Torturer’s Apprentice - Magazine. The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church.
The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture. Science Museum/SSPL Umberto Eco, in his best-selling 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor.
In the movie, he is played with serpentine menace by F. Murray Abraham. George W. Bush and torture: America’s highest officials are responsible for the “enhanced interrogation” of prisoners. Michelle Shepard/AFP/Getty Images.
It began with one document. On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. Innocent and Imprisoned: A Former Gitmo Detainee Speaks Out - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. Held without charges for seven years, he was finally freed when a federal judge reviewed the evidence against him.
His captors never paid. For a brief moment at the end of George W. Bush's tenure, before Barack Obama even took office, a few naive souls hoped that Bush Administration officials would be investigated to determine if they broke the law while in power, tried if the evidence warranted it, and jailed (like so many less-politically-connected American lawbreakers) if their guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Those who advocated treating Bush Administration officials as if they were accountable to the rule of law as regular citizens were deemed radicals. Comment: Hiding at Guantánamo. On Wednesday, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri will be arraigned at what is called the Expeditionary Legal Center at Guantánamo Bay.
“Expeditionary” is the right word: the proceedings will enter new territory, on a course that is only half-plotted. Nashiri is charged with planning the bombing of the U.S.S. Why Obama Can't Close Guantanamo. The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead.
On February 1, Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan, collapsed in the shower and died of an apparent heart attack after working out on an exercise machine. Then, at dawn one morning in May, Haji Nassim, a 37-year-old man also from Afghanistan, was found hanging from bed linen in a prison camp recreation yard. Remember Guantanamo? On : Monday, 26 Mar, 2012 Hearts and Minds The Obama administration has yet to fulfill its promise of closing Guantanamo.
What we might want to remember about forgetting on the 10th anniversary of the Prison Camp at Guantanamo. JOHN MOORE/Getty Images Ten years ago today, George W.
Bush’s first 20 prisoners arrived at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Guantanamo. 9/11 suspects refuse to answer judge's questions as Guantánamo trial opens. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four other accused terrorists were ordered to stand trial at a hearing before a Guantánamo military tribunal that descended into chaos on Saturday as the defendants refused to acknowledge the judge and their lawyers repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the court.
William Shawcross on Legal Proceedings Against Extremists. Scientists Probe Terrorist Talk On 'Dark Web' The biggest problem with Qatada? He’s innocent. How Much Is Security Worth? Soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, conventional wisdom argued that another attack was imminent.
Ohio State University Professor John Mueller was among the few who challenged conventional wisdom. Mueller, who prides himself on questioning assumptions most consider fact, has applied this approach to topics as varied as public opinion during the Vietnam War, popular conceptions of warfare, and perceptions of democracy and capitalism. In 2006, following the publication of Mueller’s book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them,he received an email from Mark Stewart, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
The spectacle of terror and its vested interests. The news stories, which quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out.
These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants.
They have become a litany in recent years. The terrifying 2003-2004 national news stories that a Detroit "sleeper cell" had sent Muslim terrorists to blow up Disneyland and other landmarks, including in Las Vegas, was later thrown out of court, with accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, to almost no press attention – the same cycle of hype and failed convictions that have characterized many such stories. The U.S. Military’s “Third-Country Nationals” It was lunchtime in Suva, Fiji, a slow day at the end of the tourist season in September of 2007, when four men appeared in the doorway of the Rever Beauty Salon, where Vinnie Tuivaga worked as a hair stylist. The men wore polished shoes and bright Hawaiian shirts, and they told Vinnie about a job that sounded, she recalls, like “the fruits of my submission to the Lord all these years.” How would she like to make five times her current salary at a luxury hotel in Dubai, a place known as the City of Gold?
How would she like to have wealthy Arab customers, women who paid ridiculous fees for trendy cut-and-color jobs? “I’ll talk it over with my husband,” she replied, coolly, but her pulse was racing. Vinnie, who was forty-five, had never worked abroad, but she often dreamed of it while hearing missionaries’ lectures at her local church. How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police - Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman - National. Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed. Danny Moloshok / Reuters. How to Fund an American Police State. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. Click here to catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police “mission creep” in this country, or download it to your iPod here.
At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. About the Author. The Counterterrorism Consensus - By Michael A. Cohen. There are few areas of greater disappointment for liberal supporters of President Barack Obama than his policies on civil liberties. From the failure to close Guantanamo Bay and his ramped up drone war to the continued reliance on indefinite detention, military commissions for accused terrorists, and the recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that potentially allows for the killing of American citizens without due process, Obama's presidency, or so the argument goes, has been one broken promise after another.
Yet, none of this seems to be having any effect on Obama's political standing -- even among Democrats. The results of a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll provide compelling evidence of how little a price Obama has paid for these policies. According to the poll, 70 percent of respondents support the president's decision to keep Guantanamo Bay open. Indeed, backing for Gitmo is actually higher today than it was in 2003. Adam Curtis Blog: HOW TO KILL A RATIONAL PEASANT. The NDAA Makes it Harder to Fight Terrorism. Andrew Bacevich, Uncle Sam, Global Gangster.
Why has so much been revealed about how US/Saudi intel foiled the AQAP bomb plot? US drone air strike kills al-Qaida terrorist wanted for USS Cole bombing. Terrorist Fishing in the Yemen - By James Traub. Phillip Knightley: When is a terror threat not a terror threat? Let's ask a man called Felix... - Commentators - Opinion. Mumbai Terror Attack Group Lashkar e Tayyiba Now More Dangerous Than Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda's Merger - By J.M. Berger. Hundreds of Somalis gathered on the outskirts of Mogadishu on Feb. 13 to celebrate the union of al Qaeda with its Somali cousin, the insurgent-terrorist group al-Shabab. But the mainstream media hasn't quite figured out what to make of the news, first announced last week, that the two groups had officially merged. Many reporters were already accustomed to thinking of them as the same group. Others grasped at straws to fit the news into the "al Qaeda is losing" narrative -- dominant ever since Osama bin Laden was killed last May.
They might have done better with a simple headline: "Dozens of Americans Join al Qaeda. " The disturbing truth is that al-Shabab has had more success recruiting Americans than any of al Qaeda's other franchises. Evaluating the war with al Qaeda. Is al Qaeda dead? Statements by counter-terrorism and intelligence officials suggest that the Obama administration is moving toward this conclusion. War against Islam? Bin Laden’s documents show Obama was right, and Gingrich and Santorum were wrong. Photo by CNN/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, President Obama changed the way the U.S. government talked about its conflict with Osama Bin Laden.
Think Again: Al Qaeda - By Seth G. Jones. US drone targeted al-Qaida deputy. Bin Laden's Death, One Year Later. The New al Qaeda Franchises - By Lois Parshley and Hanna Trudo. Al Qaeda's Challenge. Al Qaeda Is Doing Nation-Building. Should We Worry? - By Will McCants. Bin Laden's Failure: How Islamists and the U.S. Ended His War With the West - Michael Hirsh - International. Analyzing the Bin Laden Documents. Al Qaeda magazine returns with two new issues.