12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment

SWAT Team Kills Family Dog in Front of Seven-Year Old for an Ounce of Weed

Found on Reddit: SWAT team busted into a house, shot two dogs — including a corgi, for crying out loud — in full view of a 7 year old child, and found…a little pot in the house via Dispatches from the Culture Wars

How the US Government Poisoned 10,000 During Prohibition

Hey man, remember when the US government killed over 10,00 people? Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold [...]

Judge Dismisses NSA Wiretapping Case

Great news for those who love bad news: A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails. In the ruling, issued late Thursday, U.S. District Court Chief [...]

You Have No Right Not to Be Tortured

The Supreme Court refused to hear a case of four detainees bringing suit against Rumsfeld, et al: Obama’s Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad…. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its [...]

Obama’s ‘Black Jail’ in Afghanistan

How’s that Nobel Peace Prize working out? An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base. The site, known to [...]

Mark Morford on Maine, Washington, the Bible and Gay Marriage

From the always awesome Mark Morford: Meanwhile, there was a glimmer of good news up in the state of Washington, where they voted in favor of gay marriage, sort of, only they didn’t actually call it marriage because That Would Be Wrong, given how we all know “marriage” is a registered trademark of the Bible [...]

Italian Court Convicts 23 Americans in CIA Kidnapping Case

Watch carefully to see if this makes it to your evening news and how it is positioned: An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric here in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was tortured. In [...]

Torture Tells Us What We Want to Hear

[T]he unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly PDF. In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the U.S. government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated [...]

Montana’s “American Police Force”

Montana’s “American Police Force”

A group spokesperson who called himself “Captain Michael” told local news channel KULR 8 that they’re more interested in setting up a $17 million training camp than in operating the prison. This man would not specify how they plan to use the camp. Gawker

DoJ Official Blows Cover Off PATRIOT Act

In the debate over the PATRIOT Act, the Bush White House insisted it needed the authority to search people’s homes without their permission or knowledge so that terrorists wouldn’t be tipped off that they’re under investigation. Now that the authority is law, how has the Department of Justice used the new power? To go after [...]