torture

Normal Butcheries:  Saudi Arabia’s Latest Mass Execution

Great reformers are not normally found in theocratic monarchies.  Despite assertions to the contrary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains archaic in the way it deals with its opponents.  In its penal system, executions remain standard fare.  With liberal democratic countries fixated with the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was prudent for Saudi […]

Bashing Warmongering and Secrecy on Chicago Radio with Shaun Thompson

Shaun Thompson and I had a rollicking chat today on Chicago’s The Answer AM 560.   We talked about the recent Supreme Court decision permitting the CIA to invoke “State Secrets” to keep its torture site in Poland secrecy.   The Presidential Records Act cover-up of presidential records took a beating, along with former presidents who got […]

Supreme Court Betrays Justice to Protect Torturers

Mises Institute, March 12, 2021 The Supreme Court Uses Twisted Logic to Protect US Agents Committing Torture by James Bovard The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of […]
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Renaissance Woman Sylvia Pankhurst: Feminist, Artist, Council Communist, Anti-Imperialist

Why Sylvia Matters How many of you about to read this have heard of Sylvia Pankhurst? Our guess is, not many. She seems to have fallen through the cracks of socialist and suffragette movement literature. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst and sister, Christabel Pankhurst are still looked up to as leaders in the suffragette movement. What […]

Colleyville Hostages: Blowback for US Torture, War Crimes

The official version of the 11-hours hostage-taking in Colleyville, Texas, on January 15, makes it seem pretty straightforward and limited. Early that Saturday morning, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker allowed a stranger into the synagogue to get warm, later identified as Malik Faisal Akram, 44, a British national of Pakistani descent who had come to the US […]

Aafia Siddiqui, Political Prisoner

The media coverage of the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Texas has been predictably hysterical, Islamophobic and inaccurate about Aafia Siddiqui, the apparent political cause of the hostage-taker Malik Faisad Akram.  According to his family in England he has “mental health issues.”  He was “said to have” weapons and explosives.  He was “said to have” […]
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Enduring Stain: The Guantánamo Military Prison Turns Twenty

Anniversaries for detention centres, concentration camps and torture facilities are not the relishable calendar events in the canon of human worth.  But not remembering them, when they were used, and how they continue being used, would be unpardonable amnesia. On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners of the absurdly named “War on Terror”, declared with […]

Obama: “I’m really good at killing people”

Consider this article as a postscript to my earlier psychological portrait of Barack Obama as “The Ultimate Status-Seeker” (Dissident Voice, May 5, 2012).  Many unanswered questions remain about Obama: the nature of his emotional life and attachments, his primary motivations for becoming president, and his ultimate values and principles (if any). Here was a man who […]

The Hounding of Julian Assange Leaves Honest Journalism with No Refuge

It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows. His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it […]