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Rights and Liberties
Obama's CIA Pick Leon Panetta Strongly Against Torture
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on January 5, 2009 at 3:30 PM.
I've had my problems with Panetta over the years, but he's a much better pick for this job than I might have hoped for. Here he is, just this year on the torture regime:
Fear exacts a terrible toll on our democracy. Five years ago, America went to war in Iraq over the false fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Even though we now know that there were intelligence officials who questioned the assertion, few leaders were willing to challenge this argument for war because they knew it might undermine public support for the president's decision to invade Iraq.
More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual.
The president says the rules are too
But all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
Our forefathers prohibited "cruel and unusual punishment" because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.
But then there's this:
The same rationale is used to justify eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant. The president has made clear that the failure of the Congress to pass this authority could jeopardize our security. Instead of trying to negotiate a compromise with Congress that would meet both our intelligence and privacy concerns, it is easier to threaten with fear.
Luckily the wiretapping is not a purview of the CIA and torture is, so he's on the right side of what I consider to be the most important issue pertaining to his job.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
How Obama Can Fix Another Bush Disaster: The War on Workers
Posted by Art Levine, In These Times on January 5, 2009 at 1:23 PM.
At year's end, President Bush and his spinmeisters, including the First Lady, defended his legacy from Iraq to Katrina. But scholars and progressives were united in their view that President Bush is one of of the worst Presidents in history.
Yet even as pundits have justly focused on the cataclysmic trifecta of Iraq, Katrina and the $7 trillion economic meltdown, there was another calamity that combined free-market zealotry, incompetence and indifference to public health and safety: the Bush Administration's War on Workers.
In its own six-part review of the "good news/bad news" year in labor, the AFL-CIO Now blog labeled Bush's government "the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history."
On virtually every front, the Labor Department that was supposed to protect workers' lives and paychecks did practically nothing to stop 6,000 workers from being killed on the job each year and prevent an estimated $19 billion from being stolen through corporate wage theft of overtime and minimum wage payments. As David Madland and Karla Walter of the Center for American Progress Action Fund pointed out recently:
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As Attacks on Gaza Escalate, NYC Protesters Decry U.S. Aid to Israel
Posted by Zahra Hankir, Indypendent on January 5, 2009 at 12:18 PM.
As Israeli ground troops crossed the border into Gaza, rapidly escalating an offensive that has taken the lives of over 460 Palestinians, thousands of New Yorkers gathered at Times Square on Saturday afternoon demanding that Israel end the killing and that the U.S. renounce its support of the Jewish state.
"We are demanding that the Palestinians be protected, but as Americans, we are also demanding that our tax money not be spent on killing innocent civilians," said Ayman el-Fawa, an Arab American volunteer at Al-Awda, one of the organizers of the events.
In the bitter cold, protesters covered an entire four blocks for hours, spanning 38th St to 42nd St, before marching to the Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN on 2nd Ave. Spectators continued to spill into the crowd well into the evening, even after the protest officially ended.
The event was the fourth of its kind, and the protests have visibly gained momentum. This time around, the rally brought together the largest number of protestors who heavily criticized the U.S. for its continuous support of Israel.
"Innocent civilians are being killed and the American government is giving money to the Israelis, especially the administration of George Bush which has tried to justify the massacre by condemning the Palestinian resistance, who have the right to resist," said Father George Makhlouf, a Palestinian priest who resides in Long Island.
The crowd was filled with many Arab Americans but also with anti-Zionist Jews, African American organizations and various other human rights and civil rights organizations. "Not in our names! Not with our money!" read one placard; "Yes We Can! Stop U.S. Military Aid to Israel," read another.
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Katrina Recovery 'Activist' Outs Himself as FBI Spy
Posted by Karen Dalton-Beninato, Huffington Post on January 5, 2009 at 3:39 AM.
A Katrina relief worker has just outed himself as an FBI mole, and the two men Brandon Darby accuses of planning subversive activity at the RNC have been in federal detention in Minnesota since the convention. They have also been denied bail and face decades in prison -- Minnesota's near-Senator Al Franken should look into that.
Note to those trying to rebuild the City of New Orleans, if one of your volunteers turns off the radio every time the Dixie Chicks come on, wears a three piece suit to human rights rallies, storms out of the confession part of the Frost Versus Nixon, or puts invisible quote marks around the word "war crimes," you might be infiltrated by some one more interested in busting protesters than helping rebuild a city brought to its knees by massive federal levee failures.
In an open letter, Darby defended wearing a wire while working at Common Ground with: "It is very dangerous when a few individuals engage in or act on a belief system in which they feel they know the real truth and that all others are ignorant and therefore have no right to meet and express their political views." Which would explain invading Iraq on trumped up intelligence but that's probably not where he was going with this missive.
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Rep. Hoyer Says Employee Free Choice Act Will Pass In 'Early Spring'
Posted by Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake on January 4, 2009 at 10:10 AM.
Despite Chris Wallace repeating three (count 'em three) times that the Employee Free Choice Act gets rid of the secret ballot (it doesn't), his interview with Rep. Steny Hoyer on Fox News Sunday was very informative. There have been questions about how committed Democratic leaders are to passing bill, and whether its chances would be doomed if they decided to kick the can down the road a year or two.
