Food

xposted.

MoJo Video: Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen:A cook's-eye view on recession-friendly food, what the Black Panthers did right, and whether we really need more hip organic farmers.

Both Alice Waters and Van Jones praise Bryant Terry's new cookbook, Vegan Soul Kitchen. And not just for the recipes. Terry, a food policy fellow for the Kellogg Foundation, has a history of whipping up recipes for change, not just food.

After founding a youth nonprofit and hosting the public television series The Endless Feast, Terry now travels across the country giving lectures on everything from the prevalence of diet-related diseases in the South to "food deserts" in Oakland. He joined Mother Jones on video to whip up his healthy version of a quintessential soul food recipe and talk about racism in the food system, faith-based food activism, and the Southern Organic Kitchen Project.MORE


Re: His bit about foundation funding. The revolution will not be funded sounds a warning against foundation use due to their habit of constraining and redirecting the movements they fund into pathways that end up benefiting said foundation owners and funders, rather than the people themselves.

So the US reminded the Spanish who was the bigger boss...

So say the Spanish:

Spanish prosecutors will recommend against opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, the country’s attorney-general said Thursday. Candido Conde-Pumpido said the case against the high-ranking U.S. officials — including former U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales — was without merit because the men were not present when the alleged torture took place.
“If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out,” Conde-Pumpido said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. He said a trial of the men would have turned Spain’s National Court “into a plaything” to be used for political ends.

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The Prosecution Conundrum: Torture Detailed, "Nuremberg Defense" Revived & Blanket CIA Immunity

Yesterday, the torture condundrum was spelled out in vivid detail: Spain's Attorney General said prosecutors are recommending against opening an investigation into whether the top-level "Bush Six" sanctioned torture because they were not present when the alleged torture took place. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama said that the CIA officials carrying out torture policies crafted and approved by the Justice Department will not be prosecuted.
Crystal eyes note the absurdity: Absolved because you were ordered to torture by those who are absolved because they were not there.
A brilliant piece of twisted dark logic that renders justice not only blind but impotent.

An entire class of CIA operatives get blanket immunity while people like myself, Thomas Tamm and others who exposed Bush illegality were criminally investigated and are still suffering the fallout.
No one is accountable. Everyone's hands are still dirty.

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One law for the rich and powerful, another law for the not so rich and powerful.

Torture memo writer is now a freaking JUDGE!

While at the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee wrote the "insect memo" to authorize the torture on Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qada operative captured in Pakistan in 2002. His experience became George Bush's prime example for the efficacy of and need for torture. From Bush's 2006 speech:

We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.

...

So, the notion that we got anything of value from Zubayda is dubious -- but if we did, why did the CIA destroy the tapes of Zubaydah being tortured? Wouldn't they want it around as proof?


Bybee cites no medical evidenc for determining whether these techniques were "safe" or not, nor -- as Jane Mayer has documented -- was there ever any research into the efficacy of torture as an effective means of questioning. Bybee had no reason to believe, as Bush asserted, that these techniques were designed to be "safe." And contrary to George Bush's claims, the Red Cross has determined that the methods used against Zubaydah are "categorically" torture, which is illegal under both US and international law.
Jay Bybee's job, since 2003, has been sitting on the 9th Circut Court of Appeals, deciding what is an isn't constitutional. In the wake of the release of these documents, which Andrew Sullivan rightly calls an "unprofessional travesty of lawyering," he ought to resign.MORE

More from: Brendan Calling Be careful, pics are disturbing...

YES!!!!

Found: a cause of [Bee] Colony Collapse Disorder

Breaking:Spanish Indictments are back on teh table


interestingly great: Brown University Rejects Columbus Day

I have noticed that i have pretty much ignored the good stuff pres. O has been up to. Here we are:

From Polifact: Promises kept

Promises in the works

Obama Admin declares greenhouse gases are health threat

(no subject)

Countdown: Special Comment to President Obama, You're Wrong on Torture Prosecutions

Glenn Greenwald

Can anyone reconcile these?:
Barack Obama, yesterday:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

Eric Holder, yesterday:

It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.

Convention Against Torture -- signed by Reagan in 1988, ratified in 1994 by Senate:

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law (Article 4) . . . . The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . . An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Geneva Conventions, Article 146:

Each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.

Charter of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg, Article 8:

The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires.

U.S. Constitution, Article VI:

[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.

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We told ya so!

The NYT's predictable revelation: new FISA law enabled massive abuses

In The New York Times last night, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- the reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for informing the nation in 2005 that the NSA was illegally spying on Americans on the orders of George Bush, a revelation that produced no consequences other than the 2008 Democratic Congress' legalizing most of those activities and retroactively protecting the wrongdoers -- passed on leaked revelations of brand new NSA domestic spying abuses, ones enabled by the 2008 FISA law. The article reports that the spying abuses are "significant and systemic"; involve improper interception of "significant amounts" of the emails and telephone calls of Americans, including purely domestic communications; and that, under Bush (prior to the new FISA law), the NSA tried to eavesdrop with no warrants on a member of Congress traveling to the Middle East. The sources for the article report that "the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers."

...

These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill -- a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators -- aren't a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it. Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed -- and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated -- would enable these surveillance abuses. That was the purpose of the law: to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities. This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill. To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA's safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable. MORE