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No Mercy: Bush Refugee Treatment an Echo of Brutal Bi-Partisan Policies

Take counsel, execute judgment;
Make your shadow like the night in the middle of the day:
Hide the outcasts,
Do not betray him who escapes. – Isaiah 16:3.

We wrote here yesterday of the Bush Administration’s policy toward refugees fleeing the “Terror War” invasion of Somalia: to bomb them indiscriminately, capture them at gunpoint and “render” them to the torture chambers of Bush’s close ally,

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Terror War III: U.S. Forces Capture, Render Refugees From Somali “Regime Change”

Here’s how George W. Bush treats refugees fleeing from the carnage wrought by his “War on Terror”: he has them captured at gunpoint and “rendered” to torturers in his pay, where they are chained, blindfolded, beaten, stuffed into cages then “disappeared” into secret prisons notorious for their vile abuses. These captures of people trying to escape from the terrors of “regime change,” from the ravages of foreign armies invading their homes, include women and children, as attested by the story of 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, a pregnant Swedish woman who was grabbed – by American troops – as

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Kilgore Trout Has Left the Building: Kurt Vonnegut Dead

Sad news comes today of Kurt Vonnegut’s death. Like so many people, I discovered his books when I was young — back in the olden days, when his best-known novels were still being written — and was much taken with his dark deadpan wit, his vigorous humanism and the flatland Midwest voice of his prose, so much in the American grain. In his prime, Vonnegut was often compared to Mark Twain — another great favorite and formative figure in my

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Ring of Fire: Historic Johnny Cash Home Destroyed

From AP: Fire destroys longtime Johnny Cash home

Excerpts: Johnny Cash’s longtime lakeside home, a showcase where he wrote much of his famous music and entertained U.S. presidents, music royalty and visiting fans, was destroyed by fire on Tuesday. Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, lived in the 13,880-square-foot home from the late 1960s until their deaths in 2003.

“So many prominent things and prominent people in American history took place

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Jihad for Jesus: Fomenting Holy War in the American Heartland

As a follow-up to some of the themes sounded in yesterday’s post (Children in Chains: This is the New America), the excerpt below from Chris Hedge’s latest column in Truthdig cuts to the essence (with far greater eloquence than I command) of one of key elements of America’s nightmarish transmogrification: the unholy hatemongers of the “Christian” Right. Hedge’s whole column draws out further frightening implications of this explosive movement — as does this new piece from Rolling Stone, and a running series of

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Disaster and Domination: The Bush Regime’s Self-Created Arc of Crisis

The always excellent Tom Englehardt provides a magesterial overview of the whole scope of the, well, empire burlesque of the Bush Regime in his latest piece, The Theater of the Imperially Absurd. In this essay, Tom pulls together many sinister threads that are usually dealt with piecemeal – or not at all – to create a tapestry of the “arc of instability” that the Bushists have created across the planet’s oil heartlands and environs. As we have noted here – for years – the blowback from the Bush-Cheney gang’s lunatic bid for world domination

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Children in Chains: This is the New America

Bob Herbert, one of the very few voices of genuine anger and dissent remaining in the corporate media, went down to Avon Park, Florida, last week, and came back with the story of a 6-year-old girl whose kindergarten temper tantrum landed her in jail, booked on felony charges. This is what happened to her:

…the child was no match for Avon Park’s finest. The cops pulled her from under the table and handcuffed her. The officers were not fooling around. In the eyes of the cops
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Statue of Limitations: The Whole Picture of a War Porn Money Shot

“In my end is my beginning.” — T.S. Eliot

Antiwar.com takes us back to the bright dawn of Bush’s Babylonian Conquest, to that wonderful day when the teeming masses of Iraqis took to the Baghdad streets to tear down Saddam Hussein’s statue in a totally spontaneous act of appreciation for their liberators. Who can forget those moving scenes that filled every TV screen in America and Britain, those riveting close-ups of the huge crowds (whose true extent, unfortunately, could not be readily discerned from the dramatic tight

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Annals of Liberation: Bush “Terror War” Gives Taliban Big Boost

George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” marked a new milestone this week, as a poll in Afghanistan’s key Helmland region showed that the dread and draconian Taliban are now more popular than the American-led foreign occupation of the country – more than five years after the Islamic extremist group was ousted from power by a group of warlords, drug barons, oilmen and, er, Islamic extremist groups when the Bush gang took sides in the nation’s long-running, hydra-headed civil war.

The Independent reports that a new study

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