Michael Ratner on Bradley Manning

If you want a good source of news, check out The Real News Network, which, in order to maintain their independence, does not accept advertising, government, or corporate funding. They rely on donations. One of the people the network regularly features is Michael Ratner, the former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Julian Assange’s lawyer in America. He attended the Bradley Manning hearing at Fort Mead where the latter read his statement explaining what drove him to download the documents and give it over to WikiLeaks, and spoke about what he drew from it. [Read more…]

The role of religion in modern political life

The role of religion in modern political life is a puzzle. God as an idea worth taking seriously is clearly on life support, at least as far as serious analysis goes. As Andrew Levine says, for a long time in the world of political analysts “the idea that the Creator of all there is would care about the political affairs of particular Homo sapiens, that He (always a He!) would favor some members of our paltry species over others, seemed too preposterous to take seriously” and that “it is hard to see how any part of the Sturm und Drang of modern politics could really be about God, no matter what some political actors do, say, or believe. If their self-representations belie what is plainly the case, they must be deceiving themselves.” [Read more…]

Is the Tea Party inadvertently saving Social Security?

Whenever the political class, the major players in the business world (especially the financial sector), and their media lackeys, all of whom are collectively known as The Villagers, enthusiastically agree on something, concerned people should sit up and take notice because it signals that a big swindle is about to be perpetrated on the general public. The clue that such a thing is in the works in when the phrase ‘everyone knows’ is bandied around about a major policy proposal with absolutely no evidence to back it up. [Read more…]

American-British collusion in drone killings

I wrote earlier about how the Obama administration will not deny that it has the right to summarily kill US citizens without trial even if they are in the US, and the deafening silence that has accompanied this outrageous claim. It is remarkable the extent to which so-called ‘liberal Democrats’ have sold their soul when it comes to the subversion by the current administration of the things that they used to say they held dear, such as the rule of law and upholding the constitution, not to mention notions of fundamental human rights, all of which they used to condemn the Bush administration’s reign of lawlessness. [Read more…]

How significant are the same-sex marriage cases?

There has been a lot of chatter in the media recently about the upcoming oral arguments before the US Supreme Court on March 26 and 27 on two cases involving same-sex marriage. Hollingsworth v. Perry concerns California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage but was later overturned by the courts. The second is United States v. Windsor that challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). While these cases are undoubtedly important and interesting, their long-term effects are not as significant. The reason is that same-sex marriage is coming and the only question is whether it comes soon or sooner and the court cannot stop it. [Read more…]

Justice – American style

Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]

Update on Bradley Manning

Any government that engages in willful wrongdoing, such as the US government now routinely does, must also by necessity simultaneously retaliate against those who would reveals such acts. This explains why the Obama administration has been engaged in the most vicious persecutions of whistleblowers and the case against Bradley Manning provides a prime example. [Read more…]

Obama will not rule out extrajudicial killings of US citizens within the US

The invaluable Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of how the US is now a lawless state, pointing out that president Obama and his nominee to head the CIA John Brennan (both of whom are key players in the current drone execution program that have murdered Americans and foreigners abroad) have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling, even under direct questioning, to deny that they have the power to order the extrajudicial killing of Americans even within the US. [Read more…]