The question of torture... The U.S. military’s ‘anti-Islam classes’ To sort / under construction. Domestic militarization and the War on Terror. 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. Cracks and challenges. The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia. Renditions, an underground prison and a new CIA base are elements of an intensifying US war, according to a Nation investigation in Mogadishu. Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners.
Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. About the Author Jeremy Scahill Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater... Also by the Author. 9/11 and the makers of history - CISAC. After 9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover the entire planet, and US military assistance programmes are active in almost every country. Wars reorder politics and values.
They remake that which is taken to be true and right. They render the world unrecognisable from what it was when the balloon went up. It is useful to begin by recalling some of what seemed true on September 10, 2001. Today, each of these verities lies broken. Renewed global military commitments have hastened an inevitable US decline. How is it that the received wisdom about the nature of world politics was so badly wrong? 'Like cowboys at the rodeo' The fall of the left Blinkered worldview. Richard A. Clarke: What We’ve Learned From 9/11. His laser-like focus once brought him medals, but on Day 22 of the South African’s murder trial, it was clearly undermining his case—and highlighting his testimony’s inconsistencies. True to state prosecutor Gerrie Nel’s warning to Oscar Pistorius last week, it appears Nel isn’t going away anytime soon.
Known in South African legal circles as the Bulldog—or Bull Terrier, or Pitbull, depending on your source—Nel has grilled the accused Paralympian mercilessly for six days now at the Pretoria High Court, to the point where some citizens have approached the South African Human Rights Commission with complaints that Nel’s questioning has bordered on psychological torment. There are whispers that it could be another full week before Nel lets Pistorius out of the witness box, from which the defendant has cried, screamed, cursed, prayed, contradicted, and victimized himself on more than one occasion, sometimes all at once.
“I shot out of fear. Francois Burgat - A propos du terrorisme islamique. François Burgat Discusses Western and Islamist Roles in Middle Eastern Political Strategy | Tufts Fletcher School. Dr. François Burgat is in a good place to critique the Western approach to Middle Eastern politics. French by origin, he has spent the last twenty years as a researcher and diplomat living throughout the Middle East. The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies invited Burgat, who is currently the director of the prestigious Institute Français du Proche Orient, to speak about his most recent book, Islamism in the Shadow of Al Qaida. His theory is that the West misunderstands Middle Eastern political tensions by labeling everything Muslim as political Islam and failing to understand its own contribution to the situation. The history of colonization on the Middle East, Burgat argues, is a significant factor in today’s politics.
In the wake of colonialism, Arab nationalism dominated the Middle East political scene up to the 1967 war with Israel, when defeat led Islamism to replace Arab nationalism as the dominant ideology.
Torturing Democracy Through the American Wars on Crime and Terrorism? - 2008. LSE International Humanitarian Law Project public lecture Date: Monday 10 November 2008 Time: 6.30-8pm Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building Speaker: Professor Randall Coyne Chair: Professor Christine Chinkin Professor Coyne examines the cost to civil liberties and freedom of America's wars-without-end: the war on terrorism and the war on crime. Coyne's lecture touches on the constitutional questions raised by detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, the US' continuing support of capital punishment, and his work for 'enemy combatants' and death-row prisoners. Randall Coyne is Edna Asper Elkouri and Frank Elkouri Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
Podcast A podcast of this event is available to download from the LSE public lectures and events podcasts channel Media queries: please contact the Press Office if you would like to reserve a press seat or have a media query about this event, email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk|. Democratic principles in the War on Terror - Glenn Greenwald. Senate Republicans yesterday filibustered the confirmation of James Cole, President Obama’s nominee to become Deputy Attorney General. There were a couple of reasons for their opposition, but it is principally grounded in the views Cole expressed when opposing Bush’s Terrorism policies. Specifically, a 2002 Legal Times Op-Ed authored by Cole contained the offending statements, as cited yesterday by GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley; behold the irony in Grassley’s remarks: In other words: Terrorists should be treated as criminals and accorded full due process within our normal “criminal justice system” — i.e., dealt with as part of a law enforcement paradigm — not treated as warriors subjected to “the rhetoric of war” and “special procedures that altered traditional due process rights.”
In his now-controversial Op-Ed, Cole added: Cole’s point: even the most heinous Terrorists must be accorded the full and normal protections of our criminal justice system before being punished. You are more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. The Ideological Animal. Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she'd be the founder of a political organization.
She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—"former lefties" who did political 180s after 9/11. Stillwell, now a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle , had been a liberal her whole life, writing off all Republicans as "ignorant, intolerant yahoos. " Yet on 9/11, everything changed for her, as it did for so many. In the days after the attacks, the world seemed "topsy-turvy. " Disgusted, she looked elsewhere. In 2005, she wrote a column called "The Making of a 9/11 Republican. " We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. Corey Robin - The Politics of Fear. Issue #21, Summer 2011 Corey Robin To read the other essays in our symposium on the 9/11 decade, click here .
I n my 2004 book Fear: The History of a Political Idea , I argued that “one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” When I wrote “one day,” I was thinking decades, not years. Yet even before Osama bin Laden was killed and negotiations with the Taliban had begun, it was clear that the war on terror, understood in those terms, had come to an end. When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. A Kinsley gaffe if ever there was one, Kerry’s comment may have helped seal his fate in that election. From these polar realities—a thinning atmosphere of political fear, an expanding infrastructure of political fear—I draw two conclusions. The war on terror is corrupting all it touches | Simon Jenkins. On Monday the Modern Spies programme substantiated an extraordinary allegation that suggested how far the war on terror has descended into legal abyss.
