“Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year.
Filed under Weekly Column
U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Chancellor Keesling died in Iraq on June 19, 2009, from “a non-combat related incident,” according to the Pentagon. Keesling had killed himself.
Filed under Weekly Column
Climate-change activists, from pranksters to presidents, are stepping up the pressure by staging elaborate stunts.
Filed under Weekly Column
Lt. Dan Choi doesn’t want to lie. Choi, an Iraq war veteran and a graduate of West Point, declared last March 19 on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “I am gay.” Under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regulations, those three words are enough to get Choi kicked out of the military.
Filed under Weekly Column
A social worker from New York City was arrested last week while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid this week at home—all for using Twitter.
Filed under Weekly Column
Journalist Christian Parenti responds to our interview with Kevin Bales, founder of Free The Slaves
Filed under News
More Blog Posts »
The Senate passed legislation today that would remove all trade barriers between the United States and Jordan afterthe Bush administration persuaded a pivotal Republican senator to drop his objections.
Two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, investigators have not yet identified anyknowing accomplices in the United States or uncovered a broad support network that assisted the 19 hijackers. Thisaccording to a senior law enforcement official in yesterday’s New York Times.
In the last two weeks the thousands of people affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center have receivedunprecedented levels of assistance from federal state and local agencies. Agencies have generally made drastic cutsin red tape to facilitate the flow of aid and employed extremely generous standards in determining who receives it including housing, food, and disaster assistance. The aid has gone to victims of the disaster regardless of income,and therein lies the irony. For the Giuliani administration continues to discourage poor people from applying forpublic aid and housing assistance in New York.
Long after Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1979, the country remained mired in violent upheaval. Many Afghans who oppose the fundamentalist Islamic regime of the Taliban, which took power in 1996, support the Northern Alliance party, which grew out of the Mujahedeen. The official head of the Northern Alliance is the ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who claims to be the head of the Government and controls most of the country’s embassies abroad and retains Afghanistan’s UN seat after the U.N. But others say the Northern Alliance, which is the main oppositionparty to the Taliban, is also responsible for gross human rights abuses and corruption. The Afghan Northern Alliance follow a milder form of Islam than the Taliban. The group is made up of an ethnically and religiously disparate group of rebel movements, mainly non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Pashtuns are the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan.
One of the things we have tried to do here on Democracy Now! is bring the voices of people from New York and aroundthe world who have been victimized by terror but continue to speak for peace. As people in the US struggle with thequestion of how to respond to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the certainty of US military action inCentral Asia, these voices are more important than ever. One of the most important of those is Thich Nhat Hanh.