Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, was finally granted a visa to enter the U.S. this week after a long effort by the State Department to block his visit. He has just arrived in Washington, D.C., to attend the “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” organized by human rights groups to call attention to the lethal rise in the number of drone strikes under the Obama administration. Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. “Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him],” responds Akbar. The summit comes as the United States pursues a radical expansion of how it carries out drone strikes inside Yemen. The so-called “signature” strike policy went into effect earlier this month, allowing the U.S. to strike without knowing the identity of targets.

See the full coverage on Democracy Now!

The human cost of the US government’s clandestine drone strikes strategy, including the deaths of young children in Pakistan and Yemen, will be highlighted this weekend as campaigners attempt to challenge domestic support for the Obama administration’s controversial policy.

A conference in Washington, at which new video testimony will be shown from the relatives of victims, is the first step in a collaborative campaign to challenge Barack Obama’s claim in February that the strikes, aimed at terror suspects, were kept on a “tight leash” and had not inflicted huge civilian casualties.

The summit’s organisers – the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and the peace group Code Pin – hope it will increase awareness of how the CIA-controlled programme is operating in secret, without a clear legal framework and without any accountability to Congress.

Earlier this month, the US government announced it was expanding its controversial use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Yemen.

Chris Woods, a journalist at the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who exposed CIA drone attacks on rescuers and funeralgoers in Pakistan, described the summit as an “extraordinary heavyweight gathering”. He said: “Washington has not seen anything like this before.”

Woods criticised the US media for not widely reporting civilian casualties of US drone strikes abroad, which he said give a “warped understanding of what is taking place.”

Read the full article in the Guardian

At Fort Meade in Maryland, a pretrial hearing is underway in the government’s case against Private Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly turned over hundreds of thousands of secret reports and cables to Wikileaks. This month, an important new book on the 24-year-old has been published. In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, Chase Madar says that Manning deserves the Presidential medal of Freedom for opening up our secretive foreign policy to public discussion. I talked to the author this morning.

Tell us what’s happening in the case:

Chase Madar: It’s absolutely a given that Manning is going to be convicted and sentenced to at least 50 years. It’s inexorable. That said, I don’t think the case itself is one of the major injustices that’s colliding here. There’s some unfairness in the way the prosecution is taking liberties, but the real and major injustices are laws that encourage extreme secrecy and punish transparency and everything that goes long with that, like the Iraq war.

One good development– in yesterday’s pretrial hearing, the judge did require the prosecution to provide all the internal damage reports– what damage was done or really not done by these leaks. I think what you’re going to see is that even by the government’s own estimates, these disclosures did not harm national security or national interests, broadly defined.

Read the full interview on Mondoweiss

Fethiye, Turkey – When American civil rights attorney Chase Madar told me he was writing a book entitled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History, I knew right away that Madar was mentally ill, abusing a range of pharmaceuticals and possibly also epileptic.

My diagnosis was confirmed with the book’s release this month. What else would compel a lawyer to suggest that there is “an injustice hardwired within the system of laws itself”?

A studious ignorance

As Madar demonstrates in The Passion, similarly scientific methods of diagnosis have been employed in the case against Manning, the 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst from Crescent, Oklahoma who is accused of transferring hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

As a result of the leaks, the world has learned more about topics ranging from the etiquette of US soldiers operating Apache gunships in Iraq to US State Department machinations to prevent an increase in the hourly minimum wage in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, from 22 to 61 cents.

Read the full article in Al Jazeera

Street smarts: Can a new book on tactics used by the Occupy Wall Street movement and other activists, written with Google Docs and funded on Kickstarter, offer the corporate world important lessons about leadership and collaboration? Fast Company’s Neil Ungerleider thinks so.

Winners and losers: Contests are a great way to motivate a business team, but without boundaries that prevent favoritism, or awards that are achievable by all, they can become a hotbed of rivalry and frustration. Inc.com’s John Treace offers five tips for inter-office competitions.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal< /a>

Is it possible to learn leadership secrets from Occupy Wall Street and other activist movements worldwide? Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, a new book edited by Andrew Boyd (of political pranksters Billionaires for Bush) and Dave Oswald Mitchell (Briarpatch magazine), is a dense and highly readable guide to activist tactics and principles … that came to market via a highly unusual publishing model.

