Our weekly edition is a nationally syndicated one-hour digest of the best of our daily coverage.

Audio Stream | Podcast | Mp3 Download

This week on Uprising:

* Violence in Iraq Re-surges: Implications for a Continued US Occupation
* Empire Notes on the Torture Memos
* Bush Memos Reveal Ugly Extent of American Torture
* Black Agenda Report on Racial Profiling
* A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-face with Modern-day Slavery

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Violence in Iraq Re-surges

In what was the bloodiest day in Iraq so far this year, two suicide bombings killed more than seventy people on Thursday. The first attack took place in the national capital of Baghdad when a suicide bomber detonated explosives near Iraqi national police officers who were handing out aid. At least 25 were killed, six of whom were members of the police force. The second and deadlier attack occurred nearly an hour later west of Baqubah, the provincial capital of Diyala, at a local restaurant crowded with Iranian pilgrims. The blast killed 47 people and injured at least 69 more. Two more bombings followed in the cities of Tikrit and Mosul as Iraqi authorities claimed the violence was spurred by their arrest of purported Sunni insurgent leader and al-Qaeda member Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. However, even the U.S. army has speculated previously that al-Baghdadi could be a fictitious figure in the movement. On Friday, more than 60 people were killed and 125 wounded by two suicide bombers near a Shiite shrine in Baghdad. This latest spate of bombings happening over only two days, were only the most recent in an ever increasing upsurge in violence in Iraq this month. Between April 16th and April 20th, numerous suicide bombings and mortar attacks claimed the lives of 54 Iraqis.

GUEST: Dahr Jamail, Independent journalist who writes for the Inter Press Service, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Truth Out, Author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

For more information, visit www.dahr.org.

Empire Notes on the Torture Memos

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is on the Bush Torture Memos.

GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade.

Visit www.empirenotes.org for more information.

Bush Memos Reveal Ugly Extent of American Torture

The New York Times reported last week that the Central Intelligence Agency extensively used waterboarding against two al-Qaeda suspects. The technique, which Attorney General Holder has deemed to be torture, was employed 183 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times against Abu Zubaydah according to one of the four Bush-era torture memos that were released by the U.S. Justice Department earlier. In a 2002 memo written by then assistant attorney general Jay Bybee, it was stated that the effects of waterboarding “produces the perception of ‘suffocation and incipient panic’, i.e. the perception of drowning.” A footnote from another released memo from 2005 noted that the torture technique was employed with more frequency and with greater volumes of water than even the CIA rules allowed for. The revelations regarding waterboarding are just a few of many to come to light in the wake of the memo release that was prompted by an ACLU lawsuit. Others include forced nudity, approved sleep deprivation for up to 11 days, and slamming detainees into walls. Despite this, the Obama administration has publicly stated that it will not actively pursue legal prosecution against CIA agents or military interrogators, nor against those who devised the memos authorizing such techniques.

GUEST: Katherine Darmer, Professor of Law at Chapman University.

Black Agenda Report on Racial Profiling

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is about racial profiling.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-face with Modern-day Slavery

There are currently more slaves today than at any time in human history. That’s the basis of a new and extremely disturbing book by Benjamin Skinner, called A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern Slavery. Using the definition of slaves as “those that are compelled to work, through force or fraud, for no pay beyond subsistence,” Skinner traveled the world over and interviewed over a hundred slaves, slave dealers, and survivors. Through their stories, he weaves a description of a world where women and children can be bought for a few dollars for sex or domestic labor. He also chronicles the four-year State Department career of John Miller, “America’s anti-slavery czar,” and questions the tactics of the United Nations and the Bush and Clinton administrations. Skinner’s book has a foreword by top diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who says “Ben Skinner takes the reader into some of the world’s worst hell-holes” and “exhumes ghosts that walk today’s world.”

GUEST: Benjamin Skinner, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, author of “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery”

For more information, visit www.acrimesomonstrous.com.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Slavery has been with us for more than 5000 years, yet with concentrated and coordinated effort, we can eliminate it in a generation.” — Benjamin Skinner