According to the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, one of the many prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but not allowed to leave, the authorities did not pass on to his client a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago that he had brought for him. That book dealt with the prison camps in the Soviet Union and was suppressed in that country. [Read more…]
Following up his earlier debacles, in an TV show, Jeffrey Toobin continued his slide into complete subservience to authoritarianism, justifying the British government’s nine-hour detention of David Miranda and the confiscation of his property by saying that Miranda was similar to a ‘drug mule’. [Read more…]
I heard from commenters embertine and 2up2down2furious today that after his trial and sentencing, Bradley Manning has issued a statement announcing a wish to live as a woman and to be known in the future as Chelsea E. Manning and be addressed using the female pronoun.
I will of course do so. [Read more…]
So Bradley Manning will go to jail for telling the world what the US government is doing. I suspect that it was his release of the Collateral Murder video, in which US troops in a helicopter gunship shot people (including two Reuters journalists) walking along a street and then also gunned down passersby who stopped to help the wounded, all the while exchanging gleeful comments and congratulations at this act of cold-blooded murder, that triggered the desire by the Obama regime to have him punished as severely as possible. They now have their pound of flesh from Manning and seek to get the same from Edward Snowden. [Read more…]
President Obama’s defenses of the NSA programs are becoming increasingly risible. Cartoonists Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall get in their licks on this tempting target, while in this clip Stephen Colbert takes his turn at mocking him. [Read more…]
Cenk Uygur plays a recording of a voicemail message left by a member of Congress that shows how Congress gets contributions from lobbyists, by simply pointing out that they have influence on committees that serve the interests of the lobbyists. Members of Congress know that proposing new legislation is a surefire way to get contributions, which is why there are periodic proposals for tax reform that don’t actually result in any reforms. They are a way of churning the pot. [Read more…]
Jonathan Turley seems to have decided that the law-breaking behavior of the US government has become too extensive to maintain even the façade of being a free society. Here are the ten reasons that he gives for his conclusion and he elaborates on each one in his article. [Read more…]
We have seen how David Miranda was questioned for nine hours and had his electronic equipment taken from him by British security forces in the transit area of Heathrow airport. This article describes how the NSA actually pays the British secret service to spy on their behalf because the British have weaker regulations of their government officials’ actions. [Read more…]
The CIA has finally acknowledged its role, along with British MI6, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, replacing him with the despised Reza Pahlavi who adopted the grandiose title of the Shah of Iran. That event poisoned relations between the two countries ever since. Iranians deeply resented the foisting of the despotic Shah on them who, with massive US support, ruled until his overthrow in 1979. [Read more…]