U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners...
Her white hair peeked out from under a brilliant cerulean blue headscarf. Her lips and teeth were stained red from chewing areca nut and betel leaf, a mild stimulant favored by older Vietnamese women. She was missing her right eye. She also appeared to be in danger of...
Since even readers of The New York Times are aware of Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan’s open identification with torture, secret prisons, and other abuses of national and international law, Fordham University’s invitation to him to give the commencement...
Treat 'em harshly,Go to town!There's no courtTo bring us down. Torture isn't a good subject to fail on one's moral report card. If you're an individual, St. Peter is likely to take a dim view. If you're a nation, it can cost you plenty of international prestige,...
Americans are frequently most hypocritical when they are responding to a sex scandal. The tale of the sins and omissions of the Obama secret service team in Colombia is still being revealed, piece by piece. The miscreants constituted a so-called advance team, flying...
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers. Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark...
History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the "tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation, and the like...
During the recent Republican presidential primary debates, three candidates said without hesitation that they would authorize waterboarding as an interrogation technique if elected president. In their recent memoirs, both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney admitted with...
The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse edited by Marjorie Cohn (New York University Press: 2011), 342 pages. When I was a child in Reagan's America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained...
From the coups that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende in the Cold War to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the CIA has built a solid reputation as an extralegal agent of international sabotage and...
