Iraqi opposition lawmaker claims government holding thousands in unofficial prisons An Iraqi opposition lawmaker claimed Thursday that thousands of his countrymen are being mistreated in detention centers outside the official prison system. Sunni legislator Mohammed al-Daini claimed the government and paramilitary groups control 420 unofficial detention centers to hold people without legal justification. Speaking through an interpreter, al-Daini told reporters in Geneva he had gained access to 13 such prisons and obtained ...

Because they care about the issue -- not about Youtube hits, UK truthers take note ;) By Alex Felsinger | The crown jewel of Greenpeace’s naval arm, the Rainbow Warrior, pulled in to the harbor alongside the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant today before six activists stormed the facility to prepare to project video of impacts of global warming onto the plant’s giant smokestack. The action comes mere ...

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) says it has dismissed 14 people over the last three years in relation to passport database abuses.The IPS is now closely involved in building the government's national identity card database. Of 16 cases where data protection is said to have been breached, all but one involved members of staff who had legitimate access to the Passport Application Support System database. But those ...

Their system creates recession, hunger and climate chaos, but they want you to pay Until A few weeks ago, supporters of free market capitalism were confident enough to proclaim that their system was the only way that the world could be organised. Now their certainties have vanished. The economic crisis that started in banking and finance has spread quickly to the wider economy. Now it threatens to engulf whole countries, bringing ...

The head of Amnesty International called on Thursday for the winner of next week's U.S. presidential election to shut the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba within 100 days of taking office. Irene Khan also urged the U.S. Congress to investigate human rights abuses at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo and by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan during President George W Bush's administration, and take action against those responsible. "I ...

By Dave Lindorff With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in the ...

Attorney General to investigate abuse claims By Robert Verkaik  Senior CIA officers could be put on trial in Britain after it emerged last night that the Attorney General is to investigate allegations that a British resident held in Guantanamo Bay was brutally tortured, after being arrested and questioned by American forces following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.   The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has asked Baroness ...

This Is The Lowest McCain Has Sunk Yet By Juan Cole The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center ...

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo | Ask yourself this question: was the housing price bubble, which has burst, caused by (a) a Fed policy of too much liquidity, which caused artificially low interest rates, which in turn caused a great deal of malinvestment, or (b) a Fed policy of too little liquidity which caused high interest rates and a credit-starved economy? If you chose answer b, congratulations, you may have a future ...

Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance. How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and ...

Claims that identity cards will protect against terrorism are 'absolute bunkum' - says an expert at the government's intelligence agency.  JOHN HIGGINSON  The £4billion card scheme is really part of Labour's agenda to cut costs and bureaucracy by ensuring public bodies can share information, said Harvey Mattinson, a senior consultant at spy station GCHQ. 'You cannot share information without identity authentication,' he told the Society of IT Management's ...

By Chanyut Phrukkumwong | Long-term exposure to electromagnetic radio waves at certain strengths does cause brain tumors. Just like in the case of cigarette smoking, which nobody realized could damage your health until the era where lung cancer caused by regular smoking showed up. Such warnings about the dangers from electromagnetic radio waves from cell phones have been around for some years now. But the reporting has not been ...

A First-Hand Account of the Ghosts of Iraq War Trial in Washington, D.C., October 20-24, 2008 By Joy First Madison, WI -- I was involved in a jury trial in Washington, DC October 20-24 for an action in the Senate gallery on March 12. In summary, five individuals, including me, were acquitted, and five people were found guilty. But what made this trial so unique was that the government attempted to hide ...

WSWS | In an unusually frank article published in Saturday's New York Times, the newspaper's economic columnist, Joe Nocera, reveals what he calls "the dirty little secret of the banking industry"--namely, that "it has no intention of using the [government bailout] money to make new loans." As Nocera explains, the plan announced October 13 by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to hand over $250 billion in taxpayer money to the biggest banks, ...

By Ruth Tanner | The Government’s decision to take a controlling stake in some of the largest British financial institutions comes as a new War on Want report reveals how high street banks are complicit in the global arms trade. Our damning report exposes how Britain’s top five high street banks – Barclays, Halifax Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland – invest ...