The CIA has been forced to declassify some 270 memos from its secret torture facilities in Afghanistan. The story these memos tell is horrific and jolting. The people tortured were not terrorists. They were suspects. Some may say this is all ancient history, but consider the current president’s view on torture. He said he’s torture in a heartbeat. Are we still “torturing some folks”? Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
On October 7, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The war is now 16 years old — and that’s not even counting the decade of U.S. intervention in the country during the Cold War.
Donald Trump once advocated the “speedy withdrawal” of U.S. troops from that country. As president, however, he’s gone in the opposite direction, demanding the U.S. must now “fight to win.”
As Phyllis Bennis, director of the IPS New Internationalism project, explains in this short video, Trump’s plans to extend the war he once supported ending are even more worrisome for their lack of transparency. He’s not said how many new troops he’ll send or how long they’ll be deployed. Worse still, civilian casualties in multiple U.S. wars have been on the rise since he took office — by 67 percent in just six months.
It’s clear by now that the solution to terrorism won’t come from using military power, Bennis explains. That can only be achieved by diplomacy. “It’s harder, it takes longer, it’s not as sexy, it’s not sexy on CNN, it’s not any of those things,” she concludes. “But it’s the only thing that will work.”
Video by Victoria Borneman and Peter Certo. Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus with permission.
The Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a wonderful tribute to the many millions of people around the world who have struggled over the years against the insanity of nuclear weapons.
Congratulations to the courageous and far-sighted organizers who founded the campaign! And Congratulations to all who are or have been part of the worldwide movement for nuclear disarmament!
The Nobel Prize is an affirmation not only of the goal of nuclear abolition but of the essential role of civil society activism in helping to achieve that goal.
My colleague Pat Eddington has already taken a first pass at the newly unveiled legislation aimed at reforming Section 702, the controversial foreign intelligence surveillance authority that empowers warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States. While Pat focused primarily on the defects of the bill, I’d like to start by briefly surveying what I think it gets right, and then note a few other elements I was disappointed not to see included.
Probably the two most salient features of the “USA Liberty Act” for civil libertarians are that it partially closes the so-called “backdoor search loophole” in 702, and that it codifies the recent end of Upstream “about” collection. For those not steeped in electronic surveillance law, both of those will require a bit of explanation.
Continue reading “What’s Good and What’s Missing in the 702 FISA Reform Bill”
With Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act set to expire at the end of the year, Congress is scurrying to find a way to preserve the post-9/11 authority for the government to conduct mass surveillance of US citizens’ communications. They have come up with another Orwellian bill, the USA LIBERTY Act, which would fix none of Fourth Amendment problems of the original bill but would make the original unconstitutional bill permanent. So “Liberty” to Congress is a mass surveillance state. The Cato Institute’s Patrick Eddington joins today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report to discuss 702 and its possible replacement bill:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might have enough gas to get to Bamurye and back.
I had spent the previous hour attempting to convince someone to take me on this ride while simultaneously weighing the ethics of the expedition, putting together a makeshift security plan, and negotiating a price. Other motorbike drivers warned that it would be a one-way trip. “If you go, you don’t come back,” more than one of them told me. I insisted we turn around immediately.
Once, I believed journalists roamed the world reporting stories on their own. Presumably, somebody edited the articles, but a lone byline meant that the foreign correspondent was the sole author of the reporting. Then I became a journalist and quickly learned the truth. Foreign correspondents are almost never alone in our work. We’re almost always dependent on locals, often many of them, if we want to have any hope of getting the story. It was never truer for me than on that day when I was attempting to cover an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in South Sudan.
Continue reading “Nick Turse on The Journalist and the Fixer”
