Mouth Wide Shut

by John Feffer Barack Obama was, in 2008, the anti-torture candidate. It’s a sad comment on the state of U.S. democracy that such a thing ever existed. After all, it would be startling to hear appeals from a pro-oxygen or… Continue Reading

Bush-Era Torture Apologists Whitewash Their Crimes

by John Kiriakou The CIA’s torture-era leadership just won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and… Continue Reading

The Unwritten American Rules of the Road

by Alfred W. McCoy “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s… Continue Reading

The Uses of Torture

by Peter Costantini “Enhanced interrogation”: the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka’s Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But although it sounds like some new kind of… Continue Reading