One of the taboo topics in the American media is how the U.S. Government routinely violates the principles we espouse for, and try to impose on, the rest of the world. We systematically torture Muslims and then cover it up and protect our torturers while preaching accountability and the rule of law; we condemn deprivations of due process while maintaining and expanding lawless prison systems for Muslims; we demand adherence to U.N. dictates and international law while blocking investigations into U.N. reports of war crimes and possible “crimes against humanity” by our allies; we righteously oppose aggression while invading and simultaneously occupying numerous countries, while threatening to attack still more, and arming countries like Israel to the teeth to wage still other attacks, etc. etc. (full article…)

Yousef Abu Zuhri, a Hamas member and brother of the movement’s spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri, died in an Egyptian jail. Hamas is outraged, claiming he was tortured to death. (full article…)

Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday. (full article…)

In a troubling legal brief filed last week, the Obama administration followed the disreputable example of the Bush White House by opposing judicial review of military detentions, even for a discrete segment of prisoners: the 30 or so non-Afghan Bagram prisoners who were seized outside Afghanistan, far from any recognizable battlefield, and who have been incarcerated for more than six years. (full article…)

But we have a political culture which believes, literally, that the CIA must operate above and beyond the law (recall Joe Klein’s argument against torture prosecutions: CIA agents “behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation”). Even though the American people have enacted numerous laws through their Congress which explicitly criminalize certain behavior on the part of the intelligence community (torture, warrantless eavesdropping, failing to brief Congress), there is a widespread belief that we can and must allow the CIA to commit crimes with impunity. The CIA’s personal spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, argues outright that the CIA should not be prosecuted for crimes because we want to ensure they are willing to act illegally in the future. (full article…)

On Friday, seven former CIA directors urged President Obama to end the inquiry, arguing that it would inhibit intelligence operations in the future and demoralize agency employees who believed they had been cleared by previous investigators. (full article…)

The two candidates’ starkly different reactions to that ruling was supposed to underscore one of the true differences between them: that Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, would insist on adherence to core Constitutional liberties even while prosecuting the War on Terror, but McCain wouldn’t. Yet here we are, barely more than a year later, and the Obama DOJ is filing a legal brief chock full of Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments about how “Habeas rights under the U.S. Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram” and “No court has ever extended the Great Writ so far” and granting such rights “risks opening habeas claims brought by detainees in other theaters of war during future military actions” and doing so would pose “impediments to the military mission and threats to the national interest.” As The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote about the District Court proceeding: “The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.“

The Iraqi television journalist who hurled his shoes at then-President George W. Bush was released Tuesday after nine months in prison, claiming Iraqi authorities had tortured him. (more…)

There is no question that many of the detainees who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo — and still are imprisoned there — are innocent. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that they have the constitutional right to a habeas corpus hearing, federal judges in 28 out of 33 cases have found insufficient evidence to justify their detention. It takes a morally warped person not to be outraged by the imprisonment of people for years — held incommunicado and indefinitely, under brutal conditions, as Terrorists, thousands of miles away from their homes — who have done absolutely nothing wrong. And it requires an equal level of moral depravity to question the sincerity of those who object to such travesties, to attribute to opponents of preventive detention ignoble motives — as though only a desire for greater fundraising could motivate anger over the imprisonment of innocent people without charges. (more…)

A decision by the University of Wyoming to name a new center for international students for former Vice President Dick Cheney is drawing criticism from people who say Cheney’s support for the Iraq war and harsh interrogation techniques should disqualify him from the distinction.

