How to help our friends

China is a repressive regime. Clearly it now makes sense, in a post 9/11 world where the US engages in torture of its own, to join forces with the Communists: U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to…

Death by cruelty

An imprisoned man in Guantanamo Bay is told he has AIDS and authorities refuse him access to a lawyer or medical help. This is America, 2008.

Human rights first

Last week the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, spoke in Sydney. He gave a passionate, wide-ranging talk, outlined the “rules of the game” for tyrannies around the world and a West that loves to collaborate with them: The Bush administration, for example, seems to prefer promoting a narrow conception of democracy as…

Songs to torture by

Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

Never going home

According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal. Welcome to American justice, Bush administration style.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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