RUTHFULLY YOURS

My country, Venezuela, is on the verge of social and economic collapse. This slow-motion disaster, nearly 15 years in the making, was not initiated by falling oil prices or by mounting debts. It was set in motion by the authoritarian government’s hostility toward human rights and the rule of law and the institutions that protect them.

I know this on an all-too personal level. I am writing from a military prison, where I have been held since February as a result of speaking out against the government’s actions. I am one of scores of political prisoners in my country who are locked away because of their words and ideas.

This unjust incarceration has given me a firsthand view of the pervasive abuses—legal, mental and physical—perpetrated by the ruling elite in my country. It has not been a good experience, but it has been an enlightening one.

My isolation also has given me time to think and reflect on the larger crisis facing my country. It has never been clearer to me that Venezuela’s road to ruin was paved years ago by a movement to dismantle basic human rights and freedoms in the name of an illusory vision of achieving greater good for the masses through the centralization of power.

Last year’s election of Hasan Rouhani as president of Iran was supposed to inaugurate an era of moderation for the Islamic Republic. Try telling that to the family of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.
Mr. Rezaian, the Post’s Tehran correspondent and a U.S. citizen, was arrested with his wife Yeganeh Salehi in late July and held in solitary confinement, in a bed-less cell, in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. Iranian authorities have given no reason for his arrest other than to say it is “security” related. Ms. Salehi, an Iranian journalist, was released on bail in October but there is no end in sight for Mr. Rezaian, who is also reported to be in ill-health.

Mr. Rezaian is far from the first Western reporter cruelly treated by Iranian authorities. Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was beaten to death in Evin in 2003. Freelance reporter Roxanna Saberi was held in Evin for more than three months in early 2009. Maziar Bahari, a Canadian reporter for Newsweek, was imprisoned and tortured in Evin later that year, during the post-election uprising known as the Green Revolution. His story is now the subject of Jon Stewart ’s movie “Rosewater.”

Mr. Rezaian’s imprisonment is a reminder of how little has changed in Iran under its new leadership. Apologists for Mr. Rouhani have argued that there’s only so much the president can do; that Mr. Rezaian is a pawn in a power struggle between the regime’s moderates and hardliners. But that would hardly explain why Mr. Rouhani appointed as his Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, previously known for being deputy intelligence minister when thousands of political prisoners were killed in the late 1980s.

Because of the deinstitutionalization movement there are no asylums for the mentally ill or criminally insane individuals who are tossed into jails with minor offenders….rsk
Mr. Rubin, a former U.S. Treasury secretary, is co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Turner is president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice.
About one of every 100 U.S. adults is in prison. That’s five to 10 times higher than in Western Europe.

One of us is a former Treasury secretary, the other directs a criminal-justice institute. But we’ve reached the same conclusions. America’s overreliance on incarceration is exacting excessive costs on individuals and communities, as well as on the national economy. Sentences are too long, and parole and probation policies too inflexible. There is too little rehabilitation in prison and inadequate support for life after prison.

Crime itself has a terrible human cost and a serious economic cost. But appropriate punishment for those who are a risk to public safety shouldn’t obscure the vast deficiencies in the criminal-justice system that impose a significant drag on the economy.

The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly one of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is five to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies, according to a groundbreaking, 464-page report released this year by the National Academy of Sciences. America puts people in prison for crimes that other nations don’t, mostly minor drug offenses, and keeps them in prison much longer. Yet these long sentences have had at best a marginal impact on crime reduction.

This is not only a serious humanitarian and social issue, but one with profound economic and fiscal consequences. In an increasingly competitive global economy, equipping Americans for the modern workforce is an economic imperative. Excessive incarceration harms productivity. People in prison are people who aren’t working. And without effective rehabilitation, many are ill-equipped to work after release.

The Double-Dipping Legal Scam

House Speaker John Boehner says asbestos legal reform is a priority in the New Year, and it can’t come soon enough. Based on the details emerging from federal bankruptcy court, asbestos litigation fraud has reached new heights.

Garlock Sealing Technologies is a maker of gaskets that since its bankruptcy in 2010 has become a symbol of the corrupt practices of the plaintiffs bar. Lawyers demanded $1.3 billion in payouts from Garlock for mesothelioma patients until federal Judge George Hodges reviewed evidence showing that many of the claims were a sham. The judge in January slashed the company’s liability to $125 million and slammed the trial bar for “misrepresenting” the facts.
Then in October he moved to unseal that evidence, and now we’re getting a glimpse of what has become a widespread tort-bar con. Court documents show the ugly specifics of “double-dipping”—in which lawyers sue a company and claim its products caused their clients’ disease, even as they file claims with asbestos trusts blaming other products for the harm. This lets them get double or multiple payouts for a single illness, with a huge cut for the lawyers each time.

