Policy | The Muffin Post

Road Map of Georgia / Photo: Voland. Turkey is Georgia's biggest trade partner.

Georgia signed a simplified border management agreement with Turkey on October 8 aimed at increasing its attractiveness as a transit corridor for goods moving between China and Europe and increasing flows of tourists.

The new arrangement means there will be only one set of customs checks and one set of bilingual documents required at border crossings between the two countries. Until now, two sets of checks and two sets of documents have been required, making the process lengthy and laborious. “Everything is slashed by half, there are no more double checks. We estimate it will cut the time spent at checkpoints by 40%. That means that in a 24-hour period at a customs checkpoint there will be an extra six or seven hours of slots,” said Kakha Baindurashvili, Georgia’s finance minister, who signed the document in Istanbul with Turkish state minister Hayati Yazici.

He added that the agreement shows real confidence and trust between the two countries, and mimics the system that is in operation on the border between France and Switzerland. “The idea was to strengthen the transport corridor and to try to eliminate whatever barriers were still between us,” he said.

Turkey is Georgia’s biggest trade partner. It imported goods worth $151m from Georgia and exported goods worth $527m to Georgia during the period from January to August this year, according to the latest figures from Georgia’s national statistics office.

Tagged Azerbaijan, Georgia, Georgia-Turkey border management Treaty, politics, Russia, The New Silk Road, Turkey

Oct 14 2010

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Policy, USA & Canada

NSA Adviser Jones Resigns, but why?

General James L. Jones, Jr. (Ret.)

James Havel

The Heights

Bob Woodward, one of the men who first broke the Watergate story in 1973, ending the political life of President Richard Nixon, has ended the political life of another man 37 years later. General James Jones, the top National Security Agency (NSA) adviser and the man in charge of the National Security Council (NSC), has stepped down from his position several months earlier than expected, largely because of the fiery charges Woodward leveled against him in his latest book, Obama’s Wars. The book dissects the handling of Afghanistan and Pakistan under the current administration.

Jones, a former NATO commanding officer, was one of Obama’s earliest Cabinet choices. While commanding NATO, Jones lobbied tirelessly for stronger European support and commitment in Afghanistan. Outside of Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, Jones was the most experienced man on Obama’s national security team. However, according to Woodward, Jones did not get along with the most important people in this administration, including Rahm Emanuel (who just left the White House to run for mayor of Chicago), senior adviser David Axelrod, and press secretary Robert Gibbs. Woodward also highlighted the advisers’ rocky relationship when he quoted Jones referring to the aforementioned advisers as the “Mafia, Politburo, and water bugs.” Because of the personal tension, Emanuel forced Jones to tap former Carter administration adviser, Tom Donilon, to be number two on his team.

According to Woodward, Donilon became Emanuel’s go-to man, effectively shutting Jones from the day-to-day operations. Woodward, again, brought this rumor to light when he described a situation where Jones pulled Emanuel aside during a cabinet meeting for speaking to Donilon instead of him, saying “I’m the national security adviser. When you come down there, come see me.” According to Woodward, not only did he rub the “Politburo” the wrong way, he rubbed former General Stanley McChrystal, then chief of NATO forces and commanding general of all American forces in Afghanistan, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen the wrong way when he repeatedly denied their request for 40,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He defended his position, saying the military, “hadn’t proved their need for it, yet.” Gates eventually overrode Jones when he and the president agreed to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. According to other sources from within the Obama administration who Woodward interviewed, “In six months, you will be hard pressed to find anyone in the administration who notices that Jones is no longer there.”

Related story:
Obama’s New Foreign Policy Yard Boss

Tagged Bob Woodward, General James Jones, National Security Agency, NSA Adviser Jones Resigns, politcs, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates

Oct 13 2010

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Policy, World

Germany to advocate reform to UN Security Council

Germany will 'justify' the UN's 'vote of confidence'

Gregg Benzow, Dagmar Breitenbach

DW-WORLD.DE

Now that the UN General Assembly has chosen Germany to be one of five new non-permanent members of the Security Council, Berlin has begun lobbying for sweeping changes to the make-up of the world body.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle wasted little time after his country was elected to a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Speaking on Germany’s ARD public television network, Westerwelle reiterated earlier comments calling for major changes to the Council. The foreign minister criticized what he said was the lack of representation for certain regions of the world.

