Telecoms immunized from suits. 1961 speech Eisenhower Warns us of New World Order.
Torture. Cheney and justice for torture victims. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a discussion in Washington this month, talks about working in the White House after 9/11. Ariel Dorfman: Ex-Colin Powell aide says Dick Cheney fears "somebody will Pinochet him"Dorfman: Cheney likely terrified of being tried for crimes against humanity for OK'ing tortureHe says Pinochet tag would be shameful for Cheney, debases U.S. in eyes of worldDorfman: Cheney should face trial in U.S. to show that "justice for all" has meaning Editor's note: Ariel Dorfman is the Chilean-American author of "Death and the Maiden" along with a wide variety of other plays, fiction, poetry and essays.
Dorfman is the Walter Hines Page Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University. His new memoir is "Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ). (CNN) -- Dick Cheney, it has been said, fears that "somebody will Pinochet him. " Ariel Dorfman Cheney: Powell got 'sandbagged' Cheney: 'My days are numbered' For all. US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner. We need to get to the bottom of what happened—and why—so we make sure it never happens again.1—Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe.
The phrase “War on Terror”—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was “a wartime president”—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead. ContentsIntroduction1. 1.
US prisons/detention. Countries cite U.S. to deflect criticism on jails, official says. UNITED NATIONS — Some countries try to rebut criticism of how they treat prisoners by saying they are only following the U.S. example on handling terrorism suspects, a U.N. human rights expert said Monday. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations investigator on torture, told a news conference that "all too frequently" governments responded to criticism about their jails by saying they handled detainees the same way the United States did. "The United States has been the pioneer of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world," Nowak said.
"Today, other governments are kind of saying, 'But why are you criticizing us; we are not doing something different than what the United States is doing.' " He said nations such as Jordan tell him, "We are collaborating with the United States, so it can't be wrong if it is also done by the United States. " No nation other than Jordan was specified. No War Crimes Trial for Bush/Cheney, While Chirac Convicted on minor Fraud. The United States is now officially more corrupt than the Old World.
Former French president Jacques Chirac has been found guilty of corruption when he was mayor of Paris in the early 1990s (he allegedly paid his own party workers for jobs that did not exist). He was given a two-year suspended sentence. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of that crew launched a war of aggression in contravention of the UN Charter and of the Nuremberg Principles. But they’ve never been so much as the object of a congressional hearing on their invasion and ruination of a country that had not attacked the United States and posed no imminent threat to international order. Ironically, one of their charges against the Baath Regime was that it had launched wars of aggression in 1980 and 1990! As I have argued before, Bush/Cheney epitomized this sentiment: Ironically, Chirac was the princpled one here.
File sharing shut down. Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an "unlimited" fine. The 70,000 daily visitors to popular music site RnBXclusive.com were met with a purposely terrifying message on Tuesday and part of Wednesday. The UK's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) took the site down, arrested its operator, and threw up a splash page that warned downloaders of "up to 10 years imprisonment.
" Thought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in the US were ludicrous? SOCA warns that downloaders from the site could face an "unlimited fine under UK law. " SOCA also showed users their own IP address and warned that "the above information can be used to identify you and your location," adding that "SOCA has the capability to monitor and investigate you, and can inform your Internet service provider of these infringements. " Didn't get the message? The warning goes on to say, "You may be liable for prosecution and that fact that you have received this message does not preclude you from prosecution.
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