have to actually be willing
to fight. And I want every caucus-goer to know I've been fighting these
people and winning my entire life. And if we do this together, rise up
together, we can actually make absolutely certain, starting here in Iowa,
that we make this country better than we left it."" ... "Edwards got to
know workers in Iowa. He stood with them in their struggles." ... "Turning
a broad question about human rights toward the specific issue of trade
policy, the former senator said that human rights, human needs and human
values "should be central to our trade policy."" ... ""But," he added,
"if you look at what's happened with American trade policy, look at what
America got: Big corporations made a lot of money, are continuing to make
a lot of money in China. But what did America get in return? We got millions
of dangerous Chinese toys. We lost millions of jobs." ... ""And right here
in Iowa, the Maytag plant in Newton [Iowa] closed. A guy named Doug Bishop,
who I got to know very well, had worked in that plant, and his family had
worked in that plant literally for generations. And his job is now gone.
The same thing, by the way, happened in the plant that my father worked
in when I was growing up. It is so important that we stop allowing these
corporate powers and corporate profits to run America's policy, whether
it's trade policy, how we engage with China. This is not good for America.
It's not good for American jobs. And it's not good for working people in
this country."" ... "That's an issue Edwards has taken far, far more seriously
than his opponents in what is now a three-way race in Iowa. And that seriousness
has benefitted the former senator." -By John Nichols
-TheNation
Mitt
Romney
- Civil
Rights - Race
- History
- 2008
Election - "Romney
never saw father on King march: Defends figurative
words; evidence contradicts story." ... "[2008 Election Republican Presidential
Candidate] Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father
march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised
speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor
George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together." ...
"Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that
he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."" ... "But historical
evidence, including news accounts at the time, shows that George Romney
never marched with King, though he supported King's agenda." ... "Romney
has repeated the story of his father marching with King in some of his
most prominent presidential campaign appearances, including the "Tonight"
show with Jay Leno in May, his address on faith and politics Dec. 6 in
Texas, and on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday, when he was questioned
about the Mormon Church's ban on full participation by black members. He
said that he had cried in his car in 1978 when he heard the ban had ended,
and added, "My father marched with Martin Luther King."" ... "Mitt Romney
went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking
about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father
and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.""
... "Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was
not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said
in an e-mail statement to the Globe." -By Michael
Levenson -BostonGlobe
Mitt
Romney
- Civil
Rights - Race
- Politics
- Michigan
- 
Massachusetts- Texas
- 2008
Election - "Romney
fields questions on King: Campaign says claim not
literal." ... "[2008 Election] Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
has said he watched his father, the late Michigan Gov. [Governor] George
Romney, in a 1960s civil rights march in Michigan with Martin Luther King
Jr." ... "On Wednesday, Romney's campaign said his recollections of watching
his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant
to be figurative." ... ""He was speaking figuratively, not literally,"
Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate."
... "The campaign was responding to questions raised by the Free Press
and other media after a Boston [Massachusetts] publication challenged the
accuracy of Mitt Romney's account." ... "In a major speech on faith and
politics earlier this month in Texas, Mitt Romney said: "I saw my father
march with Martin Luther King."" ... "He made a similar statement Sunday
during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." He said, "You can see what
I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad
marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil
rights."" -By Todd Spangler and Alice Pepper
-FreeP.com
Mike
Huckabee - 
Ron
Paul
- Religion- Ad
- Liberty
- Book
- 2008
Election - "Huckabee
admaker calls cross imagery "absolutely accidental;" Paul says "fascism'
will be 'carrying a cross'." ... "Asked about Republican
rival Mike Huckabee's Christmas-themed ad, which
we wrote about yesterday and has attracted attention in part because
of the image of a cross that many see hovering over Huckabee's shoulder,
GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul said this morning on FOX &
Friends that:" ... ""It reminds me of what Sinclair Lewis once said.
