news

In a small compound on the outskirts of Riyadh, the Saudi government is exploring new ways to combat extremism.

This is still a prison, run by the Ministry of Interior and housed inside secure premises with high perimeter walls and barbed wire, but the Saudi authorities prefer to call it a "care centre" and refer to prisoners as "beneficiaries".

This is not what you would imagine when you think of a typical Saudi jail.

Inside, prisoners enjoy access to wide-ranging recreational facilities including their own swimming pools, video games and table tennis.

In return for the more relaxed environment, prisoners have to attend religious education classes where Islamic scholars challenge their views.

The thinking behind the new initiative is to fight al-Qaeda's ideology by convincing militant Islamists they have a distorted view of Islam.

The Ministry of Interior oversees the new scheme and has created the Ideological Security Unit (ISU) dedicated to co-ordinating their efforts.

"You cannot defeat an ideology by force. You have to fight ideas with ideas," says Abdul-Rahman Hadlaq, ISU director.

But the centre goes beyond just debating ideas. It also encourages prisoners to express their "softer side" by running art therapy classes where inmates find alternative ways to express themselves.

The US Christian Military?

Is the United States Military becoming a Christian organization? That’s what one U.S. soldier tells us.

I met Army Specialist Jeremy Hall in Kansas City a few weeks ago. He’s based at Fort Riley, in Junction City, Kansas about an hour away.

At 24, he’s a remarkable young man determined to complete one final mission. That is to win a lawsuit against the federal government.

Specialist Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his religious freedom. He says the military discriminates against non-Christians and his rights under the First Amendment were denied.

Hall has served two tours in Iraq as a gunner. He’s back at Fort Riley now only because he says his life was threatened after it became public he is an atheist.

“I don’t believe in God, luck, fate, or anything supernatural,” Hall told me.

It wasn’t always that way. Hall grew up reading the Bible every night and saying grace at dinner. Then, after his first tour of duty, he met some friends who were atheist and decided to read the Bible again. He read the whole Bible, and had so many unanswered questions, he says, he decided to embrace atheism.

In the army, he says, that cost him dearly.

Hall says he was denied a promotion because of his beliefs, and felt his life was in jeopardy. He says the army assigned him a full-time bodyguard because of threats.

Pharyngula further comments

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Of course the military leadership is in denial (this should also trouble everyone: shouldn't our military be first and foremost a pragmatic organization that is equipped to cope with reality?).
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R i g h t. You all remember that story about Christian Embassy actively proselytizing? The Christian Right has been pushing its way into the military for decades. The Campus Crusade for Christ has been working hard to indoctrinate new members of the military — you should be horrified at the priest in this video who proudly states that the US Air Force Academy, with their help, turns out "government-paid missionaries" for Christ. Go here for the disturbing video

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I've been reading a book called Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by James Carroll

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It makes the complementary point that this isn't just bad for the culture, but it's bad for the religion — that many of the worst excesses of historical discrimination and oppression are the product of not just religion alone, but that dangerous combination of religion coupled to the machinery of the state. Look here, now, in America…it's happening to us.

One: Americans are already being racist fuckwads in Iraq. Can you imagine the conflagration that fundamentalist religious kooks can cause?

Two: A fundamentalist American Christian ARMY!!! There go our freedoms...

TED talks:Rethinking Poverty

Talks Ernest Madu: Bringing world-class health care to the poorest

Paul Collier: 4 ways to improve the lives of the "bottom billion"

TEDTalks: Cameron Sinclair on Open Source Architecture

The President committed a felony THIRTY TIMES!!! And the Democrats..will let them get away!

Will someone please explain to me why exactly is Congress allowed to pass laws when most of their members haven't read them and don't know what the laws actually entail, and don't know the rationale behind the laws' creation??


