Inside the Belly of the Beltway Beast

Abu Bakker Qassim's letter to Barack Obama Dear Mr. President, I express my gratitude and my best respect for the contribution of the United States of America to our Uighur community. At the same time, I express my gratitude for your right and prompt decision to close the jail of Guantánamo Bay. I hope you will forgive my English, which I have tried to learn. I hope my letter will find you in a good health. Please allow me to express my wish and prayer to read my letter. My name is Abu Bakker and I'm writing on behalf of Ahmet, Aktar, Ejup, with whom I have lived since May 2006 in Albania, the only country that offered us political asylum from Guantánamo when US courts concluded that we were not enemy combatants. I would like to write something about myself. The Uighur people have a proverb: "Who thinks about the end will never be a hero." Obviously it is human to think about the end, as it is human for me to remember things long ago. 30.12.2000. My last night in my l

By David Swanson It's just spring, when the world is puddle-wonderful, and your representative and your two senators pack up their lingerie and come dancing from hop-scotch and toy soldiers to make the trek outside the Beltway for a well-earned vacation sponsored by corporations completely indifferent to legislative news and dedicated to appreciation of nature's bounty in this season of new birth -- er, I mean, to begin a District Work Period dedicated to discovering exactly how much you appreciate the good work they've done so far -- er, that is to say, the last frazzled human threads that our democratic republic hangs by are coming home from April 4th to 19th and if you want to nudge them gently or forcefully in any direction you should call and ask for an appointment NOW. This is something you have a right and a responsibility to do, either alone or with your friends and family, or with some like-minded neighbors, or with a coalition representing activist groups, labor u

This is a positive development. As someone entirely dedicated to peace, I am extremely pleased with the direction Pres. Obama appears to be taking

Myself and several other activists associated with the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance visited the Pentagon Tuesday morning taking with us copies of a letter that had been delivered a week earlier to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The letter asked for the U.S. government to pursue peace and just diplomacy over illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as an immediate cessation of bombing portion of the nation of Pakistan. We also said that if we did not receive a response, we would pay him a visit. Seven of us approached the doors of the Pentagon, about 30 yards from an entrance to the Metro station. We spoke with a guard monitoring those entering the building, as we did not carry officially-issued Pentagon badges. However, we are all citizens and taxpayers of the U.S., and wished to meet with at the very least someone from Gates' office. We were told to go into a security booth for those arriving at the Pentagon for business where we had to show tw

This further confirms what many of us activists long believed about the modus operandi of the Bush regime. Of course many of us (including myself and 52 others in Maryland) were tracked and labeled terrorists by the Maryland State Police. And a subset of that group was further spied on by the Department of Homeland (Fatherland) Security. Here it is, Bruce Fein explains what happened to the U.S. Constitution following September 11, 2001. FEIN: End presidential secrecy Bruce Fein Congress should swiftly enact a statute prohibiting secret presidential government. The urgency was demonstrated last week when nine ill-conceived legal memoranda to justify despotism cobbled together by the pliable Jay Bybee and John Yoo in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush were belatedly released. Their shelf-life would have been nanoseconds if they had been immediately exposed. Their counterconstitutional reasoning would have been instantly discredited. Instead, the memoranda remained inta

By Roberto Lovato, New America Media Posted on March 3, 2009, Printed on March 3, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/129674/ At a time when racial conflict and discrimination are on the rise around the world, the Administration of the world's first black U.S. president will not be attending the world's most important conference on race and racism. In what may signal a dangerous new, "post-racial" approach to global race relations, President Barack Obama's Administration announced that it will not attend the second World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Geneva next April. According to this article in the New York Times, the Administration will boycott the conference to protest what it deems the unfair equation of Zionism with racism in the outcome documents of the first conference held in Durban, South Africa, and now the second conference, also known as "Durban II, as well." Other concerns cited by A