“It is not appropriate that two continents, like Africa and Latin America, do not have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Asia, too, rightfully views itself as underrepresented,” the German foreign minister said.

“That is why any reform of the United Nations is not first and foremost about a permanent seat on the Security Council for us, but rather about a better reflection of global distribution of power,” Westerwelle emphasized.

The German victory is expected to boost the country’s new campaign to become a permanent member on the Council. Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Berlin that the government was delighted with the results.

“Germany will work hard during its term to push ahead on reforms of the UN Security Council,” she said. “That is the expectation that a lot of people in the world have.”

Tagged Angela Merkel, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, Germany and the Security Council, Policy cost Canada UN seat, UN Security Council, UN Security Council Adds Emerging Powers

Oct 08 2010

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Europe, Policy, USA & Canada

Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukács

Available at Amazon in the U.K. Limited in the U.S.

Counterfire

Georg Lukács was the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century. In the process of explaining the principles of the Russian revolution he provided answers to some vital questions: How do capitalist ideas maintain a hold on our consciousness? In what circumstances do people become radicalised? And how can socialists build genuinely mass revolutionary movements?

Lukács’ revolutionary ideas of the 1920s were suppressed by Stalin and have been marginalised by academics and even many on the left. They have lived a kind of underground existence re-emerging whenever fundamental change is being discussed. The book introduces his ideas and argues they are vital to our world of crisis and war.

A philosopher activist

Lukács became a revolutionary and a Marxist during the greatest wave of working class struggle in history, unleashed by the Russian revolution at the end of the First World War. Already a well known intellectual in Hungary, months after joining the newly-formed Hungarian Communist party in December 1918 he found himself a leader in the events which led to the brief Hungarian soviet republic in 1919. He was People’s Commissar for Education and for a short time a political commissar at the battlefront.

The Hungarian Workers Republic ended in disaster. This was, as Lukács himself came to recognise, because it was unstable from the start. The Hungarian Communist Party had called an insurrection in February 1919 well before it had majority support in the workers’ councils. The uprising was crushed, as mass radicalisation proved no substitute for political preparation. All the same, the militancy of peasants and workers and the annexation of parts of the country by foreign powers led to the collapse of the bourgeois government, creating a power vacuum.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic came about in March 1919 through a merger between the Communists and the reformist Social Democratic Party (SDP). The SDP was handed power by the ruling class in a last ditch attempt to salvage the system. Lukács and the leadership of the Communist Party interpreted the new alliance of reformists and revolutionaries as a spontaneous restoration of proletarian unity, but it turned out to be a recipe for confusion and then disaster.

Communist Party leaders acted as if they were in a revolutionary government, forcing through nationalisation of the land with no concern for the interests of the peasantry while the majority of workers remained under reformist leadership. Faced with new attacks from an alliance of counter-revolutionary powers, the SDP leaders capitulated and the Communists were isolated. A reactionary government was formed, which unleashed a reign of terror on the left, executing 5,000 and driving tens of thousands more out of the country.

Lukács wrote his key works of the 1920s – Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought, History and Class Consciousness and Tailism and the Dialectic – in the aftermath of this experience, while he was in exile in Vienna. We can see now this was a decisive moment for the socialist movement. Before the war the world socialist movement had been organised in the Second International, whose complete accommodation to the system was exposed by its leading parties’ support for the First World War. The Russian Bolsheviks stood out against this betrayal and led a successful revolution that became an inspiration for millions around the world.

Both History and Class Consciousness and Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Thought express the revolutionary potential of the moment, and the fear that lessons were not being learnt from the experience. By 1925, when Lukács wrote Tailism and the Dialectic, there were signs that the isolation of the Russian revolution was encouraging a new form of fatalism.

Oct 05 2010

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Policy, USA & Canada

Tyranny’s Last Stand: The Tipping Point is Here

Michael Edwards

Activist Post

In Malcolm Gladwell’s provocative book The Tipping Point, he gives many examples of how seemingly small, insignificant decisions can radiate to cause an eventual wave of change that overtakes the prevailing modes of behavior. He clearly extrapolates how the silent leaders of society — not the ones on TV, or the ones we appoint — set trends through their singular ability to recognize an underlying need, or change of direction. It can be as simple as a clothing style, a type of cuisine, a new travel destination . . . or the need to change the world’s political course. I believe there are signs that The Tipping Point for free humanity has been reached; from here on out, there will be an open dialogue between the forces of tyranny and the forces of freedom.

