By Marcellene Hearn | ACLU | April 29, 2014
I spent much of last week at the Post Theater in Fort Meade, watching the closed-circuit feed of the pre-trial military commissions hearings in the case of Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammed al-Nashiri, who faces the death penalty for his alleged role in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
Not only is Guantanamo Bay an illicit torture and concentration camp for alleged terrorists, but numerous legitimately recognized legal scholars have called into question the continued acceptance for the US government to still be occupying its military enclave there. Additionally, many of the purported “terrorist” poor unfortunates who continue to reside there were actually individuals who were picked up in avaricious sweeps — by less than utterly scrupulous people — in return for bounties/reward money.
As Rebecca Gordon notes in her new book, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, polls find greater support in the United States for torture now than when Bush was president. And it’s not hard to see why that would be the case.
Some sights are so strange that you can’t stop to look: that corpse with rigor mortis on the roadside; the monkey butcher’s stand; the mummy-wrapped form balanced crosswise on that slow bicycle’s cargo rack. You just blink and proceed. We all have doubtful memories like that.
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
Dear President Obama:
As you ponder your potential moves regarding President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea (a large majority of its 2 million people are ethnic Russians), it is important to remember that whatever moral leverage you may have had in the court of world opinion has been sacrificed by the precedents set by previous American presidents who did not do what you say Mr. Putin should do – obey international law.
Everywhere you look in the West, you find political pygmies rather than statesmen. In France, we see a pathetic man whose own people intensely dislike him, François Hollande, attempt to speak as though he were something other than a dry, pompous school teacher-like purveyor of American views. Almost forgotten are the strong, independent voices of a de Gaulle or a Chirac.
By Eric Draitser | RT | January 28, 2014
Article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights expressly forbids that any person “be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Peter B. Collins Presents Reporter Jason Leopold & Lawyer Robert Wagstaff
Had Adam Smith amendments to the NDAA passed in June, one year from today-- December 13, 2014, the gulag at Guantánamo would have closed. On June 13, Smith proposed ending indefinite detentions, which was voted down 200-226, 19 Republicans voting with the Democrats and 13 of the worst and most right-wing fake-dens crossing the aisle to oppose the amendment. Those 13 were:
