A prisoner’s inside view of Guantanamo

You don't see many of these Guantanamo exit interviews in the American media. This particular story about a man named Saad Iqbal Madni was published by a website called The World Can't Wait. The way he was treated by American officials is despicable. We desperately need to make sure that the story of American torture at Guantanamo, and elsewhere is fully told, and that it never happens again. If you are a United States Citizen, this activity was done in your name.

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What American justice looks like to outsiders

Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about the efforts of Julian Assange to fight extradition to Sweden, including the following paragraph:

And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange's lawyers citing the Obama administration's policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody. Indeed, almost every person with whom I've spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others: the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror "justice system." Americans still like to think of themselves as "leaders of the free world," but in the eyes of many, it's exactly the "free world" to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.

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Our JFK Moment?

We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…

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William K. Black notes the lack of prosecutions regarding financial fraud, and offers a solution

William K. Black previously worked as an investigator of financial institutions during the S&L crisis. In a detailed article at Huffpo, Black laments the almost total lack of criminal prosecutions related to our recent financial meltdown. Here's the problem in a nutshell: "What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ's senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals." Here's what we need to do about it:

Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: "Jail the S&L Crooks!" Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.

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Chink in the armor of auditors and bond rating agencies?

Matt Taibbi gives us a bit of hope that some justice will be done:

[T]he lead auditor reviewing one of the world’s largest investment banks [Lehman] had no idea what a series of regularly-occurring billion-dollar transactions committed by her main client were, and apparently wasn’t interested. It also didn’t seem to bother E&Y that Lehman was not disclosing any of this to its investors in its SEC filings. My guess is that this suit is the beginning of the end for Ernst and Young and, who knows, may be the beginning of a series of investigations that ultimately take down the auditors and ratings agencies that made the financial crisis possible. Without accountants and raters signing off on all the bogus derivative math and bad bookkeeping, a lot of this mess would never have happened.

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