Politics
hrynyshyn | September 21, 2006Anyone not already furious with the Bush administration's attempt to legalize torture as a general interrogation practice, rather than a case-specific emergency tactic, should first read this.
Then, if you still think torture works, go back and read it again. And again.
tsmith | September 21, 2006I write a lot here about science denial, and it's been pointed out previously that denying that HIV causes AIDS, for instance, is deadly quackery. Now, via Nature write and blogger Declan Butler and Nature magazine comes news of another form of science denial revolving around HIV: the 7-year imprisonment and torture of six medical workers in Libya (the "Tripoli six"), falsely accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV. In his blog post, Butler asks, "Can the blogosphere help free the Tripoli six?"
(More below...)
This mess began back in 1999, and now the six face…
pharyngula | September 21, 2006I can't tell if this is funny or not, because even humorous presentations of GW Bush make me want to snarl. I leave it to you to judge.
clock | September 20, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been wrongfully charged and are awaiting execution by firing squad in Libya for allegedly infecting children with HIV. They were tortured and forced to sign "confessions" written in Arabic they did not understand. In fact, the poor hygiene and bad practices in the hospital are to blame.
You can get more information in Nature (free access) editorial and news report and even more detail in an official report (pdf) and a letter (pdf) to Qaddafi.
What can you do?
First, ask your congresscritters what are they going to do about this - are…
oracknows | September 20, 2006Declan Butler of Nature has issued a call for help from the scientific and medical blogosphere in protesting and raising awareness about an utter travesty of justice, a vile and utterly vicious miscarriage of justice. This is one that I can't help but throw the paltry weight of my own blog behind. Here's the story:
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh…
tlambert | September 20, 2006Five nurses and a doctor have been falsely accused of deliberately infecting their patients with HIV. They've been imprisoned and tortured in Libya since 1999 and may now be condemned to death. Declan Butler writes:
what is needed is an immediate and sustained mobilization of international opinion, something which has been badly lacking so far. Bloggers, and the scientific community, can help create pressure on the authorities for the immediate release of the Tripoli six: Christiana Malinova Valcheva, Valia Georgieva Cherveniashka, Nasia Stoitcheva Nenova, Valentina Manolova Siropulo,…
jlynch | September 20, 2006From Declan Butler in this week's Nature:
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them.
On 28 August, when the prosecution was scheduled to close its case, the Libyan prosecutor called for the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to be sentenced to death. Attorneys from…
pharyngula | September 20, 2006These six medical professionals:
Ashraf al-Hajuj
Valya Chervenyashka
Snezhana Dimitrova
Nasya Nenova
Valentina Siropulo
Kristiyana Valtcheva
were working at the al-Fateh Children's Hospital in Banghazi, Libya in the late 1990s. A year later, about 400 children were diagnosed with HIV; the doctors and nurses were accused of conspiring with Israel and the USA to intentionally infect children with the disease, and were thrown into jail.
Five years later — five years spent in a Libyan jail, where they were tortured with electric shocks and beatings, and two of the nurses were raped! — defenders…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004.
(Full comments below the fold.)
I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…
stcynic | September 20, 2006A new documentary called Iraq for Sale has Haliburton under major scrutiny and it's not hard to see why. Unable to get Republican committee chairs to call for committee hearings based upon an enormous amount of evidence for malfeasance on the part of the company, the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held hearings of their own and some of the testimony was pretty bad. The Houston Chronicle, Haliburton's hometown newspaper, has this report on some of the allegations made there. For example, how about offering to get U.S. Defense of Freedom medals (the civilian Purple Heart) for injured…
stcynic | September 20, 2006Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has released a report on the 13 most corrupt members of Congress. On this page, you can click on each of the thirteen names and read the reasons why they're on the list. Here's the list:
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-CA)
Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA)
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)
Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA)
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC)
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT)
Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN)
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
tsmith | September 20, 2006David over at Orcinus has an excellent post reminding about the anniversary of the that passed largely without mention, and its stark contrast to the anniversary of 9/11.
