Galindez writes: "The mostly irresponsible corporate media keeps creating stories about Bernie Sanders going negative."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Marius Bugge/The Nation)
The Media, Not Bernie Sanders, Is Going Negative
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
10 November 15
he mostly irresponsible corporate media keeps creating stories about Bernie Sanders going negative. Let me give you an example: Jonathan Martin of The New York Times pressured Bernie Sanders with repeated questions about Hillary Clinton’s donations from employees of Goldman Sachs. More than once, Sanders said, “You will have to ask her,” but Martin pressed on. In the end, the title of his article was “Bernie Sanders Presses Hillary Clinton on Her Views on Banks.” It was Martin who did all the pressuring to create the story he may as well have already written.
The exchange took place during a press availability in Cedar Rapids in July. It was clear that Martin had his story in mind, and he pressed and pressed until Bernie said enough that he could write a story claiming that Bernie was pressuring Hillary. Maybe I shouldn’t have called Martin out individually, but I was embarrassed to be a reporter as I watched Martin act like a vulture.
More recently, we see the media trying to create conflict over Hillary’s email controversy. Article after article has seized on what they claim was Bernie changing his view on the email issue after the debate. Of course, they had to do something to tarnish the most memorable moment in the debate. The first critique was that Bernie let Hillary off the hook and gave her a gift. I didn’t see it that way at all. Bernie went into that debate with the goal of introducing himself to the American people, and I thought the “damn email” line helped to introduce him as the candidate who is authentic and telling the truth instead of making calculated statements to score points. But the corporate media couldn’t let Bernie benefit from the line of the night, so they first created the false narrative that it was a political mistake.
Sanders was asked in an interview with CNN immediately after the debate what motivated him to use the “damn emails” line. “Well, what motivated that is that I think the American people want substantive discussions on substantive issues,” Sanders said. “There is a process in place for the email situation that Hillary Clinton is dealing with. Let it play itself out. As a nation, let us start focusing on why it is that so few have so much and so many have so little.”
That was and always has been Sanders’ position. So when he told the Wall Street Journal essentially what he told CNN after the debate and has been saying for months, the vultures looking for a way to knock Bernie down started saying he had changed his tune since the debate. The Wall Street Journal article was titled “Bernie Sanders Takes Gloves Off Against Hillary Clinton in Interview.” Watch the video of the interview and judge for yourself. What has changed?
It is true, as I pointed out in my coverage of the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, that Bernie has become more “assertive” in pointing out the differences between himself and Hillary Clinton. Irresponsible and lazy journalists are making the case that he is changing tactics and going negative. They are either purposely lying or they are lazily following the pack.
I filmed a video a few months back in which a Wall Street Journal reporter tried to get Bernie to go negative on Hillary. Bernie refused to take the bait, but did lay out the differences that he thought would shape the debate.
Prior to the first debate, Sanders and his staff said their goal was to introduce him to the American people, they did that.
The strategy for debate number two is to highlight the differences between Bernie and Hillary. Pointing out those differences is not running a negative campaign. It’s not like Bernie plans to call her names or take cheap shots like Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders will stay above the fray and debate the issues. Don’t listen to the corporate media vultures who want to frame legitimate political debate as negative attacks. The only negative aspects are how they are reporting the story to you.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Reich writes: "Many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met on my book tour agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them."
Robert Reich. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
What I Learned on My Red State Book Tour
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
09 November 15
’ve just returned from three
weeks in “red” America.
It was ostensibly a book tour
but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.
I intended to put into
practice what I tell my students – that the best way to learn is to talk with
people who disagree you. I wanted to learn from red America, and hoped they’d
also learn a bit from me (and perhaps also buy my book).
But something odd happened. It
turned out that many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much
of what I had to say, and I agreed with them.
For example, most condemned
what they called “crony capitalism,” by which they mean big corporations
getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions.
I met with group of small
farmers in Missouri who were livid about growth of “factory farms” owned and
run by big corporations, that abused land and cattle, damaged the
environment, and ultimately harmed consumers.
They claimed giant food
processors were using their monopoly power to squeeze the farmers dry, and the
government was doing squat about it because of Big Agriculture’s money.
