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Vagabond Scholar: Torture Watch 10/8/09
several important pieces on torture from that past month or two
NPR's ombudsman: Why we bar the word "torture" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
Anyone who believes that NPR is a "liberal" media outlet -- and anyone who wants to understand the decay of American journalism -- should read this column by NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, as she explains and justifies why NPR bars the use of the word "torture" to describe what the Bush administration did.
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It doesn’t seem to occur to her that something other than base vindictiveness – such as a desire to maintain the universal taboo against torture, or allegiance to accuracy in language – might motivate those who want NPR to call torture "torture," rather than prettify it with banality-of-evil euphemisms invented by the very people who perpetrated it.
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As is virtually always the case with modern journalists, those who scream the loudest about how they must refrain from stating facts in order to maintain "neutrality" are the ones who, in reality, are the least neutral of all. They're just too dishonest to acknowledge it.
NPR: Harsh Interrogation Techniques or Torture?
defending the indefensible
SF Education Examiner: Arne Duncan misstates Chicago results; watchdog barks a warning
So, what are we going to do about Duncan's lies, besides ask our fairy godmother to make his nose grow every time he does it?
Just keep telling the truth, I guess.
Major new accountability campaign from the ACLU - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
The ACLU today launched a major new campaign to impose accountability for torture and related Bush-era crimes. The campaign -- Accountability for Torture -- is devoted principally to a restoration of the rule of law and the appointment by the DOJ of a Special Prosecutor. The website to coordinate these efforts is here, and that site is also now probably the single best resource for all documents and other information relating to torture and accountability efforts.
Life on Permanent Lockdown | Mother Jones
The use of so-called extended lockdown has grown exponentially since the 1980s and is now an almost routine part of the American criminal justice system. The practice has been denounced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, among others. Yet it has never aroused much public opposition, even among progressives who are outraged by reports of psychological abuse from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
Powell Told U.S. Tortured Detainees, But He Failed to Act
(Source of Truthout article) The next month, February 2004, the ICRC gave Bush administration officials a confidential report which found that U.S. occupation forces in Iraq often arrested Iraqis without good reason and subjected them to abuse and humiliation that sometimes was “tantamount to torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
t r u t h o u t | Red Cross Informed Powell About Torture
"According to the allegations collected by the ICRC, ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence' value," the report said.
"In these cases, persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators."
Ohanian > The Selling of School Reform
by Dana Goldstein
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich
and Mike Bloomberg--all failed presidential hopefuls--arrive at the
White House for a joint meeting with President Barack Obama. Upon
leaving the Oval Office, they convene a press conference on the White
House lawn.
Hullabaloo
torture apologists frequently offer extremely convoluted and even contradictory arguments. As I've written before, their defenses normally fit into a pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault.
Truthdig - A/V Booth - Sotomayor According to Colbert
many have even asked their gardener what his name is
Op-Ed Columnist - The Howls of a Fading Species - NYTimes.com
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
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There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
Hullabaloo > Another phony soldier weighs in
The General went on to say that, "during my time in Iraq there was not one instance of actionable intelligence that came out of these interrogation techniques."
Bridging Differences: Civil Rights and Democracy are Inseparable
The poorer the children, the less self-initiated activity allowed—after all, “they have to catch up.” The metaphors we use tell us a lot—including the unfortunate latest out of Washington: The Race to the Top. Ugh.
Deb
P.S. Speaking of using racing as a metaphor for schooling: If everyone becomes proficient, we’ll invent a new set of indicators to separate the very proficient, moderately proficient, etc. The new rank order will look a lot like the old ones—guess who’ll be on top and on bottom? On and on and on.
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We have a very strong heritage of seeing poverty as a personal failure.
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segregation remains in place. This is not simply due to racism as it affected schools—but also to hostility toward mixed residential communities in which not only black and white live side by side, but rich, poor, and middle-class do.
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Schools Matter: The "Pre-Brown" Quality of the Education Equality Project
Leaders of the education equity fight end up going through mental and political contortions to argue that America can and must end one system of racial injustice - while leaving all others untouched, unchallenged and intact. There is no discussion, for instance, of the disgraceful residential segregation that leaves so many urban neighborhoods - including here in New York - virtually all-white or all-black.
You rarely hear about government agencies enforcing the fair housing laws or working to reduce employment discrimination. On the contrary, the Bloomberg administration continues to battle in court against the federal Justice Department, stubbornly defending the hiring practices that created New York's 92% white Fire Department.
"America's thinking about education has taken on a strangely pre-Brown quality," writes Richard Kahlenberg, a fellow at the Century Foundation. "There exists a solid consensus among researchers that school segregation perpetuates failure, and an equally durable consensus among politicians and policymakers that nothing much can be done about it."
YouTube - Sharpton, Gingrich, Bloomberg Join Forces
...a crisis of inequality in this country with education
Bridging Differences: Can Better Teachers Close the Achievement Gap?
serves to divert attention from the need to improve the lives of poor children and their families.
Newt Gingrich Doubles Down On Sotomayor Racism Charge - Swampland – TIME.com
From the Desk of Newt Gingrich
"I have a dream: that my four little children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character."
- Dr. Martin Luther King
Can you imagine if the President of the United States nominated a judge to the U.S. Supreme Court who said this:
"My experience as a white man will make me a better judge than a Latina woman would be."
Or could you imagine if that same judge ruled from the bench to deny 18 African-American firefighters a promotion just because of their skin color?
That judge would be called a bigot -- and in my judgment, rightly so! Would there be any doubt that he would be FORCED to WITHDRAW his nomination for the Supreme Court?
Gingrich calls Sotomayor a racist. Bloomberg, Klein and Sharpton welcome him as an education reformer. « Fred Klonsky’s blog
Who was surprised that former GOP Speaker of the House and son of the Confederacy would attack Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor on the basis that she’s a Puerto Rican woman who has a history of ruling in favor of equal rights?
But how ironic that just a week ago the same Gingrich was welcomed to speak at the rally sponsored by the Education Equality Project, the self-named education reformers organized by NY Mayor Bloomberg, NY school chief Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton. This group also counts among its supporters the EdSec himself, Arne Duncan.
I’m sure Gingrich felt right at home with this bunch. And they with him?
Exposing the Pro-Life Lie | Red Room
The murder today of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas confirms what many of us have long known. Among those who call themselves pro-life, there are plenty who are anything but. They are terrorists, plain and simple, who seek to subordinate women to the religiously fanatical, patriarchal dystopia of their theocratic fantasies. At best, they are pro-fetal life. They love the pre-born but could care less for those children already here, whose poverty they will blame on their parents, whose illness and lack of health care they will shrug off as "not their problem," and whose humanity they will altogether ignore or even cheer as it is destroyed, so long as those children be Iraqi, or Afghan, or just Muslim in general.
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had Tiller been killed going into work, or had the clinic where he operated been blown up, killing the employees inside, under simple notions of the vicarious defense of others, such an act would be justified: at least it would be if one accepts the underlying premise of fetal personhood put forth by the anti-choice side.
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