The former vice president and wife Lynne are expected to attend Thursday’s dedication of the new Cheney International Center on the Laramie campus. (more…)

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today. (more…)

Ls services secrets britaniques sont une nouvelle fois secoués par une affaire de torture. Un citoyen britannique, condamné pour terrorisme, assure qu’un agent des services secrets lui a offert d’abandonner ses accusations pour torture en échange d’une somme d’argent ou d’une réduction de peine. (more…)

The government will agree to preserve the secret overseas sites where a defendant in a terror case was once held and, his lawyers say, subjected to harsh interrogation techniques after his capture in 2004, a prosecutor indicated in court in New York on Thursday. (more…)

The report, ‘Shackling as a Form of Torture and Abuse’, based on the evidence of over 500 prisoners, was released in advance of the UN International Day in Support of Torture Victims Friday, Jun. 26. It follows a report published in May by the UN Committee Against Torture that had criticised the continued mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners by Israel. The UN report also condemned Israel’s refusal to allow access to a secret detention centre known only as ‘Facility 1391′. (more…)

“People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized,” Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement dedicated to victims of torture. (more…)

“We as Palestinians have experienced political detention and abuse for 41 years under the Israeli occupation, and now we are doing it to ourselves.” (more…)

The army and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) shackle Palestinian security detainees as a form of torture and abuse, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) charged in a report issued early Tuesday morning. (more…)

To date, the highest-ranking officer to be prosecuted for detainee abuse is a lieutenant colonel who was acquitted by a court-martial panel. Yet there is simply too much evidence of high-level orders and authorization for the use of torture and abuse to justify limiting criminal investigations to those in the field. What does it say about our commitment to justice when we are willing to sacrifice a few at the bottom but unwilling to hold accountable those at the top? When we are willing to prosecute military personnel but not the civilian officials and contractors who were also part of this horrific enterprise? What kind of legacy does that leave for future generations, and future administrations, when it comes to the consequences of those in power breaking the law? (more…)

I agree in principle, but these questions are silly because none of this is new territory for the United States. Illegal behavior? Torture? Unaccountable government? Come on. We should be indignant, but it’s dishonest to pretend that these activities are any real deviation from longheld U.S. policy.

If, like me, you’ve been following America’s torture policies not just for the last few years but for decades, you can’t help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years. (more…)

Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children (more…)

Obama said he was “very much looking forward” to that part of his trip, but that he wanted to meet with Mubarak first because he is someone “who obviously has decades of experience” on a range of issues. (more…)

Yeah, a whole range of issues: torture, censorship, eradication of political opponents, etc.

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002. (more…)

The Supreme Court ruled today that former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller may not be sued by Arab Muslims who were seized in this country after the 2001 terrorist attacks and allege harsh treatment because of their religion and ethnicity. The court ruled 5 to 4 that the top officials are not liable for the actions of their subordinates absent evidence that they ordered the allegedly discriminatory activity. The decision followed the court’s ideological split between conservatives and liberals, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy siding with the conservatives and writing the opinion. (more…)

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law — a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More important, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire” — as George Washington called the new republic — extended to the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers. (more…)

They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner. (more…)

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…)

President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office. (more…)

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals. (more…)

“It is an embarrassment,” said Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University, “and clearly nobody wants to be embarrassed, particularly a speaker of the House. But other than that, there is nothing here that threatens her job.” (more…)

Few people know how to avoid, evade, beat around the bush, beg the question, bypass, circumvent, fudge, sidestep, prevaricate, equivocate, dodge, duck, avoid and ignore as well as Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, the author of a torture memorandum given to the Central Intelligence Agency. Few people know how to be as skillfully dishonest while appearing to skirt dishonesty. (more…)

Throughout my career, I have been proud to have worked on human rights and against torture around the world. (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 torture practices used in interrogations of al-Qaida prisoners were not developed by government officials in Washington, but by private security experts. In return for a daily consulting fee, they personally supervised the program at the CIA’s secret prisons from the very beginning. (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…)

The Obama administration says it may curtail Anglo-American intelligence sharing if the British High Court discloses new details of the treatment of a former Guantanamo detainee. (more…)

More than 25 of the CIA’s war-on-terror prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 11 days at a time during the administration of former president George Bush, according to The Los Angeles Times. (more…)

A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda operative, according to documents the CIA released to Congress on Thursday. (more…)

Yet it is clear from a recently released and well-documented report by the Senate Armed Services Committee that such abuses were not committed by rogue service members or CIA agents who took matters into their own hands. The extreme interrogation methods were, according to the report, sought out and authorized by administration officials at the highest levels, including then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. (more…)

In other words, the CIA’s own internal investigation could not confirm that “enhanced interrogation” had in any instance achieved the single goal that supposedly justified violations of American and international law: the disruption of a “ticking bomb” plot. (more…)

