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By Rachel Corrie
$16.29
By Jonathan Mahler
$15.60
$17
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By William Pfaff — George W. Bush’s war against terror has brought out of the darker places in America a lot of people who want to torture, or like the idea of it. We know it doesn’t work, so what drives Dick Cheney and his colleague to champion such moral depravity?
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AP photo / Rick Browmer
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Read the devastating bipartisan report from the Senate Armed Services Committee that indicts high-level Bush administration officials—including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—as bearing major responsibility for the torture at Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, and other detention facilities.
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The CIA would still be able to keep America safe by using harsh interrogation methods (read: torture) on terrorists if it weren’t for those despicable, meddling “far-left loons”—according to Bill O’Reilly, Fox News pundit and well-known international terrorism expert.
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signonsandiego.com
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Maybe it was the past eight years, or maybe it was the past three months, but a new report by the U.S. intelligence community estimates that American global power is on the decline, and will be for the next two decades as upcoming powers like China and India gain greater international standing.
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By Joe Conason — If the prospect of appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state irritates the Obama base, what will they make of keeping the man who has executed President Bush’s policies at the Pentagon?
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By William Pfaff — The Americans who voted for Barack Obama as president were promised change they could count on, but it rather looks as if they may actually be asked to make do with a mildly refurbished Clinton administration, with many of the same officials and nearly all of the same policies.
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AP photo
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By Eugene Robinson — We will look back on the Bush years and find it incredible, and disgraceful, that individuals were “purchased” from tribal warlords, tortured at Abu Ghraib, abducted to secret CIA prisons, whisked to Guantanamo and held for years without charges.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the presidential election has liberated Barack Obama from the need to play to the fickle whim of domestic politics, he should put away the saber and take a more enlightened approach to Iran.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Fisk — How is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the U.S. itself?
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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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blogspot.com
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Two Latin American leaders, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, expelled the U.S. ambassadors to their nations after claiming that the American embassies in both countries were supporting rebel groups aimed at toppling their governments. Salvador Allende and Jacobo Arbenz were unavailable for comment.
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By William Pfaff — The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
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By William Pfaff — The Bush administration has lived by a strategy of tension, and will go out of office bequeathing the wars it has started and the ill will it has created to its successors, to compromise those who come after.
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In “One Minute to Midnight,” Michael Dobbs’ definitive book on the 1962 crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the question of lessons learned and unlearned remains as acute as ever.
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AP photo / Bullit Marquez
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By Scott Ritter — Dave continued pacing back and forth in front of Mohammed. “My president,” he said, “is in trouble. Can you help him?” Mohammed was taken aback by the question. “Excuse me?” he asked. “Could you repeat yourself?” Dave sat down next to the Iraqi. “George Bush is in trouble. Our people did not find any WMD in Iraq. Can you help us?”
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Ron Suskind’s new book alleges that the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate a link between Iraq and al-Qaida. The CIA director at the time, George Tenet, calls the claim “ridiculous.” Suskind says that’s just an example of “George’s memory issue.”
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commons.wikimedia.org
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According to Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and best-selling Bush critic, the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and knew before the invasion that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The White House denies the allegations, published in Suskind’s new book, “The Way of the World.”
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley
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By Scott Ritter — The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned.
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U.S. Navy / Jordon R. Beesley
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By Chalmers Johnson — Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and balances.
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AP
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Ah, good intentions, with which that famous path was paved: According to Justice Department documents obtained and released by the ACLU on Thursday—albeit heavily redacted—CIA interrogators were authorized to use waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that they believed “in good faith” would not “have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering.”
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wikimedia.org
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Plans for a bastardized version of a U.S. embassy—an “interests section”—are reportedly in motion in Iran as the Bush administration tries to supplement its bellicose rhetoric with what it calls “people-to-people exchanges” between Iranians and U.S. citizens.
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White House / Eric Draper
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One of the benefits of saturating the American people with scandal is that folks eventually stop paying attention. That’s certainly the case with Plamegate, which is still being investigated despite the president’s best efforts to the contrary and a public that has generally moved on.
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nsa.gov
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Only a year after his agency warned of a resurgence of al-Qaida in the Arab world, CIA Director Michael Hayden remarked on Friday that U.S. “counter-terrorism work” has led to the strategic defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and significant setbacks for al-Qaida globally.
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of a 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture.
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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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This past week, Syria made headlines not once but twice. One story implicates the country in enriching uranium and says that the CIA confirmed to Congress that the target of a mysterious Israeli air raid in northern Syria on Sept. 6, 2007, was a reactor built with North Korean help.
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By Amy Goodman — The American Psychological Association is in the midst of its own heated presidential campaign. The central issue is whether APA members should be banned from participating in “harsh interrogations.”
