NewsTrust - Civil Liberties - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Treatment of prisoner dents Obama promise to end such practices

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - No, this does not match the worst abuses of the Bush era, but it is close enough that it must surely disillusion and dismay those who thought a corner was turned on Jan. 20. It must leave them hoping that faith was not misplaced. Sometimes a dented promise is worse than no promise at all.

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What the CIA hid from Congress

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Jane Harman - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - Were members of congressional intelligence committees told everything about the Bush administration's surveillance programs? Not even close, reveals Jane Harman, the former top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

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The Importance of Free Speech Online in Iran, China, Kenya

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Mark Glaser, Kim Spencer, Scott Rosenberg, Cyrus Farivar, Danny O'Brien, - Jul. 10 (Interview) - In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images to Flickr, video to YouTube, and running commentaries on blogs and Twitter. While the Iranian government would prefer to operate under a cloud, the Interent has proven to be a key distribution medium for spreading news to the rest of the world. This month's 5Across video roundtable focused on free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya -- and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years. The discussion gave context to Iranian Internet use, its demographics and the way people there get information via satellite TV from Persian-language foreign news sources such as BBC Persian and Voice of America. Plus, we talked about how China uses psychology in making its millions of Internet users believe they are all being monitored.

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Two Standards of Detention

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Amy Goodman - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - Nonviolent activists like Stepanian, and Muslims like Hashmi, secretly and dubiously charged, are held in draconian conditions, while Roeder trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s decades-long campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.

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Editorial - Age Discrimination - NYTimes.com

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 06 (Editorial) - The Supreme Court rewrote the rules for litigating age-discrimination cases in favor of employers. It falls to Congress to undo the damage.

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Letters - The Firefighters’ Test - Flawed or Fair? - NYTimes.com

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - First, you argue that the test for firefighter promotions in New Haven was flawed, and possibly illegal, because different groups achieved widely different results on the test. But the standard for determining the validity of such a test should not be that every group pass it at roughly proportional rates, as you prefer, but that its questions are germane to the positions it was designed for.

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Freedom on a small island with a big heart

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Sabin Willett - Jun. 16 (Opinion) - ONE AFTERNOON last week, four men from central Asia walked into a shop in Bermuda to buy pants. Refugees from Chinese communism, these Uighur men were swept up by US forces in 2001. They were sent to Guantanamo. But they were not terrorists and not our enemies. The military soon realized its mistake and quietly tried to resettle them abroad. The efforts failed: No one wanted to brook the Chinese for the sake of a few dissidents whom the United States would not accept itself.

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Tiananmen: Shouts That Turned To Silence

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Public Radio - By Alisa Barba - May. 31 (Opinion) - I sent a man to labor camp 20 years ago this week. His name was Xiao Bin. He was 42 years old, a factory worker from the northeast Chinese city of Dalian. It was a day after the Chinese troops had cleared out Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. It was June of 1989. The city was a wreck: streets still full of burned debris; roaming crowds of angry and excited citizens; tanks still playing chicken with students on the main thoroughfare.

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Amnesty International Human Rights Report: 'We Are Seeing a Catastrophe' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Der Spiegel - May. 28 (Interview) - This is very worrying. Obama has been alarmingly ambiguous on the issue, hinting at some new legislation. But incarceration without a trial can never be within the rule of law. We are asking the government in Washington to release all innocent prisoners from Guantanamo and to try the rest in a US court. The government should show some confidence in its own justice system.

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Attorneys Olson & Boies Interviewed About Filing Federal Suit Against Cailf. Prop 8

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

MSNBC - By Chris Matthews - May. 28 (Interview) - Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies Interviewed About Filing A Federal Lawsuit Against California Prop 8

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Election Defines a New India

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Rahul Singh - May. 20 (Opinion) - India can be a depressing country, with its grinding poverty, festering slums, imploring — often deformed — beggars, and maddening bureaucracy. But there are times when, to the world’s astonishment, the curtain of gloom and despair lifts and the light shines through — and one feels proud to be an Indian.

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Three more states back gay marriage, but will Obama?

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Rupert Cornwell - May. 10 (Opinion) - It hasn't been formally designated as such, but so far this is America's year of gay rights. The signs are many and various. Sean Penn won this year's Oscar for best male actor with his brilliant portrayal of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to political office in the US. Since January, the country has had a president who describes himself as a "fierce advocate of equality for gays and lesbians". And most remarkable of all, within the past few weeks three more US states have legalised same-sex marriage. Do not misunderstand me. America is not about to turn into the social conservative's vision of hell, where marijuana is available in diners, an abortion clinic stands on every corner and old-fashioned Christian marriage is about to vanish from the Earth. Indeed, it is far from certain that these limited successes for gay marriage will endure.

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U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By A.J. Langguth - May. 03 (Opinion) - As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle. I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses. At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.

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Telling the Brutal Truth

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - A linguistic shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

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Tax Day Becomes Protest Day

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Glenn Harlan Reynolds - Apr. 15 (Opinion) - Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

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Iowa’s Family Values

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven W. Thrasher - Apr. 09 (Opinion) - In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

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We Shall Remain ~ Video

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

PBS - Mar. 04 (Advocacy) - From the award-winning PBS series American Experience comes We Shall Remain, a provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history.

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Obama follows some of Bush's footsteps

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Helen Thomas - Feb. 22 (Opinion) - One judge asked the Justice Department lawyer if the change in administrations had any bearing on the case. "No, your honor," came the reply. According to The New York Times, "even the judges on the panel seemed surprised by the administration's decision to go forward" with the same argument.

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Why should I respect these oppressive religions?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Jan. 28 (Editorial) - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth.

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The Next Generation

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Alan Cooperman - Jan. 18 (Review) - When Deval Patrick was 6 or 7, his mother took him to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak in a park on Chicago's South Side. Patrick, now 52 and serving as the first African American governor of Massachusetts, says he does not recall a single word of King's speech. But he does remember "what it felt like" to be in that park: "Nothing but hope." Patrick's reminiscence -- described by PBS television reporter Gwen Ifill in her perceptive new book, The Breakthrough -- captures something essential about the rising generation of black political leaders. These are men and women in their 30s, 40s and 50s who inherited the hopes of the civil rights movement without having to go through its confrontations. While the worldview of older black politicians "was defined by limitation," Ifill writes, the new generation was "raised to believe they could do anything. Their schools were integrated, and Ivy League colleges came looking for them. . . . They lived in a world shaped by access instead of denial."

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You’re Likable Enough, Gay People

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Frank Rich - Dec. 28 (Opinion) - You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”

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Mumbai was not our 9/11

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Arundhati Roy - Dec. 13 (Opinion) - ...But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions

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Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Show - Dec. 13 (Interview) - Just because Mike Huckabee doesn't support the idea of changing the definition of marriage doesn't mean he's a homophobe.

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One Day in Bangkok

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Jarrett Wrisley - Dec. 04 (Opinion) - Some in the U.S. media have labeled Barack Obama the first celebrity politician. But those commentators have never been to a Thaksin rally.

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California gay marriage vote negates fundamental freedom

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Dallas Morning News - By Erin Goldman - Nov. 14 (Opinion) - The day after the election, I woke up invincible; Barack Obama was elected to serve as the president of the United States of America. The voting population looked past the color of the man's skin and voted for him based upon merit. However, my restored faith in humanity was short-lived. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," declared Obama on Nov. 4, "who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." He spoke too soon.

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