I met in Cincinnati with Republican
small-business owners who are still hurting from the bursting of
the housing bubble and the bailout of Wall Street.
“Why didn’t underwater
homeowners get any help?” one of them asked rhetorically. “Because Wall Street
has all the power.” Others nodded in agreement.
Whenever I suggested that big Wall Street banks be busted up – “any bank that’s too big to fail is
too big, period” – I got loud applause.
In Kansas City I met with Tea
Partiers who were angry that hedge-fund managers had wangled their own special “carried
interest” tax deal.
“No reason for it,” said one.
“They’re not investing a dime of their own money. But they’ve paid off the
politicians.”
In Raleigh, I heard from local
bankers who thought Bill Clinton should never have repealed the Glass-Steagall
Act. “Clinton was in the pockets of Wall Street just like George W. Bush was,” said
one.
Most of the people I met in
America’s heartland want big money out of politics, and think the Supreme
Court’s “Citizens United” decision was shameful.
Most are also dead-set
against the Trans Pacific Partnership. In fact, they’re opposed to trade
agreements, including NAFTA, that they believe have made it easier for
corporations to outsource American jobs abroad.
A surprising number think the economic system is biased in favor of the rich. (That’s consistent
with a recent Quinnipiac poll in which 46 percent of Republicans believe “the
system favors the wealthy.”)
The more conversations I
had, the more I understood the connection between their view of “crony
capitalism” and their dislike of government.
They don’t oppose government
per se. In fact, as the Pew Research Center has found, more Republicans
favor additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and
infrastructure than want to cut those programs.
Rather, they see government as
the vehicle for big corporations and Wall Street to exert their power in ways that hurt the little guy.
They call themselves
Republicans but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland are populists in
the tradition of William Jennings Bryan.
I also began to
understand why many of them are attracted to Donald Trump. I had assumed
they were attracted by Trump’s blunderbuss and his scapegoating of immigrants.
That’s part of it. But mostly, I think, they see Trump as someone
who’ll stand up for them – a countervailing power against the perceived conspiracy
of big corporations, Wall Street, and big government.
Trump isn’t saying what the moneyed interests in
the GOP want to hear. He’d impose tariffs on American companies that send
manufacturing overseas, for example.
He’d raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. (“The
hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump says. “They’re “getting away with murder.”)
He’d protect Social Security and Medicare.
I kept hearing “Trump is so
rich he can’t be bought.”
Heartland Republicans and progressive Democrats
remain wide apart on social and cultural issues.
But there’s a growing overlap on economics. The populist
upsurge is real.
I sincerely hope Donald Trump doesn’t become
president. He’s a divider and a buffoon.
But I do hope the economic populists in both
parties come together.
That’s the only way we’re going to reform a system
that’s now rigged against most of us.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Sunday, 08 November 2015 13:43
Pierce writes: "His autobiography was the only reason he got to spit in the president's eye at the National Prayer Breakfast, which was the event that launched him into the upper levels of wingnut politics."
Ben Carson. (photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
The academy has occupied a central place in Carson's tale for years. According to a story told in Carson's book, "Gifted Hands," the then-17 year old was introduced in 1969 to Gen. William Westmoreland, who had just ended his command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the two dined together. That meeting, according to Carson's telling, was followed by a "full scholarship" to the military academy. "In 1969, those who would have completed the entire process would have received their acceptance letters from the Army Adjutant General," said Theresa Brinkerhoff, a spokeswoman for the academy. She said West Point has no records that indicate Carson even began the application process. "If he chose to pursue (the application process), then we would have records indicating such," she said. When presented with these facts, Carson's campaign conceded the story was false.
His autobiography is the only reason anyone outside of his patients and his family and his colleagues ever heard of Dr. Ben Carson. His autobiography was the only reason he got to spit in the president's eye at the National Prayer Breakfast, which was the event that launched him into the upper levels of wingnut politics. Now, it is entirely possible that he can media-bash and secular-progressive-bash his way through this, at least as far as his supporters among the Bible-banging hayshakers of Iowa are concerned. Some of those people will believe anything. (And I easily can imagine a scenario in which Carson has a strong finish in Iowa anyway, and it gets spun amid The Base as a triumph over all the usual suspects.) But there's no question that he never should have said anything about the pyramids.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29097"><span class="small">Michael Winship, Moyers & Company</span></a>
Sunday, 08 November 2015 13:42
Winship writes: "Much of Bleecker Street, for example, once a Village thoroughfare of bohemia immortalized in songs by Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and Iggy Pop, is now a mini-Fifth Avenue of upscale boutiques and chain stores."