He says, 'when fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the
flag, carrying a cross.' Now I don't know whether that's a fair assessment
or not, but you wonder about using a cross, like he is the only Christian
or implying that subtly. So, I don't think I would ever use anything like
that."" ... "From [Sinclair Lewis's book] It Can't Happen Here:
"But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that
the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached
enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional
Native American Liberty."" -By Mark Memmott
-USATODAY
Chris
Dodd
- Corporate
- Government
- Spy
- Law
- Intelligence
- Politics
- Telephone
- Internet
- E-Mails
- Electronic
- Civil
Liberties - 2008
Election - Foreign
- American
- 
Nevada
- 
Conn
- 
Wisc
- VT
- Mass
- "Spy
law showdown postponed until next year." ... "Congress
won't decide until next year whether to pass a complex law that would let
telephone and Internet companies off the hook from lawsuits alleging illicit
cooperation with federal government spies." ... "In something of an unexpected
move, U.S. Senate Majority Leader [Nevada Democratic Senator] Harry Reid
took to the Senate floor on Monday evening and announced he would postpone
debate on the so-called FISA Amendments Act [FISA: Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act]. That bill, which has already been approved in a closed-door
meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would grant such corporate
immunity and make it easier for the feds to snoop on phone calls and e-mails
involving foreigners and Americans without a warrant, drawing rampant criticism
from civil liberties groups." ... "Earlier
in the day, however, it appeared more certain that the Senate would
move ahead with a vote to approve the
controversial Senate measure, which would provide legal immunity to
electronic communications providers that have allegedly opened up their
networks to the National Security Agency and other federal spies since
the September 11, 2001 attacks. Above vocal objections from some Democrats,
the senators nevertheless voted 76-10 to limit debate and other stalling
tactics related to the bill." ... "But in the end, last-minute rallying
from Democrats opposed to the telecommunications immunity provisions applied
the necessary pressure." ... "Perhaps most notably, [2008 Election Democratic
Presidential Candidate and Connecticut Senator] Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.),
a presidential hopeful,
devoted
nearly the entire day to delivering one impassioned speech after another
about his opposition to granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies
accused of providing illegal assistance to government spying programs.
Other influential Democratic senators, including [Wisconsin Democratic
Senator] Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), [Vermont Democratic Senator] Patrick
Leahy (D-Vt.), and [Massachusetts Democratic Senator] Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)
echoed his concerns at various points during the day." -By
Anne Broache -CNET
Mike
Huckabee - Homosexuality
- Science
- Politics
- History
- Federal
- Funding
- Civil
Rights - 2008
Election - 
Arkansas
- "Huckabee
wanted to isolate AIDS patients." ... "[2008 Election
Repbulican Presidential Candidate] Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating
AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding
in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous
public health risk."" ... "[Campaigning unsuccessfully to be an Arkansas
Senator] In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious
about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would
isolate the carriers of this plague."" ... ""It is difficult to understand
the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of
civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated
from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which
there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the
true health crisis it represents."" ... "When Huckabee wrote his answers
in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual
contact." ... "Also in the wide-ranging AP questionnaire in 1992, Huckabee
said, "I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle,
and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."" -By
Andrew DeMillo -AP
via -Yahoo
Americans'
- Communications
- Freedom
- Government
- Intelligence
- Surveillance
- Law
- Politics
- "Protecting
privacy." ... "Contrary to [TIME Magazine Columnist
Joel] Klein's claims, Democrats want to require individualized warrants
only when the government targets Americans, not foreigners overseas. Klein
is also flat out wrong to suggest there is "broad, bipartisan agreement"
on new surveillance powers. In fact, the [Republican President Bush] administration
and its allies adamantly oppose even modest proposals to protect law-abiding
Americans who are swept up in this new, essentially warrantless surveillance.
Only after the president's illegal wiretapping program was publicly revealed
was the administration forced to comply with the law. Now the administration
is demanding broad new powers that could allow it to collect countless
communications. Congress must make sure that the new law requires independent
court oversight and protects innocent Americans' privacy. That's not "stupid";
that's our sworn and solemn duty." -By United States
Senator Russ Feingold -ChicagoTribune
US
- Pakistan
- Emergency
- Law- 
