Interview with Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan: 'We Did Exactly What Al-Qaida Wanted Us to Do' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Obama’s Illegal Assaults. How once-controversial ‘war on terror’ tactics became the new normal.
What now gives Americans nationalistic purpose is our ability to hunt someone down and riddle their skull with bullets and dump their corpse into the ocean. Barack Obama has continued virtually all of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s once-controversial terrorism and civil liberties policies, a fact now recognized across the political spectrum. US detention policy: Exposing the dark side. Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or "black sites" (secret prisons) run by the CIA, kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services.
While some of those practices were canceled when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, others continue to characterise US detention policy in the "war on terror". Even the canceled policies continue to stain the record because there has been a total failure to hold the intellectual authors of these illegal practices accountable or to provide justice for the victims of American torture and extraordinary rendition. This five-part series traces the detention policy debacle as it has evolved over the last ten years.