The clown of Jordan is very concerned about torture… in the United States. (more…)

[N]ote that the March waterboardings were not for the purpose of increasing national security; they were intended to provide a propaganda victory for an illegal war plan. That is not just wrong, it is evil. (more…)

According to a recently released Justice Department memo, CIA operatives subjected two al-Qaeda leaders — alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and high-level lieutenant Abu Zubaida — to 266 episodes of waterboarding. Mr. Mohammed is said to have been waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 — for an average of six episodes a day of what has been described as among the most terrifying and brutal forms of coercive interrogation. Mr. Zubaida was subjected to water torture 83 times during August 2002. There is no mention of how many times a third detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded. Had any foreign government or terrorist group treated U.S. citizens in this way, the country would have been appalled — and rightly so. (more…)

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” The report undercuts the Obama administration’s case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida. (more…)

The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. (more…)

As Paul Woodward of the blog War in Context correctly points out, Obama’s determination not to pursue justice (he calls it retribution) suggests that “we no longer live in a world where the Nuremberg defense is untenable … ‘I was just following orders,’ has now become an honorable American justification for torture.”

I find it hard to believe that a man as intelligent as Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law, would equate the pursuit of justice with retribution. It makes it appear as if his decision is one of political expediency.

If holding the C.I.A. operatives accountable for violating federal or international laws is retribution, then the prosecution of ordinary citizens for crimes is also retribution.

The president does not have the authority to be selective about who should or should not be charged with a crime, and he has made a grievous error by confusing the pursuit of justice with retribution or retaliation. (more…)

“The release of CIA memos on interrogation methods by the US department of justice appears to have offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to people involved in torture,” Amnesty International said. “Torture is never acceptable and those who conduct it should not escape justice.” (more…)

Another way of putting it would be to say that the co-conspirators agreed to cover each other’s backs so that they could collectively enjoy legal impunity.

Now that that impunity is in jeopardy, the lawbreakers are upping the ante by implying that exposing torture practices poses a national security threat. (more…)

How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Sanctions Torture (more…)

Barack Obama, the US president, today signed an executive order to shut down the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, the most potent symbol of excess in George Bush’s “war on terror”. (more…)

But Mr. Obama must be mindful not to delay too much. Through no fault of his own, he has inherited a system in which many detainees have been held for years without a meaningful review of their cases. They have been denied the opportunity to scrutinize the evidence against them or to gather and present information that could exonerate them. Some have been abused or tortured. Relying on a deeply flawed and unjust legal process such as the one in place at Guantanamo is untenable — but so would be continuing to hold detainees under no process at all. (more…)

When Barack Obama signs the draft order to tear down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, he will end at a stroke one of most shameful chapters in American foreign policy history. (more…)

“Judicially speaking,” Nowak told the German broadcaster ZDF, “the United States has a clear obligation” to prosecute Rumsfeld and Bush for ordering interrogation methods at Guantanamo that contravened a UN convention on torture.” He added that there were publicly available documents “that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld.” (more…)

Bush reveals that he personally authorized torture on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. (more…)

[A]t least 30 prisoners – mostly Yemenis, who now comprise 40 percent of the prison’s population – have recently embarked on hunger strikes at Guantánamo. They are, understandably, incensed that Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, was repatriated in November, to serve out the last month of the meager sentence he received after a trial by military commission last summer, while they, who have never been charged with anything, remain imprisoned with no way of knowing if they will ever be released. (more…)

Last week, a report by the US senate armed services committee involving both Republicans and Democrats said the abuse of detainees in Guantanamo Bay “cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own”. (more…)

Rights groups B’Tselem and Hamoked released a report last year entitled “Absolute Prohibition: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees” in which they accused the court ruling of “legitimizing severe acts, contrary to international law, which does not acknowledge any exceptions to the prohibition on torture and ill-treatment.” (more…)

Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has ordered his staff to draw up plans to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. (more…)

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (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…)

