Humanitarian Issues
"When former military liberation movements come to power, the very 'command character' that ensured success against the enemy tends to become the structural flaw which impedes their building of the democratic institutions required by civil society ... The much-celebrated attainment of formal peace with the north and, maybe eventually, independence for the south, should not be equated with liberation, and certainly not with the creation of lasting democracy." [more]
"'Every single thing the U.S. did led to civil war,' says Christian Parenti, author of 'The Freedom,' his account of occupied Iraq. 'The failure of reconstruction, the firing of the army, the blatant theft of Iraqi oil money, the use of the Badr Brigade, the use of Peshmerga, the use of death squads, the use of indiscriminate detention and torture, the destruction of Falluja and other towns in Al Anbar province,' explains Parenti, created a raging insurgency and sparked civil war. [more]
"U.S. broadcast media are failing to provide even minimal coverage of the ongoing crisis — some say genocide — in Darfur, Sudan, according to a new report, which concludes that media fixation with celebrity, as well as the Iraq war, is crowding out news of important events that deserve global attention 10 years after the genocide in Rwanda." [more]
"The Minutemen left California as a failure, drawing few people to their project while encountering strong resistance from a broad coalition of opposition." [more]
"The Bush administration has turned Guantánamo into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It's a place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11 downhill slide." [more]
"'The biggest surprise was that 76 percent of people who had a medical-related bankruptcy had health insurance when they first got sick,' said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a doctor at Cambridge Hospital and one of the authors. 'That's really new. No one has asked that before.'" [more]
"In the Senate hearings, lawmakers grilled Gonzales on whether it is legally permissible for U.S. personnel to engage in 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment' of noncitizens detained outside of the United States. Gonzales replied that 'aliens interrogated by the United States outside the United States enjoy no substantive rights' under the U.S. Constitution or the Convention Against Torture, a treaty ratified by the Senate in 1994 that bans all interrogation methods that cause severe pain or discomfort." [more]
"Without a resolution of the fighting in Darfur, peace in Sudan is only partial. Despite this, Secretary of State Colin Powell has signaled Washington's intention to relax sanctions and allow U.S. companies to take advantage of Sudan's oil wealth." [more]
"The Council's current relationship with Mr. Kissinger," Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter to Hoge, "evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure. This I want no part of." [more]
"The FBI complained that military interrogators have gone far beyond the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture and have followed an apparently new executive order from President Bush that permits the use of dogs and other techniques to harass prisoners." [more]
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(IHT, Apr 30)
"In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto." [more]
(Interactivist Info Exchange, Jul 26)
"Horizontalism is not an ideology, however, it is a relationship — a way of relating to one another in a directly democratic way while at the same time creating through the process of discovery. What has resulted is the creation of an amazing complex of movements, all linked." [more]
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