Greenwich Village Street (photo: Aurelien Guichard/Flickr/CC 2.0)
When the Rich Took Over Our Neighborhood
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
08 November 15
he Chinese restaurant across the street from me – one of the last, reasonably priced joints in the neighborhood – closed last weekend. Their lease was up for renewal and the rent increased from $5,000 a month to $25,000.
Such an enormous jump isn’t unusual here in the West Village, part of Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, which has become such an expensive and trendy part of the city that I may soon be kicked out both for violating the fashion code and skewing the curve on median income.
The restaurant owner, who had run his place for three decades, was remarkably calm about it. “I understand,” he told the dining blog, Eater. “The property values are really high in this area.”
That’s an understatement. Much of Bleecker Street, for example, once a Village thoroughfare of bohemia immortalized in songs by Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and Iggy Pop, is now a mini-Fifth Avenue of upscale boutiques and chain stores from the likes of Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers and Coach. Gone are most of the delis and funky, mom-and-pop shops that gave the area its distinctive style.
Gone, too, are many of the community services that make a neighborhood a neighborhood, replaced by expensive housing and other amenities for the rich whose desires are obliterating the very things that made this area an attractive place to live in the first place. Just a block north from that now-shuttered Chinese restaurant is the former site of St. Vincent’s Hospital, founded in 1849 by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic teaching hospital that over the years treated everyone, rich or poor, and everything from cholera to AIDS (it was a pioneer in HIV-AIDS care). Survivors from the Titanic and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were brought there, and on 9/11, its medical staff waited patiently for casualties.
But five and a half years ago, St. Vincent’s flatlined and closed, awash in bankruptcy and whispers of alleged collusion with developers eager to get their hands on some prime real estate. The New York Post even reported, in 2011, that the Manhattan district attorney was investigating “whether honchos purposely tanked its finances so it could be sold.” Nothing ever came of the story or the rumors and now, rising on land where healing and compassion were once the be all and end all, are grand luxury condominiums.
“Inequality in housing has reached Dickensian dimensions. The middle class is being squeezed to the edge as the rich drive up real estate values and the working poor are shoved farther into squalor… wealth and power get their way without regard for the impact on the lives and neighborhoods of everyday people.”
This weekend, The New York Times reported that the first two condos had been sold: “An eighth-floor unit went for $19,528,202.36 and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, while another, four floors below, sold for $16,320,623.57.”
In each case, the buyers are anonymous. The Times continued, “The pricier of the sold apartments… has four bedrooms and four and a half baths spread over 4,537 square feet. The unit, with monthly carrying costs totaling $15,800, also has a library with a fireplace, a home office, a large utility room with a washer/dryer and a centrally located gallery. There is an open living/dining area with beamed ceilings, dark-stained herringbone floors and custom wood trim.”
According to the development’s website, “These handsome spaces bring to mind the cachet of an Old World private club.” No doubt the kind where Gilded Age tycoons like Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt and Whitney escaped the madding crowd and from the windows flicked their cigar ash at worker bees and slum dwellers.
So there goes the neighborhood. These new apartments next door to the empty Chinese restaurant are what economists call “local indicators,” further proof that the one percent would prefer the rest of us to vanish into the woodwork – excuse me, the “custom wood trim.” As colleague Bill Moyers reported a year ago on Moyers & Company, “Among our largest, richest 20 metro areas, less than 50 percent of the homes are affordable.”
In New York City, he said, “Inequality in housing has reached Dickensian dimensions. The middle class is being squeezed to the edge as the rich drive up real estate values and the working poor are shoved farther into squalor… wealth and power get their way without regard for the impact on the lives and neighborhoods of everyday people.”
