By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins | Otherwords.org
Thirty years after Ríos Montt’s atrocities, U.S. military policy in Latin America remains a human rights disaster.
With Syria’s strife, the NRA’s annual meeting, and Kim Kardashian’s prenatal woes to report, Central America doesn’t exactly dominate U.S. headlines these days. So we [...]
By Gardner | Blog
The line between the national interests of the American people and the international interests of international corporations is just a line drawn in the shifting sands of global politics and global manufacturing. Empires are different from nations. Empires may include many nations, but nations that exist within empires are nations that [...]
By William A. Collins | Otherwords.org
Could you or I be kidnapped and waterboarded and still have no right to sue? NATO forces have refused to turn Afghan prisoners over to some local jails due to concerns about the torture committed in many of those detention centers. After a dozen years of U.S. [...]
Matthews: ‘Waterboard Cheney’ if you want to know why the U.S. invaded Iraq (via Raw Story )
On Tuesday evening’s edition of “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” host Chris Matthews discussed the legacy of President George W. Bush’s administration and the Iraq War and the [...]
By James Ridgeway | Open Society Foundation
Solitary confinement is a brutal form of prison punishment that has claimed many lives and caused untold suffering. Supermax prisons and solitary confinement units are our domestic black sites—hidden places where human beings endure unspeakable punishments, without benefit of due process in any court of law. [...]
By Steph Solis | YES! Magazine
Today, the world honors advancements for women’s rights—and it all started with a courageous group of garment workers. After more than 100 years, International Women’s Day draws millions to commemorate the advancements made in human rights and to discuss the challenges women continue to face in politics, [...]
By Gardner | Blog
What happens to the American Dream in the aftermath of Immigration Reform and the Chained CPI?
Our elected representatives in Congress are at it, again. As the smoke clears from the fake fiscal crisis, Congress is poised to gut all those protection that FDR created for all our workers, their families, [...]
By United Nations | Press Release
Israel has shown a pattern and practice of prisoner abuse, the need for outside, credible investigation is more urgent than ever. GENEVA (27 February 2013) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, today called for an international investigation on the [...]
By Gardner | Blog
The really nasty thing about the Chained CPI is that the more we must economize, the more the Chained CPI cuts its measure of inflation, maintaining an ever growing downward spiral.
The never-ending series of manufactured fiscal crisis after manufactured fiscal crisis is about to accomplish the real goal of our [...]
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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
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Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?
Failing to Heal: Hunger Strikes in Guantánamo and the Role of Medical Professionals
By Hans Hogrefe | Open Society Foundations
As many as 130 prisoners of Guantanomo are on a hunger strike. And what is the US government’s response to this ongoing crisis? Force feeding, a procedure that amounts to torture.
Almost every medical school student takes an oath upon graduation based on the classic 4th [...]