Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel BY ROBERT SANDELS Counterpunch INTERNATIONAL Posted by Bulatlat The April summit appeared to be a grand success. No, not the one in Trinidad and Tobago; the one in Cumana, Venezuela, where Bolivian President Evo Morales said, “If we do not change capitalism, humanity will be at risk,…
Category: International
Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
BY JEREMY SCAHILL AlterNet INTERNATIONAL Posted by Bulatlat As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows…
Conflating Afghanistan and Pakistan: Obama’s Axis of Obedience
The question at hand is not whether Pakistan is on the verge of a takeover by reactionary religious extremists from Afghanistan. It is not. Conflating the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan only confuses people. Pakistan is, however, experiencing an extraordinary upheaval of popular discontent. In a word, it’s the emergence of democracy. Left on its…
Rights, Not Raids
Even with a legalization program, millions of people will remain without papers. For them, work without “authorization” will still be a crime. And while employer sanctions have little effect on migration, they will continue to make workers vulnerable to employer pressure. BY BILL ONG HING AND DAVID BACON The Nation edition of May 18, 2009…
‘Big Brother’ Regional Roles for India?
Two new challenges on the foreign policy front await the newly elected government of India to be installed soon – in heaven-turned-hell Sri Lanka and the Himalayan state of Nepal. BY J. SRI RAMAN Truthout INTERNATIONAL Posted by Bulatlat Two new challenges on the foreign policy front await the newly elected government of India to…
Bernie Madoff
Yes, he stole $65 billion from some already quite-wealthy people. I know that’s upsetting to them because rich guys like Bernie are not supposed to be stealing from their own kind. Crime, thievery, looting – that’s what happens on the other side of town. The rules of the money game on Park Avenue and Wall…
Torture: an Author and a Resister
Jay Bybee, in thanks for his being the loyal soldier to the Bush administration’s policies of torture, was nominated and confirmed by the US Senate as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he sits to this day in his lifetime appointment. Jay Bybee, an author of torture, reportedly has a placard…
Prosecute This: Torture Was Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11
Obama’s intent to immunize those who broke the law violates his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” BY MARJORIE COHN AlterNet INTERNATIONAL Posted by Bulatlat When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent…
Torture, War and the Imperial Project: The Fatal Thread
You cannot disentangle the torture program from the war of aggression in Iraq – nor from the illegal wiretapping program, the corrupt war profiteering, and all the other degradations of liberty and law that have been so accelerated in the past eight years. They are all of a piece, part and parcel of a plan…
The Bush Administration’s Stunning Geneva Hypocrisy
Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions’ protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers. BY JASON LEOPOLD Truthout INTERNATIONAL…
Reinventing Reagan?
The Central American wars were only one ugly facet of the Reagan administration’s world impact, but they were hardly an exception to the overall trend. Whatever Professor Diggins and the others believe was in Ronald Reagan’s heart and mind, during his years in office, the United States stood for “freedom, peace, [and] disarmament” only in…