“Even though construction of multifamily rental properties is running at the highest level in decades, the overwhelming majority of new units — more than 80% in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas — are luxury, according to CoStar Group Inc. Construction costs are generally too high to justify building new complexes for low- and middle-income tenants, experts say, contributing to the scarcity.”
Meanwhile, the now vacant building where the restaurant operated becomes just one of many empty storefronts here in the Village, a paradoxical phenomenon related to our ongoing gentrification known as “high-rent blight.” Even though this pestilence can destroy the character and stability of a neighborhood, owners may hold out for months and years in the hope that the space will be sold to build yet more deluxe apartments or that a bank, national chain or top-of-the-line, overpriced boutique will show up to pay top dollar, as so many others already have.
“The fate of small businesses in the West Village may be a local issue, but it is one with large implications. For one thing, cities remain major drivers of economic growth, and small businesses continue to form a larger part of G.N.P. than their larger cousins. But there is a deeper issue as well. Since the nineteen-sixties, when Americans faced an extreme wave of urban blight, they have understood rising property values as a reliable measure of recovery. But everything can go too far, and at some point high property values may begin to destroy local economic activity.”
There was a time, Wu pointed out, when the great urban critic and author Jane Jacobs – who lived just a few blocks away from me — thought that Greenwich Village was the very model of an ideal city neighborhood, precisely because, in part, local merchants did business with one another and looked out for each other and their friends and customers who lived nearby. What’s more, it had eclecticism and diversity, and as she wrote more than 50 years ago in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.”
Jacobs worried about a future in which the sense of community was lost and the elite isolated themselves from everyone else in their stately pleasure domes of beamed ceilings and dark-stained herringbone floors. “We expect too much of new buildings,” she said, “and too little of ourselves.”
She would look at what’s happening today and first despair, then fight like hell, for as Jacobs knew, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
FOCUS: US Senator Defends the Empire Against Freeing the Innocent
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Sunday, 08 November 2015 11:41
Boardman writes: "What do you say about the blameless man who was held at the Guantanamo concentration camp for 13 years, without trial, without charges against him, without credible evidence that he had done anything remotely deserving of 13 years of torture and isolation, with no hope of anything remotely like justice? If you happened to be US senator Dianne Feinstein, you might write a chilly op-ed piece for The New York Times."
Senator Dianne Feinstein. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
US Senator Defends the Empire Against Freeing the Innocent
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
08 November 15
US goes on punishing Younous Chekkouri for, well, nothing really….
hat do you say about the blameless man who was held at the Guantanamo concentration camp for 13 years, without trial, without charges against him, without credible evidence that he had done anything remotely deserving of 13 years of torture and isolation, with no hope of anything remotely like justice?
If you happened to be US senator Dianne Feinstein, you might write a chilly op-ed piece for The New York Times, calling for the umpteenth time since 2007 for closing the festering moral abscess you previously supported. In your op-ed you won’t mention those eight years of failure to close the human rights crime scene in Cuba because, after all, you never tried very hard to get it closed. You just tried hard to get on the record appearing to try to get it closed. In 2008, you even sounded critical of Guantanamo, without actually challenging any of its underlying assumptions:
Cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners under American control violates our nation’s laws and values….
It damages America’s reputation in the world and serves as a recruitment tool for our enemies….
Perhaps most importantly, it has also limited our ability to obtain reliable and usable intelligence to help combat the war on terror, prevent additional threats and bring to justice those who have sought to harm our country.
So now, in late 2015, do you stand up for the freedom of a former Guantanamo prisoner jailed in Morocco, after US promises of freedom were betrayed weeks ago? Not even close – instead you write this torpid op-ed in which you fester first over the way jihadists use Guantanamo as a recruiting tool (and why wouldn’t they? Even you sort of admit that our torture camp is “a violation of the rule of law” – and has been since the beginning, when you supported it). Then you fret over the expense of running a lawless prison camp (you don’t call it “lawless”) and you never, never mention any victim by name or acknowledge the ghastly injustices they have suffered. You certainly show no concern for Younous Chekkouri and his continued abuse with US complicity. Instead you only note, appallingly casually, that:
During the Bush administration, 779 people were brought to Guantánamo, all without charge. Over time we’ve learned that many were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time and shouldn’t have been detained in the first place. [emphasis added]
Feinstein, as a 1% rich California Democrat, has neatly portrayed herself as an ugly example of the worst of America’s callous disregard for the humanity of others. Feinstein has expressed the icy, imperial view with the familiar moral numbness, the hardened indifference that has characterized US national behavior in its extreme form since 2001. Anyone with an open mind, paying the slightest attention to the emergence of the Guantanamo gulag, learned quickly at the start that the place was a moral black hole and a vicious judicial sham. Guantanamo was created precisely to allow the US to operate outside the law, as literally an outlaw nation. The US was paying bonuses for prisoners, any prisoners, regardless of evidence, regardless of the credibility of the accuser, regardless of any rational process in the midst of the nation’s narcissistic post-911 panic.