The idea that in order to recognize tyranny, you must force it to act as such is very much the case right now. Humanity is rebelling worldwide to the dictates of Elite overlords and petty bureaucrats alike. The small, silent statements of resistance have reached a classic tipping point. Whether it is tax rebellion, free speech, freedom of religion, the freedom to speak out against endless war, women’s rights in oppressive regimes, or the freedom to grow one’s own food in peace, the small defeats and victories have become a sustained chorus of resistance to ever-increasing forces of control. This chorus has coalesced from the choirs of different nations, different genders, different political affiliations, different races, and different socioeconomic positions. This is the ultimate sign of a true tipping point: critical mass has been reached.

The modern pantheon of enemies has now been identified, along with their demiurges, by even the most common of men. The enemies are the banking consortium; the global Elite born and bred from mega-wealth; the academics and economists who disconnect ideas from reality; and the scientific and military minds who are so compartmentalized by design that they rarely know what sort of dictatorship to which they are making their contributions.

Related story:
The Story of Your Enslavement

Tagged centralized control, dictators, dictatorship, Freedom, Human Rights, The Tipping Point, tyranny

Oct 04 2010

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Policy, USA & Canada

FBI Raids Activists’ Homes in Sinister COINTELPRO Replay

Critics: Purpose was orchestrated and unlikely to find evidence of any ties to Hezbollah, PFLP and FARC.

Tom Burghardt

Global Research

In a replay of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s infamous COINTELPRO operations targeting the left during the 1960s and ’70s, America’s political police launched raids on the homes of antiwar and solidarity activists.

Heavily-armed SWAT teams smashed down doors and agents armed with search warrants carried out simultaneous raids in Minneapolis and Chicago early morning on September 24.

Rummaging through personal belongings, agents carted off boxes of files, documents, books, letters, photographs, computers and cell phones from Minneapolis antiwar activists Mick Kelly, Jessica Sundin, Meredith Aby, two others, as well as the office of that city’s Anti-War Committee.

Meanwhile, as federal snoops seized personal property in Minneapolis, FBI agents raided the Chicago homes of activists Stephanie Weiner and Joseph Iosbaker. According to the Chicago Tribune, “neighbors saw FBI agents carrying boxes from the apartment of community activist Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network.”

“In addition,” the Tribune reported, “Chicago activist Thomas Burke said he was served a grand jury subpoena that requested records of any payments to Abudayyeh or his group.”

Amongst those targeted by the FBI were individuals who organized peaceful protests against the imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq and 2008 protests at the far-right Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

As Antifascist Calling reported in 2008 and 2009, citing documents published by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, state and local police, the FBI and agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon’s Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the United States Secret Service, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency implemented an action plan designed to monitor and squelch dissent during the convention.

As part of that plan’s execution, activists and journalists were preemptively arrested, and cameras, recording equipment, computers and reporters’ confidential notes were seized. Demonstrations were broken up by riot cops who wielded batons, pepper spray and tasers and attacked peaceful protesters who had gathered to denounce the war criminals’ conclave in St. Paul.

With Friday’s raids, the federal government under “change” huckster Barack Obama, has taken their repressive program to a whole new level, threatening activists with the specter of being charged with providing “material support of terrorism.” A felony conviction under this draconian federal law (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113B, § 2339B) carries a 15 year prison term.

State-Corporate Nexus

The trend by federal, state and corporate securocrats to situate antiwar and international solidarity activism along a bogus “terrorism continuum,” is an alarming sign that plans for building an American police state are well underway as I pointed out in my 2008 analysis of the FBI’s “Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon.”

Recently, the secrecy-spilling web site Public Intelligence posted 137 bulletins produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), an American-Israeli company, under terms of a $125,000 contract to the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security.

Billing itself as “the preeminent Israeli/American security firm providing training, intelligence and education to clients across the globe,” ITRR is part of a large, but little understood nexus of “public-private partnerships” fusing state and corporate surveillance against leftists and environmentalists.

