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Best of the Web Today: 'Stop Being a Baby'

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - May. 09 (Opinion) - Infanticide and the infantilization of women.

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A Desperate Situation at Guantánamo: Over 130 Prisoners on Hunger Strike, Dozens Being Force-Fed

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 29 (News Report) - Lawyers for the prisoners say more than 130 men are taking part in the hunger strike, which began in February. One of the hunger strikers is a Yemeni man named Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel. In a letter published in The New York Times, he wrote: "Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made. I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late."

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Yemeni Activist Farea al-Muslimi Urges U.S. to Stop the Drone War on His Country

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 25 (Interview) - Yemeni activist and journalist Farea al-Muslimi delivered a moving plea before a Senate hearing this week for an end to U.S. drone strikes inside his country. Speaking at the first-ever public congressional hearing on Obama's secret drone and targeted killing program, al-Muslimi offered a rare first-hand account of the suffering that drone warfare wreaks on ordinary people's lives. His family's village of Wessab was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week, leaving five people dead. Educated in the United States as a teenager, al-Muslimi says the drone attacks are turning Yemenis against the country that embraced him.

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The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama's Expanding Drone Attacks

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Jeremy Scahill, amy Goodman - Apr. 24 (Special Report) - Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. "I called it 'Dirty Wars' because, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war," Scahill says. He goes on to discuss secret operations in Africa, the targeting of U.S. citizens in Yemen and the key role WikiLeaks played in researching the book.

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277 Million Boston Bombings

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Scheer - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - I list all those dreary statistics to drive home the point that the horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period. Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?

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As Obama Shuns Hearing, Yemeni Says U.S. Drone War Terrifying Civilians, Empowering Militants

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 24 (News Report) - Six days after the U.S. bombed his village, Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi testified on Capitol Hill about the terror of the U.S. drone wars. Al-Muslimi spoke during the Senate's first-ever public hearing on the Obama administration's targeted killing program. His family's village was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week. The White House refused to send an official to defend the program's legality. "When they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time," al-Muslimi says of his fellow Yemenis. "What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant." Others to testify at the hearing included law scholars and members of the U.S. military.

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Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama's Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman - Apr. 23 (News Analysis) - While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed "intentionally." "The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country,"

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The Persecution of Lynne Stewart

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Chris Hedges - Apr. 22 (Special Report) - Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence.

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What America's Leaving Behind in Afghanistan: Trained Militias Accused of Rape and Murder

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Jennifer Norris - Apr. 21 (News Report) - Despite some success in achieving security gains, the ALP program has been plagued by such problems as Taliban infiltration and insider attacks. But most controversially, ALP units have been accused of committing serious human rights abuses against local populations with apparent impunity.

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American Right-Wingers Are No Longer Conservative — They're Extremists

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joshua Holland, Ian Millhiser - Apr. 21 (Interview) - when North Carolina says they are not bound by the First Amendment, what they’re saying is that this -- and this is the most revolutionary moment in American history – it changed our conception of what it means to be a person living under a government. No longer are we saying that there are these governments and they have different powers and they fight out amongst themselves and that’s how we figure out what our liberties are. Now, we live in a world where everyone has rights just because they are a human being, and that’s what North Carolina is rebelling against.

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Hamid Karzai Seeks to Curb CIA Operations in Afghanistan

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Emma Graham-Harrison - Apr. 20 (News Report) - "Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation," Faizi said. "They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation."

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Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacres

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Allan Nairn - Apr. 19 (News Report) - Ríos Montt was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala President Gen. Otto Pérez Molina was directly accused of ordering executions

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After Obama Shuns Probe, Bipartisan Panel Finds ‘Indisputable’ Evidence US Tortured Under Bush

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 17 (Special Report) - The report concludes that never before in U.S. history had there been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

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'War on Whistleblowers' Film Highlights Dangers of Crackdown

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By John Knefel - Apr. 17 (Review) - A still from Robert Greenwald's film 'War on Whistleblowers' Greenwald describes the philosophical underpinnings of the national security state as two-fold. The first is an ideological belief that extreme secrecy results in increased security – "a notion

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Obama Whistleblower Prosecutions Lead To Chilling Effect On Press

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Matt Sledge - Apr. 16 (News Report) - It was an investigative story clearly in the public interest, shedding new light on the government’s long-running targeted-killing program in Pakistan. But now Landay, a veteran national security reporter for the McClatchy newspaper chain, is concerned that the Obama administration could next investigate him in hopes of finding the sources for “top-secret U.S. intelligence reports” cited in the story. “Do I think that they could come after me?” Landay asked, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Yes.”

