(If you have the stomach for it, here is a link to more of Botero’s paintings on Abu Ghraib.)
Andrea Germanos at CommonDreams writes—It Appears Trump Administration Wants to Bury Senate Torture Report Forever:
The Trump administration is moving to keep the lengthy Senate report on the CIA's torture and detention program forever from the public eye, The New York Times first reported Friday.
That's because the administration is returning to Congress copies of the over 6,000-page document, following through on requests made by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the Senate Intelligence Committee's current chairman. Laws requiring government records to eventually be made public don't apply to congressional documents.
The Times, citing multiple congressional officials, writes that the "CIA, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA's inspector general have returned their copies of the report."
Burr, who's been a critic of the report, said in a statement to Reuters: "I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report."
But countered Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project: "It would be a travesty for agencies to return the CIA torture report instead of reading and learning from it, as senators intended." [...]
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"We are the first generation to be able to end poverty, and the last generation that can take steps to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Future generations will judge us harshly if we fail to uphold our moral and historical responsibilities.”
~Ban Ki-moon, former U.N. secretary general at Vatican symposium, 2015
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—False equivalency watch: Press outraged at perfectly reasonable Illinois redistricting:
You might not have known it, but apparently the Democratic-controlled Illinois state legislature invented gerrymandering this past week. Indeed, the new maps do create the potential for a pickup of several seats for the Democrats.
Democrats are doubtlessly cheering the outcome, which more than anything reverses a previous gerrymander that gave Republicans an 11-8 lead in the delegation out of a state that Democrats have largely dominated at the statewide level. That map was a little creative in itself, as the diagram of the 17th district (right) illustrates.
Who is upset by the new Illinois Congressional map? Well, Republicans are indignant, predictably. Oddly, the U.S. political press also seems a bit disturbed by it. The evidence for that is in their seeming insistence on comparing this remap to the most notorious gerrymander of recent vintage:
From The Washington Post: DeLay lite?
Redistricting experts are already comparing the map to the one passed by Texas Republicans in 2003 under the guidance of then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Arliss Bunny drops by to alert us to Monday’s Hopping Mad interview with DKos political director Carolyn Fiddler. She sticks around for a wide-ranging discussion of world leadership, then helps hatch a plan for progressive global economic domination.
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