Amongst the targets of ITRR’s alarmist screeds were anti-drilling and environmental activists, permanent quarry for corporate spies and provocateurs, as the web site Green Is The New Red (GNR) amply documents.

Earlier this month, GNR reported that while ITRR and their political paymasters have been monitoring non-violent activists, “including a film screening of Gasland,” Pennsylvania’s heimat security boss James Powers wrote in an email that his office intended to “continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies.”

In the bizarre parallel universe inhabited by Powers and his Israeli cohorts, anti-drilling activists are “ecoterrorists,” while the mass-murdering neo-Nazi mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people including 19 children, Timothy McVeigh, was “just a person very angry with the U.S. government.”

While corporate polluters and criminals get a free pass from the federal government and an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab crusade is in full-swing, stoked by right-wing goons and their media shills, it is little wonder then, that Friday’s raids targeted supporters of the Palestinian solidarity movement.

Neo-McCarthyite Witchhunt

With a pretext that the raids were seeking “evidence related to an ongoing Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation,” FBI spokesperson Steve Warfield told The New York Times that repressors are “looking at activities connected to the material support of terrorism.”

Attorney Ted Dooley who represents Mick Kelly, a union- and socialist activist targeted by the Bureau told the Times that the SWAT team broke down Kelly’s door at 7 a.m. on Friday and served a search warrant on his companion.

According to Dooley, the warrant claimed the secret state was searching for “evidence” that activist groups had provided “material support” to “Hezbollah, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.”

Tagged activism, FBI, Hezbollah, Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, terrorism, violations of human rights

Oct 03 2010

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Money & Investment, Policy

Corporatism and the Cyborg Amongst Us

Aetius Romulous

Dissident Voice

In a world of fragile mortal beings, the corporation is a cyborg.

A corporation is nothing more than a legal construct, a packet of documents and papers that conforms to law (or more properly, has law conform to it). The corporation is a “virtual person” — a cyborg. It has been unchanged in its essential form since the first corporations were designed in the early 17th century. Its purpose was — as it is today — to concentrate the capital of individuals, provide that concentration with legal protections and rights under law and legislation, and to then use that concentrated capital to create profits from projects beyond the scope and reach of individual mortal men.

Wall Street

This corporate cyborg proved to be so remarkably adept at concentrating capital and earning returns on investment that the corporations use today has become essential in a marketplace dominated by other corporations. Individuals have no chance of competing, expressly because the intended purpose of a corporate cyborg was to defeat the meagre returns and profit of mortal individuals. Corporations were created, and are still employed, precisely because the individual cannot provide capital and returns on the scale that the corporation can. The corporate format works like a charm.

The concentration of capital is an important and necessary function however. Without a framework for the concentrated power of capital, it is hard to imagine how the great works of our modern civilization could have been developed. From the early railroads and canal systems, through to the worldwide network of fiber optic cables and satellite systems, the corporate format has wrought great and wonderful things. We are all a species much advanced because of it.

But while the current corporate format certainly does these things — it also does a great deal more. Modern corporations, for instance, have an unlimited lifespan, and outlive the original purpose of the capital and the humans that designed it. Limited liability joint stock companies can and regularly do shed appropriate risk, or avoid it altogether — risks no human would ever take on themselves, or any society would otherwise accept.

Corporations enjoy separate, beneficial tax treatment. They also have the use of an arcane accounting system they themselves created for their own use. Corporations, by nature, abhor competition and naturally gravitate towards monopoly, as they have clearly been doing in the last 30 years or so. Unlike humans, the corporate cyborg has no ethics, morals, or social responsibilities — its simple, binary purpose is solely to maximize profits at the complete expense of every other issue. Corporations have developed their own legal standing as ruthless profit harvesting individuals before the law.

There are also the unintended consequences of the commensurate concentration of power by increasingly oligarchic corporations in a liberal democracy. The naturally occurring power of astonishing sums of money and influence on simple human legislators in a society obsessed with consumer vices. The flagrant usurpation of a democratic process that should provide checks and balances but no longer can. Concentrated capital in concentrated corporations that regularly spend small fractions of their profits to bribe and influence lawmakers. Small fractions of profits that have become hundreds of millions of dollars annually as a simple cost of doing business. Amounts of cash no single human with a single worthless vote could ever hope to overcome.

