Welcome to our legacy in the Middle East: A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes. Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of…
Showing all posts tagged torture
How torture was freely used in a post 9/11 moral haze
What the Bush administration stood for and remember how little Barack Obama has changed this mindset: In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating “war on terror” detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel…
The real cost of outsourcing asylum seeker care is more pain
How unsurprising. Shocking cases of mistreatment in Britain’s detention system, most of which are run by private companies, such as Serco. But let’s not have a robust debate about whether multinationals should be managing people coming from torture and trauma: Millions of pounds in compensation is being paid to migrants who have been traumatised after…
The glories of New Labour (who liked some torture after supper)
Oh my: David Miliband gave MI6 the green light to proceed with intelligence-gathering operations in countries where there was a possible risk of terrorism suspects being tortured, the Guardian has learned. During the three years Miliband served as foreign secretary, MI6 always consulted him personally before embarking on what a source described as “any particularly…
Who lives permanently at Gitmo?
American crimes at Guantanamo Bay continue day in day out and yet the corporate press largely ignores it. Independent journalist Andy Worthington is a notable exception. So which prisoners are left at the prison camp? Worthington has collated an invaluable list, explaining how they got there and very often it was through the paying of…
What the MSM wants to forget about Iraq
L. Craig Johnstone writes in the Washington Post about Western responsibility for what we have created in Iraq: Thirty-five years ago, two young Foreign Service officers went AWOL from Henry Kissinger’s staff at the State Department to go to Vietnam in the days before the collapse of Saigon. I was one of them. Our action…
The lessons from 9/11 are ignored, buried and dead
Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, The Independent’s Robert Fisk paints a grim picture of a world that doesn’t learn, doesn’t care and only understands the language of violence: Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out…
Obama and Bush should dine together and share ideas about torture
The similarity between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in their prosecution of the “war on terror” is increasingly clear. Just in case it isn’t obvious how deep this illegality goes, here’s Michael Hayden, Mr. Bush’s last CIA director, talking to the Washington Times: You’ve got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition…
America, the same old torturing nation as under Bush
This is Obama’s America, siding with those who torture, use rendition and want to keep it secret: A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a…