Will the dishonest mainstream media on torture please stand up?

The reluctance of the American corporate media to call US torture “torture” has been exposed in a recent Harvard study. When “they” do it – Iraqis, Afghans, Colombians etc – it’s called torture. But when “we” do it, well, time to find another, less painful word. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald will have none of it and…

When we kill people, it’s a gentle kind of murder

Need more evidence that the corporate media is broken? A newly released study from students at Harvard’s John… F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking)… government officials. … This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four…

Torturing children, Israeli style

While some Israeli commentators argue against instituting a constitution– yes, people, Israel claims to be a modern democracy – the country’s soul is corrupted by a lack of care and brutal efficiency. Amira Hass in Haaretz: M., a Haaretz reader from Zichron Yaakov, was disturbed by reports about the manner in which Palestinian children are…

How Obama betrayed the rights of a tortured man

A New York Times editorial of necessary clarity: The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the claims of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian who was sent to Syria to be tortured in 2002, was a bitterly disappointing abdication of its duty to hold officials accountable for illegal acts. The Bush administration sent Mr. Arar to outsourced…

We can crush your balls and get away with it

The seemingly never-ending outrage of America’s “war on terror”, with the complicity continuing under the Obama administration. Democracy Now! reports: In a major setback for holding US officials accountable for rendition and torture, the Supreme Court has rejected Arar’s lawsuit against the US government. Arar was seized at New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2002 on…

Bush wishes he used the water-board himself

Just in case anybody missed the former US President admitting his regime used torture and was proud of it: George Bush admitted yesterday that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again “to save lives”. “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,”…

Starting to look at the torture regime led by London

What Britain is now doing. Let’s not be under any illusions about a Tory Minister allegedly looking into torture by a previous government – after all, major parties in most democracies usually protect the other from serious investigations into foreign policy issues – but such events aren’t happening in the US or Australia: The judicial…

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