rendition

Obama and the Convention Against Torture

On November 12—thirteen years after the onset of George W. Bush’s dirty underground war against “unlawful combatants”—the Obama administration finally told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the United States believed, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, “that torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions.” Finally! Not so fast.

And They Say I’m the Crazy One!!

For that minority of us who reject both this Military Industrial Empire and its ‘Two Party One Party’ system, we are marginalized and ostracized. For that smaller segment of our grouping that holds to most of the conspiracy theories of empire… Wow!! We are just simply crazy! Factor out the way out theories of aliens inside the Illuminati, the shape shifting reptilians, the One World Socialist government of the Fabian Society, or the Jews behind all our world wars etc. That is not what this writer is speaking about.

The Great Carcan

I knew a torturer. I liked him. The man loved his dog, you have to give him that. A Mongolian shepherd. He’d trained it so that if you pointed a gun or even just made bang-bang fingers, the dog would run and jump and push your arm aside with its paws, so he could take out his own gun and shoot you first. He was heartbroken when that dog died.

Complicity is Complicity, No Matter what You Say

On December 4, 2013, the New York Times reported the death of General Paul Aussaresses, one of the top military men in Algeria during the years of the Algerian national liberation struggle.  Aussaresses was an unabashed colonialist whose politics were quite rightist in nature.  One of his primary roles in the French war in Algeria was to interrogate anti-colonial fighters.  Of course, this involved torture.  Unlike many torturers before and since Aussaresses’ time in Algeria, the general never seemed ashamed of the torture he ordered.  In fact, he spoke about it in interviews and eventually