Category: Torture
A Man Can Smile and Smile and Yet Be A Villain
February 2nd, 2009, 6 Comments
It seems the new administration, for all it’s warm fuzziness, considers only Americans human enough to have actual human rights. The rest of us are still fair game for state-licensed kidnap and US torture at one remove. But Obama won’t torture, he’s said so, hasn’t he? He was a constitutional scholar, surely he’s way too [...]
Do Not Let Them Go Gently
November 6th, 2008, 2 Comments
Woah, what a night. How was it for you, Ron Paul supporters? Ah. Maybe I shoudln’t have asked. I have to say myself I’ve never been so glad to say I was wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong, double underlined wrong, in illuminated letters wrong. The Republicans didn’t ratfuck the election, martial law was not declared, no-one [...]
Unmaking A Myth
October 14th, 2008, No Comments
Was John McCain even tortured at all? If (underlined twice) this story is true then the central plank of his self-constructed personal mythology is rotten: From the Corriere della Serra via this morning’s Guardian: The Republican US presidential candidate John McCain was not tortured during his captivity in North Vietnam, the chief prison guard of [...]
Yet More Taser Terror
September 26th, 2008, No Comments
Digby: This video is so awful, it will make you sick to watch it. An officer appears to have violated police department guidelines when he used a Taser stun gun on a naked, distraught man teetering on a building ledge, officials said Thursday. Inman Morales, 35, was pronounced dead at a hospital after his nearly [...]
…And Are The Bodies Buried In The Rose Garden?
August 11th, 2008, No Comments
Think Progress confirms something I’ve always suspected: Bush White House has its own interrogation room.» In Ron Suskind’s new book, Suskind describes a disturbing case in Washington, D.C., where security officials detained and interrogated Usman Khosa, a Pakistani U.S. college graduate, because he was “fiddling” with his iPod near White House gates. Officials took Khosa [...]
Torture porn
July 16th, 2008, No Comments
During World War 2, Hitler and his pals liked nothing so much as have a nice little torture film after dinner, recordings made during Gestapo interrogation sessions. Would it go too far to believe Bush and Cheney may have done the same with videotapes from Guantanamo Bay, for example this video of the interrogation by [...]
Deporting people difficult? Not if you drug them
May 15th, 2008, No Comments
Reason 1,567,801 not to move to the US anytime soon: The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged. The [...]
So much for the “bottom up” theory of torture
April 11th, 2008, 1 Comment
When the first reports about the use of torture and worse came out it was dismissed by the Bush administration as just the work of a few rotten apples. Once that story became untenable, an alternate defence was brought out. Supposedly the use of torture, sorry, “enhanced interrogation techniques had not been approved by the [...]
Show trial
February 11th, 2008, No Comments
The Washington Post reports that the US military is ready to start its 9/11 show trials. Well, what else do you call a trial in which much of the evidence has been extracted by torture, the suspects have been kept imprisoned for years without being charged and it’s only through a Supreme Court ruling that [...]
Set Incoherent Outrage Meter To Stun
December 12th, 2007, No Comments
Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, courtesy Moby in Sadly No’s comments. This really is a forthcoming movie. I can’t begin to articulate my what, rage? Sickness? No, neither are quite it. That someone in Hollywood apparently thinks routine torture and injustice are are just a normal hazard of life to make comedy (and [...]
