More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” U.S. justice remains mired in Kafkaesque legal swamps at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram, places where murky theories about “unlawful combatants” mean detainees have no real…
Category: Human Rights
Israel Wants EU to Decry Hezbollah
Sweeping assertions by Israeli officials regarding their certainty about the authorship of a bus bombing in Bulgaria last week pinning it first on Iran and then Hezbollah may not be backed up by solid intelligence, but it may help rally…
The Center Crumbles; the Right Grows
Ironically, the American Left has pined for the collapse of the Center, assuming that the outcome would be more progressive. But as the Center now crumbles, the result seems more likely to be a lurching toward an irrational Right under corporate…
Debunking Some Anti-Iran Agit-Prop
Led by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, hard-line critics of Iran were quick to jump to a conclusion blaming its operatives for a bus bombing targeting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Some Israeli and Western media even cited a speech by Iran’s…
Rushing to Judgment on Bus Bomb
In rushing to judgment blaming Iran for a bus bombing in Bulgaria, Israeli officials and neocon writers cited the conventional wisdom about Iran’s authorship of a bombing in Argentina in 1994. However, the investigation of that case was deeply compromised…
America’s Twisted Notion of Freedom
In America, “freedom” now means the right to inflict harm on the community, whether it’s the freedom of Wall Street bankers to gamble recklessly, the freedom of the rich to shut factories and off-shore jobs or the freedom to swagger around…
America: A Nation of Wildebeest
Exclusive: The slaughter of 12 moviegoers at the new Batman film in Aurora, Colorado, recalls other moments of horror known by names like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson. But the repetition of such gun violence and the lack of a coherent response make Americans…
The Long Night of Gun Violence
The well-organized anger of the Right in favor of guns has silenced many Americans who recognize the madness of letting mentally fragile human beings run around with assault rifles. Will the latest massacre in Colorado do anything to change this strange…
Lamenting the Dead, Not the Laws
Politicians and pundits are again lamenting the latest slaughter in Colorado, where a dozen moviegoers were murdered by a troubled young man who had no trouble buying an assault rifle and other guns. But the horror will be transient while…
Reviving the Rendition Debate
Bush-era torture and extraordinary rendition have been pushed aside by the Obama administration, as it still seeks to look forward, not backward. But a group of international parliamentarians revived the troubling issue in calling for serious investigations now, not later,…