Stories of interest

A New Documentary Draws Stark Parallels Between Chile Under Pinochet and the Post-9/11 "War on Terror"

Sophia A McClennen for AlerNet writes: "Torture, the suspension of democracy and civil rights, illegal surveillance, forced displacement, and a culture of fear led by a despot who gains power through an act of violence committed on September 11. Sound familiar? Canadian director Peter Raymont's new documentary, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, covers familiar ground but in less familiar territory as he intertwines the life of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman with the history of Chile and with the events of 9/11 in both Chile and the United States."
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Senate Rejects Media Consolidation

Truthout's Christopher Kuttruff reports: "On Thursday night, the US Senate initiated the process of overturning an FCC ruling made in December to allow for greater media consolidation."
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Democracy in America

Bill Moyers writes for Common Dreams: "Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is 'better' than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, 'The system works.' Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power - and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions."
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McCain Secured Federal Funds Aiding Developer

Reuters reports: "Presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain secured millions in federal funds for a land acquisition program that provided a windfall for an Arizona developer whose executives were major campaign donors."
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Farm Bill Highlights Rich-Poor Debate

Gail Russell Chaddock, of The Christian Science Monitor writes: "At the heart of the standoff between the White House and Congress over a $307 billion farm bill is the question: Should taxpayers subsidize rich farmers - and who counts as rich? What income levels qualify - or disqualify - Americans from federal aid programs has figured in several clashes between the Bush administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress."
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"Extraordinary Rendition" on Trial in Italy

Elisabeth Rosenthal reports for the International Herald Tribune: "Clutching her Italian identity card in a gloved hand, the cloaked wife of a fiery Muslim cleric Wednesday tearfully recounted publicly for the first time how her husband was kidnapped on a Milan street in 2003 and sent to Egypt to endure torture and repeated imprisonment... Ghali Nabila spent more than six hours on the stand, marking the first testimony in a complicated court case that opened nearly a year ago." And, The Los Angeles Times' Tracy Wilkinson reports: "Ghali became the first witness to testify in the trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA operatives, who are accused of kidnapping Abu Omar and flying him to Egypt as part of the US government's secret 'extraordinary rendition' program."
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