One of the Arab world’s most widely respected non-governmental organizations is charging that at least 14 Middle East and North African governments are systematically violating the civil liberties of their citizens — and most of them are close U.S. allies in the war on terror.
Showing all posts tagged Bush administration
Starving the “liberated”
Yet another scoop from Wikileaks: The U.S. military says it is taking steps to alleviate conditions at the Iraqi-run city jail in Fallujah after recent visitors found a filthy, overcrowded facility where prisoners had to provide their own food. The episode demonstrates how far Iraq’s judicial and penal institutions still have to go under U.S.…
A back rub will win this war
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling…
How to ditch Washington, part 356
Iraq is falling apart and turning against the American occupation…
The United States of torture
Since Abu Ghraib first came to the world’s attention in 2004, nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse have been shown to the public. But soon an enormous archive of new material – including more than 1,500 other photos, unredacted court papers and interview transcripts – will be posted online by filmmaker Errol Morris, whose…
How to end the war
Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill, Huffington Post, March 26: “So?” So said Dick Cheney when asked last week about public opinion being overwhelming against the war in Iraq. “You can’t be blown off course by polls.” His attitude about the the fact that the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq has reached 4,000 displayed…
What war-mongers never learn
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, March 20: More strikingly, not a single one of them [pro-war media commentators] appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole [Iraq] disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack…
Campaigning for all (including Islamists)
My friend Elijah Zarwan, a New Yorker who until recently was a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Cairo, writes about the Muslim Brotherhood, its treatment at the hands of the US-backed dictatorships and the universality of human rights: Let me be clear: I don’t support the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m fundamentally opposed to their platform,…
The Howard/Bush/Blair legacy
Ali, a painter and a student at the academy of art in north Baghdad, tells the Guardian about life in his occupied country: “I ask myself why life in Iraq is so cheap. We are living in a nightmare. It is like there is a camera recording us and by its light we see images…
Iraq five years on
My latest New Matilda column reflects on the five years since the invasion of Iraq: Five years after the start of the Iraq war, a clear majority of Iraqis want American troops to leave. The results of the latest ORB/Channel 4 study are disturbing. The human cost of the conflict is starkly revealed: “A quarter…