Check out this great op-ed piece on minorities in the media in the Guardian UK from one of Link TV's board members, actor and UNDP Goodwill Ambassador Danny Glover! Written together with U.S. Congressman Mike Honda (D-California), the piece calls out the lack of diversity in America's newsrooms, and the paucity of coverage of minority issues. There's also a nice plug for Link TV and the channel's mission of providing diverse global perspectives, with Glover and Honda pointing out that "the more world-wise we become, the more capable we will be as a nation to understand and be understood." The article has spawned a lively discussion on the Guardian UK's website - let us know what YOU think!

A 2004 report from the CIA's inspector general was released to the public today, revealing details on CIA abuse of prisoners in the "War on Terror," including mock executions that violate federal law on torture. While a considerable amount of the document remains blacked out, the revelations have rekindled long-standing questions on prisoner abuse and torture under the Bush administration. The complete report is available here:

After word of the report leaked out on Friday, speculation rose around the next steps of Attorney General Eric Holder, who has the power to appoint a Justice Department prosecutor to investigate the CIA abuses detailed in the report. The Washington Post reported today that an announcement from Holder was imminent, naming John Durham in the role to conduct the inquiry.

Today's Democracy Now! interview with Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek investigative reporter who together with Mark Hosenball broke this story on Friday, offers an excellent overview on the legal implications of this report:

For a harrowing look at the Bush administration's policies on detention and interrogation, check out Link TV's documentary Torture on Trial. More background on the ongoing call for accountability for torture is available at linktv.org/accountability.

The debate over health care reform in the United States has now turned into more of a battle, replete with guns and anger. The divisive rancor that had seemingly disappeared following Obama's election amid calls for national unity has resurfaced at contentious town halls on the health care issue, fueled in part, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, by "conflict-driven cable news." Linguistics professor and author George Lakoff, featured previously on Link in the special "There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America," takes the Democrats to task in this video for failing to sell a national health care plan to the American public. (Video courtesy of our partners at FORA.tv!) Instead, according to Lakoff, conservatives are successfully framing the debate with phrases like "death panels" and "government takeover," while Democrats refuse to risk touting the real and tragic failures of insurance company-based health care in the United States. (For an interesting look at the ill effects of the American health care system on ordinary folk, check out Andrew Sullivan's blog series at the Atlantic Monthly, "The Views From Your Sickbeds," and another article in the September 2009 edition of the Atlantic, "How American Health Care Killed My Father" by David Goldhill.)

Yesterday, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! also looked at the health care debate, interviewing Chad Terhune, a senior writer at BusinessWeek covering health care issues. Terhune's article, "The Health Insurers Have Already Won," looks at the real potential winners in health reform -- the health insurance industry. He writes, "The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable." (Watch the complete interview below, and read more at DemocracyNow.org.) And what do you think -- is a better health care system on the horizon for the U.S.? Or will insurance companies be the only winners in this battle?

You might think that Iranians live in total information isolation, and have little idea what is being said in the U.S. and other Western countries. Watching Link TV's documentary "The Dish", about Iran's national obsession with satellite TV, will quickly disabuse you of that notion. And this week, Link TV expanded its global reach when the Tehran Times, Iran's major English-language daily newspaper, reprinted Mosaic Producer Jamal Dajani's latest article in the Huffington Post, "Iraq: Talk is Cheap, Blood is Cheaper". Though the Tehran Times is hardly a progressive, pro-Western media outlet, claiming that "it must be a loud voice of the Islamic Revolution," it does frequently include reports from international news agencies such as the Associated Press, Reuters, and now, even our own Jamal Dajani, to keep its readers informed of outside news and opinion.

If you missed Dajani's excellent Mosaic Intelligence Report from Friday, which expands upon his Huffington Post article on Iraq, we encourage you to watch it below. And to stay updated on what's really going on in the Middle East, follow Jamal Dajani on Twitter, and subscribe to his weekly Mosaic Intelligence Report enewsletter.

And a reminder: to keep Mosaic going, we rely on donations from our viewers. So if you value Mosaic, the Mosaic Intelligence Report and Link's other great programming focused on the Middle East and more, be sure to donate today, in any amount. We need to hear from you!

President Richard Nixon solicited the help of Brazil's notorious leader Emilio Medici in early talks of overthrowing Chile's President Salvador Allende, according to a secret memo from 1971 released to the public for the first time on Sunday. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote up the meeting, and was asked to act as a back channel between Medici and Nixon.

Two years later Allende was killed in a US-backed coup which put Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power. Pinochet's name would later become synonymous with brutal human rights abuses and "disappearances" in the thousands.

The actions of Brazil's leadership, who were no strangers to torture and assassination, are detailed by the victims themselves in the astonishing contemporaneous documentary Brazil: A Report on Torture [watch here]. The young students and professionals who appear in the film were living in Chile as political refugees when Pinochet came into power, throwing them again into a world of detention and pain. In this interview, filmmakers Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Saul Landau (Fidel) talk about their time in Chile interviewing the Brazilian victims, as well as US involvement in South American politics. Wexler and Landau were in Chile working on a documentary about Allende when they met the victims.

Link TV also broadcasts the documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Check here for airdates and a clip from the film.

