What's New
| Presdent Obama Donated $250,000 of Nobel Prize Money to Fisher House |
March 11, 2010, Washington, DC (New York Times) - President Obama made good on his promise to give his $1.4 million Nobel Prize money to charity, releasing the names on Thursday of the organizations that will benefit. |
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| Dr. Haley at UTSW Presents Compelling Brain Images Showing Gulf War Illness |
VCS Asks VA: Since UTSW Research Remains Vital to Understanding Gulf War Illness, Then Why Did a Handful of VA Staff in Washington Impede UTSW Contract and Then End Funding for UTSW? March 9, 2010, Salt Lake City, Utah (Science News) - Nearly two decades after vets began returning from the Middle East complaining of Gulf War Syndrome, the federal government has yet to formally accept that their vague jumble of symptoms constitutes a legitimate illness. Here, at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting, yesterday, researchers rolled out a host of brain images – various types of magnetic-resonance scans and brain-wave measurements – that they say graphically and unambiguously depict Gulf War Syndrome. |
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| March 9 VCS Weekly Update |
This week’s VCS update keeps you in the loop with news on issues you care about. One good change – our weekly news updates won’t ask you for money. Instead, our news updates point you to news articles at our web site. We hope you will read them and share the important facts with your friends. This week's update includes news about VA and suicides, VCS on CNN, our VCS FOIA campaign, VA automating Agent Orange claims, a waterboarding torture video, and Gulf War veterans' benefits. |
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| Federal Court Keeps Torture Lawsuit Against Rumsfeld Alive |
What's Waterboarding? Watch Video of Torture March 5, 2010, Chicago, Illinois (Associated Press) - A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a civil lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of responsibility for the alleged torture by U.S. forces of two Americans who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm. [Rumsfeld served at the Pentagon under former President George W. Bush.] |
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| Reducing Suicides: VA Adopts Policy on Emergency Care for Mental Health Patients |
This Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Directive provides policy to ensure the provision of safe and secure mental health services during all hours of operation for Emergency Departments (EDs) and Urgent Care Clinics (UCCs) in VHA |
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Piecing Together Bush's Torture Program
Written by Larry Siems
Monday, 28 September 2009 09:48
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The Torture Report, an initiative of the ACLU's National Security Project, aims to give the full account of the Bush administration's torture program. It will bring together everything we know from government documents, investigations, press reports, witness statements and other publications into a single narrative - one that is updated regularly and subject to critical review and improvement as it unfolds. September 24, 2009 - Today we launch The Torture Report. On this site, over the next several months, we will construct a comprehensive account of the Bush administration's torture program.The goal is simple: to tell the whole story and to get it right. How to do this - how to bring together everything we know from tens of thousands of formerly secret documents, from official and independent investigations, from press reports and the many good books that have recently appeared, and from the growing number of first-hand accounts of those who witnessed, participated in, or suffered mistreatment, how to register it all so we can come to some conclusions - is a daunting challenge. But it's a challenge we all share. In a way, as the Report's lead writer, I'm just trying to do what any one of us should be doing in the face of evidence that our elected officials presided over gross human rights violations: to piece together exactly what happened and who is responsible. I have help, fortunately. As sections are posted, a group of expert Contributors will offer comments; you'll see their annotations, which will include corrections, elaborations, questions, and suggestions, in-line in the text. We invite your comments as well; these will appear at the end of the chapters. The Report will be constantly updated to incorporate the best of these suggestions and the very latest information. We begin at the beginning - the first days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This chapter, "Origins," looks at two of the earliest actions of the Bush administration , one that literally opened a space for torture to happen and one that revealed the administration's approach to legal barriers and restrictions.
The Torture Reportis meant to be a one-of-a-kind, interactive resource that provides regularly updated, in-depth information and analysis on the Bush administration's torture program. This Diary page will point you to the latest additions, changes, and improvements to the report, along with important report-related developments and news; you'll land here whenever you visit the site. Follow the tab at the top or the chapter links at the left to reach the Report itself, and the floating menu to view expert Contributors' annotations or to comment. The Document Search tab puts an archive of some 130,000 pages of formerly secret government documents at your disposal. Watch for additional features, including a library of first-person testimonials, in the weeks ahead. More information about how to navigate this site and the Report can be found under the About this Project tab.
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