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Report Says White House Rejected All Advice from Government Agencies That Torture Was Illegal

REPORT NAMES 30 BUSH OFFICIALS COMPLICIT IN TORTURE

President Bush and his aides repeatedly ignored warnings that their torture plans were illegal from high State Department officials as well as the nation’s top uniformed legal officers, the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, a new published report states.

“These warnings of illegality and immorality given by knowledgeable and experienced (government) persons were ignored by the small group of high Executive officers read more

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Resolved: Will Create Peace on Earth

By David Swanson

New Year’s resolutions come in a lot of shapes and sizes. I don’t think New Year’s 2009 is a year to aim low. So, I’m resolving to create peace on earth. And I intend to follow through. The catch, of course, is that unless a couple of million other people make the same resolution and really commit to it, then I will have been a liar.

I do think just a couple of million people would be enough, especially if they are heavily concentrated in the United read more

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Did Bush Sr. Kill Kennedy and Frame Nixon?

By David Swanson

Russ Baker’s new book presents an account of the U.S. government that is both remarkably new and extensively documented. According to this account, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, devoted his career to secret intelligence work with the CIA many years before he became the CIA director, and the network of spies and petroleum plutocrats he began working with early on has played a powerful but hidden role in determining the direction of the U.S. government read more

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200 Years of Standing Up to U.S. War Lies

By David Swanson

Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., have edited a new collection of writings called “We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now.” Read it and weep … and cheer. Weep because we’ve been lied into wars in very similar ways for two centuries and have had to discover the deception anew each time. Cheer because some people have been there to denounce the lies on the spot every time, and their ranks have steadily grown.

In 1812, read more

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DNC Platform: Belief We Can Change In

By David Swanson

Here it is: Fifty Pages of Fluff. Jonathan Tasini, among others, has posted a draft of the AT&T Democratic Convention Party Platform: Here’s a PDF. It’s not all fluff, but it’s packaged that way, and you have to plow through 8 pages of stomach-turning platitudinous cowardice before getting to anything worthwhile. There is, in the end, a good deal of worthwhile stuff in here, and a good deal of head fakes in the right direction with no substantive detail.

When read more

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Torture Is Over (if we want it)

By David Swanson

Chairman John Conyers’ reasons not to impeach Bush or Cheney do not even include an assertion that they have not committed impeachable offenses or crimes. How could they, when Conyers is selling a book listing many of Bush and Cheney’s impeachable offenses and crimes? Conyers’ reasons do not include an assertion that he can end the ongoing crimes through some other approach. And they do not include any claim that a successful impeachment wouldn’t end read more

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Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights

By David Swanson

Remarks made on May 24, 2008, in Radford, Va., at the Building a New World Conference: http://www.wpaconference.org

Our First Amendment has been locked up in a chain-link Free Speech Zone.

The Fourth Amendment is under warrantless surveillance and scared for its life.

The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments have been detained without charge.

And the Eighth Amendment is presently undergoing waterboarding.

We are losing our original Bill of Rights as well as basic rights that underpin read more

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The Last Sane Republican

By David Swanson

The Republican Party as a national mainstream organization began with Abraham Lincoln and ended with Lincoln Chafee. Before and after those Lincolns, the party was not something that most Americans could relate to, was not something that many people could imagine offered any sort of benefit to all people as opposed to particular types of people.

Former U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee served in Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2006. He was the only Republican Senator read more

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Are Peace and Impeachment Possible?

“Are Peace and Impeachment Possible? Strategies for Saving our Constitution, Economy, and Environment”
By David Swanson
Remarks delivered in Ojai, California, on April 22, 2008

I’m going to talk for a while and then take some questions, and maybe even some corrections, since unlike the Pope and George W. Bush I do make mistakes. Our president, as far as I know, has never admitted a mistake. And of this I am sure, I have never publicly done anything as brave as what members of read more

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From Inside a Cage at Guantanamo

By David Swanson

The guards at Guantanamo are terrified. Even a man with no legs (amputated after being intentionally exposed to extreme cold by American guards in Afghanistan) is treated as a horrifying threat:

“The bandages wrapped around Abdul’s stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandage to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guards ignored him. Later I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his read more

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