Reprinted with permission from Washington’s Blog What Americans STILL Don’t Know… New polls show that – even after the Senate torture report showed that torture is unnecessary and doesn’t work – Americans still think torture is necessary and works. Why? ...

Norman Pollack RINF Alternative News When will America be cleansed of its fascistic rot? Never, because its institutional core not only protects but generates this rot. The rot? Today, revelations of torture, but torture is merely the excremental if not ...

In all the media debate about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release, finally, of a heavily redacted report on officially sanctioned torture by the CIA and the US military during the Bush/Cheney administration and the so-called War on Terror, there has ...

Mass march demands abolition of water fees, which are part of broader austerity push Sarah Lazare “We can’t pay! We won’t pay!” was the call of tens of thousands who took to the streets of Dublin, Ireland on Wednesday to ...

Former operative John Kiriakou, currently in prison, was charged with a crime after helping expose widespread abuses conducted by agency Sarah Lazare There is only one U.S. government employee who has gone to jail in connection with the widespread torture ...

The intelligence committee of the United States Senate has released its long-awaited congressional report detailing the CIA’s use of torture on prisoners in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On Tuesday, the executive summary of the roughly ...

The problem wasn’t carrying out torture. It was that releasing a report into torture might increase the chance of terrorism. That was the deliberately obtuse response from the media to a report examining the CIA’s use of torture. After a ...

As the US administration prepares for the release of a long-awaited report examining the CIA’s use of torture post 9/11, Britain’s previously undisclosed role in the controversial rendition program is set to become clearer. Following a six-year examination of CIA ...

Alexis Agathocleous George Ruiz is 72 years old. For the past 30 years, he has spent every day alone — locked in a cramped, windowless cell inside the Security Housing Unit (SHU) first at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, then ...

Sarah Mehta On Wednesday, the United Nations Committee Against Torture began its review of the United States’ record on torture—not only at the infamous Guantánamo Bay but closer to home, in our prisons, police forces, and immigration facilities. The U.S. ...

CHARLES GLASS “Protest is a right, repression is a crime.” Written on a wall at the Escuela Normal Rural Raùl Isidro Burgos, Guerrero State, Mexico, where 43 students were kidnapped following clashes with police on 26 September 2014. Three people ...

The US has announced that it will this week tell the United Nations that it now considers a ban against torture to apply to US prisoners held overseas – including those 148 men held without charge or trial at Guantanamo ...

STEVE BREYMAN On November 12—thirteen years after the onset of George W. Bush’s dirty underground war against “unlawful combatants”—the Obama administration finally told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the United States believed, in the words of Assistant Secretary ...

Despite earlier indications, White House tells panel in Geneva that U.S.  will abide by UN Convention Against Torture… for the most part  Jon Queally The Obama administration indicated on Wednesday that it will back away from a position held by ...

Appearing today before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, U.S. representatives acknowledged that the country’s legal obligations under a major anti-torture treaty apply to certain places outside the United States. The position is a departure from the Bush administration’s, which ...

British security company G4S is refusing to address concerns over its involvement in the running of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay. Human rights charity Reprieve submitted a complaint to the UK government earlier this year, arguing that G4S has ...

A former government adviser has called the UK’s efforts to curb slavery and human trafficking a “lost opportunity,” claiming the proposed bill, to be debated by MPs this week, would still leave abused victims vulnerable to exploitation. Anthony Steen, chair ...

Over 100 demonstrations held across Ireland protesting austerity scheme to tax, privatize water supply Lauren McCauley Protest organizers Right 2 Water estimate that over 150,000 people came out to protest the water charge scheme. In a statement released Saturday afternoon, ...

FRANCES WEBBER There is more to the Tories’ proposals on human rights and free movement than mere electioneering, argues Frances Webber of the Institute of Race Relations. The October 2014 Conservative party conference was dominated by justice minister Chris Grayling’s ...

One of the numerous issues being carefully avoided by the political establishment in the US midterm elections, now less than one week away, is the constitutional crisis surrounding the plot to cover up torture carried out by the CIA. All ...

Dan Bacher In the home of the Free Speech Movement at the U.C. Berkeley campus, students got a rude awakening when what they describe as an administrator “with clear political motivations” shut down the Beehive Collective’s art project on drought ...

Torture politics makes for strange bedfellows. For those of you who think the Obama Administration doesn’t know how to work with Republicans, think again. North Carolina’s Republican Senator, Richard Burr, may soon be one of the Obama Administration’s best friends. ...

Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights rejects the idea that the convention on torture exempts the US outside its borders

During and after Israel’s war on Gaza, bipartisan congressional majorities have worked to undermine war crimes investigations by the United Nations and human rights groups Stephen Zunes Israel’s seven weeks of attacks this summer on heavily populated civilian neighborhoods in ...

We have human rights because we are human, not because we are British. Forced to abandon NHS bashing for the sake of the election, David Cameron needed to feed the right some red meat. He chose the European Convention on ...

Lawrence Davidson The traditional criterion for state legitimacy was very simple. If a state and its government could hold and govern territory, it was legitimate, at least in the eyes of other governments. The form of government and its behavior ...

An unprecedented trial to assess the legality of force-feeding methods used at Guantanamo Bay will begin today, Monday Oct 6, at 10am (EST) in courtroom 26A of the District Court, Washington DC. The trial, in the case of Dhiab v. ...

The Tory plan to break with the European court is all about blunting Ukip’s bayonets – channelling rage that should be aimed elsewhere Jonathan Freedland It’s the spelling mistake that gives the game away. Like a twist in a fine ...