...today also marks the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that followed -- the anthrax letters mailed to a variety of media figures and liberal senators, killing five people and convulsing the nation with fear of similar attacks elsewhere for several weeks afterward.
But there are no network specials planned. No wreath-laying by the president. No ABC docudramas blaming the Clinton administration with made-up…
revere | September 20, 2006Christie Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator under Bush, scores points with some reality-based humans because she clearly is a GOP moderate. Which means, of course, she's solidly right wing. Still, that doesn't mean she shouldn't be trusted or respected. No, this means she shouldn't be trusted or respected. From the every reliable Jordan Barab at Confined Space:
I never thought much of former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, especially regarding EPA's fatally weak warnings about the hazards of the smoke and dust coming off the collapsed World Trade Center towers, and her inability…
jlynch | September 19, 2006It's going to be one of those weeks, so I don't know how much I'm going to get to post. I do, however, want to share the editorial from this week's Nation (emphasis mine):
George W. Bush's decision to move Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and thirteen other "high value" Al Qaeda captives from secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo was treated by much of the press as an abrupt change of course. Big news! The President acknowledged CIA prisons that the public has known about for two years! Reality: The President--in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision striking down his Administration's post-9/11…
clock | September 19, 2006This is an excerpt from the first chapter of George Lakoff's new book Thinking Points. You can read more here or download a PDF of the first chapter here.
You have heard many of these ideas before, including repeatedly on my blog, but it is nice to see them all stated succintly and collected in one place:
1. The Issue Trap
We hear it said all the time: Progressives won't unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive…
clock | September 19, 2006
Its'a all about sex, sexual repression and sexual politics:
Jessica
Lindsay
Ezra
David Neiwert
Lance
Berube
Jill
Zuzu
PZ
Sisyphus Shrugged
Scott
Echidne
Amanda
Roy
Jessica
Lauren
Amanda
Heretic
Jane
Scott
Jessica
Driftglass
Pam
Lance
oracknows | September 19, 2006Unfortunately for them, folks in Colorado have a hard core anti-vaxer named Dawn Winkler running for governor on the Libertarian ticket. I'm hoping for their sakes that, as a third party candidate, that she has virtually no chance of winning. Check out some of her rhetoric posted on Whale.to seven years ago in response to an essay by Dr. J. Thomas Megerian of Children's Hospital in Boston. Even though it's seven years old, I present part of it because it is so astonishingly clueless and because, as you will see later, Winkler apparently hasn't learned a thing since then:
How on earth did we…
clock | September 19, 2006Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the anthrax attack. It was the Big Topic for the media for about as long as any Missing White Woman story, .... or was it until it was realized that the perpetrators were not "Islamofascists" (the term that was not, but could have been, invented at the time) but the more domestic kind?
Dave and Tara have much more.
tsmith | September 19, 2006From the New York Times:
The last of the anthrax-laced letters was still making its way through the mail in late 2001 when top Bush administration officials reached an obvious conclusion: the nation desperately needed to expand its medical stockpile to prepare for another biological attack.
The result was Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion effort to exploit the country's top medical and scientific brains and fill an emergency medical cabinet with new drugs and vaccines for a host of threats. "We will rally the great promise of American science and innovation to confront the greatest danger of…
clock | September 19, 2006Demand an Exit Strategy Not a Facelift:
By pointing the finger at Rumsfeld, they deflect blame from Bush's neo-conservative agenda. It is that agenda that drew the nation to Iraq, that has distracted from a smarter struggle against terrorists and terrorism, that has resulted in the erosion of our civil liberties, that has incurred the wrath of the international community.
Identifying Rumsfeld as the problem reinforces the "bad apple frame," which is among the common frames we examine in our new book, Thinking Points. This frame derives from the old saying that one bad apple spoils the barrel…