Human Rights Law

Healthcare is a Human Right, Too

Posted on September 14, 2008
Our nation today has millions of people without health insurance of any sort.  Millions more find themselves underinsured under our current system of private health insurance.  Martin Luther King said it very wellOf all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane...

"It's A Man's World, And These Things Will Never Stop"

Posted on September 13, 2008
On July 14, three young Pakistani women en route to marriage to the young men of their choice were abducted, beaten, tortured, and buried alive by their male relatives. Two female relatives--the mother of one, the aunt of another--begged for the young women's lives...

Monkey Business on APA Anti-Torture Referendum?

Posted on September 12, 2008
Stephen Soldz has a story up at Psyche, Science and Society questioning whether there has been undue interference by staff at the American Psychological Association, "rallying sentiment against the Referendum." The Referendum's key passage reads: Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e...

Deception Mixed In With Peanut-Butter

Posted on September 12, 2008
One of my best friends, who moved to America a year after September 11, 2001 has never been someone to talk about what happened in that year, those first few months. But a week ago, she told me her story, and I listened. It's amazing how two sides of the story can be so different...

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Privacy In Today's Electronic World

Posted on September 12, 2008
In recent months there has been much discussion about the telecommunication industry and its involvement in warrantless wiretapping in response to orders from the Bush administration.  What is less newsworthy in our mainstream media is the far reaching effect of legal searches brought about by the power of a subpoena...

9-11 Means Different Things to Different People

Posted on September 11, 2008
I've been doing a variation of the following since September 11, 2003, which at the time marked the 30th anniversary of the US-assisted overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile, and the beginning of Pinochet's reign of terror against his own people...

11 September, 2001: "Everything Has Changed"

Posted on September 10, 2008
Confessions of a skeptic follow . . . Seven years ago, after the terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the United States, George W. Bush stated that "everything has changed" - a phrase often reiterated by him, his advisors and staff, his supporters to the present day...

Guerre Mener N'est Que Dampnacion

Posted on September 10, 2008
With two-thirds of his people opposing him, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is stubbornly increasing his commitment to George II's War on Terra, dispatching additional French troops to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Enduring Fiefdom. In late August, France buried ten paratroopers ambushed and killed in Kabul province...

Your Help Is Needed To Save Lives In Haiti

Posted on September 09, 2008
The floodwaters are rising as I write this, and people are dying in Haiti. Your help is urgently needed. It's impossible to overstate the crisis that back-to-back hurricanes have created in the most impoverished country in the Americas. A couple of things to consider...

Eros In Gaza

Posted on September 09, 2008
Islam, like the other major religion to crib its god from Judaism, Christianity, has been shaped by its potentates to require of believers an unnatural and unhealthy sexuality. To remain true to the tenets of the faith, Muslims, like Christians, must continuously repress or redirect sexual impulses...

Bombing Civilians in Afghanistan

Posted on September 08, 2008
On 8 September 2008 Human Rights Watch issued a 43 page report which shows that civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and NATO air-strikes had nearly tripled from 2006 to 2007, and that recent deadly air-strikes are "exacerbating the problem and fueling a public backlash" and that they have dramatically decreased public support for the Afghan Government and for the presence of US and NATO troops...

Life After Birth

Posted on September 08, 2008
So today we must confront the fact that the American people seem at present prepared to elevate to the apex of the executive a couple of faith-addled embryo-embracers. It is right, therefore, to consider a country constrained by the sort of abortion and contraception policies condoned by the dynamic duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin, who would place the egg upon an altar...

I Need Your Help: My Letter to Guantanamo's Convening Authority

Posted on September 07, 2008
The following letter has been faxed to the defense counsel of Mohammad Jawad, currently due to stand trial as part of the military tribunal process at Guantanamo. A juvenile when arrested in Afghanistan, Jawad's likely innocence, and his abuse at the hands of both Afghan and U...

Hell in Haiti - Ike Updated

Posted on September 06, 2008
Update Bolded. The lower green mass at the storms edge is Haiti. http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl... Already, angry seas and high winds are again hampering relief in Haiti.... the link above tells more about relief efforts. http://www.voanews.com/english...

8/29/05 And 8/29/08

Posted on September 05, 2008
Following is a poem I've written to commemorate the third anniversary of Katrina and the federal flood. It is in the voice of the mother of 8-year-old and 9-year-old boys who have a disabled grandmother. While it is fiction, it's based on things people actually went through during Katrina and flood and in the aftermath...

Going Home To New Orleans

Posted on September 05, 2008
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -- Annie Dillard To lose the place where you were born and raised, went to school, learned to fly a kite, throw a softball, dance the merengue, prep for final exams, drive a car, a million small composite images that make up most of your life, and remain your touchstone to the powerful imagery of all the word "home" conjures is to spend your days haunted...

Cobalt 6

Posted on September 05, 2008
Please welcome Cobalt 6, que chevere, to our blogroll. Cobalt 6 has local Virginia and national politics, continuously updated with fresh new content. Also the home of incisive political analyst (and muy funny)  Kestrel9000. I want to thank Kestrel9000 also for helping me out yesterday with some coding that I had struggled with for nearly 3 weeks...