Garlock unveiled how this worked in at least 15 different cases that it had previously settled or lost after Judge Hodges allowed for belated discovery. In a case called Torres, the plaintiff claimed the only asbestos he handled was in Garlock gaskets, even as he told multiple trusts that he regularly handled raw asbestos.

As we sit here in our homes with our families and loved ones around us, tens of thousands of wives wonder if their husbands will come home tonight.

Their husbands aren’t stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They’re on duty in places like Englewood in Chicago where there are 2 violent crimes for every 1,000 people in one month, Columbus Square in St. Louis or Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City where two police officers were just murdered.

41 law enforcement officers were shot and killed in 2014. That’s in line with the number of Americans killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan. There’s a reason that Chicago has been nicknamed Chiraq. Some parts of the country are a war zone and after the latest shooting of two police officers in New York City, a statement circulating among cops states that the NYPD has become a “wartime police department”.

The war at home has been going on for a long time and by some accounts has claimed the lives of 20,000 law enforcement officers. Since 2001, more than 700 officers have been killed by gunfire. During the Gulf War, more officers were killed on the streets of American cities than in combat against Saddam.

Even as the murders of NYPD cops Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu fill the news, Officer Charlie Kondek has been shot while pursuing a suspect in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Officer Kondek had been a former member of the NYPD. He leaves behind five children. His killer, Marco Antonio Parilla Jr, had been repeatedly arrested for the possession and sale of cocaine before being released just this August. Officer Kondek and his children paid the ultimate price for his release.

Before seeing “Mr. Turner,” written and directed by Mike Leigh, it would be wise to get some background information on JMW Turner, the great British painter who transformed seascapes into ephemeral swirls of impressionistic light and color decades before impressionism became a movement. In the movie, Turner is played by Timothy Spall who creates a persona not unlike the hunchback of Notre Dame – a man whose default facial expression is a tight-lipped scowl, underscored by frequent grunts and inappropriate gropes. Though he wears a top hat and is clearly an acclaimed member of the Royal Academy, it’s hard for his peers and the audience to know what to make of his behavior. Does he suffer from Tourettes syndrome or some personality disorder? What accounts for his attractiveness to the kind and caring Mrs. Booth who doesn’t know that he is the famous painter until well into their relationship? Leigh does little to try to explain Turner’s peculiarities, wanting us to accept him at face value – an eccentric genius and a riddle for which there is no answer.

We discover halfway through the film that the artist who claims to have no children does indeed have a living daughter and one who has just died yet there is no filial sentiment aroused by either nor any compassion for the grieving woman who bore them. Lest we suspect that he is someone who can’t form emotional connections, we see his deep attachment to the elderly father whom he still calls “daddy” and whom he respects and adores. Later, we see the domestic tranquility of his secret life with Mrs. Booth but it’s an enigmatic contrast to his ongoing brutal relationship with his awkward housekeeper, almost his female counterpart.

Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan Rice, the memo warned that the campaign against the Islamic State would unravel unless there was greater clarity regarding Washington’s intentions in Syria.

Hagel was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was uncomfortable with the insistence of humanitarian bombers on Obama’s team—notably Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power—that targeting the regime of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad should be an integral part of anti-IS strategy. On the other, he was aware that the nascent anti-IS coalition could unravel if its stridently anti-Assad members, such as Saudi Arabia, decided that the effort was no longer worth their while. All along he was unable to spell out what would constitute victory against the Islamic State and how the current strategy is going to achieve it.

To make things worse for Hagel, his relations with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had become strained because of the latter’s doubts about Obama’s “no boots on the ground” approach to the Islamic State. On several occasions last fall Dempsey indicated that eventually American ground troops may be needed in anti-IS operations in Iraq—“we’re certainly considering it,” he told the House Armed Services Committee in testimony on November 13—but the White House remained adamant that this would not happen. In addition, Dempsey is believed to favor rapprochement with Bashar’s regime as the only viable anti-IS force on the ground, but Hagel was unwilling to support such a radical policy shift. In the end Hagel looked almost irrelevant: When Dempsey testified in the House in mid-November, some congressmen behaved as if Hagel was not in the room; and he acted as if he did not have much to say.

KANO, Nigeria (AP) – A 13-year-old says her father gave her to Boko Haram extremists and that she was arrested after refusing to explode a suicide bomb in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city in the north.

Nigeria has suffered numerous suicide bombings in recent months carried out by girls and young women. That has raised fears that the insurgents are using kidnapped girls.

The girl told a news conference Wednesday night that she saw many people being buried alive at the Boko Haram camp where her father took her in Bauchi state, east of Kano.

She said her captors asked if she wanted to go to paradise and, when she said yes, explained she would have to be a suicide bomber.

“When I was told I would have to die to enter paradise, that I would have to explode a bomb and die, I said I cannot do it,” she said.

When they threatened to kill her, she allowed them to strap her into a vest primed with explosives, saying “I was afraid to be buried alive.”

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the following observation regarding the Palestinians;

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…

That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, at the turn of the 20th century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”

Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.