Mahler's Prodigal Son

This piece " CIA’s use of harsh interrogation went beyond legal authority, Senate report says " on McClatchy speaks for itself - but will not take anyone half-informed about events, by surprise. "A still-secret Senate Intelligence Committee report calls into question the legal foundation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists, a finding that challenges the key defense on which the agency and the Bush administration relied in arguing that the methods didn’t constitute torture. The report also found that the spy agency failed to keep an accurate account of the number of individuals it held, and that it issued erroneous claims about how many it detained and subjected to the controversial interrogation methods. The CIA has said that about 30 detainees underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA’s claim “is BS,” said a former U.S. official familiar with evidence underpinning the report, who...

We are all familiar with the seemingly never-ending debate in the USA about health care and now so-called Obamacare.    Less well known is how the Republicans have done everything  - as this op-ed piece in The New York Times so clearly details - to resist health-care insurance-cover to the poor or those simply not able to afford it.      One needs to ask what sort of people - certainly not human, humane or decent - can take the position they have as outlined below. "Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate, the requirement that everyone buy insurance and the subsidies that make that requirement possible. Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while wai...

Forget about thinking of decency, being scrupulous, responsible or honourable!   Here is principally the USA spending billions of dollars on the Afghan war - and what do they do now that they are departing the war-torn country?   Leaving behind a mess of unexploded bombs around the country which the Americans say they cannot afford to remove.  Scandalous! "As the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan, it is leaving behind a deadly legacy: about 800 square miles of land littered with undetonated grenades, rockets and mortar shells. The military has vacated scores of firing ranges pocked with the explosives. Dozens of children have been killed or wounded as they have stumbled upon the ordnance at the sites, which are often poorly marked. Casualties are likely to increase sharply; the U.S. military has removed the munitions from only 3 percent of the territory covered by its sprawling ranges, officials said. Clearing the rest of the contaminated land — which...

Credited to Patrick Chappette, International New York Times

For a country which forever extols as one of its virtues how democratic it is, the ability in the USA to influence elections by throwing large sums of money at candidates, advertising and everything associated with the electoral process, makes a mockery of the claim. "Previously, there was a limit of $123,200 that any individual could donate to candidates or parties in a two-year election cycle. There was also a limit on how much a person could give to each particular candidate. The cap on donations to a single candidate still stands. But now you can give to as many candidates as you like and up to $3.6m in an election cycle. They could buy up the whole of Congress if they wanted to. Relatively few people have both the desire and the ability to do that. Fewer than 600 donors gave the maximum in 2012. But raw numbers are deceptive. The rich, already powerful, punch way above their weight. In 2010 just 0.01% of Americans accounted for a quarter of all the money given to politic...

  Ever wondered?  What does happen around the world in 60 seconds?

The fact that drones are used regularly by the US military is forgotten - as is the actual devastation to those affected.   Wake up time....as this project seeks to do.   A good piece from The Atlantic . ... "A new project, initiated by a collective of artists from around the world including the French JR, has tried to reach the people pulling the trigger in America's drone wars—the drone operators themselves. It’s called “Not A Bug Splat,” and its gets its name from the term drone operators use for a successful “kill,” because—in the pixelated grayscale of the drone camera—ending a human life looks like squashing a bug. The collective created a huge poster of a child whom organizers say lost his family to drone strikes in Pakistan’s heavily bombed province, Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa. “Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face,” reads the project’s website.   ...