The neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century “looks to be heading toward closing” because there is a sense of “goal accomplished.” Founders included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and “Scooter” Libby, who argued in 1998 that “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime…now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”
In a federal district court in Detroit today, ACLU lawyers will argue that the NSA’s wiretapping programs violate the U.S. Constitution and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The ACLU is asking the program be halted, while Justice Department lawyers have asked the judge to dismiss the suit because it would reveal state secrets.
The proportion of students who are leaving college with some level of unmanageable debt “” debt they can’t repay without significant hardship “” is swelling. The average college senior graduated this year with more than $19,000 in debt. Policy choices – like the freezing of the minimum wage and the shift in the tax burden from the rich to the rest – “have starved public services while leaving ordinary Americans more dependent than ever on debt.”
With Bush administration support, states are now moving aggressively to transform Medicaid, the nation’s largest public health insurance program. Having won greater freedom from federal rules, states are adding fees, restricting benefits, and privatizing parts of the program that covers 55 million poor and disabled Americans.
After the suicides of three Guantanamo detainees, the European Union has called for the prison to be closed. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy drew criticism for describing the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.”
“Iran said Sunday that it accepted some parts of a Western offer aimed at getting Tehran to drop its nuclear program, but it rejected others,” and said that there were points that were “unclear,” such as the offer to aid Iran in developing a uranium enrichment program.
According to a national study financed by the Justice Department, “Arab-Americans reported an increasing sense of victimization, suspicion of government and law enforcement, and concerns about protecting their civil liberties” due to a series of post-9/11 policies have sown fear among the community.
The Iraq war’s profound legacy across the Arab world: “fear and suspicion over Iraq’s repercussions, a generation that casts the Bush administration’s policy as an unquestioned war on Islam, and a subterranean reserve of men who”¦declare that the fight against the United States in Iraq is a model for the future.”
“China’s sales of military vehicles and weapons to Sudan, Nepal, and Burma have aggravated conflicts and abetted violence and repressive rule in those countries,” according to a new Amnesty International report.
And finally: Public health and environmental activists have pledged to fight plans to create a temporary nuclear rod storage site on a reservation of the Goshute Indians. But Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. (R) is going one step further, having “vowed to lie down on the railroad tracks” to stop trains with the nuclear waste from reaching the site.
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