UN: Is America "the land of the free"?

Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Kevin Uhrich (pasadenaweekly.com, 4-8-14)

The Mirror Turns: UN Human Rights Committee says...

This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow)

Despite our government’s many military entanglements and abuses of authority at home, most Americans still maintain a pretty high opinion of our country and the way our government treats its citizens and others around the world. 

  

The thing is, the unquestioning zeal regularly expressed for “our way of life” by cheerleading mainstream media personalities and politicians isn’t something that’s universally shared, according to a recent report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

What's America really like? This map shows some snapshot traits (koalogist.tumblr.com)

 

Whereas it is usually the United States that stands in judgment of other countries, and has traditionally used the UN to justify the wars it’s waged since the Korean Conflict, the script has been flipped in this case, with America now being portrayed as a bully and a villain, not only abroad, but at home as well. 

Uncle Sam (Big Brother) is watching

“The committee’s recommendations highlight the gaps between US human rights obligations and current laws and practices,” said ACLU Human Rights Program Director Jamil Dakwar in a statement issued last week by the organization’s national office. “The Human Rights Committee rightly called out the United States for setting dangerous examples from counterterrorism operations to an unfair criminal justice system to inhumane treatment of migrants.”

Local reactions to the report released on March 27 were no less critical of the United States, as well as the American media, few of which gave much play to the committee’s findings.

Heads or Tails, Lesser Evil vs. Greater Evil...

“It is shocking that media in Los Angeles [capital of the world] -- print, broadcast, and social -- have nearly entirely ignored what can only be called a factual but nevertheless horrifying, detailed indictment of violations of human rights in our country,” said local civil rights activist Marvin Schachter. Schachter is a longtime member of the ACLU, both its Southern California and Pasadena Foothills chapters. He is also a member of the Pasadena United Nations Association. More

Fukushima: crowdsourcing Geiger readings

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; SAFECAST.org; Democracy Now

Protests Grow in Japan: "Bring our message to the world to stop nuclear power plants"

Volunteers crowdsource radiation monitoring, map risk on every Japanese street

Reporting live from Japan

Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan (DemocracyNow.org)

Hiroshima like Nagasaki (kootation.com)

TOKYO, Japan - “I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world,” wrote the journalist Wilfred Burchett from Hiroshima [site of the atomic bombing by the US].

Get your own Geiger counter

His story under the headline “The Atomic Plague” appeared in the London Daily Express on Sept. 5, 1945.

Burchett violated the U.S. military blockade of Hiroshima. He was the first Western journalist to visit the devastated city after the bombing. He wrote, “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”

Small, portable Geiger counters (safecast.org)

Jump ahead 66 years to March 11, 2011. Six hundred miles north is the Fukushima Nuclear Plant, where the Great East Japan Earthquake [possibly set in motion by the HAARP weapon as the US had previously threatened Japan] caused a tsunami, which led to the nuclear disaster at the nuclear power site. Listen

• "We want to fight for this cause": Nuclear refugees from Fukushima join anti-nuke protests
• Mayor of town that hosted Fukushima Nuclear Plant says he was told: “No accident could ever happen”
• Fukushima: An Ongoing Warning to the World
• Mushrooms can de-contaminate waste (fungi.com)