Tag: Human Rights Watch

Among the men about to undergo military trials at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind. By Peter Finn Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 7, 2009 The military judge overseeing proceedings against five of the men...

"My sense of alarm comes from the clear lessons from history that, once certain checks and balances are destroyed, and once certain institutions have been intimidated, the pressures that can...

Naomi Wolf in her blog of Dec. 13 brings a necessary note of outrage to the unfolding story of the torture tapes. Let us not forget, as we examine the affair around the CIA's claim to have destroyed video records of prisoner interrogations, that U.S. government officials have already admitted or directly and publicly confessed to a series of crimes: torture, lying to a government investigation, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence. Wolf argues for adding murder as a charge. There is no rationale left for not convening an immediate, independent investigation by special prosecutor. Wolf: "What we are likely to see if the tapes... are ever recovered is that the "confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country [were] obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members... if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes)." Elsewhere, for further speculation on what the CIA may be hiding, a discussion thread at Democratic Underground by poster leveymg makes the case that "Abu Zubaydah was a key Al-Qaeda figure in the CIA's Chechnya operation, which involved several of the 9/11 hijackers. He was in a position to know about the relationship of the 9/11 Hamburg cell with the CIA." Meanwhile, we recommend the full text of Naomi Wolf's article, after the jump...

Two bits of good news today, one from a federal appeals court and one from a US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials... Can't sum it up any better than this ... "You know you're living in a Reichwing dictatorship when the Nuremberg prosecutor is critical of your regime." Lori Price, Citizens for Legitimate Government