The Chechen leader of a children's charity and her husband were found shot dead today, the latest victims in a string of murders of human rights activists and journalists in the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya. Zarema Sadulayeva and husband Alik Dzhabrailov were kidnapped from the offices of Save the Generation, an NGO led by Sadulayeva dedicated to helping children suffering the effects of the devastating wars in Chechnya. The bodies of the couple were later found in the trunk of their own car.

Chechen leader and Kremlin comrade Ramzan Kadyrov denounced the killings, blaming them on a faction looking to destabilize and divide Chechen society. This tone of condemnation was a very different sentiment from the one Kadyrov recently leveled against Natalya Estemirova, human rights activist and journalist killed in Chechnya in July. In comments from an interview with Radio Free Liberty, Kadyrov claims Estemirova "never had any honor or sense of shame" and also rather crassly denied any role in her murder -- "Why would Kadyrov kill women that no one needs?"

Human rights organizations have called on the Russian government to stop the murders, and to staunch what Amnesty International called the "complete disregard for rule of law that prevails in Chechnya today." Kadyrov's response to these kinds of accusations, in a fashion popular among Russian politicians, was to change the subject to the open wound of the 2008 Russian-Georgian War in South Ossetia and blame America: "Human rights are violated all over the world. America pressures absolutely everyone. And no one says anything about it. Take South Ossetia. The Americans snuck in there at night, shot up the entire population, and left. And everyone's silent about it."

Mssrs. Kadyrov, Putin, and Medvedev: How many more need to be killed in Chechnya before that silence is broken? And who is left to break the silence? NPR reports that a major Russian radio station, Ekho Moskvy, tried to contact other human rights activists in Chechnya for their comments on the story, with no luck: ""We looked down our list and next to almost every name is the word 'died,' 'died,' 'died."'

Three American hikers who have been detained in Iran since July 31st, including Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal, apparently unwittingly strayed over the border from Iraqi Kurdistan, according to a fourth member of their party, Shon Meckfessel. Meckfessel, who did not join his friends on the ill-fated hike, wrote in a statement that the four were travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan on vacation, and his friends went off on a recommended hike to popular tourist destination Ahmed Awa, an area known for its lovely waterfall. Apparently unaware that Ahmed Awa was near the Iranian border, the three were detained while hiking in the area by Iranian authorities, and have yet to be released. Meckfessel writes, "I hope that people understand my friends' presence in the area for what it was: a simple and very regrettable mistake."

With the recent release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korean custody, thanks to a deus ex machina intervention from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the question being asked in the Iran case is where diplomacy goes next. Have Clinton's actions in North Korea piqued the interest of the Ahmadinejad regime, perhaps empowering them to turn these hikers into pawns in a greater diplomatic game with the United States? Iran has detained many Americans over the years, most recently arresting Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, charged with instigating post-election violence.

The story of one of these hikers, freelance journalist and documentary photographer Shane Bauer, was featured in today's episode of Democracy Now below, which airs on Link TV. Bauer, an Arabic speaker and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, delivered a report for Democracy Now in February 2009 on U.S. military alliances with Iraq's Sunni militias.

Link's latest episode of Latin Pulse/Pulso Latino travels to Toribio, Colombia, symbol of the indigenous resistance movement following a devastating attack by FARC guerillas in 2005. With their land under attack, occupied by guerillas, paramilitaries, and police, the Naza Indians native to this region in Southern Colombia are struggling to pick up the pieces. The dangers for civilians remain high in Colombia's Cauca region, as FARC guerillas, drug traffickers and police continue to do battle, including this recent attack in Buenos Aires, Cauca, Colombia.

This video footage comes from Colombian TV program Contravia, led by investigative journalist Hollman Morris, who was featured in this previous Latin Pulse interview. The Foundation for a New Iberian-American Journalism, an organization founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, awarded this episode of Contravia its highest prize in 2007 for journalistic excellence.

Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer has become a prominent voice in the fight against what she describes as Chinese oppression of the Turkic speaking Muslim group, the Uighurs (or Uyghurs). Demonstrations in July have brought the conflict, centered in the Xinjiang region of China, into the media spotlight. Recently Chinese hackers attacked the Melbourne International Film Festival website in an attempt to stop the prestigious international festival from screening a documentary about Kadeer, The Ten Conditions of Love. In this Link TV video host James Zogby interviews Kadeer.

From now on Link TV will be posting Viewpoint with James Zogby weekly, so check back! Also check out this video over at Global Pulse: Uighurs vs Han: China's West Side Story.

Jamal Dajani's latest Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV looks at Palestine, and the upcoming congress of the Fateh (or Fatah) political party, a faction of the PLO that is facing its own internal squabbles and charges of corruption. As the video makes clear, there is no love lost between rival factions Fateh and Hamas, and the divide between the Fateh base in the West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza seems far wider than the mere 25 geographic miles would indicate. And for most Palestinians, neither Fateh nor Hamas provide effective governance, or any real hope for a unified Palestinian state.

Read Dajani's article on the Huffington Post for more, including a very lively discussion. And check out daily episodes of Mosaic: World News from the Middle East and Dajani's Twitter feed for updates.

In the meantime, don't forget that right now Mosaic, the Mosaic Intelligence Report and Link's Global News Hour with Al Jazeera English need your support! Keep this unique and unparalleled news resource alive by making a donation to Link TV today.