Pioneers of Torture

When the Abu Ghraib photos were released in 2004, it seemed that most Americans were shocked by such novel and horrific images, but at least one was not. I'm talking about Alfred McCoy, who had been following the Central Intelligence Agency since the early 1970s, when...

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Cleansing Halliburton

It might be terrible times for so many companies suffering through a global economic meltdown, but in the war zone, there seems to be no recession in sight. In fact, with "Obama's war" in the expanding Afghanistan/Pakistan theater of operations revving up, there's...

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Unexceptional Americans

Murder, torture, abuse… and photos of the same. We've seen some of them, of course. Now, evidently under pressure from his top generals, President Obama has decided to fight the release of other grim photos from the dark side of the Bush years of offshore injustice –...

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Pipelineistan Goes Af-Pak

Back in March, Pepe Escobar, that itchy, edgy global reporter for one of my favorite online publications, Asia Times, began laying out the great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia, or what he likes to call Pipelineistan for its web of oil and natural gas...

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Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye

Recently, in a Washington Post op-ed, Mark Danner wrote: "However much we would like the [torture] scandal to be confined to the story of what was done in those isolated rooms on the other side of the world where interrogators plied their arts, and in the...

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