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Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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By Robert Fisk — The Independent’s Robert Fisk looks back at five years of catastrophe in Iraq and is reminded of Winston Churchill’s depiction of Palestine as a “hell-disaster.”
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AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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By Scott Ritter — As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I find myself thinking back on how we got ourselves into this predicament. ... As I examine where we are today and contemplate our future and those who are positioning themselves to play a role in Iraq, it seems to me that there is at least one such incident, a dinner party I attended at the home of Ahmed Chalabi in June 1998 that is worthy of a more public illumination.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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A Yemeni man has told Amnesty International that he was abducted and tortured and spent nearly three years in secret prisons at the hands of the CIA. Khaled al-Maqtari says that without charge, legal representation or even a word to his family he was shuttled from one prison to another and ultimately dumped into Yemeni custody, once the U.S. had finished with him.
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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The reputation of the U.S. on the world stage might be further colored by President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have limited the CIA’s (and other intelligence agencies’) array of interrogation techniques to those in the Army field manual. In defending Saturday’s veto, Bush once again invoked 9/11.
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AP photo / Hussein Malla
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By Scott Ritter — Imad Mughniyeh was once America’s most-wanted terrorist, and his crimes were truly abhorrent. But his assassination, Ritter argues, will only lead to more violence.
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The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating memos and opinions rendered by the department that endorsed the practice of waterboarding, which many consider to be torture. The inquiry is unrelated to the FBI’s criminal investigation of the CIA, which destroyed video recordings of the waterboarding of suspects.
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AP photo / Javier Galeano
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By Robert Scheer — The Cuban president, who is resigning after five decades in power, has caused his people suffering, but the giant to the north bears even greater responsibility for the island’s plight.
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AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Sen. John McCain has established himself as an outspoken critic of torture, which makes his vote Wednesday against the Feinstein Amendment, which would set limits on the types of interrogation techniques used by American intelligence agencies, all the more puzzling—or, in the case of The Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan, heartbreaking.
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The House of Representatives and Senate have now both signaled their disapproval of the CIA’s use of waterboarding by voting for a ban on any techniques but the 19 officially approved by the Army, but President Bush has already, in turn, signaled his intent to veto any legislation that would rule out harsh interrogation methods.
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By Eugene Robinson — The campaign for the White House is great fun, but it can also be a distraction. While the leading contenders to replace Bush continue to duke it out, the president and his lieutenants are still trying to justify torture in the name of protecting this once great democracy.
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wikipedia.org
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CIA Director Michael Hayden told lawmakers Thursday that waterboarding is a useful technique but might not be “lawful under current statute.” Hayden said his agency used waterboarding because of “misshaped and misformed” direction from Washington.
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The confirmation, delivered by CIA Director Michael Hayden on Tuesday, that the U.S. intelligence agency did indeed use the now-infamous severe interrogation technique of waterboarding on three major 9/11 suspects was given the green light by President Bush in a rare show of (relative) transparency.
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By Amy Goodman — At a time when Attorney General Mukasey dodges Senate questions about waterboarding, Americans should be asking a question of their own: Can we call ourselves civilized if torture is practiced in our name?
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By Amy Goodman — It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States.
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politics-now.com
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Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council staff under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, has written a fascinating history of the United States’ many interventions in Pakistan. It’s the sordid story of “the world’s longest running military despotism, and of America’s most generous and tragic patronage.”
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AP photo / K.M. Chaudary
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Although members of her Pakistan People’s Party remain skeptical, and although the late Benazir Bhutto herself might have disagreed, American and Pakistani intelligence officials believe that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud and his associates were behind the assassination of Bhutto in Rawalpindi last month.
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Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., responding to closed testimony from the CIA’s acting general counsel, John Rizzo, said it appeared that the officer who destroyed evidence of “enhanced” interrogations was acting against orders. Jose Rodriguez, the official in question, is asking for immunity before he tells his side of the story to Congress.
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On Wednesday, the same day that Attorney General Mukasey announced the launching of a federal probe into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, the chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, respectively, published an explosive Op-Ed piece in The New York Times slamming the CIA and the Bush administration for “stonewalling” their investigation.
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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The Justice Department is (finally) treating the CIA’s decision to destroy videotapes of agents using severe interrogation methods on terrorism suspects as cause for a criminal investigation. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey (above) acknowledged that the probe was a go on Wednesday and named John Durham as the outside prosecutor for the case.
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By Amy Goodman — Benazir Bhutto and her supporters who died with her during the suicide attack Dec. 27 are the latest victims of decades of dangerous U.S. support for Pakistan’s military regime.
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When point-blanked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about how he would handle the current situation in Pakistan, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul blasted U.S. alignment with “military dictator” Pervez Musharraf and accused Washington of fostering unrest among anti-U.S. factions in Pakistan by setting up a “puppet government.” Rep. Paul was on Thursday’s “Situation Room.”
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