Civil Rights

On September 18, 2009, seven former heads of the CIA publicly told President Barack Obama not to prosecute CIA torturers. On April 16, 2009, Obama had already publicly told Attorney General Eric Holder not to prosecute CIA torturers. On September 18th, Holder publicly reassured the CIA.

The coast was clear. The books started flowing. George W. Bush and John Yoo put their books out in 2010, Donald Rumsfeld in 2011, and Dick Cheney’s also later this summer.

Just as the torture techniques read more

Fifty years ago, freedom riders traveled by bus into the U.S. South.  Now American freedom riders are joining their allies from around the world on a flotilla bound for Gaza.  The U.S. ship is called The Audacity of Hope.
 
The heroes on this ship have pledged to sail unarmed and to refuse to use violence. The Israeli military, which continues to illegally blockade Gaza, causing endless suffering to the Gazan people, has pledged to use violent force to prevent the read more

I ran into some of your employees, John, at Boston Logan airport, believe it or not. In fact, I had no choice but to run into them or I couldn’t get home.

Now, I had just flown from London to Boston without blowing up the airplane, and in fact the Heathrow coppers have their own Insecurity Theater similar to yours. But that didn’t matter. I couldn’t continue on to our nation’s corporate headquarters on the Potomac without being further treated as a mass-murderer, as read more

Eight years ago, Donald Rumsfeld asked Jim Haynes whether they should seek new legislation on detainee treatment “so we get off the hook legally.” Rumsfeld’s request and Haynes’ response are here: PDF.

Haynes admitted that legislation could “reduce arbitrariness” but warned that by asking for legislation a precedent would be set for future presidents. In addition, Haynes cautioned, legislation might “limit the President’s ability . . . to gather read more

U.S. newspapers sometimes print what they call the total death count from one or more of our wars, and all the dead who are listed are Americans. They aren’t all the Americans. They don’t include contractors or suicides or various other categories of dead Americans. They certainly don’t include those who died for lack of basic needs while we dumped half of our public treasury into wars.

But they also don’t include anyone from that 95% of humanity that’s not from read more

From David Swanson:

I’m looking forward to speaking at the Athens Human Rights Festival in Athens, Ga., on May 14 and 15, 2011.  

I’m also looking forward to hearing the great line-up of speakers, poets, singers, and musicians. 

Here’s the schedule. 

This festival began in 1979 to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Kent State murders. That first year, Gene Guerrero (Director – Georgia American Civil Liberties Union) urged students to oppose the reinstatement read more

1. More Americans learned much more of the information that Ellsberg made public.
2. It was always assumed that Ellsberg would have a trial (as of course he did), whereas I see no reason to assume Manning ever will. (I’m almost alone in this, but – hey – it’s my list.)
3. They tried to kill Ellsberg but did not torture him.
4. Ellsberg was out on personal recognizance, while Manning has been held in an isolated 6×12 cell for the better part of a read more

Sweden banned censorship and guaranteed free speech in 1766, 10 years before the Declaration of Independence in the American British colonies, and — apart from shameful episodes of caving in to dictatorships and Nazis — has pretty well kept it in place.

Sweden banned the death penalty and has not used it since 1910.

Now, Sweden has an opportunity to punish the speech of a Nobel Peace Prize nominee with the death penalty by extraditing Julian Assange to the United States to be put on read more

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday about the failures of foreign leaders to respect people’s freedoms, a 71-year-old U.S. veteran Army officer, a man who spent 27 years in the CIA and delivered presidential daily briefs, a peace activist and proponent of nonviolence, the man who famously confronted Donald read more

If you’ve wanted to be part of a powerful effort to bring Bush-era officials to justice for their crimes, now is your chance. We’ve joined a national effort to reach out to the people of Spain, whose courts are considering prosecuting six of Bush’s lawyers under international law. Our campaign includes an open letter and ads in prominent Spanish newspapers and billboards.

Even though the Obama administration has been working hard behind the scenes to stop this, our friends at read more

The danger of permitting the Egyptians democracy, rather than replacing a dictator with his (and our) torturer lies, let us be honest, not in the possibility that Egyptian politics will approach the religiosity of our own Republican Party, and not in the possibility that the civil liberties we have helped deny Egyptians for decades won’t all be immediately established, and certainly not in the possibility that the Egyptians would commit collective suicide by attempting to attack the United read more