Posts tagged “torture”
Videotape And Lies (No Sex)
Well, well, well, well, well! The CIA has videotapes, after all, of interrogations in a secret overseas prison of admitted 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh. Discovered in a box under a desk at the CIA, the tapes could reveal how foreign governments aided the United States in holding and interrogating suspects. And they could complicate U.S. [...]
We-a Culpa! We-a Minima Culpa!
Back in May, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government published an interesting little study of media dishonesty. It examined how four major newspapers — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today — have covered the topic of waterboarding [...]
I’m Sure the Pulitzer Committee Will Be Calling Me Any Minute Now
Obama’s liberal base ‘disengaged’ – USAToday (3/10/10): “The energized base which transformed the nation and elected our first black president (is) now disengaged,” Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile says. “If this was September, I would hit the panic button.” [...] Still, signs of trouble for the Democratic majority in Congress are springing up in: Virginia, [...]
The State Secrets Privilege
It’s a privilege to be in a position where you can conspire to destroy evidence in order to preserve the ugly secrets of the torture state. A proud privilege. A privilege that Senator Pat Roberts, who used to be chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee back when Bush was adding phrases like “enhanced interrogation” to [...]
John Yoo And The Limits Of Presidential Power
John Yoo believes that the President of the United States has the constitutional authority and unfettered power to order an entire village to be “massacred”. John Yoo believes that Congress cannot stop the President from using nuclear weapons, if he “thought in good faith he was saving millions of … lives”. (Note that lives don’t [...]
UK Court Of Appeals Labels Bush A Liar
(1) We finally have a final resolution of the Binyam Mohamed case in the UK (backstory here): Three of Britain’s most senior judges have ordered the government to reveal evidence of MI5 complicity in the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed – unanimously dismissing objections by David Miliband, the foreign secretary. In a ruling that [...]
Protecting John Yoo
Administration wants suit against Yoo dismissed – SF Chronicle (12/7/09): The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues. [...]
Coming Soon: Incontrovertible Evidence Of Torture?
Binyam Mohamed is one of the victims of TWAT (The War Against Terror). The bare facts are: Mohamed, arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, was accused of training at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, joining a squad of al Qaeda bomb-makers in Pakistan and plotting to set off a radioactive bomb in the United States. [...]
Presidential Helplessness
How bizarre is this? The president of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaite, suspects that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA prison for terror suspects in 2004 and 2005, as alleged by an ABC News report last August. She suspects it, but isn’t sure. And apparently she can’t just summon a few officials, or make a few phone calls, [...]
Tax-free No-bid Cost-plus Government Contracts
ABC News brings us a couple of juicy tidbits about “the two psychologists credited for being the architects of the CIA’s brutal interrogation program after 9/11″: Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen, who suggested and supervised waterboarding at secret prisons around the world … according to their associates, boasted of being paid $1,000 a [...]