The claim was that MI6 rolled the pitch for Tony Blair's bizarre 2004 hug-in with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi by apparently arranging for the CIA to kidnap Gaddafi's opponent in exile, Abdel Hakim Belhaj. He was seized in Bangkok, where he and his wife were en route to Britain. It's been suggested they were "rendered" via the British colony of Diego Garcia to Tajoura jail in Tripoli.
Belhaj spent six years, and his wife four and a half months, at the tender mercies of Gaddafi's security boss, Moussa Koussa. Belhaj's pregnant wife was taped like a mummy on a stretcher, and he was systematically tortured. With this gift came a covering letter from MI6's Mark Allen, offering Koussa congratulations on the "safe arrival" of the "air cargo [Belhaj]. Less spurious were other elements in the strange relationship. The morass now thickens.
Former Intel Chief: Call Off The Drone War (And Maybe the Whole War on Terror) | Danger Room. ASPEN, Colorado — Ground the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. Rethink the idea of spending billions of dollars to pursue al-Qaida. Forget chasing terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, unless the local governments are willing to join in the hunt. Those aren’t the words of some human rights activist, or some far-left Congressman. They’re from retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — the man who was, until recently, nominally in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists.
Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked. Starting with the drone attacks. It’s one of many reasons why it’s a mistake to “have that campaign dominate our overall relations” with countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The “unilateral” strikes in Pakistan have to come to an end, he added, and be replaced with operations that had the full cooperation of the government in Islamabad. “You think — woah, $20 million. Drones. Neocons embrace islamic terrorist group. October 23, 2007 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. During the week of October 22-26, an official announcement effuses, "The nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever - Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.
" Ringmastered by David Horowitz, this circus will be performing under the tent of something called the "Terrorism Awareness Project. " The purpose of this ballyhoolooza, we are told, is to confront the "Big Lies" of the Left regarding terrorism and militant Islam. The U.S. To make a long and bizarre story short, the MEK got its start in early 1960s Iran, helped overthrow the Shah in 1979, but quickly turned on the revolutionary government it helped bring to power. The group's wicked political brew was on spectacular display on the old MEK flag (since abandoned), with its sickle and Kalashnikov positioned beneath a Koranic verse.
Well, no. Daniel Pipes and islamophobia. Daniel Pipes, Islam 2.0 and Islamophobia 3.0 by Sheila Musaji Daniel Pipes is a very active Islamophobe whose name comes up in almost every issue involving Muslims and or Arabs in America. We have had so many articles referencing Pipes and his work, that we will now collect information in this one article collection. Daniel Pipes was a founding Director of the Middle East Forum, is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, is on the Board of Directors of the Jewish Policy Forum, on the Advisory Board of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, and is the Director of Campus Watch about which I wrote an action alert asking academics to “turn themselves in” to Campus Watch.
In that alert, I noted that The site, Campus Watch at has begun with an initial “blacklist” of? Surprisingly, Pipes has himself supported the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) who are considered by the U.S. FAIR has a report on Pipes which notes “But do the survey results actually say this? Abu Aardvark: Pipes and Abou el Fadl. US Institute of Peace appointee Daniel Pipes has just published an attack on the Islamic scholar Khaled Abou el Fadl. This attack, even by his standards, is despicable. This attack is of a piece with other attempts to deny the existence of moderate Islamism. In the past I've argued here with Martin Kramer (about Yusuf al Qaradawi) and with Lee Smith (about Tariq Ramadan) about moderate Islamism.
[I've also written before about Abou el Fadl here.] With Kramer and Smith, there was a legitimate intellectual disagreement, and I respect their views even if I disagree. But Pipes does not even pretend to engage with anything that Abou el Fadl has written, said, or done. How does Pipes attack Abou el Fadl? But those attacks, while tendentious and weak, pale in comparison to the main line of attack. And then, this conclusion: "The case of Abou El Fadl points to the challenge of how to discern Islamists who present themselves as moderates. Al-Qaeda's Christian mirror. THE ROVING EYEAl-Qaeda's Christian mirrorBy Pepe Escobar Imagine if Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old pale, blond, blue-eyed, 100% Norwegian, gun-crazy ultra right-wing Christian fundamentalist responsible for the car bombing in Oslo and the meticulous targeted assassinations at the island of Utoya that killed 93 people, was a Muslim immigrant.
One does not even have to imagine it - as the concentric Western circles of the Islamophobia industry immediately attributed the massacre in Norway to "al-Qaeda", until facts got in the way. Wait a minute. "Targeted assassinations? " civilization - there's nothing to prevent a cool Scandinavian from exercising the same rights on his own soil. The overlapping strands of al-Qaeda ideology can be examined in detail in volumes such as Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words, edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, and published in English by Harvard University Press.
It's all about culture. Western progressives must be on red alert. Note 1. O'Reilly's Muslim-Hatred and Christian Terrorists. Bill O’Reilly: That Norwegian Mass Murderer Who Said He Was a Christian Had Nothing to Do With Christianity. Entrapment and Racialization: The "Homegrown" Canard. War against Islam? Bin Laden’s documents show Obama was right, and Gingrich and Santorum were wrong. Nationalists pose bigger threat than al-Qaeda. An un-American response to the Oslo attack - Glenn Greenwald. A "clash of civilizations?"