2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

American Shame

American Shame

Comparing unemployment, income inequality, democracy, food supply, life expectancy, prison population and student performance. New York Times

Michael Ratner on Prosecuting Bush for Torture

Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights on the legal basis for investigating Bush for torture: Let’s correct one major misconception some have about the basis for this action and how it relates to the U.S. legal system at the outset. The Convention Against Torture, which mandates that Switzerland and 146 other countries including [...]

Obama Administration Refuses to Cooperate with Poland CIA Secret Prison Inquiry

DoJ won’t help: U.S. government has refused assistance to Polish prosecutors investigating whether the CIA maintained a secret prison in Poland. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights posted a letter from prosecutors on its website saying the U.S. Justice Department in October refused to provide legal assistance requested by Polish investigators by citing a bilateral agreement [...]

Maine GOP Forced To Apologize After Convention-Goers Vandalize An Eighth-Grade Classroom

So friggging stupid: For seven years, Clifford has had “a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement” on his classroom door. He uses it “to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic ‘Four Freedoms’ illustrations.” When Clifford returned to his classroom on Monday, after [...]

Mainstream News Bias Test

When something truly awful breaks it is always interesting to watch how it is covered inside the US and compare it to the outside world. We’ve got one of those this week. Watchdog site Wikileaks has released a classified video: WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen [...]

General in Afghanistan: We’ve Killed Lots of Innocent People, Found No Bombs

Freedom’s on the march: “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the “escalation of force” problem. The [...]

McCain and Lieberman’s Nightmarish Detention Bill

This is fun: An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3( c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of [...]

Land Rush in Africa

Don’t worry, we’ll still pillage Africa: Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for [...]

Obama to Block Vote on Turkey’s Armenian Genocide

20 countries and 42 U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event. But: The Obama administration has said it will seek to block a controversial bill describing as genocide the World War I killing of Armenians by Turks. A congressional panel on Thursday approved the resolution, paving the way [...]

UN Concludes UK Complicit in Torture

Tighten that noose: United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the “war on terror”. In a report published today that will make difficult reading for ministers who repeatedly denied the UK’s involvement in torture, UN officials [...]