David Swanson's Blog, page 182
April 22, 2012
April 21, 2012
How Dare Russia
"Self-purification through suffering is easier, I tell you: easier -- than that destiny which you are paving for many of them by wholesale acquittals in court. You are merely planting cynicism in their souls." --Fyodor Dostoyevsky
April 20, 2012
Torture on Trial
Legal and Humane Frameworks for Opposing Torture
by: David Swanson
Published in the May / June 2012 Humanist
Cases come in by the thousands from all over the world. A man was beaten and whipped. A woman was beaten and raped. A boy was hooded with three empty sand bags in 100-degree heat all day, starved, beaten, and kept in stress positions. Alleged suicide victims had their hands tied behind their backs, had boot prints on their heads, or turned out to have been electrocuted. There are torture victims covered with cigarette burns, and torture victims with no visible injuries. They need the expert assistance of doctors and lawyers to heal, to win asylum, and to create any sort of accountability in courts of law.
I’ve participated in countless nonviolent protests of torture, including congressional lobbying, panels and seminars, online petition writing, bird-dogging of politicians and judges and professors. I’ve met victims and told their stories and reviewed their books. But I had never spent a day with a crowd of lawyers and doctors who deal with the medical and court struggles arising out of torture cases, not until I attended a conference in February at American University in Washington, DC, entitled “Forensic Evidence in the Fight Against Torture.”
The doctors, lawyers, and others attending and speaking at the conference were from the United States and many other countries. It was not lost on them that they were addressing something different from a “natural” disaster. In their public comments and private discussions I found universal agreement that torture has gained dramatically greater, world-wide public acceptance during the past decade, and that the United States has been the leader in promoting that greater acceptance. While Juan Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, pointed his finger at Hollywood movies and TV shows in which harsh interrogation techniques succeed in aiding crime solvers, several experts independently told me that by granting legal immunity to torturers, the United States has led by example.
It may be hard to recall that a mere decade ago torture was almost universally condemned here, and had been almost universally condemned in the Western world for centuries (racist exceptions for slavery excluded). By 2004, 43 percent of U.S. respondents to a Pew Research Center survey were saying that torture was often or sometimes justified to gain key information. By 2009, 49 percent said so. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that public support for torture increased in the United States from 27 percent in 2004 to 42 percent in 2010. AP-GfK polling found U.S. public support for torture at 38 percent in 2005, increasing to 52 percent by 2009.
That was the society I left behind as I entered the conference rooms of AU’s Washington College of Law to join an international gathering of professionals who still viewed torture as the evil it had been considered by the authors of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which included an absolute ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
April 10, 2012
Talk Nation Radio: John Horgan on the End of War
John Horgan discusses his new book "The End of War," and the scientific evidence that war can be ended. Horgan is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. A former senior writer at Scientific American (1986-1997), he has also written for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Discover, The London Times, The Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, and other publications around the world. He writes regular columns for Scientific American online, the Chronicle of Higher Education and BBC Knowledge Magazine and does video chats for Bloggingheads.tv.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Liberals Cry Out: Tax the Rich! Fund More Wars!
The shout of the Occupy movement, at least in D.C., has been "End the Wars, Tax the Rich!" in that order and in combination. Over half of federal discretionary spending goes to the war machine. We ought to fix that problem first, and then fix the problem that our overlords aren't actually paying their fair share of the taxes. My friend Leah Bolger is about to face a possible sentence of months in prison for having taken this message to the Super Committee. Remember them?
As We Ruin Our Kids' Planet, They Take Us to Court
Here in the land of the free lunch and the home of the instant gratification, most people make a huge deal out of children's rights or fetuses' rights, or occasionally both. Which is extremely bizarre -- crazier perhaps than bombing houses in Afghanistan to protect the rights of the women inside them. Because we're engaged in the deliberate and knowing process of slowly and irreversibly rendering the whole damn planet uninhabitable. If not our children, then their children will be forced to live in a desert or move to the North Pole if we don't quickly change our ways -- and possibly even if we do. And if we don't change our ways, the approach we take to the coming crisis will make fascism look like summer camp.
April 9, 2012
Heard the One About the Peace Activist on the Titanic?
As we mark the 100-year anniversary of the unsinkable Titanic sinking, we should recall both the good and bad of that long-forgotten world of 1912. Were an unbelievably expensive means of luxury travel between the United States and Europe invented today, there would be no reason to expect peace activists to be found among the passengers. But it is not at all surprising that among the first-class passengers on the world's largest ship in 1912 was a well-known advocate of peace. This is what Wikipedia has to say about him:
"William Thomas Stead (5 July 1849 – 15 April 1912) was an English journalist and editor who, as one of the early pioneers of investigative journalism, became one of the most controversial figures of the Victorian era. . . .
April 6, 2012
April 5, 2012
AUDIO: Brendan DeMelle on fracking, David Swanson on Rachel Maddow
CounterSpin (4/6/12-4/12/12)
Listen: [mp3] Note: Please feel free to download the mp3 by right-clicking the mp3 link and choose the "Save Target As" function.
This week on CounterSpin: You've heard the gas industry PR—their ads are all over television and public radio. And the message—that gas drilling is a safe, affordable path to energy independence—is being echoed by some pundits. Anti-fracking activists sure think otherwise, and they're challenging the media-industry line. We'll talk about this with Brendan deMelle of DeSmog Blog.
Also on CounterSpin today, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has a new book taking a critical look at U.S. military power. But how critical? And what lessons can we draw about exactly what kind of critique the corporate media will allow? Author and peace activist David Swanson will join us to talk about that.
Listen to this week's show.
LINKS:
--DeSmog Blog
--David Swanson
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