From the category archives:

Bush Administration

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

March 6, 2010

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes:
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as [...]

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The new McCarthyism

March 5, 2010

In The American Prospect, Adam Serwer writes:
The “Gitmo Nine” aren’t terrorists. They weren’t captured fighting for the Taliban. They’ve made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven’t declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The “Gitmo Nine” are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought the [...]

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Are we living in the post-moral age?

February 20, 2010

Rafi Eitan, an Israeli elder statesman and former intelligence officer is perhaps best known for having led the Mossad operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, and brought him back to face trial and execution in Israel in 1962.
In an interview with Haaretz this week, Eitan summed up the Zeitgeist in which we [...]

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The crime of not “looking backward”

January 20, 2010

The crime of not “looking backward”
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 19, 2010
The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout [...]

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What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s?

January 8, 2010

What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s?
By Jacob Sullum, Reason, January 6, 2010
If Obama is pretending we are not at war, he is not doing a very good job of it. “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” he declared in his inaugural address. “I don’t think [...]

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War in the Age of Terrorism

January 4, 2010

War in the Age of Terrorism
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 4, 2010
This is change: we’ve gone from change we can believe in, to a change in the mood music.
If Dick Cheney was the éminence grise behind George Bush, one could now be forgiven for thinking that George Bush himself has quietly taken on [...]

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President Obama takes the heat President Bush did not

December 30, 2009

President Obama takes the heat President Bush did not
By Josh Gerstein, Politico, December 29, 2009
Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But [...]

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What Goldstone says about the US

November 12, 2009

What Goldstone says about the US
By Mark LeVine, Al Jazeera, November 11, 2009
… if Israel is guilty of committing systematic war crimes across Gaza and the West Bank, then the US, which supported, funded and armed Israel during the war, is an accessory to those crimes.
Goldstone explains in no uncertain terms that Gaza was not [...]

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Me talk presidential one day

September 16, 2009

Me talk presidential one day
By Matt Latimer, GQ, October, 2009
If my colleagues at the White House were even momentarily scared straight about McCain over the convention fracas, the clarity wore off just as quickly as it came when the very conservative governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, was picked as McCain’s running mate. I didn’t have [...]

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‘I told the US to talk to the Taliban. They jailed me’

September 13, 2009

‘I told the US to talk to the Taliban. They jailed me’
By Kim Sengupta, The Independent, September 12, 2009
He was the man they called the mullah with a human face, the internet mullah, or the Rudolph Hess of the Taliban. Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil was the Taliban’s foreign minister. It was he who in October 2001, [...]

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September 9: The shot that was not heard round the world

September 9, 2009

September 9: The shot that was not heard round the world
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 9, 2009
As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, in the minds of most Americans the attacks of September 11, 2001 remain the signal event that shaped everything that has followed. Yet had we been paying more [...]

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Airline bomb plotters case threatened by US fears

September 8, 2009

Airline bomb plotters case threatened by US fears
By Vikram Dodd and Lee Glendinning, The Guardian, September 8, 2009
Several months of high-level surveillance on the key suspects in the airline bomb plot was almost foiled by the nervousness of US authorities who “lost their nerve”, according to Scotland Yard’s then head of counter-terrorism operations.
Andy Hayman, who [...]

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U.S. tried to soften treaty on detainees

September 8, 2009

U.S. tried to soften treaty on detainees
By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, September 8, 2009
From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish “enforced disappearances” so that those overseeing the CIA’s secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, [...]

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