Dive into the archives.


  • The Downside of American Torture

    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…)

  • This is “Change”

    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 [...]

  • Apologists For Torture

    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 [...]

  • Demoralized

    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…)

  • This is “Change”

    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 [...]

  • Moral Depravity

    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 [...]

  • How To Kill an International Student Program

    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 [...]

  • British Torture

    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…)

  • This is “Change”

    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…)

  • Israeli Torture

    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 [...]

  • American Torture

    “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…)

  • This is Zionism

    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…)

  • American Torture

    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 [...]

  • Back To the Future (On Torture)

    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 [...]

  • This is “Change”

    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.

  • Medically Approved Torture

    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…)

  • So Much For Universal Jurisdiction

    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 [...]

  • Noam Chomsky: Our Unending War of Terror

    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 — [...]

  • Obama’s Methods

    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 [...]

  • This is “Change”

    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 is “Change”

    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 [...]

  • Toture, American Style

    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 [...]

  • The Fabrications of Jay S. Bybee

    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 [...]

  • This is “Change”

    “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 [...]

  • Outsourcing Torture

    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…)

  • This is “Change”

    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 [...]

  • American War Criminals

    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 [...]

  • American Torture

    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…)

  • Juan Cole on U.S. Torture

    [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…)

  • U.S. Torture

    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 [...]

  • U.S. Torture (Even Before the Legal Memos)

    “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 [...]

  • Visions of Nuremberg

    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 [...]

  • Seven Years of Torture and Lies

    [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 [...]

  • Torture, American Style

    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…)

  • Israeli Torture

    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…)

  • Torture, American Style

    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. [...]

  • Cheney’s Scowling Visage

    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…)

  • The Taste of Freedom

    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 [...]

  • Metallica as a Method of Torture

    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 [...]

  • A Man of Many Words

    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…)

Torture

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