Foreign Policy Category Archive

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Gruesome Details Emerge of Israel’s Torture of Palestinian Prisoners

Whitney Webb • February 12, 2020

• 900 Words • 8 Comments • Reply

New allegations have surfaced claiming that Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet or Shabak, is engaged in the brutal torture of Palestinian detainees, despite the practice being against both Israeli and international law. The new accusations, deemed “very credible” by both Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, come amid a recorded spike in the use of... Read More

The Torturers and the ‘Ticking Bomb’: How Torture Became Routine in the Global War on Terror

Philip Giraldi • January 30, 2020

• 1,400 Words • 42 Comments • Reply

With all the media excitement focused on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, it comes as no surprise that some recent additional insights into how the United States became a torture regime have been largely ignored. It has been known for years that the George W. Bush Administration carried out what most of the world... Read More

Assange in Court

Craig Murray • October 22, 2019

• 2,500 Words • 53 Comments • Reply

I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening. Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: Turning Our Backs on Nuremberg

Nick Turse • March 26, 2019

• 400 Words • 8 Comments • Reply

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes! I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one... Read More

No More Torture Says France

Eric Margolis • October 6, 2018

• 800 Words • 16 Comments • Reply

‘This is La Main Rouge,’ said the gruff voice on our home telephone in Geneva, Switzerland.. ‘Stop your activities on behalf of the FLN or we will kill you.’ The mysterious caller hung up. I was petrified. La Main Rouge was killing supporters of free Algeria across Europe. This was 1959 where I was studying... Read More

Holding the Line on Torture

One Organization at a Time

Rebecca Gordon • September 9, 2018

• 2,700 Words • Leave a Comment

Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The APA’s decision is important -- and not just symbolically. Today... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: Psychologists Say No to Torture

Tom Engelhardt • September 9, 2018

• 600 Words • Leave a Comment

I offer you this guarantee: there’s an anniversary coming on October 7th that no one in this country is going to celebrate or, I suspect, even think about. Seventeen years ago, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the air campaign that began the invasion of Afghanistan. It would prove... Read More

Democrats Confirm Torturer As Director of CIA

Paul Craig Roberts • May 19, 2018

• 600 Words

How did a person who should be in the criminal dock both in the US and in the International Criminal Court for running a torture prison get appointed the Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency? What is all the Washington talk about defending human rights when a torturer is put in charge of covert... Read More

Erin Thompson: Curating Guantanamo

Tom Engelhardt • December 3, 2017

• 600 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Few Americans ever took in the vastness of the prison outsourcing system the administration of George W. Bush set up from Afghanistan to Iraq, Thailand to Poland, the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. In those years, I began referring to that global network of prisons as our... Read More

The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open

What the Paintings by Its Prisoners Tell Us About Our Humanity and Theirs

Erin L. Thompson • December 3, 2017

• 2,600 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a very different beach: deserted, framed by distant headlands with unsullied... Read More

"Enemy Combatants" Again?

Will Washington Never Learn?

Karen Greenberg • October 15, 2017

• 2,400 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

Eight years ago, when I wrote a book on the first days of Guantanamo, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, I assumed that Gitmo would prove a grim anomaly in our history. Today, it seems as if that “detention facility” will have a far longer life than I ever imagined and that it,... Read More

Karen Greenberg: Gitmo's Living Legacy in the Trump Era

Tom Engelhardt • October 15, 2017

• 400 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

Karen Greenberg first arrived at TomDispatch in January 2005 in tandem with defense attorney Joshua Dratel. Their book The Torture Papers was just being published and they were asking questions. Thirty-seven of them, to be exact, all pointed, all uncomfortable, all directed at then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, all focused on the Bush administration’s torture... Read More

Two CIA Contractors Successfully Sued for “Black Site” Torture

Hired psychologists devised "enhanced interrogation techniques” to break prisoners

Philip Giraldi • August 23, 2017

• 1,400 Words • Leave a Comment

Given the intense media coverage over Charlottesville, a recent small headlinelargely escaped notice, but it could have a major impact on how Americans come to terms with the excesses that developed from the “global war on terror.” For the first time, several individuals closely associated with the CIA torture program were about to become answerable... Read More

Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity

Torture, Rendition, and Indefinite Detention Under Trump

Rebecca Gordon • April 6, 2017

• 2,800 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars -- under the banner of a “Global War on Terror” -- they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised... Read More

Of Course Donald Trump Is Still in Favour of Waterboarding

Patrick Cockburn • November 25, 2016

• 1,200 Words • 20 Comments • Reply

Where does Donald Trump stand on the use of torture by US security agencies? During the presidential election campaign he notoriously recommended a return to waterboarding, the repeated near-drowning of detainees that was banned by President Obama in 2009. But last week The New York Times reported that in an interview with its senior staff,... Read More

Human Rights Watch Reports That US Government Tortured Children

Paul Craig Roberts • August 1, 2016

• 1,800 Words • 11 Comments

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has just released its report, “Extreme Measures: Abused Children Detained As National Security Threats.” From my reading of the report, Israel and the US are the two worst abusers. Boko Haram is a distant third. Which country is the worst abuser, Israel or the US? Taking into account that the US... Read More

Crimes of the War on Terror

Should George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Others Be Jailed?

Rebecca Gordon • June 7, 2016

• 3,000 Words • 65 Comments • Reply

"The cold was terrible but the screams were worse," Sara Mendez told the BBC. "The screams of those who were being tortured were the first thing you heard and they made you shiver. That's why there was a radio blasting day and night." In the 1970s, Mendez was a young Uruguayan teacher with leftist leanings.... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial

Tom Engelhardt • April 24, 2016

• 700 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

Let’s take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American world. In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the waterboarding of terror... Read More

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The al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t

The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

Rebecca Gordon • April 24, 2016

• 3,000 Words • 27 Comments • Reply

The allegations against the man were serious indeed. * Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda. * The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a... Read More

America Revisits the Dark Side

Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter

Rebecca Gordon • January 7, 2016

• 3,000 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time -- and in the case of the drone warscontinue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Tom Engelhardt • January 7, 2016

• 600 Words • 3 Comments • Reply

What a scam! Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen described it this way in a front-page New York Times report on how a small group of incredibly wealthy Americans funded their way into another tax universe: “Operating largely out of public view -- in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the... Read More

The CIA’s Torture Defenders

An all-star cast teams up to spin their enhanced interrogation regime

Philip Giraldi • September 23, 2015

• 1,700 Words • Leave a Comment

Back in the days when I was a spy there were certain things that one just did not dwell upon. Everyone who worked in the field knew that there were episodes that it would be best not to recall, either because they were embarrassing, possibly unsavory, or even, more rarely, wildly successful though at a... Read More

Where Are They Now?

The trillion dollar a year war on terror is a witness protection program for government felons

Philip Giraldi • July 7, 2015

• 2,400 Words • 135 Comments • Reply

The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior bureaucrats who have long believed that their status... Read More

The Other Conspirator

The Secret Origins of the CIA’s Torture Program and the Forgotten Man Who Tried to Expose It

Barbara Myers • May 31, 2015

• 7,800 Words • 5 Comments • Reply

The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It’s the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last... Read More

Barbara Myers: the Unknown Whistleblower

Nick Turse • May 31, 2015

• 700 Words • Leave a Comment

Rambo! In my Reagan-era youth, the name was synonymous with the Vietnam War -- at least the Vietnam War reimagined, the celluloid fantasy version of it in which a tanned, glistening, muscle-bound commando busted the handcuffs of defeat and redeemed America’s honor in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Untold millions including the Gipper himself, an... Read More

Torture at Gitmo? Blame Jordan!

Peter Lee • April 30, 2015

• 1,100 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

There was a nasty dustup on Twitter between the Glenn Greenwald forces and sympathizers with Bashar al Assad concerning the case of Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen who was deported by the US to Syria, where he was detained for 9 months and tortured (he describes his treatment here)--and whether Syria under Assad had assisted the... Read More

Don’t See Evil

Google’s Boycott Campaign Against War Photography and Alternative Media

Dan Sanchez • March 29, 2015

• 4,000 Words • 22 Comments • Reply

What happens when a dynamic company, started by a couple of idealistic friends in grad school, succeeds so wildly that it becomes a mega-corporation that pervades the lives of hundreds of millions? In imperial America, it would seem, it eventually becomes corrupted, even captured. Tragically, that seems to be the unfolding story of Google. By... Read More

The Real American Exceptionalism

From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Alfred McCoy • February 24, 2015

• 3,300 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

"The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond... Read More

Saying No to Torture

A Gallery of American Heroes

Rebecca Gordon • February 10, 2015

• 2,800 Words • 23 Comments • Reply

Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too... Read More

Shooting Itself in the Foot

Andrew Napolitano • January 28, 2015

• 900 Words • Leave a Comment

Ali Saleh al-Marri is a convicted conspirator who entered the United States before 9/11 in order to create a dreaded sleeper cell here that might someday launch an attack on Americans similar to what we witnessed earlier this month in Paris. When the feds woke from their slumber on 9/11, they wisely began to search... Read More

The Road to Torture

It's All-American

Philip Giraldi • December 23, 2014

• 1,500 Words • 54 Comments • Reply

Christmas week is possibly a good time to reflect on what kind of nation we have become. Americans are much given to think of themselves as exceptional, so much so that “exceptionalism” as a national attribute has entered the political vocabulary. Americans also like to think of themselves as generous, fair minded to a fault,... Read More

What the Torture Report Is Missing

The Senate's investigation may only be the tip of the iceberg

Philip Giraldi • December 15, 2014

• 2,000 Words • Leave a Comment

The meticulously documented 528-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s secret rendition, detention, and interrogation program is remarkable for its candor. In blunt language it describes the horrors of the black site secret prisons and the efforts that were made to get terrorist suspects to talk. It effectively makes two overriding points, first that... Read More

Imperialism and the Politics of Torture

James Petras • December 15, 2014

• 1,900 Words • Leave a Comment

Introduction: The US Senate Report documenting CIA torture of alleged terrorist suspects raises a number of fundamental questions about the nature and operations of the State, the relationship and the responsibility of the Executive Branch and Congress to the vast secret police networks which span the globe – including the United States. CIA: The Politics... Read More

CIA 'Torture Report': Agency Conduct Was Driven by Pressure to Link Iraq to al-Qaeda Following 9/11

The White House wanted to justify the 2003 invasion

Patrick Cockburn • December 14, 2014

• 700 Words • 7 Comments • Reply

The CIA tortured al-Qaeda suspects because it wanted evidence that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 in order to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The agency was under intense pressure from the White House and senior figures in the Bush administration to extract confessions confirming co-operation between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda, although... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: the Torture Wars

Tom Engelhardt • December 14, 2014

• 800 Words • Leave a Comment

It came from the top and that’s never been a secret. The president authorized the building of those CIA “black sites” and the use of what came to be known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” and has spoken of this with a certain pride. The president’s top officials essentially put in an order at the Department... Read More

CIA Torture Report: It Didn't Work Then, It Doesn't Work Now

Its use is always wrong and, despite CIA justifications post 9/11, the information obtained from it is invariably tainted

Patrick Cockburn • December 14, 2014

• 1,100 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

The justifications for its actions given by the CIA since thepublication of the Senate report on torture are similar to those given by torturers down the ages. They claim that the information obtained by inflicting intolerable pain is of the greatest value and could not have been obtained by any other means. The information is... Read More

American Torture -- Past, Present, and… Future?

