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Nasty video of protester brutality

Andrew Sullivan supported George W. Bush for president in 2000 and praised his initial reactions to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the years since, Sullivan's become disgusted by the moral morass of American torture and Bush's stalwart defense of it. But Bush, Sullivan writes in a cover-story epistle to the former president in the Atlantic, is the only person who can amend torture's stain on the country. So Sullivan appeals to the conservative and Christian roots he shares with Bush and calls for the former president to "reject categorically the phony legalisms, criminal destruction of crucial evidence, and retrospective rationalizations used to pretend that none of this happened. It happened." Bush must, Sullivan writes, say a public mea culpa to the American people, as Ronald Reagan did in response to the Iran-Contra scandal. If not, Sullivan warns that a future president might "resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power-and only within your power-to prevent that from happening."

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land." "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minist

a column from the Independent - a fascinating alternative view of the Somali Pirates

More about the young man who was shot and killed while face down on the pavement, "execution style", as the author says, by a transit cop on BART, the San Francisco Bay Area's rapid transit system. Perhaps I'm missing something, but weren't the police supposed to be enforcing the laws, including the one against murder?

Another great moment in modern American law enforcement. Man gets bludgeoned and tasered by the police for having an epileptic seizure.