Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.
THE Bush and Obama reign symbolises an increase in state-sanctioned torture. People like Dick Cheney played a role in it, but that's just part of history that's not too relevant to this article. The matter of fact is, torture is typically outsourced to other countries or islands. It's a legal loophole. The CIA has some 'interrogation'/torture sites in Europe [1] (we wrote about this before, and even shared dozen of links about it since last year) and the same facilities and laws are set to become applicable to US citizens also [2,3] (we have shared hundreds of links about it since last year). Putting assassinations by drone aside (it's a subject for another day), it becomes increasingly clear that the domestic population is increasingly seen as a threat, not a collective to defend. Just see who the NSA is profiling. The same algorithms they ran on the Soviet Union they now apply to US citizens. What seems like racist and aggressive policing [4], abandoning common principles [5], ought to remind us of the possibility of racial profiling used for internment (like Japanese Americans in the 1940s). This is probably scary and it may sound far-fetched, but the legal foundations for it are being put in place. Profiling is not just the business of advertising companies.
Poland must wrap up a long-running probe into an alleged CIA jail on its territory where suspected Al-Qaeda members were purportedly tortured, and hold those involved accountable, UN monitors said Friday.
On November 8, senior Democratic Whip Representative James P. McGovern (D-Mass.) sent a letter to leaders of the town of Oxford, Massachusetts, praising them for their passage of a resolution repealing sections of the NDAA that permit the president of the United States to order the indefinite detention of American citizens, denying them their constitutionally protected right of due process.
The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee submitted on Thursday an already-approved cybersecurity bill to be considered as an amendment to next year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
If the amendment manages to stay intact as Congress prepares to approve the 2014 NDAA, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)’s Cybersecurity Act of 2013 may finally be codified into law.
Rockefeller’s proposal, S.1353, was unanimously approved by the Commerce Committee in July but has stayed relatively dormant ever since. On Thursday he submitted that bill as an amendment to be considered as part of an annual Pentagon spending plan that could fast track his attempts to land his proposal on President Barack Obama’s desk after attempts in Congress to adopt cybersecurity legislation have largely proven to be futile.
Jennifer Weber can’t read the Gettysburg Address to her students at the University of Kansas without taking a risk.
She chokes up a little, though she’s a Civil War author and historian. “A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” She starts losing it right about there.
“I’m not much of a crying person,” she said.
But whenever she steps inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and starts reading the words of the address carved in stone, the tears well up again.
She doesn’t choke up when she tells the president’s story, though.
Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other "student-union type stuff". Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.