Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has today’s gut-punch article, “Let the Games Begin,” in which he compiles the ways that Republican Congressmen Steve King and Darrell Issa used parliamentary tactics to derail a Judiciary Committee hearing on torture architect (and “fucking stupidest guy on the planet,” according to General Tommy Franks) Doug Feith.
Tag Archives: Torture
Our Diminished Democracy
In his White House Watch column for the Washington Post, Dan Froomkin does a good job of summing up the Bush administration’s disastrous response to September 11. In doing so, though, he also summarizes how these actions reflect not just a response to difficult circumstances, but rather a conscious power grab on the part of Cheney and his advisors.
Froomkin’s daily column remains a valuable resource for following the misdeeds of the current administration. Every installment raises a painful question: why isn’t the media more interested in exposing this lawbreaking?
The Worst of the Worst?
The McClatchy newspaper group has done excellent independent reporting on the excesses and illegalities of the Bush administration. A recent series, Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, highlights the travesty of the United States’ Cuban-based detention center. As a comprehensive series of stories, interviews, photos and videos makes clear, many of the prisoners that have spent years detained in harsh conditions had little or no connection to terrorism. Many were instead turned over to U.S. forces for reward money or revenge for local slights.
Putting Out The Unwelcome Mat
Blanche DuBois would have a tough time (well, an even tougher time) in modern America, as kindness to strangers doesn’t seem to be much of a motivating factor for anyone anymore. As the New York Times reports, an Italian man coming to the United States to visit his girlfriend received the common Customs response of being treated like a criminal for no reason:
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
An African Ordeal
Paul Salopek has an amazing story, “Lost in the Sahel,” in the April issue of National Geographic. While traveling to the Darfur region of Sudan to write about the human rights crisis taking place there, he and his companions are captured by militia members.
Accused of being a spy, Salopek is beaten and detained by his government captors; it is only through persistent diplomacy that he and his companions are eventually released. The shock of his ordeal haunts the rest of the piece, which explores culture and deprivation throughout the Sahel, the strip of land bordering the souther edge of the Sahara.