Author Archives: SuzanneBl

There are 46 Guantánamo Detainees Who Will Never Be Tried and Never Be Released

Mother Jones

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Throughout the years-long debate about fate of the Guantánamo prison, there’s always been one unanswered question: how many detainees are in permanent limbo? That is, how many of them are considered unquestionably too dangerous to release, but just as unquestionably not prosecutable. Now we know:

The Obama administration Monday lifted a veil of secrecy surrounding the status of the detainees at Guantánamo, for the first time publicly naming the four dozen captives it defined as indefinite detainees — men too dangerous to transfer but who cannot be tried in a court of law.

….Administration officials have through the years described a variety of reasons why the men could not face trial: Evidence against some of the indefinite detainees was too tainted by CIA or other interrogation torture or abuse to be admissible in a court; insufficient evidence to prove an individual detainee had committed a crime; or military intelligence opinions that certain captives had undertaken suicide or other type of terrorist training, and had vowed to engage in an attack on release.

The formal classification for these prisoners is “continued detention pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (2001), as informed by principles of the laws of war,” as you can see in the excerpt below.

There are lots of Guantánamo detainees who have no near-term prospect of being prosecuted or released, but still could be if circumstances change. However, even if we handled every single one of them, there’s still a hard nut of 46 prisoners with no recourse at all. They will never be tried, and they will never be released.

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There are 46 Guantánamo Detainees Who Will Never Be Tried and Never Be Released

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Will Connecticut lead the way on GMO labeling?

Mother Jones

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On June 3, the Connecticut legislature passed a bipartisan GMO labeling bill, making it the first state to require food manufacturers to reveal whether their products include genetically engineered ingredients. The bill passed both chambers by a landslide, and right-to-know activists have declared it a major victory. But the bill comes with a catch. Before it goes into effect, similar legislation must be adopted in at least four other states, including one that borders Connecticut, and those states must have an aggregate population of at least 20 million residents.

In other words, the Nutmeg State will continue to do nothing on GMOs until New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island and some combination of other states also decide to take on Big Ag and Big Biotech. This trigger clause was meant to protect Connecticut businesses from being put at a competitive disadvantage and to keep the state from “going it alone,” says Paul Towers of Pesticide Action Network. Towers called it “a cautious but important step.”

With a population of 3.5 million, Connecticut doesn’t hold the same sway as a large population state like New York or California that, just by acting alone, could force GMO labeling nationwide. (Since so much of their product is sold in those states, if one of them passed a labeling bill, food manufacturers would most likely just label all of the products they sell in the US, for the sake of efficiency.) That’s why the biotech and food industries dropped $46 million last year against California’s Prop. 37, out-spending right-to-know supporters 5 to 1 and ultimately defeating the measure.

Even with Connecticut’s trigger clause, advocates are optimistic. Tara Cook-Littman, the head of GMO Free CT, said her group fought against the clause throughout the legislative session. But ultimately, she said, the group felt that the integrity of the bill wasn’t compromised by its inclusion. “The truth is we really think we have nothing to fear from the trigger clause,” Cook-Littman told Mother Jones. “We’re hoping that the clause will end up being a catalyst to encourage other states to join us.”

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Will Connecticut lead the way on GMO labeling?

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Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?

Mother Jones

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Here is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start:

In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as “tea party” and “patriots.”

And just who is this screener? Here’s the New York Times:

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general.

….It is not yet clear which manager in Cincinnati asked for an initial keyword search of Tea Party applications, Congressional aides said. One of the employees that the House committee is seeking to interview this week, Joseph Herr, had been a manager in charge of the group of specialists in Cincinnati from its inception through August 2010, according to the aides.

So we don’t yet know who this poor schmoe is. But we’re going to subpeona Joseph Herr and make him tell us! And when that happens, this mysterious lone specialist will officially become the most reviled person in America. I can hardly wait.

BY THE WAY: Both of these pieces are well worth reading. They are among the first in what is quickly becoming a whole new subgenre: the story about how the Cincinnati office of the IRS is completely and totally FUBARed. I expect this to culminate in a 20,000-word piece in the New Yorker.

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Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?

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Remember Mother Earth This Mom’s Day

Isabel Araujo

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Remember Mother Earth This Mom’s Day

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GOP throws tantrum over Obama’s EPA nominee

GOP throws tantrum over Obama’s EPA nominee

Reuters/Jason RobertsGina McCarthy — she’s just too EPA-ish.

Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to show up for work Thursday morning, basically because they really don’t like the EPA.

The committee was scheduled to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s pick to head the EPA. The vote had already been delayed three weeks to accommodate grumbling Republicans, according to committee chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Then, this morning, right before the scheduled committee hearing, the eight GOP members sent a letter saying they were going to boycott.

From Politico:

“This has nothing to do with Gina McCarthy,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who charged that the boycott has more to do with a desire to obstruct EPA’s role in climate change regulations. …

Committee ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) announced the boycott by all eight GOP members around 8:30 a.m., saying they would deny the panel a quorum because McCarthy and the EPA haven’t provided answers to the questions they’d posed.

Democrats have noted that the questions totaled more than 1,000 — what they call a record. Republicans also had five “requests” for EPA on issues such as how the agency handles outside groups’ threats of litigation — though Democrats said the GOP senators were actually asking the agency to offer major concessions in how it conducts public business. …

“As you know, all Republicans on our EPW committee have asked EPA to honor five very reasonable and basic requests in conjunction with the nomination of Gina McCarthy which focus on openness and transparency,” the GOP members wrote. “While you have allowed EPA adequate time to fully respond before any markup on the nomination, EPA has stonewalled on four of the five categories.”

John Walke sums up the Republicans’ logic at NRDC’s Switchboard blog:

[A] group of eight conservative Senators has staked their opposition to McCarthy on a mixed procedural-political syllogism that could fit on a bumper sticker: “Transparency good; EPA not transparent; therefore McCarthy bad.” …

The Republican Senators’ demands are less about transparency than wrapping anti-health grievances and obstructionist tactics in the pleasing garb of transparency concerns.

Walke then painstakingly explains why the GOP’s demands are ridiculous.

This little episode doesn’t bode well for McCarthy’s nomination — or the health of the Senate. From Politico again:

[The GOP boycott] prompted new calls by some liberals for changing the Senate’s filibuster rules — a tacit admission that McCarthy will have trouble getting 60 votes when her nomination finally heads to the floor.

“You know why some of us are going to be in favor of reforming the rules of the Senate? It’s because of abuses like this,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said.

Boxer added, “This is outrageous. Get out of the fringe lane.”

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

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GOP throws tantrum over Obama’s EPA nominee

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Finally, Some Not-Terrible Climate News: Greenland Not Melting Any Faster

Mother Jones

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Back in 2006, scientists in Greenland made an alarming observation: Glaciers were crumbling into the ocean twice as fast. And not in little cocktail-sized cubes, either: Glaciologist Jason Box accurately predicted the spot where a hunk four times the size of Manhattan would later shear off into the sea.

At the same time, the inland top of the ice sheet was thawing at record levels; last summer, for the first time in 150 years, its entire surface was melting. By summer’s end, this water alone raised sea levels all over the world by a millimeter.

As Box told our Climate Desk Live audience in January, rising air and water temperatures—driven by greenhouse gas emissions—are to blame. And with more warming on the way, he made a grim prediction: melting from Greenland and the world’s other land-based glaciers could ultimately raise global sea levels by 69 feet, Box warns.

But don’t start building your flood-proof Ark quite yet: Advanced imaging released in August suggested the ice sheet is capable of quickly reversing its melting habit. And a study out today in Nature finds that the sped-up ice loss on the water’s edge, while still a problem, is unlikely to get much worse, even with a big rise in global temperatures. Taken together, these two studies suggest that Greenland’s ice melt problem isn’t as bad as experts like Box had predicted.

For the Nature study, Faezeh Nick, a researcher at Norway’s University Centre in Svalbard, led a team that took the closest-ever look at so-called “outlet glaciers,” the 200 or so outermost arms of the ice sheet that flow straight into the sea. Their findings suggest that the increase in melting rate is about to slow down, suggesting that in a medium warming scenario these glaciers will likely contribute just 19-30 millimeters to global sea levels by 2100. That’s much less than if the current acceleration of melting were to persist, but still a noteworthy share of the quarter- to half-meter rise projected by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Scientists on the sailboat Gambo measure water temperature and salinity in front of a Greenland glacier. Faezeh M. Nick

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Finally, Some Not-Terrible Climate News: Greenland Not Melting Any Faster

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