A few days ago I linked to a story of Kadra Abdi, a young Somali-American woman who was profiled and harassed by immigration authorities on her return from a trip to Sweden. Now comes along an even worse story of TSA harassment on a domestic trip of Aditya Mukerjee, a young man of Indian origin. Mukerjee gives detailed account of his ordeal. [Read more…]
Whenever whistleblower reveals government actions, especially those that seriously embarrass the government, their reaction is that they are angry because the leaks have endangered nation al security and/or put people’s lives at risk. This was dutifully picked up by the lapdog media and trumpeted far and wide. This was the charge made against Chelsea Manning and then against Edward Snowden. But at Manning’s trial, the prosecution could not make the case that her revelations had actually put people’s lives at risk. [Read more…]
According to the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, one of the many prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but not allowed to leave, the authorities did not pass on to his client a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago that he had brought for him. That book dealt with the prison camps in the Soviet Union and was suppressed in that country. [Read more…]
Following up his earlier debacles, in an TV show, Jeffrey Toobin continued his slide into complete subservience to authoritarianism, justifying the British government’s nine-hour detention of David Miranda and the confiscation of his property by saying that Miranda was similar to a ‘drug mule’. [Read more…]
I heard from commenters embertine and 2up2down2furious today that after his trial and sentencing, Bradley Manning has issued a statement announcing a wish to live as a woman and to be known in the future as Chelsea E. Manning and be addressed using the female pronoun.
I will of course do so. [Read more…]
So Bradley Manning will go to jail for telling the world what the US government is doing. I suspect that it was his release of the Collateral Murder video, in which US troops in a helicopter gunship shot people (including two Reuters journalists) walking along a street and then also gunned down passersby who stopped to help the wounded, all the while exchanging gleeful comments and congratulations at this act of cold-blooded murder, that triggered the desire by the Obama regime to have him punished as severely as possible. They now have their pound of flesh from Manning and seek to get the same from Edward Snowden. [Read more…]
President Obama’s defenses of the NSA programs are becoming increasingly risible. Cartoonists Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall get in their licks on this tempting target, while in this clip Stephen Colbert takes his turn at mocking him. [Read more…]
Cenk Uygur plays a recording of a voicemail message left by a member of Congress that shows how Congress gets contributions from lobbyists, by simply pointing out that they have influence on committees that serve the interests of the lobbyists. Members of Congress know that proposing new legislation is a surefire way to get contributions, which is why there are periodic proposals for tax reform that don’t actually result in any reforms. They are a way of churning the pot. [Read more…]