The corporation has become the de facto governing force of 21st century society, cyborgs pushing aside and making the individual state moot. Far from one world government, the earth is teeming with one-world corporations. 21st century schizoid man.

The essential issue of our time is that western liberal democracies are ill equipped to handle unbridled corporatism; they have goals and motivations that are completely at odds with each other.

Many people conflate “corporatism” with “capitalism”, most believing they are one and the same. They are not. It is possible to have a robust capitalism that answers to the social imperatives of democracy; however, the corporate goals of capitalism are entirely at odds with the social necessities of democracy. It is entirely possible — and desirable — to isolate corporatism through law and legislation, however the contemporary ideology of capitalism and free markets believes that the two – corporatism and capitalism – are indivisible. An attack on corporatism is an attack on capitalism. And an attack on capitalism is heresy.

Corporatism is not capitalism

The failure of democratic institutions to separate out corporatism from capitalism ensures that every instance of conflict between corporations and social welfare will end in the triumph of corporate interests above those of progressive liberal democracy. With each victory, power is transferred from humans to the mechanical corporate format.

Oct 03 2010

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Middle East, Policy

Palestinians warn of imminent clashes in Israeli jails

The Muffin Post

Palestinians warn that a deterioration of conditions in Israeli controlled prison could result in clashes between them and the Israeli Prison Authority (IPA). They blame the IPA for exacerbating tension, direct provocation, and harassment of prisoners.

Among some of the reasons and grievances cited:

• Palestinians are sentenced to unreasonable and unlawful terms in the military courts.

• Administrative prison sentences are extended up to eight times, without indictments.

• The Israeli prison system has banned visits to some prisoners for several years and carries out forceful strip searches on prisoners.

• Prisoners are served unclean food.

• Prison guards perform surprise night raids and violently empty prisoners’ cells, breaking down walls, and engaging in ruthless searches for items like mobile telephones.

• The Israeli Prison Authority suspends studies at the university level for prisoners shortly before graduation to deprive them of the opportunity to graduate.

The Palestinian prisoners welcomed the meeting between Hamas and Fatah leaders to discuss national reconciliation a week back in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

According to the Palestinian Information Center the Palestinian prisoners supported such meetings.

A longtime prisoner said:

“The political atmosphere and general conditions experienced by the Palestinian people and their cause are ripe for a complete reconciliation, especially under the shadow of Israeli intransigence which denies the rights of the Palestinian people and the clear escalations against Jerusalem and continued settlement activity.”

Prisoners called for more talks between Fatah and Hamas in an effort to promote reconciliation and national unity and to rally around common issues, such as the war prisoners issue and the occupation of Jerusalem, that unite the Palestinians.

Tagged clashes, Israeli jails, Nations That Lose the High Ground, Palestinians, Some Thoughts on Resistance, tensions, violations of rights, war prisoners

Oct 02 2010

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Middle East, Policy

Will the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Bring Down Saad al-Hariri’s Government?

RANNIE AMIRI

Uprooted Palestinians

A war of words has erupted between Lebanon’s Hezbollah-led March 8 Coalition and Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri’s ruling March 14 Coalition, posing the greatest challenge to Hariri’s leadership yet and threatening the viability of his “national unity” government.

As indictments loom following the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s (STL) investigation into the February 2005 assassination of the late premier Rafiq al-Hariri, his now-prime minister son finds himself trapped between diametrically opposed forces. Those in his parliamentary bloc and own Future Movement back the STL—and importantly, its funding—while the March 8 opposition has called for it to either seriously consider claims of alleged Israeli involvement in Hariri’s killing or be shut down.

The STL is still expected to implicate Hezbollah elements in the murder even after Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah presented intercepted video footage obtained from Israeli reconnaissance drones revealing the path of Hariri’s motorcade and exact location of the attack. He also said Ghassan al-Jedd, a known Israeli spy, was present at the crime scene that day (Jedd later fled to Israel).

Nasrallah’s disclosures came against the backdrop of an extensive crackdown on Israeli espionage rings operating in Lebanon’s security and telecommunications sectors, including the state-owned mobile service provider, Alfa. Having worked for the Mossad for more than a decade, one agent confessed to installing computer programs and planting chips in Alfa transmitters to be used by Israeli intelligence to monitor communications, and locate and target individuals for assassination.

