Ten Years After 9/11, America Deserves Better than Dick Cheney’s Self-Serving Autobiography

On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and [...]

New Evidence Reveals US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture, Despite Rumsfeld’s Denials

This report was written by Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US [...]

The Significance of Human Rights Watch’s New Call To Prosecute Bush Officials For Torture

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a new report Tuesday. As they stated in the press release announcing the 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees” (HTML, PDF), there is “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration.” As a result, President Barack Obama is obliged “to order a criminal [...]

How The Supreme Court Gave Up On Guantanamo

Last Monday, on the very same day that the Obama administration gave up on Guantánamo, so too did the Supreme Court. As far as we know, it was not a choreographed climbdown — nor had money been offered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to rehabilitate their legacies — but the effect was the [...]

Mocking the Law, Judges Rule that Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Insignificant Guantanamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives

If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors’ reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot [...]

The Indictment For Torture Filed Against George W. Bush (Part One: The Facts)

Just two weeks ago, as former US President George W. Bush was preparing to make his first visit to Europe since the publication, last November, of his biography Decision Points, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, with support from the International Federation for [...]

WikiLeaks Cables Reveals Bush, Obama Pressured Germany, Spain Not To Probe Torture

In the relatively small number of US diplomatic cables released to date by WikiLeaks, from its cache of 251,287 documents, the most disturbing revelations concerning the “War on Terror” deal with the pressure that the Bush administration exerted on Germany in 2007, regarding the planned prosecution of 13 CIA agents involved in the rendition and [...]

Interview with Former Covert CIA Operative Valerie Plame (Part 1)

Originally aired November 13, 2007. Republished in connection with the release of the film, Fair Game, which is based on Plame’s memoir of the same name. Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick [...]

Obama Continues Most Of Bush’s Wiretap Policies

By One Vote, US Court OKs Torture And ‘Extraordinary Rendition’

Sometimes a story is so troubling that it takes some time to digest, and the ruling delivered last Wednesday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (PDF), in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, is one such story. The men — Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed [...]