U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact. 

While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like "unlawful combatants"), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret.  That is what Rumsfeld says he did.

An account of what we know on this matter can be found on page 110 of a new report by Congressman John Conyers called "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War." http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5769

Following a catalog of evidence of other crimes sanctioned by top Bush Administration officials, the report reads:

Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the public. But some -- notably at the top rungs of the profession -- have become players in the power games of the nation’s capital. And more than a few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want to decide what the public shouldn’t know.

When the New York Times front page broke the story of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the newspaper’s editors had good reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling backstory: The Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.

The White House did what it could -- including, as a last-ditch move, an early December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office -- in its efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The good news is that those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is that they were successful for more than a year.

“The decision to hold the story last year was mine,” Keller said, according to a Washington Post article that appeared 10 days after

AUSTIN, Texas -- 2006 makes the ninth year in a row the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour. It's bad economics, it's bad policy, it's stupid, it's unfair, and it's high damn time to do something about it. It is also, as Sen. Edward Kennedy says, a moral issue.

The Democrats have a new strategy that may finally get the Republicans off the pot. They're working to get a minimum wage increase on state ballots, including Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Arkansas and Montana. The theory is that putting a minimum-wage increase on the ballot does for Democrats what putting on an anti-gay marriage proposition does for Republicans -- it gets out the base.

Of the seven states with the best chance to have minimum wage ballot initiatives, five were decided by less that 10 percentage points in the most recent presidential election. In theory, this should scare the happy pappy out of the Republicans, who will then vote to increase the minimum wage the first chance they get in Congress, thus assuring an increase either way. Clever, eh?

The U.S. military used white phosphorous as a weapon in Fallujah, and the U.S. military says such use is illegal.  That's one heck of a fog fact (Larry Beinhart's term for a fact that is neither secret nor known).  This fact has appeared in an article in the Guardian (UK) and been circulated on the internet, but has just not interested the corporate media in the United States.

  It interests Congressman John Conyers, however.  Last week, Conyers released a 273-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War."  This 273-page report covers many war-related crimes, including the use of white phosphorous.  http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5769

 

The medieval town in which Arnold Schwarzenegger grew up has rightly rejected his medieval murder of Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

The Terminator's nickname has taken on a twisted new dimension. His Austrian home town is horrified, along with sane human beings throughout the rest of the world. Above all, this was a fascist killing.

For the full horror of what Schwarzenegger has done in American terms, we must hearken back to the witch trials of the 1600s.

In Salem and elsewhere in New England, Puritan fanatics took the loud hysteria of scheming adolescents as "evidence" of deviltry. In 1692-3 a score of citizens---nearly all of them women---were "convicted" of witchcraft.

The charges were sick and absurd. Many of the accused were esteemed grandmothers. Most were independent gardeners, farmers, craftspeople or in business for themselves. In many cases, family feuds or the coveting of land and property were at the core of the accusations.