Last night on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades broke a significant piece of news: on August 14, Lt. Colonel Diane Zierhoffer, a U.S. Army psychologist who ordered illegal torture techniques -- sleep deprivation and isolation -- on a juvenile detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, invoked her right to avoid compulsory self-incrimination, refusing to testify in the case of Mohammad Jawad.
Lt. Colonel Zierhoffer, PhD, had been called as a witness before the National Military Commission trial by defense attorney David Frakt, an Air Force Reserves Major. She had been slated to testify yesterday in a hearing on his motion to dismiss the case, based upon alleged gross government misconduct in torturing Jawad.
Dr. Zierhoffer's testimony would have been the first publicly known occasion that a member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) had been called to testify in a detainee hearing.
Tweet against torture? Absolutely, says one of the newest members to the Twitter social networking site, ciaTweets. Wait: the CIA now has a presence on Twitter? Kinda! Whether they like it or not.
Brand communication agency Cow reports that Exxon, Ford Motor Company, and many other major companies risk being ‘brand-jacked’ online. A recent survey of the most highly capitalized companies on the London Stock Exchange reveals that nearly 70 percent of the FTSE100 have left their company or brand ID on the micro blogging platform Twitter unclaimed.
Major companies? Hmmm... What about "the Company"? Let's just say that the new ciaTweets is known by the Company it tweaks (and Tweets).
That's what I told BBC World Service when they called to record an interview on the plight of two HIV/AIDS doctors who are being held in Iran. The two Iranian doctors, who are brothers, have been held incommunicado since late June, without access to attorneys or visits from their family.
According to international media reports, they've been accused of fomenting "a velvet revolution." The prosecutor offers as evidence that they've traveled internationally, participated in HIV/AIDS conferences that drew the attention of international non-governmental organizations, and trained people. Those activities are not internationally recognized crimes; that's what freedom looks like.
These two Iranian HIV/AIDS physicians, who are brothers, need your help right now. This will just take a minute, and will make a difference. As I write this, my colleagues at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) are holding a press conference in Mexico City, at the international AIDS conference. One of the brothers was scheduled to speak there this week. Instead, there will be an empty chair on the dais. Why is that, and what urgent action can you take to help?
Please add your voice to those of human rights groups and HIV/AIDS advocates around the world who are urging Iran to free two Iranian doctors, Arash Alaei and Kamiar Alaei -- HIV/AIDS leaders who have reportedly been detained without charge and held incommunicado in Iran. The physicians, who are brothers, were reportedly arrested at the end of June, 2008.
Physicians for Human Rights (where two weeks ago, I took a position as Chief Communications Officer) has issued a statement and posted an online petition calling on the government of Iran "either to charge these physicians and provide them with access to counsel and family, or release them immediately so that they can continue their important medical and public health work for the betterment of the people of Iran and the world."
Please sign the petition and circulate it widely on behalf of our colleagues at risk.
This call to action from Physicians for Human Rights CEO Frank Donaghue just landed in my inbox; I figured fellow Kossacks would want to take immediate action in response to PHR's report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and Its Impact. PHR asked me to consult with them on raising the profile of this report. It's getting loads of attention in the netroots, and breaking through in traditional media.
But reading the report is not enough; immediate action is needed to hold the current administration accountable for war crimes. Those who ordered the use of torture must be held to account now. Please help get the word out. Thank you. -- jhutson
Physicians for Humans Rights just laid the smackdown on a Pentagon spokesman who dissed PHR's new report on medical evidence of U.S. torture and its enduring impact on former detainees, men who were never charged with any crime.
This is juicy. In a moment, the Pentagon talks smack and gets smacked down. First, a bit of background.
The Associated Press just broke the big story about Physicians for Human Rights' landmark report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and Its Impact, and MeteorBlades is the first blogger to break it down.
On top of this outstanding coverage, here's just one little story that will break your heart. It takes less than a minute to tell, but may stay with you for the rest of your life.
Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, has met a number of former detainees -- men who were never charged with any crime, but who endured months of relentless and horrific torture at the hands of US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Today, VoteVets.org and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) released a bombshell of an e-mail obtained from a Veterans Affairs (VA) employee. The email directs VA staff to refrain from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
U.S. Representative Vito Fossella -- the only Republican Congressman now representing New York City -- has had a monkey wrench thrown in his November 2008 reelection bid. It's not the fact that he has been arrested for DUI, or his disclosure of an extra-marital affair, or his confession to fathering a lovechild: it's the rank hypocrisy of another anti-choice, anti-gay "family values" Republican who has opposed women's reproductive freedom and attacked gay rights with smug talk of "the sanctity of marriage". It's the double standard of a conservative Congressman who voted to impeach President Bill Clinton for having an extra-marital affair. And in this hypocrisy, Mr. Fossella joins a long line of Republican double-talkers, including Senator John McCain.
