BOVARD » Torture

Archive for Torture

The archive page you are viewing contains only excerpts of each post. To view the full post, click on its title.

Saturday 30th January 2010

Justice Department Bans Justice for Torturers

The Obama Justice Department has apparently decided that, since torture is not a crime (at least not anything deserving of prosecution), then concocting legal doctrines that unleashed torturers around the world is also no offense.
A Justice Department internal investigation has concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee were gulity only of “poor judgment” in [...]

Monday 18th January 2010

Gitmo Murders & Pentagon Coverup?

Scott Horton of Harper’s has a great piece online on how three detainees at Gitmo were killed during interrogations. The military responded with an elaborate coverup that claimed the three men committed suicide as an “act of asymmetrical warfare.”
The military’s story has been blow to bits in large part by former Gitmo guards who [...]

Sunday 22nd November 2009

Doonesbury: Torture Remains Prime-Time Entertainment

11:00 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Torture | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

Three cheers for Doonesbury!

Unfortunately, prominent half-wits take their own values from this TV show. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an assembly of judges in the summer of 2007: ““Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives… Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”
I [...]

Monday 9th November 2009

Torture Update: Andy Worthington’s Excellent New Film

Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantanamo Files, is touring the U.S. with his excellent new film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” He will be in California later this week. Tour schedule is here.
“Outside the Law” does a fine job of blending the legal issues and personal details to burn [...]

Tuesday 25th August 2009

On Jamaican Radio tonight (8/25) on Torture Prosecutions

2:22 pm | Torture | Uncategorized | Comments: 0

I will be on the the Evening Edition, a radio program in Kingston, Jamaica, this evening (Tuesday, 8/25) from 7:45 to 8:00 Eastern time. We will discussthe torture investigations and the high criminals who got away.
You can listen live here.
[Newstalk 93 FM Jamaica]
+***
UPDATE: The hosts were very good but the phone connection…. [...]

Monday 24th August 2009

Torturous Betting Odds for Justice?

10:43 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Torture | Uncategorized | Comments: 4

So the Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to prosecute some CIA agents who went beyond the guidelines the Bush administration authorized for extreme interrogations. This is good news.
But will the torture policymakers be exempt from the law?
If so, maybe the pimp media will bring West Virginia’s Lynndie England, the star of the [...]

Sunday 9th August 2009

Iran’s Worst Barbarism: Honesty About Torture

The current government is Iran is a bunch of damn rascals and thugs, and there are boatloads of questions about the honesty of their last election.
The regime’s brutal crackdown on protestors reveals its true character. (But the Iranian government is not novel in this sense: the Syrians have been as brutal with their dissidents, [...]

Friday 17th July 2009

Torture and Political Science

9:15 am | Torture | dictatorship | Comments: 3

Amazing how few political scientists responded to the last 5 years of revelations about torture by the U.S. government.
But perhaps this merely continues that profession’s perennial habit of ignoring the dark side of Leviathan.
British historian Thomas Macaulay noted in his 1837 essay on Francis Bacon that “he who first treated legislation as [...]

Tuesday 23rd June 2009

Celebrate Torture Day by Punishing Torturers

The Future of Freedom Foundation is shotgunning out this email today…..
Celebrate Torture Day by Punishing Torturers
by James Bovard, June 23, 2009
Since 1997, every June 26 has been formally recognized as the International Day of Support for Victims of Torture. Political leaders around the globe take the occasion to proclaim their opposition to barbarism.
On June [...]

Friday 12th June 2009

Perverse Reading Habits of U.S. Attorneys: Shredding Privacy, Except for Torturers

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:
US Attorney subpoenas Las Vegas Review-Journal for info about posters to a web-page story.

“On May 26 the Review-Journal published an article about an ongoing federal tax evasion trial. The primary defendant, Las Vegan Robert Kahre, stands accused of tax fraud for using the rather inventive argument that he could [...]

Wednesday 10th June 2009

The Latest Torture Coverup Scam

The Future of Freedom Foundation is shotgunning out an oped I wrote on the latest torture coverup. Alas, this subject continues to be hell on idealists.
*****
The Latest Torture Cover-Up Scam
by James Bovard, June 10, 2009
The Obama administration appears increasingly devoted to covering up the worst crimes of the Bush era. On Monday, CIA chief Leon [...]

Monday 1st June 2009

Supreme Court Justice Aids Torture Coverup

1:33 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Congress | Torture | Comments: 3

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg approved an Obama administration request to have an additional 30 days to submit their appeal to justify suppressing the photos of US troops torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration can now dally until July 9 before submitting their brief arguing their case.
This is simply one more layer [...]

Friday 29th May 2009

Obama’s Torture Coverup

9:37 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Torture | Comments: 2

Does President Obama have a vested interest in covering up the crimes of the Bush administration?
His decision to block the release of photos of U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reminder that the nation may still be running on “Cheney time.” As long as the photos are not released, former Bush [...]

Friday 8th May 2009

The Real Victims of the Torture Scandal

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds debunks the torture scandal once and for all. In a post entitled “PELOSI LIED, THE WATERBOARDING ISSUE DIED,” Reynolds declares that “the torture issue was mostly a political tool designed to cow right-leaning members of the punditocracy by calling them Nazis. Now that it’s not needed so much, it can [...]

Tuesday 5th May 2009

My 2 Cents on Ron Paul, Surveillance, and the Republican Party’s Future

David Weigel has a good piece in the Washington Independent today on Ron Paul ’s rising influence in Washington. The articles mentions that Ron Paul has been bringing in some folks to have lunch and discuss ideas with some of his Republican colleagues. The article includes a quote from me: “There’s a [...]

Saturday 25th April 2009

Obama’s Double Standard on Atrocities & Evil

At a Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Capitol on Thursday, President Obama called for “fighting the silence that is evil’s greatest co-conspirator.”
On the same day, Obama decided to oppose creation of a truth commission to vigorously investigate and expose U.S. torture crimes.
This is another of those damn paradoxes of which Washington is full of.
Perhaps [...]

Thursday 23rd April 2009

Bullseye on Fascism & Torture

Last week, conservatives were complaining Obama was establishing a socialistic fascist dictatorship.
This week, conservatives are complaining Obama does not want to torture his opponents. from Talking Points Memo
I reckon this is another one of those damn paradoxes Washington is full of.
There are plenty of reasons to vigorously oppose Obama’s power grabs (like Bush’s power [...]

Friday 17th April 2009

Obama-Style “Nation of Laws”

Obama proudly declared yesterday that ours is a “nation of laws” at the same time he announced that CIA torturers would not be prosecuted for their crimes.
Life in Washington is one damn paradox after another.
Kudos to the American Civil Liberties Union for their lawsuit that compelled the disclosure of the torture memos yesterday. But [...]

Friday 13th March 2009

Part 2 of “How Abu Ghraib was Politically Defused”

The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today the second part of my analysis of “How Abu Ghraib was Politically Defused.”
It is amazing how little attention was paid to the heap of evidence of torture-as-official-policy until long after Bush snared a second term.
Here is a link to a permanent web page with both articles on [...]

books

information:

archives:

search:

info: