Posts Tagged ‘Donald Rumsfeld’

“A Few Bad Apples”

 “A Few Bad Apples”               On October 19, 2003,[1]  Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company picked up a Sony Cybershot camera and began taking photographs of life on Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib prison.  She documented naked prisoners being stacked like cordwood, prisoners being threatened by attack dogs, hooded prisoners, beaten […]

Various Circles of Hell

Various Circles of Hell Jack L. B. Gohn               Because of the agonizingly slow leakage of information concerning the previous administration’s practices of internment and interrogation of Muslim men, it is only recently that the Central Intelligence Agency component has come into focus.               When the Abu Ghraib photos were first leaked to […]

War Powers, War Lies: Part 11: Why We Fought

To read the groupthinkers’ policy statements from the decade preceding 9/11, it appears that they believed it was time for the U.S. to establish that it had the military power to do anything it pleased in the Middle East. Somehow this would guarantee our access to oil, assure Israel’s survival, and perpetuate our ascendancy over what the hawks’ fellow-traveler journalist Christopher Hitchens has called “Islamo-fascism.” And apparently Iraq was to be the showcase for this program. But within the echo-chamber that was the hawks’ ruminations, the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 10: Kangaroo

And here is the moral, strategic, and tactical problem: How we can expect the world to accord full faith and credit to that court’s eventual verdict when we establish and countenance tribunals that are themselves human rights violations? A question urgently worth pondering.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 7: Captive Taxonomy

But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.