Meet the new jailers-- Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors. Mass executions, torture again, etc. How bad is it when the inmates plead
for us to come back? (Warning--this second link is graphic evidence of what we did there--NSFW)
posted by amberglow
on Sep 10, 2006 -
27 comments
"In 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)
distributed a 38-question survey to 5,918 FDA scientists to examine the state of science at the FDA. The
results paint a picture of a troubled agency: hundreds of scientists reported significant interference with the FDA’s scientific work, compromising the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission of protecting public health and safety."
posted by daksya
on Jul 20, 2006 -
25 comments
"You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you?
30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live.
posted by Hartster
on Jul 13, 2006 -
31 comments
Yesterday, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush.
Here it is. (Courtesy Le Monde, 8 page PDF, English.) The letter has been "dismissed by its recipients as a rambling philosophical treatise." (
Times) Further coverage at
NYT and
Le Monde (French). The letter ends 27 years of diplomatic silence.
posted by blacklite
on May 9, 2006 -
95 comments
Abu Ghraib, continued. A new cache of disturbing images and videos from the original interrogations, with commentary from Salon. [Definitely NSFW, or for Earth, for that matter.]
posted by digaman
on Mar 14, 2006 -
48 comments
The Office of Human Radiation Experiments , established in March 1994, leads the Department of Energy's efforts to tell the agency's Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects. We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE's 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country. Internet access to these resources is a key part of making DOE more open and responsive to the American public.
posted by Dome-O-Rama
on Feb 16, 2006 -
7 comments
Zeitgeistfilter: Lumpen Leisure and
Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown... Now Shut Up and Buy Something -- two fine rants about our current state of disunion by James Howard Kuntsler, author of
The Long Emergency (
excerpt), and writer and Vietnam vet
Joe Bageant. "All over but the keening for our soon-to-be-lost machine world," Kunstler predicts in
The American Conservative, while Bageant taps the inner stream-of-unconsciousness for
Dissident Voice: "Things cannot be as bad as the alarmists say. They cannot be as bad as I often suspect they are. If there really were such a thing as global warming they would be starting to do something about it. And besides, even if it were true, science will find a way to fix it. If there really were genocide going on in so many places far more people would be concerned... If the earth were heating up we would surely notice it. If our soldiers and government agencies were torturing people around the world it would make the news. If millions were being exterminated, it would be more obvious, would it not?" (Kunstler's book previously discussed
here, Bageant
here.)
posted by digaman
on Feb 14, 2006 -
52 comments
A Disturbance in the Blogosphere: Publishing the UK/US/Uzbekistan Torture Memo. Braving arrest,
bloggers have broken the UK’s law of silence with the truth about torture.
Bloggers are mass publishing the leaked UK/US/Uzbekistan Torture Memos. The memos are from the correspondences of Craig Murray who was the United Kingdom's ambassador to Uzbekistan.
These memos are evidence and a memorandum of record outlining the rendition and torture of US-arrested prisoners in Uzbekistan.
From Craig Murray's Memo:
12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the [UN] Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.
posted by Dunvegan
on Dec 29, 2005 -
246 comments
Bush administration admits denies making mistake! Starts off new relationship with conservative German chancellor by personally insulting her.
"We are not quite sure what was in her head." - a senior Bush administration official, referring to Merkel. This after Condoleeza Rice gave Merkel private assurances and made
a public statement in which she said
"when and if mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify them. Any policy will sometimes have mistakes . . . we will do everything that we can to rectify those mistakes." Obviously, Condi was mistaken. The Bush administration does not make mistakes.
posted by insomnia_lj
on Dec 6, 2005 -
54 comments
Cheyney the Torturer? According to
Dan Froomkin today, Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to the secretary of state) said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.
posted by shiska
on Nov 4, 2005 -
52 comments
David Ji , a
Chinese-American electronics entrepreneur, spent two months in custody enduring all-night interrogation sessions, but his stubbornness and occasional flashes of sarcasm infuriated his Chinese captors...guards emptied his pockets, removed his shoes and socks, and ripped the buttons off his oxford shirt. He was ushered disheveled and barefoot into the office of Zhao Yong, the chief executive of Sichuan Changhong Electric, Mr. Ji's onetime business partner and, more recently,
his warden.
posted by taschenrechner
on Nov 1, 2005 -
34 comments
RFID+US Passport? By October 2006, the U.S. government will require nearly all of the passports it issues to include a computer chip containing the passport holder's personal information...
posted by yoga
on Oct 27, 2005 -
41 comments
Katrina: The Gathering is the latest great new collectible card game!
