The American officials, who were part of an unusually large group sent to deliver a report on the country’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture, offered a careful and familiar set of responses to questions that the panel posed.

Despite abuses in places like the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the American officials denied that the government systematically mistreated prisoners and reiterated a commitment to a global ban on torture.
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But the UN legal experts charged with ensuring that nations keep their commitments under the Convention Against Torture appeared skeptical.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/05/news/geneva.php

If Congress was serious about price gouging, then it would give the F.T.C. the power to break up large corporations… But of course, the Republocrats are beholden to large corporations…

No federal statute prohibits price gouging now, said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It’s true that we all think we know price gouging when we see it, but that’s not the sort of definition that a prosecutor can take to a judge or jury,” he said. “We’re here to put the gougers out of business, if there are gougers, or behind bars.”

Traditionally, the FTC has played a key role in investigating price fixing or manipulation, offenses that usually involve collusion between two or more players in a market who conspire to reduce competition so they can increase prices. There are many people who allege that major oil companies have engaged in such a plot by limiting output by oil refineries. Schmidt said the FTC was conducting “a very serious substantial investigation that is examining whether there has been unlawful gasoline price manipulation.”

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In the early days after Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft sought to reassure us with repeated announcements of the detention of large numbers of “terror suspects” — ultimately the government admitted to detaining 5,000 foreign nationals in the first two years after Sept. 11. Yet to this day not one of them stands convicted of a terrorist offense. Similarly, the administration launched a nationwide ethnic profiling campaign, calling in 8,000 young men for FBI interviews and 80,000 more for registration, fingerprinting and photographing by immigration authorities, simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries. Not one of those 88,000 has been convicted of terrorism.

Early on, the administration labeled the Guantanamo detainees “the worst of the worst.” Yet we now know that more than 250 have been released, that they included boys as young as 13 and that of those who remain, only 8 percent are even accused of being fighters for al-Qaeda. The majority are not accused of engaging in any hostile acts against the United States.

Jose Padilla, the American arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and whisked into military custody amid the attorney general’s claims that he was planning to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb,” has been released from military custody and is now charged only with being a marginal player in a hazy conspiracy to support terrorism. His indictment cites no terrorist acts or terrorist groups that were actually supported.

While the government rounded up Arabs and Muslims with no ties to terrorism and authorized torture and disappearances, several of its highest-profile cases fell short, and it failed to carry out the more mundane work that might actually make us safer. In December the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission gave the administration a disastrous report card on its progress in implementing a series of practical security recommendations — such as better screening of cargo on airlines and containers coming into ports, securing of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union to keep them out of terrorists’ hands, and protection of vulnerable targets such as chemical plants.

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