If you’ve ever read George Orwell’s, 1984, you know that, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” This seems eerily similar to the lie that we’ve been sold about the terrorist threat to our country. The lie that we need a “100-year war” because this enemy doesn’t abide by the “traditional” rules of war (whatever THAT means), and that we need to take the battle to them so we don’t end up with a “mushroom cloud” over here, is just that: a LIE. Perhaps a quick review of history will drive home this point:
Conservatives’ Blind Support of Our Troops and Their Unintended Defense of the Big Lie
Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
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Frank Schaeffer: I'm Now a 'Liberal' Because I'm a Conservative
I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father's activity as one of the founders of the Religious Right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party --- in other words its base --- actually hates America.
The Halliburton Loophole
Among the many dubious provisions in the 2005 energy bill was one dubbed the Halliburton loophole, which was inserted at the behest of — you guessed it — then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a former chief executive of Halliburton.
Italian court convicts 23 Americans of kidnapping in CIA rendition of Muslim cleric
An Italian judge has convicted 23 American CIA agents and two Italian secret agents over the kidnap of a Muslim cleric in 2003.
The defendants were accused of abducting the cleric, known as Abu Omar, from Milan and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.
FDA Hid Research That Damned Aspartame
Fatal Studies Should Have Blocked NutraSweet Approval
When the G.D. Searle Co. sought FDA approval for NutraSweet they submitted doctored, fraudulent "studies," so corrupt that the Department of Justice appointed two prosecutors to Investigate Searle. Searle's lawyers hired the prosecutors and the case died with the statute of limitations.
Bush’s interrogators used slaps to ‘instill fear and despair’
Recently declassified documents on the Bush administration interrogation program describe several techniques used on detainees in US custody, some of which may have violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.
The “purpose” of the abdominal slap is defined in the documents as being “to instill fear and despair, to punish selective behavior and to instill humiliation or cause insult.”
Democrats’ healthcare bill would pay for ‘prayer’ treatment
The three senators have quietly inserted a provision into the Democrats' healthcare overhaul that would allow the Christian Science church to receive remuneration from the federal government for prayer treatments as medical expenses.
Why are liberal Democrats teaming up with a conservative senator for a provision that would normally be the bane of the Senate's liberal elite? Because the headquarters of the Christian Science church is in Boston.
US Report Criticizes Israel's Jewish Character
In its 2009 International Religious Freedoms Report, the U.S. State Department accuses Israel of “governmental and legal discrimination against non-Jews and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism.” The JewishIsrael organization, in its review of the document, calls it a “protracted denunciation against Israel’s Jewish character.”
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