Glenn Greenwald today

As Turley says, and as I've written many times over the last two weeks, what is most appalling here beyond the bill itself are the pure falsehoods being spewed to the public about what Congress is doing -- and those falsehoods are largely being spewed not by Republicans. Republicans are gleefully admitting, even boasting, that this bill gives them everything Bush and Cheney wanted and more, and includes only minor changes from the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill passed last February (which Obama, seeking the Democratic Party nomination, made a point of opposing). Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill -- it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn't really that important anyway! -- are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush's lawbreaking.

It's been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime -- completely reverse everything they claimed to believe -- the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill -- a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes -- will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and "Kit" Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama's altar in order to get yourself to think that way? The issues implicated by this bill -- government spying, lawbreaking, manipulation of national security claims for secrecy and presidential power, the extreme privileges corporations inside Washington receive -- have been at the very heart of progressive complaints against the Bush era for the last seven years. The type of capitulation and complicity which Jay Rockefeller and Steny Hoyer embraced is exactly what progressives have spent the last seven years scathingly attacking.
All of that magically changed for many people -- by no means all -- the day that Obama announced that he supported this "compromise," when these issues were suddenly relegated to nothing more than inconsequential, symbolic distractions, and complicity with Bush lawbreaking magically morphed into shrewd pragmatism. It's the same rationale that the dreaded Blue Dogs have been using since 2001 to justify their complicity which is now pouring out of the mouths of Obama defenders (we need to win elections first and foremost, and can only do that if we don't challenge Republicans on National Security and Terrorism)

And what do Obama's aides say about this whole thing?

Yet policy wonks inside the campaign sputter policy that Obama listens to and follows, again, apparently oblivious to how following that advice, when inconsistent with the positions taken in the past, just reinforces the other side's campaign claim that Obama is just another calculating, unprincipled politician. The best evidence that they don't get this is Telco Immunity. Obama said he would filibuster a FISA bill with Telco Immunity in it. He has now signaled he won't. When you talk to people close to the campaign about this, they say stuff like: "Come on, who really cares about that issue? Does anyone think the left is going to vote for McCain rather than Obama? This was a hard question. We tried to get it right. And anyway, the FISA compromise in the bill was a good one."

Indeed.

Read the whole thing

Hullabaloo points out that:

The congress is about to validate and legalize the president's theory that he has the right to ignore the constitution. And because the telcoms will be given immunity it's very hard to see how we will ever get a court to rule on whether that's constitutional. This is a very bad precedent and one that we will regret. If you give them more power than they need, they will use it. It's what humans do.



The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.

George Washington
1796 - Farewell Address

Hullabaloo links to Ars technica who lay down three easy to understand reasons why we will pay the price of this legislation for time to come.

The 114-page bill was pushed through the House so quickly that there was no real time to debate its many complex provisions. This may explain why the telecom immunity provision has received so much attention in the media: it is much easier to explain to readers not familiar with the intricacies of surveillance law than the other provisions. But as important as the immunity issue is, the legislation also makes many prospective changes to surveillance law that will profoundly impact our privacy rights for years to come.
Specifically, the new legislation dramatically expands the government's ability to wiretap without meaningful judicial oversight, by redefining "oversight" so that the feds can drag their feet on getting authorization almost indefinitely. It also gives the feds unprecedented new latitude in selecting eavesdropping targets, latitude that could be used to collect information on non-terrorist-related activities like P2P copyright infringement and online gambling. In short, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 opens up loopholes so large that the feds could drive a truck loaded down with purloined civil liberties through it. So the telecom immunity stuff is just the smoke; let's take a look at the fire.

Timeline of Obama's statements on FISA

So what is being done about the Democratic sellout?