OR Books, the publishers of Beautiful Trouble, have embraced a post-print business model that centers on non-returnable books printed on demand or distributed via e-book. Boyd and Mitchell raised $12,000 for the book via Kickstarter, with the money covering research, editing, production, design, and administration costs. The book’s content–written by a host of activists and left-wing organizations–was published under a Creative Commons license which gives authors the right to republish their contributions elsewhere for nonprofit purposes.

Read the full article in Fast Company

An all American hero who deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom or a traitor to his country? Amongst his fellow Americans, supporters and detractors of Bradley Manning fall squarely into either camp, whilst so called ‘liberals’ in the US wag a stern finger, revert to their one dimensional collective consciousness of ‘sage paternalism’ and reproachfully state: ‘He broke the law’.

Private First Class Bradley Manning is recognised as the source of hundreds of thousands of documents that have appeared on the Wikileaks website, including the so called ‘Afghan War Logs’, the ‘Iraq War Logs’, the ‘Guantanamo files’, the ‘State Department Cables’. He faces twenty two charges in front of a military court, including violation of the Espionage Act (1917) and aiding and abetting the enemy, an indictment that permits use of the death penalty.

New York based attorney and writer, Chase Madar tells the story of Private First Class Bradley Manning, with careful attention to those details carelessly or purposely omitted by a mostly one sided US media. Madar’s book gives a glimpse of Manning’s early years and his exceptional scholarly potential- winning prizes at science fairs and representing his school in intellectual competitions, designing his first website aged ten and enjoying the admiration of his young peers. These details are purposely smudged out by those wishing to portray him as a loner with a chip on his shoulder, an anarchist, an attention seeker, or of unsound mind.

Read the full article in the London Progressive Journal

Civil rights attorney Madar takes on the controversial story of Private Bradley Manning, the young man responsible for exfiltrating to WikiLeaks almost half a million confidential U.S military documents (as well as the “Collateral Murder” video in which American soldiers in a helicopter fire on Iraqi civilians). The author provides a brief biography of Manning, beginning with his childhood in Oklahoma, and moving through his enlistment and training, during which time Manning, a self-described gay atheist, struggled to acclimate to life in the military. Sprinkled throughout are selections from chatlogs of conversations between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker and former confidant responsible for reporting Manning to the authorities. As a result, Manning was sent to Quantico Marine Corps Base where he was placed in solitary confinement for nine months and where he remains incarcerated. Madar maintains that Manning is “a poster child for the cause of honest dealing, patriotic dissent, and the right to know what one’s government is doing,” for which actions the author deems Manning deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Madar makes a compelling and passionate case, not just for one individual’s actions, but for the re-examination of the rules of engagement, the government’s classification system, and the treatment of whistleblowers in the U.S.

See the complete review in Publishers Weekly

In June, Norman Finkelstein will mark 30 years of criticizing Israel. He remembers the exact day – the beginning of the Lebanon war, which ended his indifference to the Middle East’s troubles. He’ll have a new book coming out – “Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End” – that focuses on Jewish public figures who represent, in his view, the narrative of beautiful Israel that’s coming to an end. He is sure to make a lot of people mad again.

Jobless since losing his tenure in 2007 at DePaul University’s political science department in an ugly public fight with Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein remains in demand as a speaker at universities.

Yet if you happened to walk into one of his lectures, you might be surprised to hear him say he is “not going to be an Israel-basher anymore.” It’s not that he’s changed his mind on the conflict, he just says blaming Israel has become too easy.

Read the full article in Haaretz

Mahmoud Salem @Sandmonkey
For when and where the revolution will be and other important info, go here: http://bit.ly/Jan25egypt
09:51:18 p.m. Jan 24

Hossam @3arabawy
streets r empty. Police r everywhere. #Jan25
09:27:57 a.m. Jan 25

Adam Makary @adamakary
#Jan25 protester’s demands: increase in minimum wage, dismissal of interior ministry, removal of emergency law, shorten presidential term
10:15:08 a.m. Jan 25

Manar Mohsen @ManarMohsen
Those tweeting about the protest in Egypt, please use the hashtag #Jan25 in order to spread any information.
10:54:41 a.m. Jan 25

Sarahngb @Sarahngb
Tahrir square looks scary. Cordons, policemen, fire trucks, CS trucks. #Jan25
11:38:28 a.m. Jan 25

Read the full excerpt in Lapham’s Quarterly