The continuing shame of Guantanamo

This is not my country. What we are doing to most of the prisoners at Guantanamo is disgusting and shameful. This article by John Grisham makes U.S. misconduct vivid:

[T]he US was throwing money at anyone who could deliver an out-of-town Arab found in the region. Nabil was sold to the US for a bounty of $5,000 and taken to an underground prison in Kabul. There he experienced torture for the first time. To house the prisoners of its war on terror, the US military put up a makeshift prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Bagram would quickly become notorious, and make Guantánamo look like a church camp. When Nabil arrived there in January 2002, as one of the first prisoners, there were no walls, only razor-wire cages. In the bitter cold, Nabil was forced to sleep on concrete floors without cover. Food and water were scarce. To and from his frequent interrogations, Nabil was beaten by US soldiers and dragged up and down concrete stairs. Other prisoners died. After a month in Bagram, Nabil was transferred to a prison at Kandahar, where the abuse continued.

Throughout his incarceration in Afghanistan, Nabil strenuously denied any connection to al-Qaida, the Taliban or anyone or any organisation remotely linked to the 9/11 attacks. And the Americans had no proof of his involvement, save for bogus claims implicating him from other prisoners extracted in a Kabul torture chamber. Several US interrogators told him his was a case of mistaken identity. Nonetheless, the US had adopted strict rules for Arabs in custody – all were to be sent to Guantánamo. On 15 February 2002, Nabil was flown to Cuba; shackled, bound and hooded.

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Foxes guarding the NSA henhouse

Stunning news by The Atlantic:

Last Friday, President Obama promised a review of current government surveillance practice by an independent group of outside experts. Turns out that the review group will be established by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who's come under fire from Congress for erroneously telling legislators that the U.S. doesn't "collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of million of Americans."

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Why non-believers don’t exist

Matthew Hut's "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking" is one of the most challenging and well-written books I've read in the past decade. His premise is that ALL of us believe in "magical thinking," which he defines as the "mingling of psychological concepts with physical ones" (as opposed to another approach, which would have been "holding beliefs that contradict scientific consensus--he defends his approach on p. 7 of his book). In this article at Huffpo, Hutson elaborates:

Thanks to evolved habits of mind, we suspect the reality of essences, voodoo, luck, mind over matter, ESP, the soul, karma, and destiny. We attribute mental properties to nonmental phenomena (treating natural events as purposeful, say) and attribute nonmental properties to mental phenomena (treating thoughts as having force in the world). We mix up the realms of mind and matter. What's more, such illusions are not all bad--they can provide a sense of control over the events around us and a sense of meaning in life. So before you call someone with far-fetched beliefs stupid or crazy, read on and check out 13 of the many reasons the supposed "non-believer" is just one more figment of the imagination.
What follows, I guarantee, is that everyone of you will realize that you are believe in magical thinking.

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