From Tom Dispatch
By Karen J. Greenberg

These days, it’s virtually impossible to escape the world of torture the Bush administration constructed. Whether we like it or not, almost every day we learn ever more about the full range of its shameful policies, about who the culprits were, and just which crimes they might be prosecuted for. But in the morass of memos, testimony, op-eds, punditry, whistle-blowing, documents, and who knows what else, with all the blaming, evasion, and denial going on, somehow we’ve overlooked the most significant victim of all. One casualty of the Bush torture policies — certainly, at least equal in damage to those who were tortured and the country whose laws were twisted and perverted in the process — has been human rights itself. And no one even seems to notice.

So let’s be utterly clear: The policies of the Bush administration were not just horrific in themselves or to others, they may also have brought to an end the human rights movement as we know it.

One need only glance at the recently released Justice Department memos, which have caused such a media storm of late, for the story of what has happened to human rights in American hands to become clearer. It is not just, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently wrote, that “our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it.” No less important, though hardly commented upon, is this fact: the United States succumbed to the exact patterns of abusive state action that the human rights movement was created to outlaw forever. What the Bush administration pursued, after all, was a policy of state-sponsored, legally codified dehumanization designed to torture (and in some cases destroy) individuals, which was to be systematically and bureaucratically implemented in the name of the greater good of the country, however defined.

The documents that the Obama administration and Congress have just released make this conclusion impossible to avoid. These include four memos written by the Office of Legal Council between 2002 and 2005, the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Interrogation Practices, and the Senate Select Committee Narrative on the Chronology of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Memos. Added to this must be the publication by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books of a previously secret International Committee of the Red Cross report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

Read more Human Rights

From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama promised “more transparent … more creative” government. His release of the torture memos, and the Pentagon’s expected release of more photos of detainee abuse, is a step in the right direction. Yet he assured the CIA that he will not prosecute those who followed the instructions to torture from the Bush administration. Congress might not agree with this leniency, with prominent senators calling for investigations.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, just released a 262-page report titled “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.” Levin said the report “represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse … to low-ranking soldiers. Claims … that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a ‘few bad apples’ were simply false.” Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also are proposing investigations.

The Senate interest in investigation has backers in the U.S. House, from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, D-Mich., who told The Huffington Post recently, “We’re coming after these guys.”

Amrit Singh, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Pentagon’s photos “provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib. Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse.” The ACLU also won a ruling to obtain documents relating to the CIA’s destruction of 92 videotapes of harsh interrogations. The tapes are gone, supposedly, but notes about the content of the tapes remain, and a federal judge has ordered their release.

Read more Disclosure

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Our subject today: the end of the physical world.

Which is, yes, a tad hyperbolic, but it contains a nugget of truth. Bear with me.

Last week, I fell into conversation with a fellow named Bud and shared something that has been rattling around my head for a while now: a sense that, as intellectual properties become ever more digitized, we are seeing the disappearance of, well … “things.” Physical artifacts that once were as much a part of every day as ketchup stains on your tie are now disappearing inside hard drives.

Bud, a musician, knew exactly what I meant. He used to play with a band. Now he has a band, if he so desires, inside his keyboard.

But it’s not just live music. It’s recorded music. I have a huge collection of CDs and vinyl albums that these days is used mainly for décor; when I want tunes, I turn to my iPod.

And it’s photography. We used to have these things called snapshots, but no longer. Photos are digitized now.

Read more Loss

From The Virginian-Pilot
By Daryl Lease

A few questions and answers about the economy…

Q. I keep reading that some state legislatures are turning down federal stimulus money for unemployment compensation. Florida’s lawmakers just turned down $444 million, a few weeks after the Virginia General Assembly refused $125 million. Louisiana and other states, mostly in the South, are apparently considering the same. What’s going on?

A. Lawmakers, predominantly visionary Republicans, say the money comes with too many strings. For instance, the states would have to start covering part-time workers who lose their jobs and extend the length of time that people in job retraining programs can draw unemployment.

Q. What’s so awful about that?

A. As the majority leader in Florida’s House of Representatives says, it’s “an unfunded mandate from the Obama administration.”

Q. Um, hello? $444 million? $125 million? Isn’t that “funding”?

A. Technically, yes. And it’s not actually a mandate, per se. It’s a temporary program, lasting two years. But we all know it’s hard to end something like this once it starts.

Read more Q and A

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist

Goldman Sachs’ new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left Frank’s committee in September, will join Goldman as director of government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury Department. This is not Paese’s first swing through the Wall Street-Congress revolving door: he previously worked at JP Morgan and Mercantile Bankshares, and in between served as senior minority counsel at the Financial Services Committee.

Read more Congress

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

With good reason, progressive economists reflect positively on Roosevelt’s New Deal even though:

– it failed to end the Great Depression;

– had many flaws;

– did too little for blacks, women, immigrants, small farmers, agricultural workers, and the poor;

– let blacks be persecuted, discriminated against, and in the South denied their voting rights and lynched;

– 10 weeks after Pearl Harbor, he signed an Executive Order interning loyal Japanese American citizens because of their ethnicity; smaller numbers of German and Italian Americans as well;

– despite popular discontent with US broadcasting, he signed the 1934 Communications Act establishing permanent broadcasting law that handed the public airwaves to entrenched interests and laid the foundation for today’s corrupted media; he called it a “New Deal in Radio Law,” indeed for the broadcasters that profited;

– his main task was to save capitalism, not remake America into a social democracy beyond what was necessary at the time; Read the rest of this entry »

From Global Research
By Michel Chossudovsky

The Swine Flu scare has boosted the stock market values of Big Pharma. Following initial reports from Mexico on the influenza outbreak, the demand for anti-flu drugs has skyrocketed.

