Jeremy Scahill, Josh Begley, Cora Currier, Ryan Devereaux, Peter Maass, Ryan Gallagher, and Nick Turse, The Drone Papers. The Intercept, 15 October 2015. Eight-part series. “The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars…. The articles in The Drone Papers were produced by a team of reporters and researchers from The Intercept that has spent months analyzing the documents. The series is intended to serve as a long-overdue public examination of the methods and outcomes of America’s assassination program. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through four presidential terms, has been shrouded in excessive secrecy. The public has a right to see these documents not only to engage in an informed debate about the future of U.S. wars, both overt and covert, but also to understand the circumstances under which the U.S. government arrogates to itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal.” Eight-part series. [Read more…]
October 15, 2015
The Drone Papers
October 15, 2015 Filed Under: National Security, War/War crimes Tagged With: abdul rahman awlaki, afghanistan, al qaeda, american civil liberties union (aclu), anwar al awlaki, barack obama, bilal el-berjawi, bureau of investigative journalism, cia, djibouti (camp lemonnier), drone warfare, enemy killed in action (ekia), hindu kush, human rights watch, jameel jaffer, lt. general michael flynn, nina shamsi, operation haymaker, pakistan, pentagon's intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance task force study of 2013 (isr), signals intelligence (sigint), somalia, taliban, us military's joint special operations command (jsoc), yemen
September 16, 2015
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The Atlantic, October 2015. “American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they’ve failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report ‘The Negro Family’ tragically helped create this system, it’s time to reclaim his original intent.”
September 16, 2015 Filed Under: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Ethics, Politics, Poverty, Prisons/Jails, Racism Tagged With: "the negro family: the case for national action", article iv of the us constitution (fugitive slave clause), barack obama, bill clinton, crime rates, criminal justice system, daniel patrick moynihan, ferguson police department, frederick douglass, harriet tubman, j. edgar hoover, lynching, lyndon johnson, marcus garvey, martin luther king jr, mass incarceration, michael brown, poverty, racial zoning, richard nixon, slavery, underground railroad, war on drugs