Over the last eight years, Cheney’s scowling visage has been the more true and honest face of the Bush administration. Unlike Bush, when discussing the national security policies of the US Cheney rarely bothered with transparently disingenuous appeals to democracy-building, dealing instead in appeals to fear and raw assertions of power. (more…)

Torture and other forms of abuse in Iraqi detention facilities, frequently to elicit confessions in early stages of detention, are well documented. The reliance on confessions in the court’s proceedings, coupled with the absence of physical or other corroborating evidence, raises the possibility of serious miscarriages of justice. In at least 10 investigative hearings and two trials that Human Rights Watch observed, defendants renounced confessions submitted as evidence. In most of those cases, the defendants said they had been physically abused or threatened by interrogators. (more…)

Download the full report in PDF.

The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody. (more…)

I’m sure this is what Bush intended when he promised to bring democracy to Iraq. Ah, freedom smells great!

In a radio interview in November 2004, [James Hetfield of Metallica] said that he was “proud” that the military had used his music (even though they “hadn’t asked his permission or paid him royalties”). “For me, the lyrics are a form of expression, a freedom to express my insanity,” he explained, adding, “If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure.” (more…)

The only freedom to be derived from Metallica’s crappy music is removing one’s headphones… So if that’s what Hetfield means, I’m with him all the way.

Waterboarding is used in interrogation to make a detainee feel as if he is drowning.

Asked whether he thought it was appropriate, Cheney replied: “I do.”

Asked if he thought, in hindsight, any of the tactics went too far, Cheney said, “I don’t.” (more…)

A US Senate committee has accused the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of being directly responsible for the abusive interrogations of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. (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…)

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
(more…)

Most politicians wait at least until they’ve been sworn in before they start breaking their campaign promises. In this sense, as in so many others, Barack Obama represents an entirely new phenomenon: the politician who preemptively reneges.

A recent Wall Street Journal piece describing the transition process as it relates to intelligence-gathering reveals we aren’t going to see much change in this vitally important realm, the one in which the Bush administration truly made its blackest mark. This will "create tension within the Democratic party," we are told, apparently because even the worst party hacks will have a hard time going along with the revised Obama Doctrine on the issue of torture.

According to the Journal, Obama’s advisors on intelligence matters are "centrists" in the Clinton mold and outright Republicans, who favor torture "with oversight." These, we are told, are the "pragmatists," likely candidates for position in Obama’s national security bureaucracy. "He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues," avers Roger Cressey, who served as a counter-terrorism official under Clinton as well as Bush II.

It’s a grotesque commentary on the moral health of the nation when advocacy of torture is considered "centrist." One shudders to imagine what it means to be right-of-center. (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…)

When I was coming back from my award ceremony and also a speaking engagement, I was stopped for nearly one hour and a half before an Israeli Shin Bet officer came to me and started collecting my bags, which were securely checked already. I kept waiting for some time until they got my luggage and they started checking everything.

The Shabak officer just came to me and then said, “You are a crazy man.” And I just kept quiet and listened to what he’s going to say. And then he said, “Is there anyone who has been to the Netherlands, to France, to Sweden, to Greece and to the United Kingdom and come back to Gaza Strip? Gaza is a dirty place. Why do you come back to Gaza? Gaza is a dirty place, and the people there are dirty. Why do you come to live in such a place, where there is no electricity, there is no light, and there is darkness, and there is shortages of fuel, and there is lots of difficulties? Why don’t you live in France, instead?”

And I continued to explain to the Shabak officer that I choose to come, because I want to come back to Gaza and to be a voice for the voiceless. I want to be the person who gets the message out of the Gaza Strip and to help the world understand what’s going on. And then he answered me, “OK, Mohammed, then it’s your choice. You choose to suffer.” I said, “Not really. I don’t choose to suffer. I choose to tell the truth.” (more…)

I would like to share some rather disturbing news regarding a friend of mine from Gaza. Mohammed Omer, an award winning journalist, was recently assaulted by the Israeli Occupation forces without justification as he attempted to return to Gaza via the Allenby Bridge crossing on the Jordanian-West Bank border. Mohammed, whom I came to know during my stay in Gaza, was returning from an award ceremony in London where he was presented with the prestigious 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

Of course, Israel controls Gaza’s borders and it took an immense effort for Mohammed even to leave Gaza to attend the London ceremony. And when he returned, Israel had a treat in store for him. How dare this presumptuous twenty-something earn an international prize for his reporting from Gaza! Needless to say, Israeli soldiers treated him in the most abhorrent, imperialistic fashion… His crime: to be Palestinian, to exist. (more…)

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty. (more…)

Chairman John Conyers
House Judiciary Committee
U.S. House of Representatives
U.S. Congress
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Conyers:

Prominent Constitutional law experts believe President Bush has engaged in at least, five categories of repeated, defiant “high crimes and misdemeanors”, which separately or together would allow Congress to subject the President to impeachment under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. The sworn oath of members of Congress is to uphold the Constitution. Failure of the members of Congress to pursue impeachment of President Bush is an affront to the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the people of the United States.

In addition to a criminal war of aggression in Iraq, in violation of our constitution, statutes and treaties, there are the arrests of thousands of Americans and their imprisonment without charges, the spying on Americans without juridical warrant, systematic torture, and the unprecedented wholesale, defiant signing statements declaring that the President, in his unbridled discretion, is the law. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: [Five years ago] on March 19th, 2003, the US began bombing Baghdad. The invasion was on. Six weeks later, President Bush stood under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared an end to major military combat operations in Iraq. Now, half a decade later, the war continues with no end in sight.

In a speech today to mark the fifth anniversary, the President, who leaves office in less than eleven months, will again give an upbeat assessment of the war. According to released excerpts of his address, Bush will insist the so-called troop surge in Iraq has opened the door to a “major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.”

But by most accounts, the war has been an unmitigated disaster. Up to one million Iraqis have been killed, with no estimates on the number of those wounded. Up to 2.5 million people are estimated to be displaced inside Iraq, and more than two million have fled to neighboring countries. Meanwhile, nearly 4,000 US soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the overall cost of this war will be $3 trillion. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: [Tonight] the US invasion and occupation of Iraq will enter its sixth year. On Monday, at least seventy-two Iraqis were killed in violence around Iraq, including forty-two Shiite worshippers in a suicide bombing in Karbala. Two US troops were also killed, bringing the US death toll to 3,990, ten deaths away from the 4,000 mark.

If the Bush administration’s drive to invade Iraq was aided by corporate media cheerleading, the five-year mark today is being met with near-silence by the corporate media. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the US occupation of Iraq has accounted for just three percent of news stories in television, print and online media so far this year. On cable news networks, it’s accounted for just one percent.

That silence was on display this past weekend when the corporate media largely ignored a monumental gathering just outside the nation’s capital. For four days, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and active-duty soldiers convened at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland for Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings that took place in Detroit held during the Vietnam War. (more…)

AMY GOODMAN: Iraq and Afghanistan veterans gathered in Maryland this past weekend to testify at Winter Soldier, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the event was modeled after the historic 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held during the Vietnam War.

Over the weekend, war veterans spoke of free-fire zones, the shootings and beatings of innocent civilians, racism at the highest levels of the military, sexual harassment and assault within the military, and the torturing of prisoners.

Although Winter Soldier was held just outside the nation’s capital, it was almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media. A search on the Lexis database found that no major television network or cable news network even mentioned Winter Soldier over the weekend, neither did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or most other major newspapers in the country. The editors of the Washington Post chose to cover Winter Soldier but placed the article in the local section. (more…)

The U.S. Congress sent President Bush a bill that would have banned the CIA from using ‘harsh interrogation methods,’ which most of the world sees as torture and which even the military is forbidden to use. Said Mr. Bush: “The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.”

It is not surprising that the irony of that statement is lost on Mr. Bush. Terrorist tools that he allows the Central Intelligence Agency to use are a ‘valuable tool’ in the war against terror.

The spineless Democratic Congressional leadership duly weighed in with meaningless rhetoric, proving once again that talk is cheap, and it can’t get much cheaper than the pronouncements of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In vowing to override the presidential veto, a near impossibility considering the numbers and therefore an easy target for taking the moral high ground, Ms. Pelosi said: “In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority.” (more…)