Tagged Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Rafiq al-Hariri murder, Saad al-Hariri, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Uprooted Palestians

Oct 02 2010

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Policy, USA & Canada, World

US Courts Legalize CIA Abduction, Detention, And Torture Of Innocent American Citizens

Alexander Higgins

Alexander Higgins Blog

The United States Court Of Appeals 9th circuit has legalized the CIA abduction, overseas detention, and torture of innocent American citizens.

It has also ruled that innocent civilians tortured and detained, even after release, have no rights for recourse against the CIA or corporations involved because litigation would jeopardize state secrets and top secret classified information critical to National Security.

The Richard H. Chambers, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Pasadena, California / Photo: Coolcaesar

The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration has won a shocking victory in federal appeals courts when the US federal appeals court ruled that innocent victims abducted and tortured by the CIA do not have a right to sue companies involved in facilitating the torture programs.

The lawsuit involves litigation against Boeing for its involvement the US CIA torture program of innocent US citizens.

The lawsuit charges that US Citizens alleged to be terrorists were subject to illegal “forced disappearances” after which Boeing ran CIA black-op “torture flights” of the alleged terrorism suspects during which the tortured citizens were flown to secret overseas prisons where torture is legal.

The 5 men involved in the litigation were originally abducted by the CIA and shipped to the oversea the secret overseas torture prisons based on suspicions that they were involved with the 9/11 attack.

So far 3 of the 5 men have been released because they were innocent and had no involvement with the attacks.

According the Associated Press, the three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit court of appeals quickly dismissed the lawsuit after the US Government claimed the litigation would reveal state secrets along with top secret US Government intelligence by a vote of 2 to 1.

The ruling effectively legalizes the abduction, overseas detention and torture of innocent US civilian citizens by the CIA.

The decision also removes the remedies innocent people who are tortured or detained can take against the CIA or corporations contracted by the CIA to run its black-ops.

Can you say Fascism?

Not surprisingly this is the same Federal Appeals Court that ruled that private property is no longer private when it made it legal for Government officials to sneak on to private property and install GPS devices to track US citizens anytime they want without a warrant.

Judge Michael Hawkins, a federal judge on the panel who disagreed with the ruling, told the Associated Press that the lawsuit was dismissed prematurely and argued that the litigants should still be allowed to prevent evidence that is not secret and not critical to the so-called “National Security” interests of the United States.

“They are not even allowed to attempt to prove their case by the use of nonsecret evidence in their own hands or in the hands of third parties”, wrote Judge Michael Hawkins about the decision.

ACLU attorney Ben Wizner who represents the 5 men stated that he plans on appealing the decision and taking it the United States Supreme court.

However, considering the recent streak of rulings which have diminished the constitutional rights protecting American citizens while increasing the tyrannical powers of the Executive branch of the federal government it is likely that current ruling will stand.

The recent rulings continue uphold the wide array of human rights violations originally implemented by President George W. Bush in the name of the so called “War on Terror”.

Despite the many campaign promises by President Barack Obama to end those promises he has only expanded the oppression the Obama administration has only expanded Bush’s violations to the point of a totalitarianism dictatorship.

The ACLU points out that Obama administration has fought for and won the legalization of Bush’s human rights violations in the US courts and instead of ending the practices President Obama has made the abusive practices of civil rights violations the new normal.

Tagged CIA, Human Rights, Law, national security, rendition, torture, United States Court Of Appeals 9th circuit

The Muffin Post

Online Journal for the common (Wo)Man.

Category Archives: Policy

Georgia signed border treaty with Turkey to opens up China-Europe transit route

NSA Adviser Jones Resigns, but why?

Germany to advocate reform to UN Security Council

Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukács

Tyranny’s Last Stand: The Tipping Point is Here

FBI Raids Activists’ Homes in Sinister COINTELPRO Replay

Corporatism and the Cyborg Amongst Us

Palestinians warn of imminent clashes in Israeli jails

Will the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Bring Down Saad al-Hariri’s Government?

US Courts Legalize CIA Abduction, Detention, And Torture Of Innocent American Citizens

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