Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Trevor Timm: [The CIA is getting away with keeping every important secret about torture

The CIA is getting away with keeping every important secret about torture

A definitive Senate report about one of America’s darkest periods continues to be withheld – precisely because the agency behind it refuses to come clean

The CIA is getting away with keeping every important secret about torture

A definitive Senate report about one of America’s darkest periods continues to be withheld – precisely because the agency behind it refuses to come clean]

A definitive Senate report about one of America’s darkest periods continues to be withheld – precisely because the agency behind it refuses to come clean

At this point, is there anything the Central Intelligence Agency thinks it can’t get away with?

To recap: the CIA systematically tortured people, then lied about it. Destroyed evidence of it, then lied about that. Spied on the US Senate staffers investigating the agency for torture, then lied about that. Now, after somehow being put in charge of deciding what parts of the Senate’s final report on that torture should be redacted, the CIA has predictively censored the key evidence of the litany of all of those transgressions.

The agency’s black marker has reportedly censored – at different points in the report – already-public, embarrassing and criminally culpable information. By doing so, the CIA has rendered it, as one Senator noted, “incomprehensible”. So while the Senators and Langley fight it out behind closed doors, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the intelligence committee chair, put the report’s public release on hold. Again.

Sadhbh Walshe: Teenagers in US prisons: it’s time for the savagery and neglect to finally end

A terrifying new report might just leave one of the country’s most notoriously bad jails at the forefront of reform for a broken system

When Inmate H, a teenager serving time at New York’s Rikers Island, fell asleep during a class, a female corrections officer wrapped metal handcuffs around her fist and hit him in the ribcage to rouse him. The tactic worked – Inmate H woke abruptly and shouted an obscenity at the officer. For this, he was: dragged into the corridor; punched in the eye; kicked in the face, head and back repeatedly by multiple officers; kicked in the mouth; and pepper-sprayed directly into the eyes. While the horror show was unfolding, two teachers inside the classroom reported that they heard the young prisoner screaming out, crying for his mother.

The story of Inmate H is just one of many examples of the brutal violence inflicted upon teenage prisoners at the second biggest jail in America, where nearly half of the juvenile population reports having been beaten at least once by guards. Many of these tales of injustice were laid bare in a stomach-churning report released this week by the US attorney Preet Bharara, who compared the youth experience at the “broken institution” of Rikers to the book Lord of the Flies.

Sharda Sekaran: Detroit’s water crisis is a wake-up call to all Americans

The US cannot credibly advocate for human rights abroad while failing to protect them at home

A decade ago, I joined a group of human rights advocates to found the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative to promote freedom from poverty and access to basic resources in the United States. The idea for the project seemed far-fetched to many. After all, the U.S. is a rich country, and human rights are widely seen as a foreign policy issue, not a domestic concern.

But with the threat looming over 100,000 Detroit residents of losing access to something as basic as water, our endeavor now appears prescient. [..]

Fortunately, amid strong efforts by local activists and national and international allies, the city’s emergency manager on July 29 returned control over the Detroit Water and Sewage Department to the mayor and city council. Residents hope city officials will enact an affordability plan that will cap a household’s water bills on the basis of income.

There is no guarantee for Detroiters, however, that this hand-off will be permanent or that it will result in affordable access to water. In fact, Mayor Mike Duggan has a history of supporting privatization, with the sale of the nonprofit Detroit Medical Center to a for-profit hospital conglomerate in Virginia. That the issue is still in doubt demonstrates our country’s continuing inability to meet the demands of human rights and social justice.

Dean Baker: Patent for hepatitis C drug costs US billions of dollars

States can save money by sending liver-disease sufferers overseas to receive treatment

There are an estimated 3 million people with hep C in the United States. This puts the tab to treat them at more than $250 billion. That would be a major cost to private insurers and public-sector programs such as Medicaid. This is the basis for the hand wringing: Should we require private insurers to pick up the tab for Sovaldi for hep C sufferers? Does everyone get treated or just the very sick? And should already stretched state Medicaid programs have to bear this additional burden?

The answers to these questions, however, are much easier for anyone who doesn’t mind bucking the drug companies. Sovaldi is expensive in the U.S. because the government gives Gilead Sciences a patent monopoly on the drug. It uses this monopoly to charge a price that is far above the free-market rate: A generic version is already available in Egypt for $900 per treatment. Indian generic manufacturers believe that they can produce the drug for less than $200.

This presents a simple and obvious way around the $84,000 problem: Send people to Egypt or India for a treatment that costs 1 percent as much or less. The U.S. could pay for family members to go as well, stay a full three months and still come out tens of thousands of dollars ahead. Certainly this can be presented as an option to people, perhaps throwing in a $5,000 or $10,000 incentive to make the trip worth their while.

Heidi Moore: Who’s the next great media mogul? Nobody

As news conglomerates break apart, the Rupert Murdochs of the world need to look further down the food chain for the next great money-makers

Do we need better media moguls?

Newspaper writers and pundits have an obsession with media-company business models: how newspapers should charge for their articles online, how to lure advertisers, 12 reasons to worry about BuzzFeed’s clicks.

But what if the problem isn’t business models, per se? What if the problem is management models?

Already this week, the US news business has witnessed a quartet of major milestones for independence, and with them, the first test of whether formerly major media companies really need their moguls. Spoiler alert: they probably do. The reality check is that journalists are going to have to fill the void themselves.

Qanta Ahmed: A grim prognosis for Syrian and Iraqi hospitals

The militarization of healthcare in the region has crippled the medical profession and its patients

During the recent Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Israel has been harshly criticized for its strikes on Gaza’s hospitals. Meanwhile, in the self-declared Islamic Caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria, violence surges while fewer and fewer doctors and hospitals remain functional. The deliberate targeting of hospitals and doctors in the theater of war has become a new, deadly strategy.

However, this worsening humanitarian crisis in neighboring countries garners a fraction of the outrage directed towards Israel. As war rages on, millions in Syria and Iraq will continue to die unnoticed, in battle, or from easily preventable ailments that have gone untreated. Long after the cease-fire finally sticks between Israel and Hamas, the vulnerability of patients and their doctors in Iraq and Syria will only grow.

For years now, the forces of President Bashar al-Assad have deliberately targeted hospitals and health centers across Syria in aerial bombardments. According to Physicians for Human Rights, 95 percent of all such attacks have been by the regime. The World Health Organization reports that 57 percent of Syria’s public hospitals are damaged, while 37 percent have been rendered out of service. With 40 percent of ambulances destroyed and others commandeered to transport weapons, patients in the field are being left to suffer and die.