Glenn Greenwald explains


Advert in the Washington Times (now readable)

As I have described previously, the campaign we have been conducting is intended to be only the first step -- not the last -- in taking a stand against the endless erosion of core constitutional protections and the rapidly expanding Lawless Surveillance State. We have created a new organization, Accountability Now, to conduct the ongoing battle to target and remove from power those who enable these abuses; to force these issues into our political discourse; and to prevent the Washington Establishment from continuing to trample on basic constitutional protections with impunity.
The first campaign of this new organization is the formation of Strange Bedfellows, the ideologically diverse coalition we have formed with liberals, libertarians and others who are devoted to the preservation of our core constitutional liberties and the rule of law. Before it has even begun, The Wall St. Journal and numerous online venues have written about this unique coalition.
To initiate and fund our new campaign, we have teamed with the individual who was behind the innovative and extraordinarily successful Ron Paul "money bombs" -- Trevor Lyman, along with Rick Williams and Break the Matrix -- to plan an "Accountability Money Bomb" for August 8. That is the day in 1974 when Richard Nixon was forced to resign from office for his lawbreaking and surveillance abuses. That day illustrates how far we have fallen in this country in less than 35 years, as we now not only permit rampant presidential lawbreaking and a limitless surveillance state, but have a bipartisan political class that endorses it and even retroactively protects the lawbreakers.

To participate in the money bomb and support our new organization, you can pledge to donate here -- or by clicking on the logo above. On August 8, those who pledged will make their actual donations in whatever amount they choose, and the results will then be announced.

This type of ideologically diverse coalition devoted to the preservation of basic constitutional protections and the rule of law -- modeled after the still-growing and increasingly potent left-right coalition that has spontaneously arisen in Britain to fight against their Establishment's corrupt seizure of limitless surveillance and detention powers -- can be a new and powerful force. Those who are responsible for these erosions need to be undermined and the nature of the debate over these issues needs to be changed. A successful start and the support of as many people as possible is vital to launching this effort the right way -- in a way that will enable its presence to be heard and felt in the Beltway precincts that need to hear and feel it.

FISA BILL PASSES 68-29

And all the amendments? FAILED.

Cloture on the bill just passed 72-26. Obama voted in favor of cloture along with all Republicans. Hillary Clinton voted against cloture.

After the cloture vote, the Senate just approved final passage of the FISA bill, by a vote of 69-28. Obama voted with all Republicans for the bill. Hillary Clinton voted against it.

Democrats voting in favor of final passage of the FISA bill: Bayh - Carper - Casey - Conrad - Dorgan - Feinstein - Innuoye - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mukulski - Nelson (Neb.) - Nelson (Fla.) - Obama - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb - Whitehouse.

Democrats voting against final passage of the FISA bill: Akaka - Biden - Bingaman - Boxer - Brown - Cantwell - Cardin - Clinton - Dodd - Dorgan - Durbin - Feingold - Harkin - Kerry - Leahy - Levin - Lautenberg - Murray - Reed - Reid - Sanders - Schumer - Stabenow - Tester - Wyden.

The fight back begins.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California civil rights organization, intends to challenge the constitutionality of the immunity provision.

How to donate:

http://www.eff.org/

This is where we need to be sending our money now. They will surely need it for the constitutional challenge.

from here and "Cora" on teh "Senator Obama get FISA right website".

Sounds Familiar?

Via:Phoenix Woman on Daily Kos


LA TIMES WORLD

Mexico to boost phone and e-mail taps with U.S. aid

By Sam Enriquez
May 25, 2007

Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country’s conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with the United States on law enforcement.
The expansion comes as President Felipe Calderon is pushing to amend the Mexican Constitution to allow officials to tap phones without a judge’s approval in some cases. Calderon argues that the government needs the authority to combat drug gangs, which have killed hundreds of people this year.
Mexican authorities for years have been able to wiretap most telephone conversations and tap into e-mail, but the new $3-million Communications Intercept System being installed by Mexico’s Federal Investigative Agency will expand their reach.
The system will allow authorities to track cellphone users as they travel, according to contract specifications. It includes extensive storage capacity and will allow authorities to identify callers by voice. The system, scheduled to begin operation this month, was paid for by the U.S. State Department and sold by Verint Systems Inc., a politically well-connected firm based in Melville, N.Y., that specializes in electronic surveillance.
Although information about the system is publicly available, the matter has drawn little attention so far in the United States or Mexico. The modernization program is described in U.S. government documents, including the contract specifications, reviewed by The Times.
They suggest that Washington could have access to information derived from the surveillance. Officials of both governments declined to comment on that possibility.

