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No apologies from U.S. government over this once popular pursuit
March 13, 2006
Last week, the U.S. came out with its annual human rights report for the world. The only difference between this year’s and those of the recent past is the elimination of Iraq as being the world’s most vile abuser of human rights. Otherwise, the same culprits are mentioned: China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and a quickly ascending Venezuela.
Here are a few statements from the report:
The Chinese (…)

Catherine Komp, The NewStandard Omar Khadr, accused of committing war crimes at the age of 15, is slated to go before a military panel next month at Guantánamo in what his attorneys say is a violation of international youth rights.
Mar. 13 - With the US military moving forward with the unprecedented trial of a prisoner captured at age 15, human rights lawyers are appealing to an (…)

Going overboard
The wave of bipartisan protest over a Dubai company managing U.S. ports is a tempest in an election year.
DID YOU HEAR the one about Dick Cheney, a priest and a rabbi walking into an Arab-run port?
No? Too bad, because the brouhaha that has replaced Cheney-mania is a lot less entertaining. This week brought a strange bipartisan convergence over, of all things, the commercial management of U.S. ports.
Bipartisan consensus is often a troubling sign, particularly when (…)

By Mark Engler
In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it takes a moment to sort through the counter’s decimal places and make sense of it. The hundreds of dollars fly by too quickly to track. The thousands change a little faster than once a second. As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144.
It is worth staring at the site for a while to (…)

By Sidney Blumenthal
A three-year-old executive order that vastly expanded his powers illuminates how the vice president and his minions led us into war.
After shooting Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney’s immediate impulse was to control the intelligence. Rather than call the president directly, he ordered an aide to inform White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that there had been an accident but not that Cheney was its cause. Then a host of surrogates attacked the victim for (…)

by Julian Borger
Hours after a commercial plane struck the Pentagon on September 11 2001 the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was issuing rapid orders to his aides to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement, according to notes taken by one of them.
"Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly," the notes say. "Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not."
The handwritten notes, with some parts blanked out, were declassified this month in response (…)

BY STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
WASHINGTON - When Lisa Koch asked several people at a Chicago soup kitchen to complete a survey of the people who eat there, she got a surprising response: "They asked how long it would take because they had to get back to work after lunch."
A national survey of people eating at soup kitchens, food banks and shelters found that 36 percent came from households in which at least one person had a job. In the Chicago area, it was 39 percent.
"Even though the economy (…)

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Love him or hate him, Frank Gaffney is effective.
The founder and president of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a small think tank funded mainly by US defense contractors, far-right foundations and right-wing Zionists, Gaffney was among the first to seize on the government’s approval of a Dubai company to manage terminals at six major US ports and helped blow it up into a major embarrassment for President George W Bush.
Indeed, it was (…)

by William Greider
David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai Ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there’s no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle East Muslims—actually, by an Arab government—managing six major American ports. Cool down, (…)

By Nathan Newman and David Sirota
Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn’t talking about work they’d done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a (…)