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Headline Tag: Science Rating: Amazing Hits: 801 Comments: 0 TED: How Ordinary People Become Monsters TED: How Ordinary People Become Monsters Philip Zimbardo, PhD knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge. RT 23:10, Filmed Feb 2008, Posted Sep 2008. User: spam_vigilante Sep 27, 2008 9:24 AM
Headline Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 323 Comments: 0 Rachel Maddow Show: War Crimes Rachel Maddow Show: War Crimes Rachel reports on the recent revelation that Condoleeza Rice has admitted to the Congress in writing that Cabinet members discussed in the White House how to torture people. Alex Gibney who's new movie Taxi to the Dark Side will be airing on HBO shortly weighs in. Sep 27, 2008 12:12 AM
Permanent Tag: Torture Rating: Good Hits: 41 Comments: 1 Gummy Bear Torture Chamber Gummy Bear Torture Chamber Gummy Bear Torture Chamber Sep 13, 2008 6:43 PM
Headline Tag: Politics Rating: Amazing Hits: 282 Comments: 2 Bush Strongly Disagrees with Recent Supreme Court Decision! Bush Strongly Disagrees with Recent Supreme Court Decision! President Bush says he'll abide by the Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo detainees, but that he doesn't agree with it. Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. Sep 13, 2008 1:07 PM
Unmoderated Tag: Politics Rating: No Votes Hits: 26 Comments: 0 Rep Duncan Hunter Defends Torture Rep Duncan Hunter Defends Torture RNC 08 coverage by The Young Turks. Sep 5, 2008 1:36 PM
Permanent Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 104 Comments: 0 Colbert Report: Jane Mayer Colbert Report: Jane Mayer Stephen asks Jane Mayer why she has to see enhanced interrogation as the glass being half empty, instead of half full with a guy's face in it. From The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert. Aug 13, 2008 4:00 AM
Permanent Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 323 Comments: 0 Daily Show: Still President Bush: His Not yet Legacy: Language Daily Show: Still President Bush: His Not yet Legacy: Language George W. Bush doesn't want to set an artificial timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but instead an aspirational time horizon. From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Aug 6, 2008 4:01 AM
Permanent Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 155 Comments: 0 Colbert Report: The Word: Honest Belief Colbert Report: The Word: Honest Belief The torture memo ends torture by helping people believe they've never done it. From The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert. Jul 30, 2008 4:00 AM
Unmoderated Tag: Politics Rating: Good Hits: 61 Comments: 0 Olbermann: Fox News in the Bush League Olbermann: Fox News in the Bush League Shocking! _____ Countdown with Keith Olbermann airs Mon.-Fri.8p/est, 10p/est, 2a/est on MSNBC news channel Jul 29, 2008 12:21 AM
Headline Tag: Politics Rating: Amazing Hits: 201 Comments: 0 Amnesty International: Ink Amnesty International: Ink Here’s the second monochromatic life-saving-signatures spot for Amnesty International. This time directed by Zurich 29 of French production company La Pac for TBWA France. Watch Amnesty International “Ink”. User: IAmDeK Jul 23, 2008 10:21 AM
Permanent Tag: Politics Rating: Ok Hits: 119 Comments: 1 Will Bush Cancel the 2008 Election? Will Bush Cancel the 2008 Election? Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election? by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis Published on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org It is time to think about the "unthinkable." The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election. The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don't know. But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006) we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention. The real question is not how or when they might do it. It's how, realistically, we can stop them. In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor's mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the US Supreme Court. A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed. In Ohio 2004, the arsenal of dirty tricks exploded. Based in Columbus, we have documented more than a hundred different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney) we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount. As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed. For 2008 we expect the list of vote theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters. This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory Voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card. Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000. The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency, and many new dirty tricks added in. But in Ohio 2006, the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The Secretary of State was the essential on-the-ground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004. When he announced for governor, many Ohioans joked that "Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes." But lose he did....along with the GOP candidates for Secretary of State, Attorney-General and US Senate. By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6% of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost. Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6% bump couldn't save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pled guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7% approval rating (that's not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30% in some polls. So while the GOP still had control of the electoral machinery here in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft. In traditional electoral terms, that may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it's hard to imagine any Republican candidate going into the election within striking distance. The potential variations are many, but the graffiti on the wall is clear. What's also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law, and for the US Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a clear and present policy statement. Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn't they? The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branch has been carefully laid. The litany is well-known, but worth a very partial listing: The continuation of the drug war, and the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, have decimated the Bill of Rights, and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence, and far more. The current Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, has not backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants. The establishment of the Homeland Security Agency has given it additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the "immigration problem," large concentration camps are under construction around the US. The administration has endorsed and is exercising its "right" to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled "quaint." With more than 200 "signing statements" the administration acts on its belief that the "unitary executive" trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration's use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress. There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress?and the public?have rolled over without significant resistance. Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438, and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term "dictatorial" is a modest understatement. The Founders established our government with checks and balances. But executive orders have accumulated important precedent. The Emancipation Proclamation by which Lincoln declared an end to slavery in the South, was issued under the "military necessity" of adding blacks to the Union Army, a step without which the North might not have won the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Harry Truman's Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military. Most to the point, FDR's Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent into the now infamous concentration camps of World War II. There is also precedent for a president overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains. But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision. Some 14,000 native Americans were moved at gunpoint to Oklahoma. More than 3,000 died along the way. All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It's well established that Richard Nixon?mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney?commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election. Today we must ask: who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a "national emergency" such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar? Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it seem Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial. Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command? The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson, he could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress. What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do. We also hear loose talk about "90 million gun owners." From the public side, the only conceivable counter-force might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general non-cooperation. But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lock-step support to whatever the regime says and does. It's also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton et. al. So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup? We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail. For only one thing is certain: denial will do nothing. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. The FITRAKIS FILES are at www.freepress.org (where this article was originally published), along with HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, which Bob and Harvey co-wrote. Jul 8, 2008 8:23 AM
Headline Tag: Cinema Rating: Good Hits: 421 Comments: 0 Swimming with Sharks Swimming with Sharks If you ever wanted to kidnap and torture your boss, this is the flick for you. Circa 1994. Jul 7, 2008 10:19 PM
Headline Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 302 Comments: 3 Dispatches: Is Torture a Good Idea? Dispatches: Is Torture a Good Idea? Channel 4 presentation, RT 49:06. Clive Stafford Smith is a British lawyer who has represented American prisoners on Death Row and, more recently, detainees in Guantanamo Bay. In this programme, he reveals the abuses suffered by Guantanamo detainees and talks to experts in the field of torture, including CIA and US Army veterans. The programme examines cases of false confessions extracted under torture, suggesting that torture is useless as well as being repugnant and illegal. User: spam_vigilante Jul 6, 2008 4:36 AM
Headline Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 507 Comments: 4 Human Rights Report Confirms Bush Guilty of War Crimes Human Rights Report Confirms Bush Guilty of War Crimes The Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights reached that conclusion after two-day clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees, who had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The detainees were never charged with crimes. "We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering," said Dr. Allen Keller, a medical evaluator for the study. In a 121-page report, the doctors' group said that it uncovered medical evidence of torture, including beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sodomy and scores of other abuses. The report is prefaced by retired U.S. Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the Army's investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in 2003. "There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes," Taguba says. "The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account." Over the years, reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture at Guantanamo prompted the Bush administration to deny that the U.S. military tortures detainees. Since only 11 detainees were examined "the findings of this assessment cannot be generalized to the treatment of all detainees in U.S. custody," the report says. However, the incidents documented are consistent with findings of other investigations into government treatment, "making it reasonable to conclude that these detainees were not the only ones abused, but are representative of a much larger number of detainees subjected to torture and ill treatment while in U.S. custody." Four of the men evaluated were arrested in or taken to Afghanistan between late 2001 and early 2003 and later were sent to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held for an average of three years before being released without charge, the report says. The other seven were detained in Iraq in 2003 and released within a year, the report says. All the subjects told examiners that they were subjected to multiple forms of torture or ill treatment that "often occurred in combination over a long period of time," the report says. Among the ex-detainees was an Iraqi in his mid-40s, identified only as Laith, whom U.S. soldiers took into custody in October 2003 and who was released from Abu Ghraib in June 2004. According to the report, Laith was subjected to sleep deprivation, electric shocks and threats of sexual abuse to himself and his family. "They took off even my underwear. They asked me to do some movements that make me look in a very bad way so they can take photographs. ... They were trying to make me look like an animal," Laith told examiners, according to the report. According to the report, Laith said the most "painful" experiences involved threats to his family: "And they asked me, 'Have you ever heard voices of women in this prison?' I answered, 'Yes.' They were saying, 'Then you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them.' " The examiners concluded in the report that "Laith appears to have suffered severe and lasting physical and psychological injuries as a result of his arrest and incarceration at Abu Ghraib prison." Another detainee, Youssef, was detained by U.S. soldiers nearly seven years ago when he tried to enter Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan without a passport, the report says. He initially was held in an Afghan prison, where he describes "being stripped naked, being intimidated by dogs, being hooded and being thrown against the wall on repeated occasions," the report says. A few months later, he was taken to the Guantanamo Bay facility, where he was subjected to interrogators who would enter his cell and force him to lie on the floor with his hands tied behind his back to his feet, the report says. Youssef said the interrogators wanted him to confess of involvement with the Taliban, the report says. Based on its investigation, the report calls on the U.S. government to issue a formal apology to detainees subject to torture and ill treatment by the military since fall 2001 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Jun 26, 2008 12:30 PM
Headline Tag: Television Rating: Amazing Hits: 299 Comments: 3 How Clear is It Where McCain Stands on Issues How Clear is It Where McCain Stands on Issues From the Cafferty File, here's Jack's question: If John McCain doesn't stop changing his position on the issues, he threatens to make John Kerry look like an amateur. In order for McCain to win in November, he has to appeal to both the traditional Republican base and to independents. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post says it's a delicate dance, and if McCain's not careful "he's liable to break a hip." Of course any doctor will tell you a broken hip can be very difficult to recover from. On Iraq, the economy, guns and God, McCain is to the right. On immigration, campaign finance reform and global warming, he's to the left. It's all very reminiscent of John Kerry back in 2004. McCain went after Barack Obama yesterday, for proposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. A month ago McCain said he was willing to consider a windfall tax on the oil companies. What about offshore drilling? During his last presidential run, McCain was against it. Now he's for it, saying the states should decide if they want to drill for oil off the coast. This could cost him big time in states like California and Florida which are extremely environmentally conscious. Then there are the Bush tax cuts. McCain was against them -- twice -- but now he's for them. McCain has also called for the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay to be closed down and torture banned. But last week he criticized the Supreme Court's ruling that detainees there should have access to U.S. courts -- calling it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Here's my question to you: How clear is it where John McCain stands on the issues? Jun 19, 2008 4:17 PM
 
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