The tribunal has almost never sided against the government, so today’s decision did not come as a surprise to those following the proceedings, much of which happened behind closed doors. The matter isn’t entirely over, however: The judges said they would still consider specific instances where data collection on the groups may have violated their rights.
When the young computer staffers at the Mercury News’s fledgling Mercury Center division posted the story on the paper’s new Internet site, they also removed the hocus pocus mystery of “journalism” that the major media had long fed the public.
The message was clear: In the United States those in prison deserve it; in foreign lands they are imprisoned unjustly. The Disneyfication of Alcatraz is the equivalent of turning one of Stalin’s gulags into a prison-themed amusement park. Prisons are institutionalized evil. And whitewashing evil is a moral monstrosity.
The end product has been lawlessness and Somali-style civil war. The state has basically been “failed” by the US and its allies. Post-Jamahiriya governmental authority is only exercised by those in power inside of their offices and a few spaces. Violent crime has proliferated. Tripoli and other major cities are being fought for by different factions and Libyan weapons are being smuggled into different countries. Even US officials, which helped midwife the groups running rampant in Libya, have not been safe from the turmoil they helped create; the murder of US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens in Benghazi on 12 September 2012 is testimony to this.
The survival of many millions of people is too important to be left to the drug companies. For a fraction of what the federal government is wasting on spreading and failing lawless wars abroad, it can expand from the Walter Reed Army Hospital example to become a humanitarian superpower that produces life-saving vaccines and medicines as if the plight of sick people mattered more than windfall profits for Big Pharma.
The revolutionists call on us to ignore the political charades and spectacles orchestrated by our oligarchic masters around electoral politics. They tell us to dismiss the liberals who look to a political system that is dead. They expose the press as an echo chamber for the elites.
Day by day, more and more of us understand that big banks are at the heart of the UK’s failing economic model and have an unhealthy influence over our political system. But still too few of us understand exactly how the banks have become so powerful and why they are so toxic. Banks and finance didn’t just take control of our economy and society out of nowhere. So how have our banking institutions and “too big to jail” bankers come in to being?
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security….”
This film is radical. With over a dozen NHS insiders as my witnesses, I will tell the alarming story of how the health service as we know it is being quietly abolished. Almost without our noticing, it’s been replaced by a system modelled on the US in which care is delivered by profit-maximising companies that charge patients for treatment which is anyway to be restricted and reduced.
Often confused with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Forward Intelligence Teams, NETCU was the public face of the police’s dealings with protests. Here we revisit how it enabled industry and police to collaborate in the suppression of protest, and show how its former officers continue to provide a service to industry.
When it comes to honoring and remembering, however, it’s clearly slipped our minds how — upon encountering the Arawak people in 1492 — the venerated Mr. Columbus noted that they “would make fine servants,” adding, “with 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
By Michael Parenti (Common Dreams) Looking back at the years of fury and carnage, Colonel Angelo Gatti, staff officer of the Italian Army (Austrian front), wrote in his diary: “This whole war has been a pile of lies. We came into war because a few men in authority, the dreamers, flung us into it.” No, Gatti, caro mio, those few […]
