NewsTrust - Torture - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

S.C. Debate: The Ultimate Waterboarding Championship

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Esquire - By Charles P. Pierce - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - Oh, my goodness, they do love their waterboarding, all of them except Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, who is still battling a chronic case of invisibility. Herman Cain thinks it's okay as long as we call it "an enhanced interrogation technique," albeit one that results in an enhanced inability to breathe. (Otherwise, on Saturday night, Herman Cain announced his willingness to delegate the entire job of being president to various subordinates, which will be the nicest thing he's done to a subordinate in a while. It's going to be like Reagan without the senility.) Rick Santorum, when he's not out there killing Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as their neighbors' cats and whomever's trimming their hedges that day, is fine with it, too, and for many of the same philological reasons that so appeal to Herman. La Bachmann is busy pricing designer thumbscrews and also is busy going completely off her admittedly limited rails and deep, deep into the outer bananasphere.

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Dorothy Parvaz: Inside Syria's secret prisons

Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Aljazeera - By Dorothy Parvaz - May. 18 (Interview) - Parvaz recounts her experiences while detained in Syria and Iran. I was standing in two fist-sized pools of smeared, sticky blood, trying to sort out why there were seven angry Syrians yelling at me. Only one of them - who I came to know as Mr Shut Up du

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Bin Laden’s death and the debate over torture

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By John McCain - May. 12 (Opinion) - Osama bin Laden’s welcome death has ignited debate over whether the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners were instrumental in locating bin Laden, and whether they are a justifiable means for gathering intelligence.

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The Torture Apologists

Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 05 (Editorial) - The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden's death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Aljazeera - Feb. 08 (Opinion) - On January 29, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s top spy chief, was anointed vice president by tottering dictator, Hosni Mubarak. By appointing Suleiman, part of a shake-up of the cabinet in an attempt to appease the masses of protesters and retain his own grip on the presidency, Mubarak has once again shown his knack for devilish shrewdness. Suleiman has long been favoured by the US government for his ardent anti-Islamism, his willingness to talk and act tough on Iran - and he has long been the CIA’s main man in Cairo.

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No Price to Pay for Torture

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jun. 16 (Editorial) - The conduct of the Supreme Court and the Obama administration in the case of an innocent Canadian man who was sent to Syria to be tortured in 2002 is disgraceful.

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He Was Tortured, But He Can’t Sue

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:58:43 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By David Cole - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - On Monday, June 14, the Supreme Court declined to hear Maher Arar’s case, conclusively shutting the door on the Canadian citizen’s effort to obtain redress from US officials who stopped him in September 2002 while he was changing planes on his way home to Canada and shipped him instead to Syria, where he was tortured and imprisoned without charges for nearly a year. In so ruling, the Court refused to reconsider the decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sitting en banc, which had ruled in November 2009 that Arar’s case raised too many sensitive issues of national security and confidential information to permit its adjudication in a court of law. If he is to obtain any remedy now, it must come from Congress and the President. The courts have washed their hands of the affair, but that does not mean that it is resolved.

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How Should Obama Deal With Bush Era Torture?

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Feb. 14 (Opinion) - Walling and phobias are the least of it: hypothermia, sleep deprivation up to 960 hours, waterboarding, brutal stress positions, sensory deprivation and isolation for years, mock executions, and confinement in upright coffins were all deployed and they are all forms of torture. The fundamental judge of torture, the International Red Cross, has called it torture; Museum0004 every other country in the world acknowledges that it was torture, the current president acknowledges that it was torture, and the record shows unequivocally that it was authorized and supervised directly from the president's and vice-president's office. My own hope was that president Bush would take the lead on this. But, alas, he hasn't. I see the great political benefits of this approach - but the belligerence of the far right that refuses to acknowledge the plain facts in front of us would still lead to deep polarization.

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Binyam Mohamed: full text of David Miliband's statement - Telegraph

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By David Miliband - Oct. 17 (Statement) - ''The Government is deeply disappointed by the judgment handed down today by the High Court which concludes that a summary of US intelligence material should be put into the public domain against their wishes. We will be appealing in the strongest possible terms.

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Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Charles C. Krulak, Joseph P. Hoar - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

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Treatment of prisoner dents Obama promise to end such practices

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - No, this does not match the worst abuses of the Bush era, but it is close enough that it must surely disillusion and dismay those who thought a corner was turned on Jan. 20. It must leave them hoping that faith was not misplaced. Sometimes a dented promise is worse than no promise at all.

