http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/05/rule_of_law/index.html
* Greenwald
I was wondering if someone could reconcile these three things: *
From Obama terrorism adviser John Brennan, on this weekend's Meet the Press: we're a country of laws
From The New York Times, September 24, 2009:
indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges
continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial
(administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.)
From CNN, November 13, 2009:
sent to military commissions for trial
fair trials for people who commit crimes 'controversial'
the Obama administration is explicitly denying civilian trials to numerous terrorism suspects whenever it feels like doing so
"The rule of law" requires charges for all people accused of crimes whom we want to imprison.
The reality is that the Bush administration used a discretionary multi-tiered justice system for terrorism suspects: they gave civilian trials to some, put others before military commissions, and held the rest indefinitely without charges. How can it possibly be the case that the Obama administration is upholding "the rule of law" when, to use Benen's words, it is according rights to terrorism suspects "the same exact way the Bush administration did.
The new president, during his first year, has adopted the bulk of the counterterrorism strategy he found on his desk when he arrived in the Oval Office. Obama explicitly banned several Bush policies that were already discontinued by the time he was inaugurated.
A President who imprisons people with military commissions or even no charges at all -- and constantly invokes secrecy claims to shield the Executive Branch from judicial review over allegations of lawbreaking -- is now hailed -- by progressives -- as a stalwart defender of "the rule of law."*
America's Most Impoverished Cities
http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/12/most-impoverished-cities-business-beltway-poverty-cities.html
The Great Recession is rewriting the rules of American poverty. Data from the Census Bureau, released in September, show that during the first year of the recession, incomes fell farther and poverty leaped higher than during almost any other time in a generation.
To find out who is being hit worst, we used new data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey. Although the Census Bureau defines poverty simply as people earning below a certain income level, (which varies based on family size) we also looked at per capita incomes for a region, the percentage of food stamp recipients, the percentage of people under age 65 receiving public health care and the unemployment rate.
Poverty may once have been worst in the Deep South. And cities on the border with Mexico are plagued with poverty. But the recession--and the decline of American manufacturing--has left Rust Belt cities with comparable levels of poverty. The problem is concentrated in these three regions. All 10 cities on our list are southern cities, border cities or declining manufacturing centers.
Crony Capitalism Unchanged
http://current.com/items/91792378_crony-capitalism-unchanged.htm
The Real News Network Interviews Robert Johnson on Bank Regulation...
Sheriff’s destruction of medical marijuana leads to lawsuit
http://current.com/items/91853893_sheriff-s-destruction-of-medical-marijuana-leads-to-lawsuit.htm
IPS
Bottled Water Scare Exposes Threat to Groundwater : Paraguay
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49811
The Patiño aquifer "can no longer be recommended as a source of bottled water, because it no longer meets the conditions for water quality," Félix Villar, a member of the Paraguayan Association of Water Resources and a professor at the National University engineering school's groundwater department, told IPS.
According to the National Office on Environmental Health, 40 percent of this land-locked South American country's population of 6.1 million uses water from the Patiño aquifer, which lies below Greater Asunción.
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