Hundreds of anthropologists at the business meeting — the first official quorum in 30 years — unanimously endorsed a resolution condemning “the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture.”

But one anthropologist, while sharing her peers’ condemnation of torture as immoral and ineffective, worried that some of her colleagues had the wrong response to Abu Ghraib: Don’t scold the military, she argued. Educate it.

“If Patai’s book had been used correctly, they would never have done that. Because they would have understood that … you’re not going to get intelligence information out of these people, you’re going to get them and their families attacking you,” she said later. “Half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all.” (full article…)

US President Barack Obama had thought he could clean up the Bush administration’s questionable human rights legacy on his own terms. Recent decisions regarding Abu Ghraib pictures and military tribunals show that he was mistaken. His message of “change” is at risk. (more…)

“This tragic, misguided, and unprincipled reversal seems to be consistent with the fact that instead of getting a real ‘change’ on policies under the Obama administration, the American people are experiencing continuity across the board with those of the discredited and criminal Bush administration when it comes to international law, human rights, and U.S. constitutional law related thereto.” (more…)

The president is seeking to overturn a deal made last month between the Pentagon and the American Civil Liberties Union to make public the pictures from Abu Ghraib and other prisons after a court ruled they should be released. Obama instructed the White House legal office to argue in court against the immediate release of the photographs after several senior military officers, including the former US commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the present commander in Baghdad, General Ray Odierno, said their publication would endanger US troops. (more…)

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding. (more…)

The U.S. government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the U.S. government.

It is now well documented and known all over the world that the U.S. government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the U.S. government has had people kidnaped and “renditioned,” that is, transported to Third World countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.

Also documented and well known is the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees. One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green light to the Bush regime’s use of torture is John Yoo, who somehow secured a U.S. Justice Department appointment and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law.

Members of Berkeley’s city council believe that Yoo should be charged with war crimes. The U.S. government has charged lesser offenders than Yoo with war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve the Bush regime’s goal of finding a way around the torture prohibitions of both U.S. statutory law and the Geneva Conventions. (more…)

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki’s “democratic” government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein’s old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad’s “high-security detention facility” but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced “democracy” to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq’s death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

“Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another,” a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. “But hanging isn’t easy.” As always, the devil is in the detail. (more…)