There is an strong extremist Buddhist faction in Sri Lanka that believes that non-Buddhists are second class citizens and this group is powerful enough that it can influence the government, yet another example of the terrible consequences when religions can influence the use of state power.
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James Bamford is a writer specializing in security issues. After great effort he managed to arrange an interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow for Wired magazine. The writer spent three full days spread out over three weeks interviewing Snowden for a cover story as to what made him do what he did, a question that continues to fascinate observers despite Snowden having seemingly answered it many times. The article is accompanied by several photographs that were take just before Bamford arrived in Moscow and the story of that photo shoot is itself pretty interesting.
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Three years ago, I wrote about the danger of the creeping paramilitarization of local police departments, with them acquiring military style clothing, weaponry, vehicles, and other hardware. The trouble in Ferguson, MO following the killing of an unarmed black man by police, shows just what can happen when you do that. It looks like the local police went full metal jacket on a civilian population as they protested the initial shooting, with snipers, armored vehicles, and all the other goodies that the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security has been showering on police departments with. These photos show snipers, police in riot gear, and the like.
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When president Obama talks about torture practiced by the US, and excuses the actions of the torturers, he gives the impression that they occurred under the Bush-Cheney regime. But a new Amnesty International report says that torture continued well into the Obama presidency even as recently as a year ago. Nico Hines and Sami Yousafzai describe some of its contents.
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There has been increased attention to the abuse of civil forfeiture laws. These are laws that enable authorities to seize the property of individuals even if they are never even charged with a crime and putting the burden on them to go through the complex and expensive legal process to get back their property. Mark Frauenfelder describes what happens in Philadelphia.
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The MIT linguist and political analyst does a quick recent history of the situation in the region and what Israel hopes to achieve by its successive military assaults on Gaza that are causing outrage and protests in the rest of the world, as this report of a recent rally and demonstration in London demonstrates.
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My nomination for that would be its ‘national security reporter ‘ Dina Temple-Raston whom I have long castigated for being an unapologetic propagandist for the organs of the national security state. Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of her breathless and uncritical coverage, this time of claims made by the CIA and its front organizations.
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There has been an orgy of remembrances about Richard Nixon’s resignation as president because the 40th anniversary was on the 9th. I am not a big fan of these retrospectives but I found the following video clip intriguing. It is from a TV series called Nixon’s the One that has not yet been broadcast in the US. It is supposed to be an accurate verbatim portrayal of events based on transcripts and notes of those present.
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In an extremely important and positive development triggered by Edward Snowden, Yahoo announces that like Google they will begin to encrypt email. It was clear that the only way that government spying could be thwarted is if the big companies started including sophisticated encryption methods into their software and made it easy to use, because ordinary people would be too intimidated by what is required to do so on their own. We cannot depend upon Congress to rein the NSA in.
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There seem to be more and more leakers willing to spill the dirt on what their governments are doing and it looks like The Intercept is their vehicle of choice for revealing information, which must be causing the major media outlets considerable chagrin at not getting the scoops. Of course, they have only themselves to blame because they have shown themselves to be not good custodians of the public trust, being more eager to ingratiate themselves with governments than informing the public.
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