President Bill Clinton has made another blunder on the campaign trail -- playing the victim card and making exaggerated and inaccurate statements while sticking up for his wife and her fact-challenged tale of Bosnian sniper fire. And he did so on camera, injecting his own bluster and bogus claims, just when the story had started to die down.
During campaign stops in Jasper and Boonville, Indiana, yesterday, Mr. Clinton told voters that his wife had -- just once -- "misstated" the circumstances of her 1996 Bosnia trip, attributing her Tuzla tale of dodging sniper fire to exhaustion. And instead of holding his wife accountable, he castigated the press for overreacting to her inaccurate account.
First, let's go to the videotape. Then let's go over just how many facts Mr. Clinton plowed over in his blundering defense of his wife.
Like a carny barker hawking geek shows, peek shows, freak shows, and funhouse tickets, Vets for Freedom Executive Director Pete Hegseth patters for the Bush/McCain surge propaganda roadshow. When he's unchallenged and uninterrupted, and the rubes are all quiet and mesmerized, he's very slick. Hegseth is a veteran who served in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. He's a TV-ready pitchman who wears a shiny flag pin on his lapel; and he is fully committed to holding the Bush/McCain line against all facts and reason.
Last night, he met his match on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, as he faced off and fell flat at the feet of a VoteVets.org co-founder and Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz. Soltz launched into a salvo of history and histrionics that collapsed Hegseth's calm composure and trashed his talking points. When Hegseth praised the success of the surge, Soltz called it a huge failure that represented nothing more than a bugle sounding a retreat from the real culprit on the real front lines of the war on terror: Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Then, when Hegseth tried to recover, Soltz turned into the heckler from heck, interjecting more facts and logic and refusing to be talked over or cut off, even by leather-lunged Matthews.
This morning, Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign called on Senator Barack Obama to release all documents related to his 2005 purchase of a home adjacent to land owned by Tony Rezko. The Obama campaign's response -- we did that already -- was swift and hard, and turned the tables on Clinton.
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor teed up the issue as one of disinformation and blatant hypocrisy.
The enormity of the White House scandal that broke in the blogosphere last Friday, and resulted in the same-day resignation of President George W. Bush's longtime aide Tim Goeglein, has yet to be revealed.
What is at stake is not merely the reputation of Bush's former gatekeeper to the religious right, but four million evangelical votes.
By Karl Rove's calculation, Bush won 15 million out of 19 million evangelical votes in 2000. Rove correctly reasoned that targeting those extra four million votes would be key to winning Bush a second term in 2004. These are votes which, if not secured by the GOP in 2008, could cost the election of its presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain. These are votes that in 2004 and in 2008, Bush and Rove had personally entrusted Goeglein to shepherd. Now that Rove and his right-hand man, Goeglein, have both quit the White House, there is no shepherd to keep these four million evangelical voters in the fold.
VoteVets.org co-founder Jon Soltz has just provided a roadmap to dismantling rightwing talking points and holding Senator John McCain accountable on the Iraq War. Soltz, who served in Iraq and Kosovo, debated HumanEvents.com's Ericka Anderson in a segment hosted by MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell. This is must-see TV because it offers a preview of how the majority of voters who seek to end the Iraq War can effectively frame the issues and priorities in the coming presidential contest. To view the MSNBC segment, click here.
In this bit of earned media coverage, VoteVets is raising issues and concerns of troops and veterans in a brave, blunt way. In short, Soltz accuses McCain of failing America by following Bush's failed policy of retreat from Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
When Senator Barack Obama denounced Louis Farrakhan, he publicly deplored anti-Semitic statements by the Nation of Islam leader. Senator Hillary Clinton chided Obama during the Ohio debate for not rejecting Farrakhan as well as denouncing him. Obama said that there is little distinction between denunciation and rejection. Clinton said that he was wrong; rejection, in her estimation, seemed even stronger. Ultimately, Obama graciously conceded the point and said that he both rejected and denounced Farrakhan.
In a late night rally on February 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama returned to Boston, the city where four years ago his political career soared to national prominence when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
At a downtown convention hall on the eve of Super Tuesday, Obama electrified a capacity crowd of nine thousand. This was no mean feat, considering that many in the crowd had already stood on their feet for five hours outside the World Trade Center, patiently waiting in a line that stretched for many blocks through the streets of South Boston.
Tweet against torture? Absolutely, says one of the newest members to the Twitter social networking site, 