For all her lack of humanity, Senator Feinstein is hardly the worst of Congress
Feinstein does not acknowledge her role in the crime of Guantanamo, nor does she acknowledge directly that it is a crime at all. Her appeal is to others in Congress who continue to insist that the US continue committing Guantanamo crimes in perpetuity. In this context, her suggestion that Congress allow the US to set free the 53 Guantanamo hostages already cleared for release is an almost radical idea. Yes, she almost calls outright for the US to free the innocent. But not quite. Her Guantanamo “solution” reads like an Andy Borowitz column, except the senator is serious:
In particular, we need a proposal for bringing detainees to the United States and holding them securely for as long as necessary.
That’s exactly the problem with Guantanamo! “Detainees” are extra-legal prisoners, they are hostages, they can be held indefinitely, without charges, without evidence of wrongdoing, with no more against them than “simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time” (a rather apt description of Feinstein as a senator). This solution is a corrupt manipulation that does nothing to restore the rule of international law, the principle of due process of law, or any of the other affronts to justice the US continues to make with impunity.
This is not an extreme rendition of Feinstein’s argument. She reiterated the lawlessness she endorses in even clearer terms a few paragraphs later, leaving it up to the US to decide what to do about people against whom there is no evidence:
Third, for those relatively few detainees who can’t be tried because of a lack of evidence but still need to be held until the end of hostilities, bringing them to the United States presents a more cost-effective option. [emphasis added]
So who decides that these people “need to be held”? And more important, who decided that we have reached “the end of hostilities”? Feinstein assumes the US is engaged in endless war, and expresses no objection to that. She wants to close Guantanamo as prison real estate. That’s all. She has no problem with continuing the lawless behavior Guantanamo represents as long as it’s more out of sight. Hers is the consensus view in national politics. Like her equally shabby peers, she’s a politician, she’s concerned only about looking good, she doesn’t care about doing good.
US bought Chekkouri as a hostage, paid good money for him
“779 people were brought to Guantanamo, all without charge,” writes Feinstein with the all-too-common official attitude: “stuff happens.” In a just world, stuff would be happening to the moral outlaws who perpetrated and still maintain the blatant criminal enterprise that Guantanamo has been from the start. If Feinstein had any compassion, she could highlight the Younous Chekkouri case as an example of the moral chaos created by US Guantanamo policy. Secret military files titled “Gitmo Files” published by Wikileaks, including Chekkouri’s case, have been available since April 2011.
In October 2005, officials at Guantanamo acknowledged in writing that Chekkouri was a relief worker who had done relief work and had no identifiable connection with any terrorist group (reiterating similar circumstantial, non-substantive findings in November 2004). Some of the assumed facts had been gathered by torturing Chekkouri and others. Nevertheless, these officials used conclusory inferences unsupported by any evidence as the basis for continuing to hold Chekkouri. The officials promised “a meaningful opportunity to be heard.” The 16-page, declassified transcript of an undated status review hearing (#002562) portrays the tribunal as merely reiterating the conclusory inferences without presenting supporting evidence. The transcript portrays Chekkouri as open, direct, responsive to all questions, and denying any terrorist activity or connection (except for fellow prisoners). After several similar hearings, Chekkouri was “recommended for further detention” in an official assessment in November 2008 that includes much more information (true or false) than was addressed in the available records of the “meaningful opportunities to be heard.”