Hoyer set everyone straight this morning:
Chris Wallace: Are you going to pass it in the first month?
Steny Hoyer: I don't know about the first month but we're going to pass it early.
[]
Chris Wallace: And give me a sense of the time frame -- so you've said maybe not the first month, how soon?
Steny Hoyer: Oh I think it'll be early, I think it'll be early in the year, certainly in the early spring.
Hoyer also said that H.R. 800, which passed the House last year, will be the base bill.
The Chamber of Commerce and NAM really pissed the Dems off with their aggressive ad campaigns against Senate challengers like Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall, Jeanne Shaheen and Al Franken last year. The ads didn't work -- despite the fact that McCain added anti-Employee Free Choice rhetoric to his own stump speech, the public really never fundamentally understood what it was all about and the ads never managed to move the opinion needle.
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Talking While Brown: A Look at Racism in U.S. Airports
Posted by dday, Hullabaloo on January 3, 2009 at 11:45 AM.
I know that Barack Obama's election ended all racial strife in America, but somebody forgot to tell the TSA.
Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.
Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.
Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.
"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."
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Bush Administration Taken to Task for Allowing Loaded Guns into National Parks
Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress on December 31, 2008 at 8:14 AM.
Earlier this month, the Department of Interior overturned a Reagan-era regulation, allowing loaded firearms at most national park sites such as the National Mall. Yesterday, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sued the administration, saying the rule "jeopardizes the safety of park visitors in violation of federal law." The release notes that the White House violated their own directive:
The suit charges that the Interior Department violated several federal laws in its rush to implement the rule before President Bush leaves office, including failing to conduct any environmental review of the harm that the rule will cause, as is required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The Department also violated a White House directive that no rules should be issued after November 1, 2008, except in "extraordinary circumstances," issuing the last-minute rule change on December 10, 2008.
The Bush administration also violated its own directive in November with a last-minute rule gutting worker protections.
Demand That Obama Go After BushCo's 'Gravest Crimes'
Posted by Ari Melber, TheNation.com on December 30, 2008 at 6:10 AM.
The Obama transition team is taking questions again at Change.gov, throwing open the site this week for citizen input. The first run of this experiment was a mixed bag. The platform was open and transparent, but the official answers felt more like old boilerplate than new responses. When the submitted questions parrot topics in the traditional media, of course, the exchange can feel like a dated press conference. But here's a vital question that few reporters have ever presented to Obama:
Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?
That question ranked sixth in voting last time -- out of over 10,000 submissions -- but the transition team only answered the top five questions. Now that Vice President Cheney confessed his support for waterboarding on national television, flouting the rule of law, the issue is even more urgent. Activist Bob Fertik, who has submitted the question twice, explains how you can vote to press this issue on the transition team:
Sign in at http://change.gov/openforquestions
Search for "Fitzgerald" […and] find our question
Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote
While the press has fixated on the criminal allegations against Gov. Blagojevich, for some reason, the (even more serious) allegations of torture by officials in the current administration receive scant attention. I have not heard one question about this during Obama's transition press conferences, and the traveling press corps almost never pressed Obama on the issue during the general election campaign.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
Satire: Bush Calls on Palestinians to 'Just Die Already'
Posted by Arun Gupta, AlterNet on December 29, 2008 at 5:00 AM.
Responding to the dramatic escalation of violence in the Middle East, President Bush said that the Palestinians' refusal to "just die already" was "the root cause of the crisis."
Talking to reporters at the White House, Bush said: "See, the Israelis are just retaliating against the Palestinians' continued existence, but it's very inefficient. I mean, the Israelis have killed less than 300 Palestinians in two days of bombing Gaza. All those bombs and missiles cost a lot of money, and it's barely making a dent in the population."
The president added, "It would help the peace process significantly if Palestinians throughout the region were to all quit living, such as by stopping eating and drinking completely. We think the conflict could be ended in mere weeks."
Israeli government spokesmen endorsed the White House's new peace initiative in principle, but questioned whether it was the most effective method.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was prepared to "provide durable plastic bags to every Palestinian with instructions in Arabic how to seal it tightly over their heads so they would suffocate in mere minutes, rather than the much slower process of starvation."
Barak cautioned that the Israeli government could not pay for such an ambitious program on its own and was preparing to submit an emergency request to the U.S. Congress for more than a billion dollars to fund the plan.
According to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, Bush was "studying the Israeli proposal seriously."
When asked about the Palestinian reaction, Perino said the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority had responded "enthusiastically" to the idea, and forwarded its own proposal of Palestinians marching "en masse into the Dead Sea to drown immediately."
Perino said, "We are pleased that our friends in the Palestinian Authority are ready to stand with the West and Israel against terrorism and act in the best interests of peace by committing mass suicide, but now is not the time to bog down the process with competing proposals.
