By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?

... Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.

READ THE REST.

Press Update From The Free Gaza Movement
We Will Head Toward Gaza Again

Larnaca, Cypus, July 3, 2009: This morning, the five kidnapped passengers from Bahrain left Israel via a private jet sent by their king. They will hold a press conference in Bahrain tonight at 7 pm Bahrain time. The two Al Jazeera journalists will be freed sometime today, their equipment given back to them but not the footage of the Israeli terrorist frogmen boarding the boat and roughing up some of the passengers.

All passengers are fine, but they are still imprisoned by a country that illegally boarded their small boat, towed it, and confiscated the supplies that had already been inspected in Cyprus.

The following message has come from Captain Denis inside the prison cell in Israel where he is being held, along with 11 more of our passengers, including former Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire.

Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent"
By Stephen Lendman

Marjorie Cohn is a Distinguished Law Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego where she's taught since 1991 and is the current President of the National Lawyers Guild. She's also been a criminal defense attorney at the trial and appellate levels, is an author, and writes many articles for professional journals, other publications, and numerous popular web sites.

Her record of achievements, distinctions, and awards are many and varied - for her teaching, writing, and her work as a lawyer and activist for peace, social and economic justice, and respect for the rule of law. Cohn's previous books include "Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice" and "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law."

Her newest book just out, co-authored with Kathleen Gilberd (a recognized expert on military administrative law), is titled "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent." It explores why US military personnel disobey orders and refuse to participate in two illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also explains that US and international law obligate them to do so.

Reporting From Honduras: Hondurans Call Out for Help from the International Community
by Medea Benjamin | OpEd News

Our emergency international delegation to Honduras, organized from the United States by CODEPINK, Global Exchange and Non-Violence International, began its fact-finding mission in the wake of the June 28 coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya.

We started out with a briefing by the Network of Sustainable Development (Red de Desarrollo Sostenible, a 15-year-old organization devoted to the exchange of information about sustainable development. It has now become a center for exchanging information about the coup. Using blogspot, facebook, twitter, myspace, flickr and youtube, the Network's network is abuzz with hour-by-hour accounts of political developments. Their communication system has become a critical way for Honduras to get information, since the coup leaders have muzzled the press.

The Network has a history of being objective and staying above politics, but the staff is outraged by the coup. "This was just over the top," said National Coordinator Raquel Isaura, who is being targeted by the right for some anti-coup internet messages posted under her name. "A military coup in this day and age must be condemned by all sectors of civil society." Read more.

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Baseless Expenditures | TomDispatch.com

Along with postcards of cowboys riding jackalopes and giant berries on flatcars, there's a brand new entry in the American gigantism sweepstakes: an embassy complex to be built in Islamabad, Pakistan, for -- if you assume the normal cost overruns on such projects -- what's likely to be close to a billion dollars. If that doesn't make the U.S. number one in the imperial hubris footrace for all eternity, what will? The question is: with its projected "large military and intelligence contingent," and its "surge" of diplomats, will that embassy also issue the largest visas on the planet?

Here's the strange thing: The embassy story was broken at the end of May by the superb journalists at McClatchy News (in this case, Warren P. Stroebel and Saeed Shah). As part of what Shah, in the Christian Science Monitor, estimates as a staggering "$2-billion-plus price tag on a revamped diplomatic presence for the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan," they reported that an appropriation of $736 million for embassy construction had quietly made its way through both houses of Congress without a peep from anyone. This news, however, seemed to plunge off a steep cliff into a deep well of silence. Indicative as the Obama administration's decision to build such an imperial monstrosity may be of a longer-term commitment to a wider war in the Af-Pak (as in Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations, it evidently proved of no interest to anyone here.

The story was not widely picked up or played up significantly. Despite the fact that major news operations have been bolstering their staffs in Pakistan, there has been no further reporting on the appropriation, the plans for the embassy, or what it all might mean. As far as I can tell, nowhere in the United States did a mainstream editorial page decry, challenge, or even discuss the development. Charlie Rose didn't gather experts to consider it, nor did the Newshour with Jim Lehrer seem to think it worth exploring. Letters of outrage at the thought of those desperately needed funds heading Islamabad-wards didn't pour into local newspapers (perhaps because few knew it was happening and those who did saw it as just another humdrum story about making the U.S. safer in a dangerous world). I've seen no obvious congressional attempts to oppose the passage of the money. The general attitude is evidently: Been there, done that (in Iraq, as a matter of fact, in the Bush years).

The Constitution Project is holding a panel "Congress vs. the President: The Scope and Limits of Congressional Oversight Powers" on July 16th. Details and RSVP here.

Want to do something this July 4 that is REALLY different, full of fun, warmth and community and a TRUE evocation of Independence Day's meaning? Something right here in an accessible part of Manhattan, AND no ants (or very few)!

I am referring to our Third Annual Reading (aloud) of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence in Central Park's glorious Strawberry Fields where the spirit of John Lennon resides. This event, hosted by the eminent civil liberties attorney, Norman Siegel, and a group of his most grateful clients, the Granny Peace Brigade, is unique in the United States, we believe, and really not to be missed. Read more, Map.

