Search Results for: "Amnesty International"

Holder's Bad Applism and Our Own

By David Swanson
(with image by Michael Parenti)

Attorney General Eric Holder is addressing a war crime without addressing the wars, and is focusing on the lowest ranking participants in that crime without addressing its status as official policy established by higher ups and openly confessed to by a former president and vice president. This is bad applism, the same approach that has held a handful of recruits responsible for Abu Ghraib, claiming to thereby remove bad apples from a good system. read more

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Rallies Around U.S. To Demand Accountability for Torture

Thursday, June 25, 2009, has been designated Torture Accountability Action Day by a large coalition of human rights groups planning rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.’s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.

http://accountability4torture.com

Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, read more

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It Could Happen to Yoo

By David Swanson

Sometimes, during a tsunami of bad news, it’s nice to come up for a breath of encouraging air. The only way to do that this week that I know of is to read a beautiful 42-page order by a judge (PDF). Usually such things don’t strike me as beautiful, but this one says that leading torture lawyer John Yoo can be sued in court by one of his victims. It also says that his arguments read more

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Take Heart and Have Courage

By David Swanson

We’ve pushed long and hard to put accountability, impeachment, prosecution, and the restoration of congressional power on the American table, and they’ve all just landed with a thud and splatter of gravy and cranberry dressing. So, eat up, take heart, and prepare to work harder than we have over the past several frustrating years of path breaking and pressure building.

Impeachment, specifically of torture memo author turned lifetime federal judge Jay Bybee ( read more

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Listen to Francis Boyle

By David Swanson

As evidence of Bush and Cheney’s crimes is slowly pried loose from President Obama’s fingers, it’s easy to forget just how long ago numerous articulate voices were identifying and denouncing those crimes, none more so that Francis Boyle, who told Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show on September 13, 2001:

“Before I support a war that will jeopardize the lives of tens of thousands of our servicemen and women, I want to see the evidence that we are relying read more

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Rotten at the Core

By David Swanson

–Remarks on March 19, 2009, in a park in which people are living in Richmond, Va., in front of offices of the Federal Reserve–

From outside the United States it’s easy to imagine that everyone inside the United States is doing well. If you live in a country occupied by U.S. soldiers, as over 150 countries are around the world, if you live with extreme poverty and disease, if the United States provides your country’s government with shiny expensive weapons, read more

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Spring Break for Iraq

By David Swanson

I’m honored to have been included in this event and applaud what Our Spring Break and DC Students for a Democratic Society are doing here in cold, wet Washington, D.C., for spring break.

We’re now at 6 years of bloody and horrific occupation of Iraq, and 7.5 years in Afghanistan. That means that most college students in the United States were not yet college students when this began. Opposing something that you grow up with takes more wisdom and more nerve, and yet read more

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UFPJ Violates Own Policies to Avoid Holding War Criminals Accountable

United for Peace and Justice, Largest Peace Coalition in U.S., Abandons its Agenda in Order to Avoid Working for Accountability and Prosecutions

At a time when more and more organizations are speaking up for accountability, including AfterDowningStreet, Democrats.com, Progressive Democrats of America, Code Pink, Center for Constitutional Rights, Robert Jackson Steering Committee, National Accountability Network, People for the American Way, American Civil Liberties Union, American Freedom Campaign, read more

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Nonviolence Now

By David Swanson

Change is in the air. How about a change away from violence?

The state of Georgia is preparing to execute a man widely known to almost certainly be innocent. Here is an Amnesty International report on the case of Troy Davis. And here are things you can do to try to prevent this murder, this state killing, this official lynching in the twenty-first century.

And if you don’t live in Georgia, don’t get too self-satisfied. All of us are currently engaged in killing innocent read more

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Where Your Tax Dollar Will and Will Not Go

By David Swanson

During an endless airplane trip from hell yesterday that included an extended stay in Chicago’s scenic O’Hare airport, I had the misfortune to read one book about where our tax dollars go and another book that was, indirectly, about where they do not go.

Nick Turse has done something pretty amazing in producing an entertaining account of the almost limitless variety of ways in which our money is wasted by what he calls the military industrial technological entertainment read more

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