"Having millions of decomposing corpses floating in the Dead Sea, while poetic, would require a lengthy environmental review that would mean an unacceptable delay in the plan. The president emphasizes that he is committed to a quick resolution of the conflict, but one that minimizes the costs for all parties involved. President Bush feels starvation is the best solution because it would allow maggots, dogs, vultures and other scavengers of carrion to consume the dead in a timely and thorough manner."
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Inside Gaza: A Living Hell
Posted by Sami Abdel-Shafi, Independent UK on December 28, 2008 at 8:00 AM.
I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father's house, to make sure he was OK. Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.
Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighborhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here? Perhaps a police station about 200 meters away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometer away, where one of the main police training centers stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement program was under way. These were the young men trained to organize traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip's police chief.
News came by word of mouth. There had been more than 150 deaths and more than 200 people were injured or missing under rubble after the first two hours of bombing. Israel had said it would continue the offensive and deepen it if necessary. Likewise, it was said that Hamas had launched more rockets at southern Israeli towns, causing one death and four injuries. Gaza had never seen anything like the numbers of dead bodies lying on its streets. Hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside.
Bombs targeting a Hamas security force building badly damaged an adjacent school, and several children were injured. We heard of many other targets around the Gaza Strip. It reminds me of the "shock and awe" campaign the Allies launched over Baghdad in 2003. But shock and awe did not bring stability or peace.
These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell.
Bush Pushes Scary Midnight Regulations (Many to Last)
Posted by Harry Hanbury, American News Project on December 26, 2008 at 11:54 AM.
George W. Bush is on pace to impose more last-minute changes to federal rules than any president in history. Many consider Bush's "midnight regulations" to be a parting gift to big industry and against the greater public interest. Discussions are already underway to see if the next Congress can undo what the Bush White House has done.
Naked Man Killed By Cop's Taser in Texas; UK Journalist Investigates Taser Abuse
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on December 26, 2008 at 11:14 AM.
Finally, someone has written a thoughtful argument against tasers in a mainstream newspaper. It's in Britain, but they are on verge of going full taser, so it's right that they should be discussing it. It's more than we ever did here in the US.
Johann Hari:
Daniel Sylvester can't forget the night the police fired 50,000 volts of electricity into his skull. The 46-year-old grandfather owns his own security business, and he was recently walking down the street when a police van screeched up to him.
He didn't know what they wanted, but obeyed when they told him to approach slowly. "I then had this incredible jolt of pain on the back of my head," he explains. The electricity made him spasm; as he fell to the ground, he felt his teeth scatter on the tarmac and his bowels open. "Then they shot me again in the head. I can't describe the pain." (Another victim says it is "like someone reached into my body to rip my muscles apart with a fork.") The police then saw he was not the person they were looking for, said he was free to go, and drove off.
This did not happen in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or any other country notorious for using electro-shock weapons. It happened in north London and, if the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has her way, it will be coming soon to a street near you. In Britain there are 3,000 police officers trained to use Tasers as part of specialised armed response units, but Smith has fired a jolt forward. She wants there to be 30,000 Taser-carrying officers, authorised to use them against unarmed citizens, including children. These "stun-guns" fire small metal darts into your skin, and through the trailing wires run an agonising electric current through your body.
Read the rest of the post on the flip side »
A Look Inside Bush's 'Pardongate'
Posted by Faiz Shakir, Think Progress on December 26, 2008 at 10:58 AM.
After first pardoning "a Brooklyn real estate developer accused of scamming hundreds of poor, minority homebuyers - and whose father donated $28,500 to the Republican Party this year," the Bush White House moved quickly to reverse course. Bush revoked the pardon for Isaac Toussie after the White House acknowledged that the Brooklyn housing scammer did not meet pardon guidelines.
Putting aside the fact that Bush decided it was fine to grant a pardon for a predatory mortgage lender in the midst of a recession, there were a number of other improprieties in the pardon of Toussie:
- First of all, it had been granted by Bush despite the fact that the Pardon Attorney, Ronald L. Rogers, had not given a formal recommendation for it.
- Also, Toussie had not qualified for a pardon per Justice Department guidelines because it had not yet been five years since the completion of his sentence.
- Furthermore, Toussie's pardon came after his father, Robert, made his first political donation of $28,500 to the national Republican party in April.
Perhaps the most intriguing matter is the process by which the White House decided to issue the pardon. Toussie had hired Bradford Berenson, a former top lawyer in the White House counsel's office from 2001-2003, to handle the case.
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North Carolina May Pay Reparations for Eugenics Program That Lasted Until 1975
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on December 26, 2008 at 2:22 AM.
North Carolina lawmakers pushed Thursday to offer reparations to thousands of victims of a forced sterilization program now recognized as a shameful part of U.S. history.
A state House panel recommended the state give $20,000 to victims of the eugenics program, which sterilized about 7,600 people between 1929 and 1975 who were considered to be mentally handicapped or genetically inferior. Though North Carolina and several other states have apologized for such programs, none have offered reparations.
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The Founding of the Church of Gay
Posted by AndyS in Colorado, Daily Kos on December 25, 2008 at 5:00 PM.
This will be a church and a religion with the following precepts (and ONLY the following precepts):
First, we can demand immediate tax exempt status for all activities of the Church of Gay as any other Church.
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