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By Tom Segev
By Chalmers Johnson
$11.03
$20
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AN HONORABLE GERMAN (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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A newly hired philosophy professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has become the latest defender of President Obama’s deadly drone program.
Posted on Aug 3, 2012
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Flickr / The National Guard
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President Obama will be able to say that he kept one of his promises from the ’08 campaign trail come Dec. 31 of this year, when all but 160 American troops will leave Iraq after more than eight years of heavy military involvement (read: war) in the Middle Eastern nation. (more)
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By Amy Goodman — Combat operations in Iraq are over, if you believe President Barack Obama’s rhetoric. But torture in Iraq’s prisons, first exposed during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is thriving, increasingly distant from any scrutiny or accountability.
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AP photo / Lynne Sladky
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By Marie Cocco — The partisan firefight over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary allegation that the CIA lied to Congress about its use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture—is a blessing. It turns the compelling case for a public inquiry into the Bush administration’s policies toward terrorism detainees into an urgent necessity.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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A bipartisan report released by Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain blames former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials for interrogation abuses. Based on an 18-month investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the report determined that prisoner abuse “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” as the administration has claimed.
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worldbiography.net
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Two recently disclosed memos from 2003 and 2004 show the Bush administration giving CIA torture techniques, most famously waterboarding, an explicit executive nod after worries arose in the intelligence community about the legality of the treatment of detainees.
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blogs.nytimes.com
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Documentary whiz Errol Morris is turning his camera on Abu Ghraib’s most notorious moments in his latest film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” in which he unearths a host of unsettling information about torture, “ghost” prisoners and interrogators, and, as Morris describes in this blog about his new project, exactly what happened to prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi’s body after he died under interrogation at the prison in Iraq.
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Shane T. McCoy / U.S. Navy
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By Robert Scheer — Ah, yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.
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bbc.co.uk
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The disgrace brought on the U.S. by members of the military who participated in the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison will likely linger for some time, but one of the key Army figures involved in the case, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan (pictured), has been cleared of any serious charges from the 2003 scandal.
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari, file
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A new book by two ACLU lawyers, “Administration of Torture,” includes documents in which one Gen. Michael Dunlavey claims that President Bush gave him “marching orders” to get the Pentagon’s approval of more severe interrogation methods at Guantanamo. Also, it alleges that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani.
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AP Photo/Dennis Cook
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Truthdig tips its hat this week to Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, whose 2004 report about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was damningly thorough and truthful—and who thus found himself contradicted and chastised by Pentagon and Bush administration officials for doing his job right.
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This is the four-minute highlight reel from “Iraq for Sale” that documentarian Robert Greenwald wanted to screen for Congress as part of his testimony. Republicans blocked him from doing so. If you haven’t been following the outrageous war profiteering going on in Iraq—like many of our elected officials—this is a must-see clip.
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The U.S. military insists that Abu Ghraib was an isolated abuse, but at least one soldier suggests a wider system of torture is at work: “I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking.”
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In this “60 Minutes” segment, Anderson Cooper interviews the former U.S. soldier who brought the Abu Ghraib pictures to light. Video and/or transcript
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From Salon.com
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The 25-year-old soldier terrified Iraqi detainees with his canine—allegedly for amusement. He will be discharged for bad conduct and get a reduction in pay.
Posted on Mar 23, 2006
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From Salon.com
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Sgt. Michael Smith (pictured above threatening an Abu Ghraib detainee with a dog) becomes the ninth soldier to be convicted for detainee abuse. He faces over eight years in prison.
To date, no high-ranking officials have been charged with crimes stemming from the abuses.
Posted on Mar 21, 2006
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From Salon.com
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Salon presents a horrifying new gallery of 279 photos and 19 videos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib.
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From the New York Times
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Salon.com presents exclusive evidence that The New York Times incorrectly identified—in a Page 1 story!—the hooded detainee shown in one of the most iconic abuse photos from the notorious Iraqi prison. (Hat tip: Huff Po)
Posted on Mar 14, 2006
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From The New York Times
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The photo of him in a hood, arms outspread and with electrical wires trailing from his body became the definitive image of the prison abuse scandal.
He is now heading up a prisoners’ rights organization.
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Naomi Klein —
Bush’s choice of Panama to make his declaration that America does not torture “is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.”
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Two years before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Navy’s general counsel warned the Pentagon that its wink-and-nod policies on torture would invite abuse, reports The New Yorker.
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In a big story that is receiving scant media attention, the U.S. claims that Iraqi police forces are acting as “death squads” to wipe out Sunnis.
At the same time, the Iraq parliament is condemning the U.S. for the newly released pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib.
Posted on Feb 16, 2006
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Images: BBC / Illustration: Karen Spector
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Newly released photos and videos of inhumane conditions at Abu Ghraib have again shone a spotlight on America’s treatment of its prisoners. Read the sworn statements by prisoners at Abu Ghraib, obtained and translated by the Washington Post in 2004 at the height of the prison abuse scandal.
Excerpt: “As soon as we arrived, they put sandbags over our heads and they kept beating us…. And every single night this military guy comes over and beat us and handcuffed us until the end of his shift.”
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Musician, actor and social activist Harry Belafonte issues a strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy at the Jan. 20 session of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.
Listen:  Speech (4.6 MB)
Posted on Jan 29, 2006
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The more we learn of the Bush administration’s pervasive outsourcing of torture, the more sensible it seems as a policy. Evidently, our intelligence people, tainted as they are by the squeamish morality of Western civilization, are just not fully up to the task of getting prisoners to tell us what the administration wants us to hear.
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Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
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