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Israel allows journalists to visit West Bank jail, following Palestinian criticism

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Joel Greenberg - Apr. 15 (News Report) - OFER PRISON, West Bank — Put on the defensive by the recent deaths of two Palestinian prisoners in custody, Israeli authorities opened the gates of a West Bank jail on Sunday to foreign reporters, providing a rare, though controlled, look at conditions behind bars. ...

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Beatings, Attempted Suicides and Deliberate Starvation: The Dystopic Hell of Guantanamo Bay

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Alex Kane - Apr. 14 (News Report) - Colonel John Bogdan’s arrival at Guantanamo Bay meant trouble for the prisoners who had been locked up there for over a decade, many of them without ever being charged with a crime. His punitive actions sparked the first mass hunger strike at Guantanamo since 2006. In turn, the strike is shining a light on the festering issue of indefinite detention without charge, and the Obama administration’s failure to close the prison that has become a symbol of the lawlessness of America’s “war on terror.”

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Intelligence Documents Suggest Obama Administration Lied About Who Drones Kill

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Steven Hseih - Apr. 10 (News Report) - The documents also provide a glimpse into the Obama administration’s seemingly thin rationale for executing some attacks. Contrary to claims of the CIA program’s precision and “ exceedingly rare” civilian casualties, the intelligence reports proves that “drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing.” McClatchy’s report notes that several drone victims “died in what appeared to be signature strikes,” or attacks carried out based on a “signature” pattern of behavior, rather than a known identity.

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WikiLeaks: Vatican Dismissed Pinochet Massacre Reports As 'Communist Propaganda'

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Peter Finocchiaro - Apr. 08 (News Report) - Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was responsible for the deaths of as many as 3,200 people in Chile in the 1970s, but the Vatican dismissed reports of bloodshed at the time as "communist propaganda," according to diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

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What?! Enviro Activist Re-Imprisoned for Writing a Blog Post

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Steven Hsieh - Apr. 06 (News Report) - McGowan’s wife, Jenny Synan says officials re-jailed her husband for writing a Huffington Post blog piece critical of a controversial prison program designed to restrict inmates’ communication to the outside world.

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5 Things You Should Know About the History of the Death Penalty

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Stephen Hartnett - Apr. 03 (Special Report) - The history of capital punishment is the history of slavery's attempts to destroy free speech.

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Amazon dam activists threaten to wage war on Brazil over military incursion

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jonathan Watts - Apr. 03 (News Report) - Munduruku leaders hit out at 'betrayal' after government pushes on with dam-building project without community's consent An Amazonian community has threatened to "go to war" with the Brazilian government after a military incursion into their land by dam builders. The Munduruku indigenous community in Para state say they have been betrayed by the authorities, who are pushing ahead with plans to build a cascade of hydropower plants on the Tapajós river without their permission. Public prosecutors, human rights groups, environmental organisations and Christian missionaries have condemned the government's strong-arm tactics. Helicopters, soldiers and armed police have been involved in Operation Tapajós, which aims to conduct an environmental impact assessment for the first proposed construction, the 6,133MW São Luiz do Tapajós dam. The facility, to be built by the Norte Energia consortium, is the biggest of three planned dams on the Tapajós, the fifth-largest river in the Amazon ...

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Will Congress Stop US Support for Honduras' Death Squad Regime?

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Mark Weisbrot - Apr. 01 (Special Report) - Five young men walk down a quiet street in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. A big black SUV pulls up, followed by a second vehicle. Two masked men with bullet-proof vests jump out of the lead car, with AK-47s raised. The two youths closest to the vehicles see that they have no chance of running, so they freeze and put their hands in the air. The other three break into a sprint, with bullets chasing after them from the assassins' guns. Miraculously, they escape, with one injured - but the two who surrendered are forced to lie face down on the ground. The two students, who were brothers 18- and 20-years-old, are murdered with a burst of bullets, in full view of the camera. Less than 40 seconds after their arrival, the assassins are driving away, never to be found. The high level of professional training and modus operandi of the assassins have led many observers to conclude that this was a government operation.

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Conservative Morality: Free Pass for Criminal Bankers, Restrictions for Women and Gay Citizens

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Reich - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - Conservative moralists don't want women to have control over their bodies or same-sex couples to marry, but they don't give a hoot about billionaires taking over our democracy for personal gain or big bankers taking over our economy. Yet these violations of public morality are far more dangerous to our society because they undermine the public trust that's essential to both our democracy and economy.

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Religious Leaders Call on President Obama to Reconsider His Position on Drone Strikes

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - Mar. 30 (Opinion) - Six religious leaders from across the country joined together during the week of Easter to call on President Obama to reexamine his position on drone strikes. In briefings and explanations to the American public President Obama's administration has used Just War Theory to justify CIA and U.S. military use of drone strikes throughout the world. Joining forces with director and producer Robert Greenwald, these rabbis, reverends, and priests created a short video sharing why drone strikes in Pakistan violate Just War Theory.

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