Noam Chomsky: Drones Are Murder Without Trial + We Live In A Plutocracy

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Dandelion Salad

with Noam Chomsky

Jason Liosatos on May 17, 2013

My interview with Noam Chomsky. We talk about ethical compromises, and government actions without vision or wisdom which is creating terrible consequences and feedback loops. We also talk about the Drone killings, the US terrorist manufacturing campaigns, the dangerous indoctrination and conditioning of soldiers and the public, Navy Seals killing Bin Laden who was only a suspect and the Polio vaccine horror in Pakistan, Sadistic Guantanamo torture, fear, and the great danger of our government and collective psychosis…and more.

Dear President Obama: “By What Authority?” by Bruce Fein and Ralph Nader + Barack Obama’s Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Yemen

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Dandelion Salad

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
May 13, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

As a former lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, you know that the federal government, including the Office of the President, does not enjoy limitless powers.  As President, your powers are limited to those conferred either by the Constitution or federal statutes. 

Murder Is Our National Sport by Chris Hedges

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
May 13, 2013

Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.

Lawyer’s Jail Torment Marks US Totalitarian State by Finian Cunningham

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by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
April 24, 2013

Half a century ago this month Martin Luther King wrote his famous prison protest against racial injustice, entitled ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. An excerpt reads:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality… Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

A Warning from Guantánamo – Four Prisoners Are Close to Death, and the Authorities Don’t Care by Andy Worthington

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by Andy Worthington
Writer, Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
April 26, 2013

I have just received a brief message from a credible source inside Guantánamo, about the situation in the prison today, which I wanted to make available because it exposes how four prisoners are close to death, as a result of the prison-wide hunger strike that is on its 80th day, and yet the guard force are behaving with brutality and indifference.

The Persecution of Lynne Stewart by Chris Hedges

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by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
April 22, 2013

Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4 cancer that has metastasized, spreading to her lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs, creating a grave threat to her life, she sits in a prison cell at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is serving a 10-year sentence.

Barack Obama Is Comfortable with Bush’s Inferno by Ralph Nader + ABA White Papers

Dandelion Salad

Image by World Can’t Wait via Flickr

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
April 19, 2013

George W. Bush is riding high. A megamillionaire, from the taxpayer-subsidized Texas Rangers company, he makes $150,000 to $200,000 per speech, receives a large presidential pension and support facilities and is about to dedicate the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on April 25.

Andy Worthington: Gitmo Guards Brutally Hurt Prisoners

with Andy Worthington
Writer, Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
April 5, 2013

Image by World Can’t Wait via Flickr

PressTVGlobalNews·Apr 5, 2013

A political analyst tells Press TV that there is a kind of very brutal attempt to clamp down on the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to try and stop them from being on hunger strike.

Now more than 100 detainees at the United States’ infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba are staging a hunger strike to protest disrespect of the Qur’an and confiscation of personal items.

Guantanamo Exposes Reality of US Fascism by Finian Cunningham

Image by World Can’t Wait via Flickr

by Finian Cunningham
Writer, Dandelion Salad
East Africa
Crossposted from PressTV
March 26, 2013

They are essentially dead men who just happen to breathe. That is the grim assessment of the legal representative for the inmates in the American concentration camp, otherwise known as Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine in Texas Prisons by Kenneth Foster

Dandelion Salad

by Kenneth Foster
SocialistWorker.org
March 21, 2013

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Kenneth Foster is a prisoner in Texas. Despite the fact that he wasn’t convicted of being responsible for a murder–only of being present–he was sent to death row in 1996 and came within three hours of execution 11 years later before his sentence was commuted. Both before and after this victory, Kenneth was an outspoken activist and writer, not only on his own behalf, but against the criminal justice system as a whole.

The Shame of America’s Gulag by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
March 18, 2013

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Franklin Lamb: US Must End Gitmo Prison Horrors + A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

Image by World Can’t Wait via Flickr

with Franklin Lamb
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Beirut, Lebanon
Mar. 16, 2013

PressTVGlobalNews·Mar 16, 2013

An analyst says US citizens need to force US President Barack Obama to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp by joining in solidarity with the prisoners’ hunger strike.

Over 100 inmates at the notorious US Guantanamo military prison and torture camp have joined a hunger strike, protesting their indefinite detention and worsening conditions there.

America’s Disappeared by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
February 23, 2013

Image by Shrieking Tree via Flickr

Injustices do not become any less unjust the longer they are not addressed, and when it comes to the “war on terror” launched by President Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those injustices continue to fester, and to poison America’s soul.

One of those injustices is Guantánamo, where 166 men are still imprisoned, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by a task force established by the President four years ago, and another is Bagram in Afghanistan (renamed and rebranded the Parwan Detention Facility),

“The Terror Courts”: An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture at Guantánamo Bay

Dandelion Salad

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democracynow·Feb 22, 2013

www.democracynow.org – Wall Street Journal journalist Jess Bravin reports on the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo. Describing it as “the most important legal story in decades,” Bravin uncovers how the Bush administration quickly drew up an alternative legal system to try men captured abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. Soon evidence obtained by torture was being used to prosecute prisoners, but some military officers refused to take part.

Profiting From Human Misery by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
February 18, 2013

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility’s gates every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation’s immigration policy and conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend Evelyn Obey.