Supermax Prisons and Guantanamo: Worse Than the Gulag?
Saturday October 5, 2013 marks a full year in United States custody for Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad and three other British residents extradited from the United Kingdom to the US. Nobody in the UK knows specifically why they are being held in the US, except that the charges relate, in Talha and Babar’s cases, to […]
Saudi Arabia and Qatar: Kingdoms of Slave Labor, Human Rights Abuses
In the past few decades, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have seen their influence, both regional and global, grow rapidly. The extraordinary wealth of both oil-rich nations give them a lot of say and sway far beyond the Gulf area. Both Kingdoms have used their tremendous power of the purse, given by oil revenues, to gain […]
Turkey’s Revolutionary Conundrum
To characterize the current struggle in Turkey as being a clash of secularism versus Islam — that is, a conflict between the secular demands of the urban Turkish population and the pro-Islamic social conservative forces led by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) — is dangerous. This not only […]
The United States’ Obscene Wealth Inequality
By Gilbert Mercier and Dady Chery In the past 33 years, the United States has become a study in blatant and obscene contrasts between the rich and poor. Although FDR’s New Deal helped to lift the country out of the Great Depression and to establish the social and economic policies and standards that created a […]
A Tale of Two Concentration Camps: Guantanamo and Ruhleben
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” With such oxymoronic sentiment begins one of Charles Dickens’ great classics from which the title of this article is […]
