U.S. government withholds information about Bagram detainees

By Danielle Kurtzleben, Inter Press Service News

WASHINGTON, Aug 14 (IPS) – The U.S. government continues to withhold even the most basic information about prisoners in the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a New York-based legal rights organisation.

An April 2009 ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents and information about the detainment of prisoners at Bagram has yielded dead ends with both the Department of Defence (DOD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The ACLU wants the Obama Administration to make these records public, including information about “the number of people currently detained at Bagram, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention, as well as records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as ‘enemy combatants.’”

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We Are Stardust, We Are Golden (2/3)

Max Yasgur’s dairy farm, Bethel, New York, Saturday, August 16, 1969. Day 2

• Quill, forty minute set of four songs
• Keef Hartley Band
• Country Joe McDonald
• John Sebastian
• Santana
• Canned Heat
• Mountain
• Grateful Dead
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Janis Joplin with The Kozmic Blues Band ^[22]
• Sly & the Family Stone
• The Who began at 4 AM, kicking off a 25-song set including Tommy
• Jefferson Airplane

Country Joe McDonald – FISH Cheer/Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die-Rag

For more videos, including performances by John Sebastian, Santana (with a 19 year old Michael Shrieve on drums), Canned Heat, Canned Heat, Mountain, Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane, click on link below video.

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Health Care in Britain: An Expat Goes for a Checkup

CARED FOR The physicist Stephen Hawking is a defender of Britain’s National Health.

By SARAH LYALL | NYT | August 15, 2009

LONDON — There are times when, viewed from afar, American political discourse looks like nothing more than a huge brawl conducted by noisy, ill-informed polemicists. This is one of them, as Britain found last week when the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was, bizarrely, drawn into the raucous debate over the health care proposals of President Obama and Congress.

Mr. Hawking, 67, has Lou Gehrig’s disease, is paralyzed, speaks through a voice synthesizer and needs a great deal of medical attention. He also lives in Britain. This makes him a spectacularly unfortunate choice to pick as an example of the evils of the National Health Service, which has provided free health care — to him, and to millions of other people here — for 61 years.

But that is what Investor’s Business Daily did on Aug. 3, in an editorial opposing Mr. Obama’s proposals by accusing him of wanting to institute an N.H.S.-style system in America. Mr. Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K.,” the newspaper declared, because the health service would declare his life “essentially worthless.”

The paper printed a correction, and Mr. Hawking issued a statement saying that, actually, the health service had helped keep him alive.

ORIGINAL STORY

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