The Lingering Effects of Torture
After Guantanamo, Scientists and Advocates Study Detainees
By Devin Powell | Inside Science News Service via ABCNews | Link features ABC's Jake Tapper's first video interview with Algerian Lakhdar Boumediene.

Like many of the other inmates interrogated at Guantanamo Bay, Adeel's personal nightmare did not end when he returned home.

Today, in his native Pakistan, the sound of approaching footsteps or the sight of someone in a uniform can trigger bad memories and set off a panic attack. The former teacher and father of five now thinks of himself as a suspicious and lonely person.

"I feel like I am in a big prison and still in isolation. I have lost all my life," he told psychologists working for the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights. They diagnosed him as having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe depression.

Newly emerging research on large numbers of torture survivors shows that anecdotal stories like these are common and suggests that "psychological" forms of torture -- often thought to be milder than the direct infliction of physical pain -- can in fact have serious long-term mental health consequences.

Adeel's story is similar to those of other prisoners who may be released this year as President Obama pushes to close the facility. Adeel spent four years in U.S. custody, first at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Afghanistan and then at Guantanamo -- and was freed in 2006, never having been charged with a crime. Read More

Listen or read the transcript.

DOJ did one crappy-ass job of trying to give Emmet Sullivan a better reason they can't turn over Dick Cheney's interview materials than that Jon Stewart would embarrass poor Dick. They trot out the same canard about needing cooperation from high level officials in the future. But there [are] two big problems with their argument. READ THE REST AT EMPTYWHEEL.

Jeb Bush is testing the waters.

Denounce the Human Rights Abuses in Honduras | Press Release

WASHINGTON - June 30 - The situation in Honduras turned violent when over 10,000 people gathered in the streets to protest the coup Monday evening. Using tear gas, high-powered water and guns (it is still not clear whether soldiers were armed with rubber bullets or otherwise) many people were wounded and there has been one confirmed death in the capital, Tegucigalpa. In the capital, pro-coup marches are occurring, defended by the police and national guard. As of Tuesday morning, the resistance movement to the coup is gathering in Tegucigalpa, to determine how and where to take to the streets. Therefore, there is anticipation of violence today, as soldiers are expected to react violently today to protesters as they did yesterday.

Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, A Secret History of Dissent in the All-Volunteer Military | TomDispatch.com

The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) exists for a reason captured in a study by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of the "definitive history of the Marine Corps," published in Armed Forces Journal in 1971. The U.S. military in Vietnam was at that moment at the edge of chaos. As Colonel Heinl put it, it was experiencing "widespread conditions... that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917."

In fact, statistics flowing back to Washington about the American war machine in Vietnam then pointed toward an unimaginable nightmare. Drug use was rampant; desertions stood at 70 per thousand, a modern high; small-scale mutinies or "combat refusals" were at critical, if untabulated, levels; incidents of racial conflict had soared; and strife between "lifers" and draftees was at unprecedented levels. Reported "fraggings" -- assassination attempts -- against unpopular officers or NCOs had risen from 126 in 1969 to 333 in 1971, despite declining troop strength in Vietnam. According to Colonel Heinl's figures, as many as 144 antiwar underground newspapers were being published by, or for, soldiers. And most threatening of all, active duty soldiers in relatively small numbers (as well as a swelling number of Vietnam veterans) were beginning to actively organize against the war.

When, in January 1973, before the war was even over, President Richard Nixon announced that an American draft army was at an end and an all-volunteer force would be created, this was why. The U.S. military was in the wilderness without a compass, having discovered one crucial thing: you couldn't fight an endless, unpopular counterinsurgency war with the kind of conscript army a democracy had to offer. What resulted, of course, was the AVF, a moniker that, as Andrew Bacevich has written in his book The New American Militarism, was but "a euphemism for what is, in fact, a professional army... [that] does not even remotely 'look like' democratic America." Citizenship and the obligation to serve were now officially severed and, from the 1980s on, most Americans would ever more vigorously cheer on the AVF from the sidelines, while it would be a force theoretically purged of possible Vietnam-style dissent and refusal.

In that sense, it could be considered a success. We've now been at war seven and a half years in Afghanistan and more than five in Iraq, two catastrophic counterinsurgency struggles, and yet a Vietnam-style movement has neither arisen in the military, nor for that matter in the streets of what's now called "the homeland." But as TomDispatch regular Dahr Jamail indicates below and in his new book, The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissent has proved irrepressible. With the generous support of the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund, Jamail has produced a report on the seeds of refusal and dissent in the military that may -- in a quagmire future in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq -- grow into something far larger. Tom

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard on the Palestine Question

Part 1:

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard is an activist, Constitutional Rights attorney, and the cofounder of the Partnership for Civil Justice. She is also the co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild. Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard was one of the speakers at an event entitled, “Viva Palestina: A Lifeline from the U.S. to Gaza.” Click "Read more" to continue video.