Supported by media disinformation, an atmosphere of fear and intimidation has unfolded. Health “emergencies” have been declared in various parts of the US.

The most sought after influenza drugs are Tamiflu and Relenza. Treatment courses by the US government have been released from the national stockpile “to make sure health care providers are ready for any escalation in cases.”

Tamiflu is produced by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche on behalf of a US based biotech company Gilead Sciences, Inc. While the drug is produced by Roche, it was developed by Gilead Sciences Inc. which owns the intellectual property rights.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was one of the major shareholders of Gilead Sciences. In 1997, Rumsfeld was appointed Chairman of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a position which he held until becoming Secretary of Defence in the Bush administration in 2001. Rumsfeld was on the Board of Directors from the establishment of Gilead in 1987.

Fortune Magazine in a report published at the height of 2005 bird flu crisis, described Gilead as one of the most politically connected companies in the biotech industry. Rumsfeld’s interests and/or holdings in Gilead following his resignation in 2006 are not known.

Read more Bonanza

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

In the turbulent imagination of the hard-core conservative, American foreign policy should be about telling off the rest of the planet. According to the right-wing mind-set, a manly foreign policy would curtail any effort at seeking influence abroad, cut off assistance to developing countries, forget about improving our global image and, above all, withdraw from the existing international organizations, especially the United Nations, which is nothing more than a gargantuan waste of money and a hive of parasitic bureaucrats. Only if we brusquely and even violently dismiss the obnoxious foreigners who annoy us can we vindicate our political and moral superiority.

Then there is the real world, where we regularly encounter threats like swine flu—and where we must depend on the other people who live in this world to help protect our nation and our families. Certainly that is the outlook of America’s new presidency, confirmed with profound urgency after 100 days by the sudden prospect of pandemic disease.

Every day, reactionary bluster is exploited for theatrical purposes by radio and television personalities, rustic politicians, frothing bloggers and all the other clownish extremists who regale us with parodies of conservatism. For simple minds, that’s entertainment. But for the past several years, powerful officials in the United States applied the right’s bombastic prescriptions to policy, most disastrously on matters of war and peace and international cooperation. The last administration actually sent an ambassador to the U.N. who had publicly disparaged its very existence.

So it is unsurprising that the open mind and extended hand of Barack Obama would infuriate the same figures who once applauded John Bolton and cheered for war with mouths full of “freedom fries.” They cannot comprehend why the new president would take immediate steps toward repairing our reputation and our alliances. They would rather look for scapegoats than solutions.

Read more Ignorance

From The Guardian UK
By Naomi Wolf

As citizens’ outrage over the torture memos heats up, and the US Congress is barraged with calls to appoint a special prosecutor, Americans may be about to commit an egregious miscarriage of justice. Republicans have now accused Democrats in Congress of having “blood on your hands too” in relation to the escalating calls to investigate. I would go further: not only do Congressional Democrats have blood on their hands – but so do we, the American people. And CIA agents may be about to be sacrificed to assuage their – and our – actual and associative guilt.

The suddenly urgent calls by our Congressional Democratic leaders, and even by many of the American people, to prosecute CIA operatives, military men and women and contractors who were certainly involved with, colluded in or turned a blind eye to torture are not only the height of hypocrisy, they are a form of unconscionable scapegoating. The scapegoating is political on the part of Congressional leaders, and psychological on the part of many Americans who are now “shocked” at what was done in their name.

Hello America, were you asleep for the past seven years? The fact that the Bush administration used torture has been the furthest thing from a secret. When the political winds were with the last administration, which framed qualms about torture as being soft on “the war on terror”, just about every Congressional Democrat fell right into line to accept it, if not cheer it on. Even Hillary Clinton supported torture – right up through her presidential run. Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture in closed-door meetings. When activist groups and citizens called for a special prosecutor, all we heard from Congressional Democrats was how they did not wish to spend the political capital.

President Bush hid the torture in plain sight by championing it. Vice-President Cheney gave such explicit interviews about his role in directing the policy of torture that in legal terms, were there a prosecution, they would amount to a confession. Did the Congress that is now so piously calling for the investigation of rank-and-file agents and military personnel express their horror and outrage then? With a very few exceptions, they did not.

Read more Torturers

From The LA Times
By Frank Snepp

When Bush administration lawyers wrote their memos authorizing extreme interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, they had to conjure up horrible images: Prisoners gagging and sputtering as their interrogators reproduced the sensation of drowning. Human heads slammed repeatedly into walls. Insect-phobic prisoners cowering in fear in 8-by-10-foot cages.

How can the lawyers live with those images? And what damage did the interrogators who used the techniques sustain to their souls?

These are not academic questions for me. As a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the last five years of the war, I know I put my soul at extreme peril. I am still haunted by what I did, and I suspect that what I witnessed and perpetrated in those years set the stage for the Bush Justice Department’s approach to torture

In the six months leading up to the Vietnam War cease-fire in 1973, I was assigned to debrief eight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners at the National Interrogation Center in downtown Saigon. I had been trained as an intelligence analyst, not an interrogator. But because I was, by then, one of the CIA’s most knowledgeable experts on North Vietnamese politics and strategy, it was thought I might engage the prisoners in “meaningful” discourse, albeit through translators because I spoke no Vietnamese.

My most challenging interrogation involved Nguyen Van Tai, the highest-ranking enemy officer we captured. A colonel in the North Vietnamese security service, he’d run assassination and terrorist operations against the French during the first Indochina war, and he employed the same brutal tactics against Americans and South Vietnamese officials in Saigon.

Read more Torture