One Utah

Thanks, Raw Story. The House Judiciary Committee has released a witness list for its hearing on the impeachment of President George W. Bush.
Late Thursday afternoon, the committee released the full witness list, broken down into two panels.
Panel One
The Honorable Dennis Kucinich, Representative from Ohio
[...]

We don’t actually need any more evidence of Bush administration crimes, but today the American Civil Liberties Union released more anyway. Previously top secret memos obtained by the ACLU reveal more of the bizarre, perverse and disingenuous legal theories that Justice Department lawyers tried to use to justify torture of detainees. From Raw [...]

Everyone except a few bloggers has probably forgotten, if they ever knew, that last April Barack Obama made a half-hearted pledge to prosecute at least some of the crimes committed by the Bush administration. In response to a question from a DailyKos blogger, he answered carefully:
What I would want to [...]

Allegorically speaking, to a political junkie such as myself, C-Span and C-Span 2 are the uncut heroin of political news. If you’re somebody who doesn’t really need to be told what you just saw with your own eyes, C-Span provides the perfect information gathering vehicle to understand what is going on in Washington politics, but [...]

Thanks Leo for the tip. Personally, I see no place for pure libertarianism on this planet. Its light began to fade when the transcontinental railroad opened.
Nevertheless, this article speaks to the danger of the current Republican response to the SCOTUS case. Bad decision they say…as would have Hitler.
From the Future of Freedom [...]

The Bush administration’s plan for rigged 9/11 terrorist show trials to coincide with the 2008 presidential election has run into legal difficulties.
Charges have been dropped against the “20th hijacker,” Mohamed al-Qahtani. He allegedly came to the United States to take part in the September 11, 2001 attacks, but he was denied entry to the [...]

From ABC News:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved the torture of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency. The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, which in 2002-2003 included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor [...]

Via Talking Points Memo and other sources, today we got to read the infamous torture memo that sought to justify the horrifying abuses of detainees at the hands of the U.S. government at Guanatanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and CIA secret “black site” prisons. It was written on March 14, 2003 by John Yoo, then [...]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in [...]

I hate the way the so-called War On Terror has been twisted to make morally repugnant acts like torture acceptable.
Rather than argue that torture is a moral good, supporters of torture have argued it is a regrettable moral necessity.
The argument goes like this:
Terrorists do bad things. Doing bad things proves they are bad men. [...]

Who’s up for The Long War? This is a term first popularized in February 2006 for the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, although its origins appear to date back further. In April 2005, James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-published a book titled Winning the Long War. [See comments below [...]