...

It’s unclear how broad a net the new surveillance system will cast: Mexicans speak regularly by phone, for example, with millions of relatives living in the U.S. Those conversations appear to be fair game for both governments.
Legal experts say that prosecutors with access to Mexican wiretaps could use the information in U.S. courts. U.S. Supreme Court decisions have held that 4th Amendment protections against illegal wiretaps do not apply outside the United States, particularly if the surveillance is conducted by another country, Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.
Mexico’s telecommunications monopoly, Telmex, controlled by Carlos Slim Helu, the world’s second-wealthiest individual, has not received official notice of the new system, which will intercept its electronic signals, a spokeswoman said this week.
“Telmex is a firm that always complies with laws and rules set by the Mexican government,” she said.
Calderon recently asked Mexico’s Congress to amend the country’s constitution and allow federal prosecutors free rein to conduct searches and secretly record conversations among people suspected of what the government defines as serious crimes.
His proposal would eliminate the current legal requirement that prosecutors gain approval from a judge before installing any wiretap, the vetting process that will for now govern use of the new system’s intercepts. Calderon says the legal changes are needed to turn the tide in the battle against the drug gangs.
“The purpose is to create swift investigative measures against organized crime,” Calderon wrote senators when introducing his proposed constitutional amendments in March. “At times, turning to judicial authorities hinders or makes investigations impossible.”
But others argued that the proposed changes would undermine constitutional protections and open the door to the type of domestic spying that has plagued many Latin American countries. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe last week ousted a dozen generals, including the head of intelligence, after police were found to be wiretapping public figures, including members of his government.
“Calderon’s proposal is limited to ‘urgent cases’ and organized crime, but the problem is that when the judiciary has been put out of the loop, the attorney general can basically decide these however he wants to,” said John Ackerman, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Without the intervention of a judge, the door swings wide open to widespread abuse of basic civil liberties.”

Yes, I am pissed at Obama. But McCain? HELLLLL NOOOOOOO!!!!

Exhibit A

John McCain has developed a legendary reputation for affording reporters unfettered access. Now, however, his campaign has apparently decided to pursue a new strategy: avoid reporters. McCain today held a 10-minute press conference, complete with podium, microphones for the questioners, network-quality audio and a camera for a local television station, which allowed CNN to carry it live.
And where was the national press corps? Sitting on the runway 27 miles away, having been ferried to McCain’s charter plane, totally unaware that a press availability was about to take place until one of the handful of “pool reporters” sent an e-mail alert.
The reporters frantically fired up their cellular modems and logged on to CNN.com to catch the end of the press conference, unable to ask any questions. The handful of reporters there asked about the FISA terrorism bill, Iran and about McCain’s pledge to balance the budget.

...

Via: Think Progress
The Washington Post reports that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is now traveling in a new “Straight Talk Express” campaign airplane. It “features a special area” with “a couch and two captain’s chairs” where “McCain will conduct group interviews with the press.” But not all reporters covering McCain can enjoy this new lap of luxury. Top McCain aide Mark Salter said “‘only the good reporters’ would get to sit in the specially-configured section for interviews. ‘You’ll have to earn it,’ he said.” So how can these reporters “earn” a seat? Never challenge the Senator, as McCain biographer Matt Welch explained in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times:

[McCain is] very open to people. You can come on the bus, everything is great but if he knows or if his team knows that you have a hostile line of questioning or you have a long and well documented critique, they’re not going to talk to you. […]
As a human, he’s haunted by the notion of honesty and about honor and truth. He wishes that he could speak the truth all the time. He doesn’t. I don’t think he speaks the truth any more than any other politician really, no more, no less.