Linn Washington Police carp about college students’ selection of a prison inmate for their commencement speaker. It must have something to do with Mumia Abu-Jamal…the man that cops across America love to hate. Chuck Canterbury, National President of the Fraternal ...

Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to terminate the Human Rights Act if the Conservatives are re-elected in Britain’s 2015 general election. The controversial proposal has stoked the ire of civil rights groups across the nation. Speaking on the final ...

Justice minister’s attack to destroy ability to challenge state Amberhawk Training According to most of the broadsheets, if there is a Conservative government after the next General Election, the European Court of Human Rights will no longer be able to ...

LISA SIMEONE Several stories have been circulating recently about people’s medications being confiscated by the TSA. In some cases, these are potentially lifesaving medications, such as nitroglycerin for heart patients or insulin for diabetics.  We’ve written in the past about ...

After more than a decade of criticism, the New York Timesexecutive editor Dean Baquet announced (8/7/14) that when the paper reports on US torture, it will call it “torture” (FAIR Blog,8/8/14). But what if the paper decides that well-documented evidence of US torture ...

“It would be much better if the U.S. did not award contracts to companies with horrendous track records and itself stopped human rights abuses at Guantanamo.” Sarah Lazare A British private security company that has been accused of numerous human ...

Rights group, lawyer give Sept. 4 deadline for Manning’s Gender Dysphoria to be treated Andrea Germanos The medical needs and therefore constitutional rights of Chelsea Manning continue to be ignored during her incarceration, a fact that has prompted the threat ...

Jeff Bachman On Aug. 1, President Barack Obama stated in an oddly casual manner that “we tortured some folks.” As Obama is well aware, torture is a violation of international law. It is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their ...

Britain could have had its own Guantanamo Bay, according to classified documents detailing discussions between the US and Tony Blair’s government. The prison, which could have been built in the British territory of Diego Garcia, would have hosted up to ...

William Blum Since the “war on terror,” the  before  , there was the argument pretense that Two of the things that governments tend to cover-up or lie about the most are assassinations and torture, both of which are widely looked ...

An American accused of conspiring to aid the militant group Islamic State was ordered by a New York judge to be held without bail after he was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport earlier this month, according to the ...

Watching Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians in Gaza over our TV screens makes it easy to forget about the human rights abuses taking place right here on American soil. Sybrina Fulton and Ron Davis, whose sons were killed in what ...

Eric London Senator Dianne Feinstein announced last Friday that the Senate Intelligence Committee would delay the release of a declassified summary of its voluminous report on CIA torture programs during the Bush administration due to the scale of redactions made ...

Professor and political activist Cornel West declared President Barack Obama a “war criminal,” arguing that his support of Israel and his drone policy make him complicit in the deaths of innocent people. The controversial activist made the comments at a ...

Lawrence Davidson By the end of the 19th Century, it was recognized by those concerned with human rights that the nation-state was a destructive anachronism. It was an entity that seemed addicted to periodic spasms of mass violence, particularly in the ...

Obama just admitted that the United States tortured people. Apparently, he’s softening up the public for the imminent release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA. The Committee’s report “will reveal new and shocking details about the CIA’s detention, rendition and interrogation program in ...

I don’t want to understate how seriously wrong it is that the CIA searched Senate computers. Our constitutional order is seriously out of whack when the executive branch acts with that kind of impunity — to its overseers, no less. But given everything ...

Unlike previous centuries and epochs, modern warfare is not restricted solely to the battlefield. Rather, it extends into the information sphere where the dissemination of propaganda and the construction of narratives are of equal importance to weapons and soldiers. For ...

When the CIA first began using its controversial interrogation and detention methods after the September 11th attacks, it reportedly declined to tell the Secretary of State and other American ambassadors about its actions. The revelation comes from the Senate’s still-unreleased ...

Jeff Bachman RINF Alternative News On July 15, the Miami Herald reported that a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue to participate in the force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay prisoners who are on hunger strike. According to Cori Crider of Reprieve, who was ...

Rarely-used resolution may allow Senate to declassify documents without presidential approval Nadia Prupis U.S. Senators are considering using a special rule to compel the White House to reveal the information from their investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 use of torture ...

Hannah K. Gold Earlier this month, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson announced that his office would no longer, in many cases, prosecute low-level marijuana possession. Despite being limited to Brooklyn and allowing exceptions for people smoking in public areas or ...

Joachim Hagopian Journalist Mai Bei, (Yahoo News) is reminding America of its recent dark past vis-à-vis that longtime rogue agency the CIA’s global torture operations during that rogue regime of the Bush administration. The plot thickens with the Senate Intelligence Committee ...

With all eyes glued on the atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine, another homegrown atrocity may soon be underway. The Obama administration has quietly executed one of those sneaky summer weekend news dumps in hopes of nobody noticing or caring. Because ...

“We are not living in a democratic society” The shut off of water to tens of thousands of Detroit residents has provoked widespread anger and opposition throughout the city and beyond. As part of a broader corporate-imposed bankruptcy restructuring, the ...

Kevin Mathews We’ve been following the Guantanamo Bay prisoner hunger strikes for some time now, but the situation has inexplicably not improved. In fact, things have gotten so terrible that one of the nurses assigned to administer the force-feedings has declined ...

“If I end up in chains in Guantanamo I can live with that,” Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor-turned-privacy advocate, told the Guardian newspaper during a recent interview released in part by the paper on Thursday. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger ...