Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release a report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years after 9-11, but the contents of the report are practically irrelevant since the decision not to punish those responsible makes it an exercise in historical archiving at best, nothing more. After his inauguration in 2009, President […]
Tag Archives: Civil Liberties
Never Mind the Torture Report (Or Rectal Re-hydration for the Masses!)
Posted in Opinion
Also tagged Imperial Presidency, Justice System, Social Criticism, Terrorism, Torture, War
Leave a comment
The Earth-Shattering Whistleblower You Haven’t Heard About
While many in the nation are concerned with Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker who helped to spread the word about the agency’s spying and data collection within the US, the extent of that spying still remains clouded. Are our calls actually being recorded? Can that information be recalled at a later date? […]
The King of Ruffle Bar and the Insanity of Bureaucracy
In anthropologist Edward Hall’s 1976 book Beyond Culture, he describes a story of a wild dog that lived on the small, otherwise uninhabited island of Ruffle Bar, which is just off the coast of Brooklyn and Long Island. The dog, nicknamed “The King of Ruffle Bar,” seemed to be in good health and had sustained […]
Strip Searching Innocent Victims in the ‘Land of the Free’
Last July, Leila Tarantino, a citizen of Citrus County, Florida, was driving with her two children. According to a lawsuit she filed with the district court last week, Tarantino says she made a full stop at a stop sign, but was pulled over by police anyway. She was held in the back of a police […]