...

Back to the Carpetbagger Report
Despite McCain’s obvious fondness for talking with reporters, his campaign, curiously, seems to be limiting access to his aides and surrogates. One campaign reporter says that after he published stores that were not to the liking of the McCain campaign, its press office threatened to cut him off. And several weeks ago, during a conference call, an operator came on the line and told me that I “was no longer needed” on the call. Though I explained I was a journalist listening to the call, the operator said he had been told to unplug me. I protested the decision, and he said he would check and get right back. The operator never returned, and I remained on the call. But during the question period, I was not called on.

Read it all


Exhibit B

On Monday, the McCain campaign triumphantly released a joint statement from 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” the senator’s economic plan. Almost immediately, the statement looked a little sketchy, given they only endorsed his plan after taking out two of the more transparently stupid centerpiece ideas of the plan — the gas tax holiday and his promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term.
Today, the press stunt looks even worse. Alexander Burns and Avi Zenilman found that many of the 300 economists “don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda” and at least one of McCain’s 300 economists “doesn’t even support McCain for president.”

...

and B1

The way this fraud was created is rather simple. They solicited support for McCain's plans in general, then attached that support to a detailed laundry list Monday. Obviously given the entire 15 page plan to sign, many if not most would have balked because of specific provisions which make no sense economically at all.

The McCain campaign’s economic team, led by adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, began collecting signatures from economists several months ago, with the intention of showing support for McCain's broad economic priorities, rather than the specific items in his Jobs for America proposal.

The statement they signed is 403 words long — and there is no mention of the gas tax holiday or the deficit, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will approach $400 billion this year.

Bear in mind, of course, that this is the same economic bill in which McCain professes to be able to balance teh budget in FOUR YEARS, but seems to have issues explaining precisely how he's gonna do so:

Honestly, I don't want to be writing about McCain's various displays of economic ignorance all the time. But he keeps coming up with statements that are just so jaw-droppingly awful that I have to. The latest is a CNN interview from this morning, which is posted, with its transcript, here. Rather than go through it at length, I'll just list the main points:

(1) McCain is asked how he plans to balance the budget. He says that the problem is that spending is out of control, and he will control it. He adds that he will create lots of new jobs in nuclear energy and coal gasification, I assume using only controlled spending. John Roberts (who has cited figures, and seems quite well-prepared) presses him, and this exchange follows:

"ROBERTS: Senator, you can't get over the fact, though, that extending the Bush tax cuts, as you want to do, and adding in your tax cuts do take the deficit number -- we actually go from a $70 billion surplus to a $445 billion deficit. MCCAIN: You can't seem to get over the fact that it's spending that's out of control. And you restrain spending and also you can't get over the fact that historically when you raise people's taxes, guess what, revenue goes down. Every time we cut capital gains taxes, there has been an increase in revenue. I'm glad to have this discussion with you, and obviously you disagree, but the facts are that when you keep taxes low, when you restrain spending, as we did in 1982 when Ronald Reagan came to office, then the economy grows. We've created 46 million new jobs since 1982, because of lower taxes, but the spending got out of control, and that obviously caused the deficit, which then caused us to have to borrow money from China, et cetera, et cetera. And that's our problem that we have today, is spending and not keeping taxes low and stimulating the economy."

No. When you raise taxes (within reason), revenue tends to go up. (See this helpful graph.) And when you cut capital gains taxes, revenues go down, save for short-term blips that reflect people wanting to cash in under the new rates. McCain also mentions that the CBO and others who have estimated the effects of cuts in capital gains taxes use "static scoring." According to Greg Mankiw, who was the chair of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, even with dynamic scoring, cuts in the capital gains tax only recoup 50% of the revenue lost.

People. It is really worth your while to read the rest of the above entry.

Still think McCain is viable?


( You won't after reading these )