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Showing posts from July, 2013

America's “worst nightmare”

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Greenwald: Snowden   has enough information to cause US govt ‘worst damage in history’ Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden possesses dangerous information which could potentially lead to America's “worst nightmare” if it is revealed, according to the journalist who first published Snowden's leaked documents. “Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist responsible for publishing some of Snowden’s first leaks, told Argentina-based newspaper La Nación. “But that's not his goal. His objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves to, without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. He has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public,”  Greenwald said. H...

The Invisible War

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Sexual assault occurs in myriad settings and the perpetrators come from every swath of U.S. society. Yet as recent incidents and reports make clear, it's a particularly intractable problem in the military, with its enduring macho culture and unique legal system. During this week's battle of wills between legislators and military leaders at the Senate armed services committee hearing into sexual assault, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and other high-level witnesses admitted failure, expressing remorse and their desire to do better over a crisis that lawmakers warned threatened US troops' recruitment and retention. But the uniformed military leaders – who outnumbered victims' advocates testifying by a ratio of 18 to two – staged a unified pushback on Senate proposals to strip military commanders of their power to decide whether to prosecute sexual assaults in the ranks. Victims' advocates say the current system stops 86% of victims coming forward and...