McCain, Bennet Freeze & Forced Removal of Navajo: '74 - '96

Posted on September 04, 2008
Just what was one method of forced removal McCain used to bring about this? ACSA study reveals that after assembling a team of "pro-Peabody Western Coal" Indians and obtaining a false "Hopi-Navajo" Tribal Counsel designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for these paid Tribal representatives, in the period 1974-1996, Senator McCain was able to get large bands of the Dineh-Navajo relocated off their lands, so that Peabody Western could mine the coal under their farms at nominal expense...

Why The Obsession With Palin With Louisiana Is Hurting (With Donation Info)

Posted on September 04, 2008
As duplicative, repetitive diaries keep being posted about Sarah Palin on other sites, the agonizing aftermath of Gustav in Louisiana is being ignored, if it hasn't been forgotten already. Don't get me wrong--but there's plenty of time to go into Palin's issues between now and the election (though as Obama has said, we shouldn't go into Bristol's pregnancy because that's a family problem of the Palins...

How An Illinois Gal Got "Katrina Brain"

Posted on September 04, 2008
I've often imagined many on NION and the various other blogs I'm a member of have been wondering why I care so much and have been so passionate in my support of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Region from afar, after having been to New Orleans but once, over 30 years ago...

Louisiana Environmental Disaster: Where Are The MSM?

Posted on September 04, 2008
Back in 1988 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, I can recall at least a few weeks of steady coverage by both the three major networks and cable news (just CNN at the time) of the disaster, its environmental impact, and efforts to clean it up. But the fuel oil spill that happened in Louisiana towards the end of July proves to be a much larger disaster with farther-reaching consequences--yet for some news briefs I've seen on NBC Nightly News and a couple of cable channels, there hasn't been the major coverage it should be getting...

Western hunters, fishermen cry out for responsible management of public land

Posted on September 04, 2008
 :  Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development has issued its Recommendations for Responsible Oil and Gas Development (16-page pdf), a set of thirty-two specific policy recommendations. This document is quoted at length below with permission from SfRED, which wishes to see more public discussion of these issues...

Robert Jay Lifton on APA, Torture, & "Socialization to Evil"

Posted on September 03, 2008
Google Video has a fascinating new posting, a work of an independent Boston documentary film maker Hermine Muskat. From the site description:  Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and social activist, applies psychology and psychoanalysis to an understanding of psychologists' involvement in atrocity-producing situations and the interrogation of detainees at places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib...

Katrina and Gustav An Early Assessment

Posted on September 03, 2008
Well, we're working our way through clean-up and repair in the wake of a storm that reached Category 2 on the Saffer-Simpson scale here in New Orleans.   Even though I firmly believe that Michael Moore is an idiot for thinking a hurricane making landfall in any populated area is a good thing for anyone, Hurricane Gustav was important for New Orleans in a number of ways...

Judge Orders Secret Torture Memos Released

Posted on September 03, 2008
Written by SmileySam and posted to NION with permission - gracias, Sam. A Federal Judge has told the Feds to release the 3 Torture Memos we know some about or make their case why they shouldn't be released. NEW YORK – A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to turn over three memos that authorized the extremely harsh treatment of prisoners in CIA custody or explain by October 3 why these memos can lawfully be withheld...

Haiti After Gustav: Your Help Is Needed w/Update

Posted on September 03, 2008
From Kyle at Citizen Orange, more news on the urgent need for help in Haiti. Haiti is suffering from it's very own Katrina and barely a peep can be heard about it from the U.S. Reports from the Associated Press doesn't paint a much rosier picture: "They are screaming for help," Norsil said as a U...

Afghanistan: Black Sites Up For Super WalMartification

Posted on September 02, 2008
Here's a little somethin'-somethin' you won't see or hear about from the RNCC this week. "I wish someone could take the baby. It's cold here at night." -- Shakeba, 17 years old, prisoner of Bagram AFB. Behind these crumbling prison walls, in series of cold, crude cells where women sleep eight to a room, lies a medieval reality that sits just across the street from Kabul's bustling downtown district...

Security, Hallowed Be Thy Name And Dominion

Posted on September 01, 2008
Now, that was quite expected:FISA court rejects ACLU request for transparency A court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act denied an ACLU motion Thursday that would have increased public scrutiny of how the Bush administration's new spying law is reviewed, according to a statement released Friday...

Undressed

Posted on August 31, 2008
love The Mayor didn't speak again before they reached Orense; an idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of a man--even of a man like Franco--dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence--for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?                    -Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote suffering All stories resemble one another, and sorrow lies at the heart of every one...

Bush and McCain's Greatest New Orleans Hits

Posted on August 31, 2008
cross posted from The Dream Antilles Hurricanes aren't the only things that spiral out of control.  Rethuglican politics spiral too.  They go round and round and round, reprising their greatest hits, trying to revise and rewrite and edit out their greatest failures...

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