Karen Greenberg

For more than 18 years, Karen Greenberg has been writing about the crimes the U.S. committed at its offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It would be, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans, “the least worst place” (a phrase Greenberg turned into the title of her book on the subject). Sorry, Don, … Continue reading “The Forever War’s Forever Legacy”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the Blindman’s Buff variation of tag, a child designated as “It” is tasked with tapping another child while wearing a blindfold. The sightless child knows the other children, all able to see, are there but is left to stumble around, using sounds and knowledge of the space they’re in as … Continue reading “Crimes Against Humanity, American-Style”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In March 2007, Karen Greenberg reported on a visit she had made to the war-on-terror prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and what it felt like to be distinctly offshore of American justice. She began that piece this way: “Several weeks ago, I took the infamous … Continue reading “Confronting America’s Forever Prison”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yes, many of its prisoners, swept up in the early days of the war on terror, had committed no hostile acts against this country or its allies (55% of them, according to one study). And yes, they were dressed in those unforgettable orange jumpsuits that ISIS would later so horrifically put … Continue reading “Guantánamo’s Forever Elusive Endgame”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our … Continue reading “No Accountability and No Apologies”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. If it hasn’t been forever, it’s certainly felt like it. Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the American-installed government there collapsed, its leader fled the country, and its American-trained military (already well staffed with plenty of “ghost” troops) evaporated. Many of the government soldiers … Continue reading “Will the Forever Wars Become Forever Policy?”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It seemed obvious enough to me in 2006. When you included the CIA’s “black sites” around the globe (where prisoners from the war on terror were being kept and regularly tortured), American military prisons like the shocking Abu Ghraib in Iraq, which had just then been emptied, and the huge military … Continue reading “The Guantánamo Conundrum”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in 2012, I stumbled across figures on the U.S. government’s classification of documents and was stunned. In 2011, 92,064,862 of them had been sequestered and 26,058,678 of those given “top secret” status. (Who even knew that so many documents could be generated by a single government?) And that top-secret figure, … Continue reading “Now You See It, Now You Don’t”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. After six all-American decades in business, Toys “R” Us crashed in 2018, closing its 735 U.S. stores and filing for bankruptcy. As it happens, however, the Washington-branded outfit, Mistreatment and Misconduct “R” Us (or M&M “R” Us), continues to thrive, as it has this century so far. In case the holiday … Continue reading “On Board the USS Detention“