I almost don't know how to describe it. A brilliant, concise, very complete, and quite hilarious
1 summary of the the political fallout. It just keeps going and going and going. I think I want to play a game of it.
1 - My options are laugh or cry, so.
posted by blacklite
on Sep 14, 2005 -
38 comments
At this challenging time for President Bush, let us
reminisce about the
system that
elected him. Will the next election be different? Do you want it to be? What are you going to do about it
?
posted by Pretty_Generic
on Sep 12, 2005 -
61 comments
Amend for Arnold & Jen (found on linkfilter) is a site trying to start up one of them "grassroots movements" to amend the Constitution of the United States, in order to allow naturalized citizens, those who were not born in the U.S. but have since become citizens, the possibility of holding the office of President. But not just out of a sense of social justice; primarily, it's to clear the way for an Arnold Schwarzenegger presidential campaign. (Or one for Jennifer Granholm... heh, whoever
that is!)
It should be noted, for whatever it's worth, that
Wikipedia's entry for Granholm states that she cares "not a whit" for running for president. Of special note are the
slogans the AFA (
gasp, not AFA&J?!?!) people cooked up to advance their cause, "
Amend US," "
Give 10 to Amend," and "
Tell Your Friends 2 Amend." Because let's face it: if you voted for ol' Schwarzy, you're probably a little more susceptible to catchphrases than the average bear, hm?
Oh I'm know I'm gonna catch it for that one.
posted by JHarris
on Aug 14, 2005 -
43 comments
The best American hamburgers? The American Hamburger is one of those things that I truly miss about the US and one of those things that we Brits try to copy but, for some reason, just never seem to get right.
Forget the golden-arches, we need some
proper hamburger joints serving up half-pound burgers, real milkshakes and endless refills...
posted by Nugget
on Jul 26, 2005 -
119 comments
Estimated civilian casualties in Iraq:
25,000. A new study by the
Oxford Research Group and
Iraq Body Count estimates that 1 in 1000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion began. They further estimate that 37 percent of these deaths were caused by coalition forces, and 9 percent were killed by the insurgents. Estimated civilian wounded: 42,500.
Over 1700 US troops have also died, and over 18,000 have been injured.
posted by digaman
on Jul 19, 2005 -
39 comments
This paper outlines the major thesis of the larger work... that US foreign policy during the Cold War was not primarily about keeping the USSR out of Western Europe, but rather about promoting the global capitalist system on a worldwide stage... Three themes—strategic, economic, ideological—are introduced in support of this argument, and applied to the 30 case studies. They lead to the conclusion that in many of these interventions the US opposed leftist Third World personalities by supporting more right-wing local clients rather than centrists who were often available. These decisions almost always proved disastrous for the local societies affected, and often even were unfortunate for longer-term American diplomatic interests.U.S. Foreign Policy in the Periphery: A 50-Year Retrospective. Related:
With Our History, Spinning America's Image Isn't Enough
posted by y2karl
on Jul 1, 2005 -
39 comments
"It wouldn't surprise me if we paid rewards" --As part of the AP's receipt of transcripts of the millitary tribunals in Guantanamo, multiple reports of our allies using money the US gave them to buy "terrorists" for shipment there.
..."When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn't pay them, they'd make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I'd definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."
Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo....
posted by amberglow
on Jun 1, 2005 -
14 comments
Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict? U.S. Military Aid and Arms Transfers Since September 11--from the
World Policy Institute, a report on whether we put our money where our mouth is. Statements like
"Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth" might sound nice and even inspiring, but why is our own government funding overwhelmingly anti-democratic and abusive governments?
... When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in 2003 -- a full 80% -- were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses. ...
posted by amberglow
on May 24, 2005 -
51 comments