Beyond the Senate Torture Report

Rebecca Gordon • December 14, 2014

• 2,400 Words • 4 Comments • Reply

It’s the political story of the week in Washington. At long last, after the endless stalling and foot-shuffling, the arguments about redaction and CIA computer hacking, the claims that its release might stoke others out there in the Muslim world to violence and “throw the C.I.A. to the wolves,” the report -- you know which... Read More

Torturers Are Not Patriots

Eric Margolis • December 13, 2014

• 1,000 Words • 21 Comments • Reply

Torture is a crime under both American and international law. The Bush administration repeatedly broke the law from 2002 to 2006 by unleashing a wave of torture, kidnapping, and murder, all under the banner of its faux “war on terror.” “Terror” is a wonderfully useful propaganda term developed by the Israelis and adopted by the... Read More

The CIA’s Torture Program

Paul Craig Roberts • December 11, 2014

• 400 Words • 4 Comments

Readers have asked for my take on the CIA torture report. There is so much information and commentary available that it is unnecessary. Igor Volsky provides a concise summary. President George W. Bush signed off on torture and then told the gullible people that “this government does not torture people.” The torture was horrific. The... Read More

The CIA and Its Torturers

Andrew Napolitano • December 11, 2014

• 900 Words • 8 Comments • Reply

When the head of the CIA's torture unit decided to destroy videotapes of his team's horrific work, he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that led to the release this week of the most massive, detailed documentation of unlawful behavior by high-ranking government officials and intentional infliction of pain on noncombatants by the... Read More

Do They Really Oppose Torture?

Ron Paul • December 11, 2014

• 400 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

The Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-awaited report on CIA torture of detainees and the reaction has been strong. While some still maintain that torture is justified, the emerging details of the program have left most of the country disgusted and ashamed. Many in the current Administration blame the Bush people for this dark chapter,... Read More

Senate Torture Report Vanishes

David Copperfield is a CIA Contractor?

Philip Giraldi • September 23, 2014

• 1,400 Words • 21 Comments • Reply

The crisis involving the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Godsend to politicians, which is probably why the threat actually posed by the group is being hyped as it is while the White House and Pentagon continue to change the meaning of commonly used English expressions to enable the attacking of just... Read More

Spying, Lying and Torture

Andrew Napolitano • August 7, 2014

• 1,000 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency's job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those tasks, Brennan would no doubt argue,... Read More

End Torture, Shut Down the CIA!

Ron Paul • July 27, 2014

• 600 Words • Leave a Comment

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos... Read More

Rebecca Gordon: A Nation of Cowards?

Tom Engelhardt • July 10, 2014

• 500 Words • Leave a Comment

It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke: a CIA agent and a U.S. Special Operations commando walked into a barbershop in Sana... That’s the capital of Yemen in case you didn’t remember and not the sort of place where armed Americans usually wander out alone just to get a haircut. Here’s what we... Read More

The 25th Hour

Still Living With Jack Bauer in a Terrified New American World

Rebecca Gordon • July 10, 2014

• 2,200 Words • 5 Comments • Reply

Once upon a time, if a character on TV or in a movie tortured someone, it was a sure sign that he was a bad guy. Now, the torturers are the all-American heroes. From 24 to Zero Dark Thirty, it’s been the good guys who wielded the pliers and the waterboards. We’re not only living... Read More

How to Forgive Your Torturer

The River Kwai Passes Through Latin America and Washington

Ariel Dorfman • June 17, 2014

• 1,800 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

What a way to celebrate Torture Awareness Month! According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45% of Americans believe that torture is “sometimes necessary and acceptable” in order to “gain information that may protect the public.” Twenty-nine percent of Britons “strongly or somewhat agreed” that torture was justified when asked the same question.... Read More

Ariel Dorfman: A Tale of Torture and Forgiveness

Tom Engelhardt • June 17, 2014

• 600 Words • Leave a Comment

I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness... Read More

Torture, the Senate, and the CIA

Philip Giraldi • May 16, 2014

• 500 Words • Leave a Comment

There is some horse-trading going on between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the packaging of the committee’s now notorious 6,300-page report on the CIA interrogation program. It is generally agreed that only the 500-page summary of the report will actually see the light of day—and even that will be heavily... Read More

The Road from Abu Ghraib

A Torture Story Without a Hero or an Ending

Karen Greenberg • April 27, 2014

• 3,100 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual 83 times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether... Read More

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"Torture" Items Across Entire Archive

Category Classics

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

Laurent Guyénot

• 383 Comments • Reply

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.

Sydney Schanberg

• 149 Comments • Reply

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars