Rights

The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual “Free the Press” campaign today, which will purportedly highlight “journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting…

Internet

FCC Plots Murder of Blogs on Behalf of Billionaire Media Lords

Juan Cole

Breaking: FCC Will Announce the Death of Net Neutrality Tomorrow (via Americans Against The Tea Party) If you thought corporations played a big role in your life already, just wait until tomorrow, when the FCC gives up on trying to find a way to enforce equal access to broadband and finally kills net neutrality. What […]

Constitution

Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington

Juan Cole

(By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch.com) How the mighty have fallen. Once known as “Obama’s favorite general,” James Cartwright will soon don a prison uniform and, thanks to a plea deal, spend 13 months behind bars. Involved in setting up the earliest military cyberforce inside U.S. Strategic Command, which he led from 2004 to 2007, Cartwright […]

Arab Spring

Pro-Feminists & Metrosexuals: The New Arab Men of the Millennial Generation

Juan Cole

(By Khaled Diab via Your Middle East ) A growing number of Arab men are not only championing the rights of women but also challenging traditional ideals of masculinity. Sexual harassment in Egypt has reached such epidemic proportions that it has even infiltrated the campus of the country’s oldest secular university. At the heart of […]

Domestic Surveillance

NYPD closes Unit that Spied on Muslims

Juan Cole

The New York Police Department has ended its “secret” spying on Muslims. The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner…

Central Intelligence Agency

Torture is from Mars? CIA’s Hayden Says Sen. Feinstein Too “Emotional” To Judge CIA Torture

Juan Cole

Former CIA, NSA Boss Says Senator Feinstein Is Too Emotional To Judge CIA Torture Fairly (via Techdirt) We’ve written about former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden plenty of times around here, and the guy is practically a caricature of what you’d expect him to be. He defends the intelligence community at all costs, and […]

Republican Party

Pelosi: “Cheney Proud of ordering CIA Torture”; Sen A. King: ‘Waterboard Cheney!’

Juan Cole

Dick Cheney has defended torture techniques so many times that a frustrated U.S. senator has finally offered to waterboard the former vice president. “The accusations are not true,” Cheney told college television station ATV last week. “Some people…

Constitution

America’s Post-9/11 Dystopia: No-Fly Lists, Secret Gov’t Databases and Guilty even if Proven Innocent

Juan Cole

(By Peter van Buren) Rahinah Ibrahim is a slight Malaysian woman who attended Stanford University on a U.S. student visa, majoring in architecture. She was not a political person. Despite this, as part of a post-9/11 sweep directed against Muslims, she was investigated by the FBI. In 2004, while she was still in the U.S. […]