Glenn Greenwald discusses a recently disclosed corporate plan to sabotage the careers of supporters of Wikileaks such as Greenwald.
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Glenn Greenwald develops this story in detail on his site.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.
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.
But then I see something like this. And then I saw this article by Glenn Greenwald concerning an American citizen who was tortured in Kuwait, then barred for re-entry in the U.S. for no good reason:
All of this underscores the rapidly expanding powers the U.S. Government and law enforcement agents within the country are seizing without a shred of due process. For the government to put an American citizen on the no-fly list while he's traveling outside the U.S. is tantamount to barring him from entering his own country -- a draconian punishment, involuntary exile, meted out without any due process.
Barry Schwartz (on whom I’ve posted before) says it’s clear that “we need to rein in the bankers.” What is the solution indifferent, uncaring and selfish individuals and institutions? More rules? More incentives? Barry Schwartz says rules and incentives are not long-term solutions because they de-moralize us. They create large populations of people who do everything for incentives. We become addicted to incentives. Further, there is no set of rules that will effectively get us what we need. Bankers are smart and they will find cracks in any rules. They will find a new way to bring the financial system, once again, to the point of collapse. What we really need is virtue and character --- “we need people who want to do the right thing.” We need “practical wisdom,” the moral will and skill to figure out what the right thing is, and then to do it. Aristotle studied carpenters and other crafts-people who appreciated that you often need to bend the rules to get the job done. Dealing with other people demands flexibility improvisation, and wise people understand this. Wise people do this rule-bending “in the service of the right aims.” We need to do this rule bending in the service of others, not merely ourselves. This is “practical wisdom” in a nutshell. [More . . . ]