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How the British Empire Created and Killed George Orwell
by Martin Sieff
This is the fascinating story of Orwell’s unknown past and slow motion suicide from guilt and torment. Like O’Brien in 1984, Orwell tortured prisoners in Burma in service to the British Empire. Live rat torture was a regular practice of British troops, not a fantastic creation of Orwell’s imagination. His work for the BBC became the basis for the Ministry of Truth.
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 Naomi Klein, Author of "The Shock Doctrine", On "Coronavirus Capitalism" Author, activist and journalist Naomi Klein says the coronavirus crisis, like earlier ones, could be a catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to most workers and small businesses. In 2007, Klein wrote “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Now she argues President Trump’s p... |
 UN Human Rights Commissioner refuses to bend knee This is the low-point of the past year - Yet, it is also the beginning of the return of RA! The Sun will return, the Days will lengthen. Darkness will vanish.Or will it?UN Human Rights Commissioner has announced he will not seek a 2nd term. The US is pressuring him to get back on track and Support Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel - With all the Religious and Political and Social Pressure ... 2 |
 Apologies for torture seem to be the hardest words Imagine that you live in a city where you must drive past the offices of individuals whose decisions and actions led to your torture. These individuals -- they might be called "violence workers" or "desk torturers" -- are celebrated as honourable people who acted in the "best of faith" even though they knowingly created false descriptions of you as an "imminent threat" to state security, landing you in an abominable dungeon. 1 |
 Military Officers and Generals to Trump: Don't Torture A total of 176 retired officers, generals and admirals have written a letter to GOP President-elect Donald Trump, urging him not to reinstate the use of torture.In a letter dated Jan. 6, these retired military officials are asking Trump not to pursue past promises to bring back waterboarding and other practices that are “a hell of a lot worse.” 3 |
History of US adventures in regime change
DelancyPlace.com sends out an interesting non-fiction book excerpt daily. Today (July 29) the excerpt is from These United States by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue. The subject of the excerpt is Guatemala and how we overthrew its democratically elected government in 1954 and with CIA intervention created the horror show theme that has become the hallmark of our foreign policy. From the excerpt:... |
 Natylie Baldwin: The CIA's Torture Defenders One might well ask whether publishing an ostensibly serious book justifying torture could even happen anywhere but in the United States. The contributors are all retired now with generous pensions and lucrative second career positions in the National Security industry. But regrettably their legacy endures. Outright lying and plausible dissimulating continue to be the name of the game in Washington. 1 |
"New York Times: Prosecute Cheney" The New York Times editorial board has called upon President Barack Obama to prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney for the torture of terrorism suspects. The sharply worded editorial, published Monday, comes amid an effort by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch to launch an investigation into U.S. torture practices. The two groups will submit a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday cal... 19 |
UN torture report criticises Australia's refugee policies
"The Australian government has flatly rejected, and directly defied, a report by the Geneva-based UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) stating that the country's refugee policies could be in breach of the UN Convention Against Torture."
With what has been brought out about torture in the United States are we to assume there are no UN concerns? If not why not? If so, why are the Corporate Media Propagandists not reporting suc... |
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"The Senate Report on the C.I.A.'s Torture and Lies", by the Editorial Board of the NY Times The world has long known that the United States government illegally detained and tortured prisoners after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and lied about it to Congress and the world. But the summary of a report released today of the Senate investigation of these operations, even after being sanitized by the Central Intelligence Agency itself, is a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to st... |
"Barbaric Beyond Measure," NY Times ediorial about Albert Woodfox's four decades in solitary confinement 42 Years In Solitary! The facts of the case were on Albert Woodfox's side: There was no physical evidence linking him or his co-defendant, Herman Wallace, to the murder, and prosecutors did not reveal that their main witness had been bribed to testify against the men. Mr. Woodfox, by all accounts, has been a model prisoner, and under Louisiana prison policy this should have earned him his exit from solitary confinement years a... 1 |
Eroc Holder's Five Crucial Failures So Eric Holder is finally resigning as Attorney General. Good riddance! He failed miserably in five crucial areas. First, he refused to prosecute George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld for breaking the treaty against torture and the statutes that also prohibit it. Second, he let Wall Street CEOs off the hook for messing around with mortgage derivatives, misleading investors and clients, ... 2 |
 The CIA Must Tell the Truth About My Rendition At 12 Years Old This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee is fighting the White House and the CIA over pre-publication redactions made to a Congressional report on the agency's use of torture and rendition. This debate is very personal for Khadija al-Saadi, who at 12 years old was rendered from Hong Kong to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004. |
 Action Alert: Demand an end to Arthur "Cetewayo" Johnson's 34 years in solitary confinement Arthur "Cetewayo" Johnson is a politicized prisoner who has been held in solitary confinement by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) since 1979. Despite his exemplary disciplinary record of the past 25 years, and his recently turning 61 years old, Cetewayo continues to be subjected to 23-24-hour lockdown in solitary confinement with its attendant austerity, monotony, and deprivations. He has not had human conta... |
Once Upon a Time...: If You Love Martyrs So Much, Then You Be One "Some will object to my statement that Manning is being tortured today. They will acknowledge that he was held in solitary confinement and forced to sleep naked for months on end (among other inhumane practices), and that unquestionably was torture. But all that is over, and now he is "only" being imprisoned because of his actions. And he may still be sentenced to decades in prison, but he will not be subjected to inhumane con... 4 |
 Is It Legal Malpractice to Fail to Get Holder to Promise Not To Torture Your Client? "The idea that the Attorney General of the United States of America would send such a letter to the representative of a foreign government, particularly Russia under the leadership of a former KGB official, was so preposterous that I thought the first news report I read about Attorney General Holder's letter concerning Edward Snowden was satire. The joke, however, was on me." 1 |
CIA Director convicted of torture charges! Not. But Italy's Spy Chief is.
No, it can't happen here, but it does happen in countries that actually have an independent judiciary.
"This entire case reveals vital facts about the culture of impunity for high-level officials that prevails in the US even when they commit the most egregious crimes:" |
The dangerous rebranding of John Brennan The timing couldn't have been coincidental. Just as a previously secret memo to Congress from the US Department of Justice's Office of Legal Council was released by NBC News and picked up by every major media outlet, the process of rebranding President Obama's pick to head the CIA, John Brennan, from enabler of torture and mastermind of the drone assassination, to a crusader for peace and civil rights began in earnest. This is... |
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Torture and the Dark Side of "Zero Dark Thirty" Critique of the Oscar-nominated film "Zero Dark Thirty" and an analysis of the controversy surrounding its depiction of torture. 2 |
 How America Became a Global Kidnapper and Torturer Two days after the 9/11 attacks, during a meeting of Bush's closest advisers, Cofer Black declared the country's enemies must be left with "flies walking across their eyeballs'. It was an image of death so striking that Black became known among the President's inner circle as "the flies on the eyeballs guy'. Unlike its allies -- the UK, France, Spain and Israel -- the US had little experience of serious terrorist attacks on it... 1 |
 Metro UK editorial about solitary confinement in the US cites the case of the Angola 3 It has been denounced as torture by the United Nations and is virtually unheard of in Britain. But in the US, solitary confinement is widely used, as radical cleric Abu Hamza and four other extradited terror suspects may soon discover...Supermax inmates may be held for years and even decades with virtually no human contact and this year two men in Louisiana -- Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox -- marked the grim milestone of 4... |
 Leaked Memo: Mitt Romney aides propose return of waterboarding Mitt Romney should scrap Barack Obama's ban on the torture of terror suspects and consider re-introducing waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" if he is elected president, a leaked Romney campaign policy document has urged. The five-page memo entitled "Interrogation Techniques" advised Mr Romney to "rescind and replace" Mr Obama's executive order outlawing the use of all torture. 4 |
Taking Liberties: Canada's Growing Torture Infrastructure | Rabble.ca
The ease with which self-described democratic states embroil themselves in torture continues to be illustrated by the manner in which agencies of the Canadian state, from spies to judges, have wedged open a door to legitimize complicity in a practice that both domestic and international law ban outright. |
The Right to Counsel at Guantánamo Bay
Lawyers for the government and for detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are scheduled to square off in federal court in Washington on Friday over new rules imposed this spring by the Obama administration restricting access to counsel for prisoners not actively challenging their detention. They are neither fair nor constitutional. |
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A Spiteful New Policy at Guantanamo Bay
The Obama administration's latest overuse of executive authority at Guantánamo Bay is a decision not to let lawyers visit clients in detention under terms that have been in place since 2004. Because these meetings pose little risk and would send a message about America's adherence to the rule of law, the administration looks as if it is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their... |
 Citing the Angola 3 case, TIME says "It's Time To End Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons " This week, the Angola 3 and the broader issue of torture in US prisons was the focus of a Time Magazine essay. Time's Adam Cohen writes: In April, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace marked a grim anniversary. The two Louisiana State Prison inmates, both in their 60s, had been held in solitary confinement for 40 years. Amnesty International condemned their punishment as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" and called it a violation of... |
 Unexceptionalism - A Primer If you're the newly anointed president, react to a terrorist attack by invading a nonterrorist country. Despite the loss or disablement of untold numbers of lives, manage your war so that its results will be indeterminate. Using the state of war as justification, order secret surveillance of American citizens, data mine their phone calls and e-mail, make business, medical and public library records available to government ... 2 |
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How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners
I read nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents about America's abuse of prisoners since 2001. Here is what I learned...it all started with ONE document. On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run sec... |
Why Obama's 'targeted killing' is worse than Bush's torture "Targeted killing" is the killing of certain individuals away from battle zones using military means, including missiles, bombs and commando raids. The missiles and bombs are often delivered by drone aircraft. Given the munitions, it is the rare attack that spares the lives of bystanders -- over 2,200 persons are estimated to have been killed in the three years of the Obama administration in Pakistan alone. 1 |
Money can't heal their wounds
From a bank executive to a medical student to the imam of a mosque to an embroidery worker, everyone arrested on false charges of involvement in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast has a frightening story to tell.Four years after they were subjected to torture by police in illegal custody, they are yet to overcome the trauma and are not sure if they can ever lead a normal life again. 1 |
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