Robert Crawford - No Secret Why CIA is Now Romanticizing 'Harsh Interrogation' Techniques

José Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, used these words in a "60 Minutes" interview last Sunday to defend the use of water-boarding and other "harsh interrogation" techniques on suspected terrorists. His self-assurance recalls the observation of General Taguba, the lead investigator into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, that "the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." Rodriguez’s new book, Harsh Measures is an undisguised justification of CIA torture.

Interviewer Leslie Stahl offered only mild push-back. The broadcast exemplifies the normalization of the monstrous, the transmutation of the radical and stunning reality of U.S. torture into a reasonable topic of "debate." There was no mention of the absolute, no-exceptions-permitted prohibition of torture under the Torture Convention and the Geneva Conventions; no mention of the U.S. Anti-Torture Statute or War Crimes Act; no acknowledgment that the so-called "torture memos," written in secret by the Bush administration and immediately rescinded by the Obama administration, were intended (in the words of a CIA official) as a "golden shield" against criminal prosecution.

Rodriguez claimed that 92 CIA videos of "harsh interrogation" methods were destroyed in order to protect interrogators from Al Qaeda reprisals, but the U.S. government can and regularly does hide the identity of Americans when releasing documents to the public. Missing from the "60 Minutes" exchange was any mention that the CIA was under court order to preserve the tapes, and that their destruction constituted a possible obstruction of justice. The entire discussion unfolded without any mention of the law.

Since Stahl omitted another critical question, I will ask it here: Why now? Why a CIA authorized book justifying CIA torture? There are two possible explanations. First, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) will soon release its long-awaited report on CIA torture. The report is expected to find no convincing evidence that harsh interrogation techniques led to any breakthroughs in the fight against terrorism. We should not be surprised if the CIA might want to preempt this inconvenient finding. How many will heed a report released by Senate Democrats compared to the high-profile interview and book tour of a tough CIA veteran pushing the romance of "dark-side" fixes to America’s security problems?

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/12-4

Police Taking Cash from People, just because….

HSUS: Lawyers In Cages

The Humane Society of the United States is not affiliated with your local pet shelter, but ads imply that they are.

Brian Vastag - Mayan prophecy: The world won’t end, as a newfound calendar goes on and on and on

The ancient Mayans were masters of time, keepers of good calendars.

And now we have one of their timekeepers’ workrooms to prove it.

In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thereby predicting the end of the world.

The newly found calendars, which track the motion of the moon, Venus and Mars, provide an unprecedented glimpse into how these storied sky-gazers — who dominated Central America for nearly 1,000 years — kept such accurate track of months, seasons and years.

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/mayan-prophecy-the-world-wont-end-as-a-newfound-calendar-goes-on-and-on-and-on/2012/05/10/gIQA03s3FU_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Mitt Romney - My School Days

Today, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney released the following open letter to the American people:

Dear Friends:

This week, The Washington Post reported an incident from my high school days in which I bullied a gay classmate by pinning him to the ground and cutting his hair off.  This story revealed a side of Mitt Romney that may have been surprising to many of you: the Mitt Romney with an irrepressible and hilarious sense of humor.

Some of you may say, “Hold on, Mitt – isn’t holding a kid down and cutting off his hair going a little far?”  Well, the merry prankster in me tells me you can never go too far when it comes to giving the greatest gift of all: the gift of laughter.  And I certainly remember many of us laughing long and hard about what I did to that Nancy-boy.  Was it cruel?  Perhaps, but it’s not like I tied him to the roof of a car or anything.

Read More:

http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/11/my-school-days/

Renee Parsons - The Strategic Partnership Agreement and Pakistan

As President Obama has committed to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014, the recently signed Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with Afghan President Hamid Karzai will implement an 'enduring' strategic partnership that extends a US presence in that country until 2024. A premise for the SPA is that as Islamic extremists find sanctuary within Pakistan borders, a commitment to train Afghan national security forces (ANSF) requires a long term U.S. presence until a strong Afghanistan army and police can defend their own country.

How NATO allies will respond at the upcoming Summit in Chicago to the Agreement's call for extension of the 2014 withdrawal date which the Alliance adopted at its 2010 Lisbon summit remains uncertain. While many NATO nations have indicated an eagerness to depart Afghanistan in 2014 and some have even announced a pre-2014 departure, the Agreement's appeal for a continued Afghan-NATO presence can be expected to agitate the Alliance.

Read More;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/the-strategic-partnership_b_1499926.html

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez - Welcome to the Knowledge Factory

The lead article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review is titled “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps.”

More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010, part of “an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007.

“Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay for their children’s college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.”

And the numbers of impoverished Ph.D.s may actually be much higher than this.

“Leaders of organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think that the number of people counted by the government does not represent the full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report their reliance on federal aid.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/09-1

Matt Reichel - The New Wall Street Racket Looting Your City, One Block at a Time

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced a “new and innovative” financing tool last month to help Chicago renovate failing infrastructure without precipitating another budget crisis, many in the city were understandably critical. 

Chicagoans have already endured the notorious 75-year lease of their parking meters to a consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. That sale promulgated a system wherein the public is held hostage by private finance, due largely to the inclusion of arcane legal stipulations like “non-compete clauses” and “compensation events” in the language of the contract.

Ellen Danin, writing in the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy relates that: “Chicagoans learned about compensation events when CBS reported that the city’s parking meter contract required reimbursement for events like repairing streets. Public records showed that in the first quarter of 2009, the city was liable to the parking meter contractor for more than $106,000 in lost income during the slow months for street repair and street closings for festivals, parades, and holidays, as well as repairs and maintenance. At that rate, it is not unreasonable to predict that Chicago will owe roughly $500,000 a year to the private contractor.”

The city essentially acts as an insurer for the meter merchants, with the return being a one-time injection of roughly a billion dollars that the previous mayor, Daley the Second, haphazardly exhausted on closing budget deficits in the waning years of his two-decade tour at the helm.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155276/the_new_wall_street_racket_looting_your_city%2C_one_block_at_a_time

Rebecca Solnit - Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175536/

Margaret Austin Smith - Undergrads May Fail Critical-Thinking Test, but Academia Is Failing Them

The two professors sat in front of me, making conversation before the talk. The speaker's title slide already projected on the wall ahead: "What (if anything) are undergraduates learning during college?" The professors laughed at just how apt they thought the title was: "Isn't that right?" "Yes, anything, please!" And then the more senior faculty member, a woman, returned with a comment that made her junior colleague bristle: "Especially the boys. Some of those boys just try to get by with the minimum possible." The junior colleague sat silent, and then spoke with a sharpness that spiked into the buoyant mood of moments before: "Well, that was me in high school. But the thing is, I was just bored to tears." His senior colleague stopped chuckling to nod knowingly.

The slides belonged to Josipa Roksa, a co-author with Richard Arum of the 2011 sociology/media sensation "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" and of its 2012 follow-up report, "Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort."The premise of the talk, as well as the premise of the book and its sequel, was that undergraduate students are not improving their critical thinking skills in college, that this claim is sustained by the failure of a putatively representative sample of 2,362 students at 24 four-year institutions to increase their average score on standardized tests of critical thinking, and that this failure in critical thinking is affecting them negatively in the labor market and in civil society (as indicated by the percentage with full-time employment or graduate or professional school status, and by self-reported newspaper-reading habits).

Read More:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8446-undergrads-may-fail-critical-thinking-test-but-academia-is-failing-them