Younous Abdurrahman Chekkouri, now 47, is represented by the UK human rights organization Reprieve, which says about its work: “We help people who suffer extreme human rights abuses at the hands of the world’s most powerful governments.” Reprieve is still pushing Chekkouri’s case because he is still not free, even though he has been released from Guantanamo 13 years after he was kidnapped:
Younous was doing charity work in Afghanistan and starting a business when he was rounded up with other Arabs and taken to a prison in Kandahar.
He was sold to US forces for a bounty and then taken to Guantánamo Bay. He was held without charge for 14 years before finally being released to his native Morocco in September 2015.
Now the US is tolerating a substitute Morocc-antanamo holding Chekkouri
In 2011, attorneys for Chekkouri challenged the supposed evidence against him in a habeas corpus hearing. The US government’s case fell apart and Chekkouri was eventually re-classified as suitable for transfer. In September 2015, the US transferred Chekkouri from Guantanamo to Morocco, where he was born in 1968. The Moroccans took Chekkouri into custody immediately and he remains in custody, under threat of a Moroccan trial based on the discredited US evidence. US officials have told Reprieve that they released Chekkouri into Moroccan custody on the understanding that he would not face charges and that he would be held no more than 72 hours for any reason. The Moroccan government says there was no such understanding. Attorney Cori Crider, who represents Chekkouri and is a director at Reprieve, said on November 5:
Someone is just not telling the truth here. Either US State Department officials misled me and my client about Morocco’s intentions when my client was in Guantánamo, or Moroccan officials have been making diplomatic promises freely and breaking them just as fast. Which is it? And if the State Department did tell Mr. Chekkouri the truth and the promises have been broken, why isn’t this being made a major issue in US-Moroccan relations now?
Attorney Crider also wrote to US attorney general Loretta Lynch, who was then visiting Morocco, asking her to “urgently intervene” to persuade Moroccan authorities to honor the assurances made by the US in order to get Chekkouri to agree to go to Morocco. So far, Attorney General Lynch is not known to have acted to honor her government’s promises. US ambassador to Morocco Dwight Bush has refused to offer any assistance. Officials at the US State Department have apparently done nothing for Chekkouri, even though they had assured him he would be held no more than 72 hours and he has in fact been imprisoned since September 15 in Morocco, where his next hearing is scheduled for December 3.
This is all of a piece of official US bad faith on Guantanamo. Let Morocco look bad doing American dirty work (like exporting prisoners for torture). The US can claim clean hands and no responsibility, and it’s all a degenerate lie in service of Dick Cheney’s version of American exceptionalism.
And Dianne Feinstein, along with most of the rest of Congress, is part of the corrupt charade. With all the moral fervor of a profitable plantation owner trying to weasel her way onto the right side of history, Feinstein calls for closing Guantanamo, sooner or later, some day, like the President says he wants, and “Congress should be working with him to finally shut it down.” Sure, the President ordered Guantanamo closed his first day in office, then dithered fecklessly from January 2009 till now, while Congress was led by fear-mongering torture-tolerating toadies who were determined to punish someone, anyone, regardless of guilt, so long as the person was some third world color. Feinstein speaks no truth to that power, she does not acknowledge that Guantanamo is an American outrage that is entirely of America’s making, entirely of America’s perpetuation, and entirely to America’s shame, were America capable of feeling shame any more.
By any reasonable standard, Guantanamo and the rest of the US secret torture and incarceration network represent a continuing, collective crime against humanity. Meanwhile, at Guantanamo, the US is again inflicting genital searches on prisoners before they can meet with their attorneys, sometimes keeping such simple due process from going forward. In all fairness, America is not at all exceptional in such crimes.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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he mostly irresponsible corporate media keeps creating stories about Bernie Sanders going negative. Let me give you an example: Jonathan Martin of The New York Times pressured Bernie Sanders with repeated questions about Hillary Clinton’s donations from employees of Goldman Sachs. More than once, Sanders said, “You will have to ask her,” but Martin pressed on. In the end, the title of his article was “
’ve just returned from three
weeks in “red” America.
uh-Roh, Doc.
hat do you say about the blameless man who was held at the Guantanamo concentration camp for 13 years, without trial, without charges against him, without credible evidence that he had done anything remotely deserving of 13 years of torture and isolation, with no hope of anything remotely like justice? 