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Cheney for President

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By James Taranto - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - As the Obama administration moves toward prosecuting intelligence agents for allegedly overzealous questioning of terrorism in the months following the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post delivers a timely reminder of why those methods were thought necessary.

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Video: Dick Cheney calls Eric Holder's interrogation investigation political

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fox News - By Chris Wallace - Aug. 31 (Interview) - WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it. CHENEY: I am.

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The Washington Post's Support For Torture

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Aug. 30 (Comment) - In the latest release from those in the Bush administration and CIA who authorized and supported America's torture of prisoners of war, we get the following story today in the Washington Post. It details that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gave up a ...

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Is half a torture investigation better than none at all?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - Holder has fallen prey to the sort of magical legal thinking that seeps through the whole CIA report: the presumption that if there's a legal memo, it must be legal.

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Reopening the Interrogation File

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Eugene Robinson - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - History's demands can seem inconvenient, unfair or unreasonable. But they can't be ignored. The Obama administration has a legal and moral duty to determine whether crimes were committed in the Bush-era detention and interrogation of "war on terror" prisoners -- and, if so, to prosecute those responsible.

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The Other End of the Abu Ghraib Camera

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By William Quinn - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - DESPITE demands by human rights advocates that photos documenting abuse of military detainees be made public, the Senate last month passed legislation to block their release. The legislation is now before the House. President Obama supports these efforts. This is all good news. Classifying the photos would help protect those detainees’ basic rights to dignity and privacy.

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Two Standards of Detention

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Amy Goodman - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - Nonviolent activists like Stepanian, and Muslims like Hashmi, secretly and dubiously charged, are held in draconian conditions, while Roeder trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s decades-long campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.

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Cheney and Rice Remember 9/11. I Do, Too.

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Richard A. Clarke - May. 29 (Opinion) - Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

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Two Speeches

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - May. 26 (Opinion) - It’s tempting to see last week’s speech-making duel between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney as a mismatch, with the eloquence of the admired incumbent set against the snarl of the discredited predecessor. Certainly, there was no contest in terms of political stagecraft. Obama appeared in the hushed rotunda of the National Archives, in front of the documents that embody the highest aspirations of American government, while Cheney found a secure location at a right-wing think tank, one of a handful of places in the country where he could be assured a friendly audience.

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An Obama-Cheney Thought Experiment

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - May. 23 (Opinion) - Here’s a thought experiment: When you watch excerpts of the Obama-Cheney great debate over national security, try to imagine how these issues would play if America should be hit by another 9/11-level terrorist attack.

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Obama tries to show that America can have a thoughtful war president.

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By John Dickerson - May. 22 (Opinion) - On Thursday, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney both spoke about the war against terrorists. Obama spoke to America's ideals, literally if not figuratively, delivering his speech in the building that houses the Constitution. Cheney spoke from a bunker, figuratively if not literally, holding forth in a roomful of conservative partisans. How this debate plays out politically will depend on where the American people find themselves.

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The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FindLaw - By John Dean - May. 15 (Editorial) - Politicians come and go, but the folks who actually run the government have an agenda of their own, including covering their mistakes.

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Inquirer defends the indefensible: A monthly column by torture architect John Yoo

Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Philadelphia Inquirer - By Will Bunch - May. 12 (Opinion) - It was Yoo's immoral guidance that aided the United States in sanctioning the torture practice known as waterboarding -- used in the Spanish Inquisition, by despots such as Pol Pot and by Chinese Communists in the Korean War to obtain false confessions from Americans -- as well as slamming detainees into walls, part of a harsh interrogation regime that has been linked to the deaths of at least a dozen U.S, detainees and possibly more.

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Interrogating Torture

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Philip Gourevitch - May. 04 (Opinion) - Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration’s policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that they showed nothing more than the depravity of a group of rogue soldiers who had fallen under his sway. Yet it became almost immediately apparent—and has been confirmed repeatedly in the years since, most recently with President Obama’s decision to release four Bush Administration memorandums seeking to establish a legal justification for the use of torture—that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed not individuals run amok but American policy in action. (From those memos, we now know that Bush Administration lawyers had a technical term for what Charles Graner called bashing a man against a wall. The term is “walling.”)

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