Just as the White House has rejected creation of an independent commission to investigate abuses at Gitmo and elsewhere (Reuters, June 21), comes this deeply disturbing news. It is (as we've recently noted) taboo to say this sort of thing, but how is the analogy to the Nazi doctors avoidable? No, it is not the same as Mengele. The point is, you stand up and point out the similarity before it gets to that level of evil. The fact that the analogy is taboo, ironically, just abets the Nazification of the USA. Thanks to TruthOut for passing this one along.

The conspiranoiacs are going to be salivating over this one. For all their relentless insistence that the entire government is controlled by The Conspiracy, nothing makes them giddier than a whiff of vindication from The Establishment. Too bad the poorly-named "9-11 skeptics" will never exhibit any skepticism over these claims...

Kudos to Newsday, which (unlike the NY Times thus far) today notes the approaching one-year anniversary of Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo detainees are entitled to judicial review. It was hailed as a victory by civil libertarians at the time, yet detainees have had no access to the courts since then. Note that Newsday rightly uses the word "courts" to refer to the civilian judiciary and not the Pentagon's special "tribunals" for the detainees, which are laden with extraordinarily onerous restrictions, and are arguably a legal fiction. Here are some excerpts from Newsday's coverage:

David Horowitz' website Discover the Networks: A Guide to the Political Left is pretty funny, evoking what Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics." Its list of un-American "radicals" includes both George Soros and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (neither "leftists"), as well as Death Row celebrity Mumia Abu-Jamal and pro-death penalty ex-prez Bill Clinton. What isn't so funny is that Discover the Networks apparently exchanged links with a truly evil site called Target of Opportunity. The disingenuous "disclaimer" on this site is actually an explicit incitement to violence:

In their bid to get the Patriot Act made permanent when it comes up for renewal later this year, Bush and Attorney General Gonzales are claiming 200 terrorism convictions thanks to new post-9-11 powers. However, a review of the cases by the Washintgon Post June 12 finds that the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with terrorism. Thanks to TruthOut for passing this along:

The 9-11 Commission, its formal mission completed, is staying on as a private body, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project. In its first efforts, this private body is finding fault with the FBI for perceived inefficiencies in its intelligence capabilities, and the agency, in turn, assures that it is making amends. All freedom-lovers should shudder.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," charged: "The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families. And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."

The following item ran in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on June 6:

Participants at an anti-Zionist conference in Kiev called for the deportation of Jews from Ukraine.
The call came from one of the participants in the June 3 meeting in the Ukrainian capital. David Duke, a U.S. white supremacist, presided over the one-day conference, titled "Zionism as the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization." A number of Ukrainian politicians and public figures took part in the conference, including Levko Lukyanenko, a member of Parliament from the bloc headed by Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko.