The Justice Department announced today that it will appeal the case of Gill v Personnel Management, in which a federal district court had ruled in favor of seven same-sex married couples and three widowed persons, including the widower of a Congressman, that they were entitled to federal benefits due married people. The lower court had found the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, and Obama’s Justice Department in now appealing that ruling.

Headlines were made last week concerning revelations that a key researcher who was part of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiment had also headed a 1940s project in Guatemala that deliberately inoculated prisoners and insane asylum inmates with various venereal diseases. But there have been many more examples of U.S. government experimentation on unwitting subjects, including CIA experiments on detainees held in the “war on terror.”

90 Second Summary video of Debt, Deficits & Defense: A Way Forward

A story at Truthout reports that a Department of Defense Office of Inspector General investigation into allegations of drugging of detainees, completed almost exactly a year ago, was nevertheless hidden from public knowledge for months. Its results remain hidden, labeled classified. This is especially strange as this document was publicly requested by no less than now-Vice President (then Senator) Joe Biden, along with Senators Carl Levin and Chuck Hagel, after a couple of articles — one by Jeff Stein and one by Joby Warrick at the Washington Post — blew the whistle on dozens of reports of alleged drugging of detainees.

The Pentagon’s public relations machine is working overtime these days trying to sell a theme of "progress" in Afghanistan to push back against calls to end the war. The message machine behind this push is gargantuan, costing $547 million and employing more than 27,000 people. But, as our latest Rethink Afghanistan video shows, all that [...]

A program being run through Department of Defense that is supposed to help small businesses subcontract with large businesses does the complete opposite and no one seems to know about it…

It’s been reported that the Burris Amendment applies a conscience rule to military health care, an incarnation that is extremely problematic and could be widely invoked in the most dangerous of settings.

Written by MakoSharkEsq for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Defense Secretary Gates wants to extricate himself and the president from the impending P.R. disaster shaping up around the flailing Kandahar operation set for this Fall. "I think it’s important to remember that Kandahar is not Afghanistan," Gates said in comments that appeared to play down a U.S.-led operation for control of the area, known [...]

Simply put, the president’s continued troop increases aren’t working.

An article posted Friday on the website for The Times of London points out that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has submitted a sworn statement confirming that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld all knew that innocent civilians were detained at Guantanamo. I have found a Joint Chiefs publication that outlines the official policy under which this long term detention and interrogation of civilians is authorized.