Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the corporate “mainstream” media make quite a pair. We’re hearing a very “balanced” debate over whether KSM should be tried in New York City, and whether the most insane objections to that proposal are really insane or not. But what are we not hearing?
President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.” And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.
British authorities are investigating 33 new claims of abuse against UK troops who were stationed in Iraq.
The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include accusations of serious sexual abuse and torture, including one case in which a 16-year-old Iraqi says he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has [...]
The United States of America owes much of the hope it has right now of remaining what John Adams called “a nation of laws, not men” to Italian law enforcement. Were it not for the fact that Italian prosecutors, unlike their American counterparts, answer to the law rather than a president, the enforcement of laws against a massive crime spree by U.S. officials (and their Italian accomplices) would not have begun.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray says UK and the US sent prisoners to Uzbek to be tortured.
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” Murray said. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence [...]
President Obama has cut a swathe through the Bush-era National Security Program, forcing the CIA to close its secret overseas prisons and ban harsh interrogation methods. Russia Today’s Anastasia Churkina spoke to Human Rights lawyer John Sifton, who reveals the truth behind CIA secret prisons – the controversy, the lies, the torture, and the blacked-out [...]
This report was originally published at The Political Carnival, where GottaLaff blogs regularly.
Via former jailbird Judith Miller, that paragon of fine reporting, we get “news” that is simultaneously clearly laughable and utterly despicable:
In an interview with PJTV’s Bill Whittle on Friday, former New York Times reporter and now Fox News pundit Judith Miller had nothing [...]
The 15th anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media here. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty.” For example, the organization said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.
After railing against Senators and Representatives for their cowardly, uninformed and unacceptable attempts to prevent President Obama from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason — even for trials — I’m delighted to report that, last Tuesday, the Senate finally saw sense, voting, by 79 votes to 19, as part of a $42.8 billion bill for Homeland Security, to accept that the administration can bring prisoners to the US mainland to face trials.
Well, that took a while. Nearly a year after George W. Bush’s Republican party was voted out of office, and at least five years after reports first surfaced that music was being used in “War on Terror” facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo as part of a package of “enhanced interrogation technique,” — which, in any world other than the reality-defying one inhabited by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, would have been defined as torture — several noted musicians have spoken out to condemn the practice.
