Iraq

Juan Cole, the indefatigable commentator on human rights and Middle Eastern affairs, has picked up on a translation of a fascinating interview in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo with Damien Corsetti, a former US Army private, who worked as an interrogator in the notorious US prisons at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in [...]

The delivery of a new “terror suspect” to Guantánamo makes five new arrivals since March. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, looks at their stories, and asks what the administration –- under pressure in the Supreme Court, and with no functioning “war crimes” trials [...]

For the background on Dick Cheney’s rise to power, I recommend John Nichols’ Dick: The Man Who Is President (New Press, 2004), published in paperback in 2005 as The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney. This is a review that I wrote for the website Nth Position:
The man at the heart of investigative reporter [...]

Return to Abu Ghraib
Don’t miss Seymour Hersh’s essential article, The General’s Report, in this week’s New Yorker, based on interviews with former US army general Antonio Taguba. Ordered by the Pentagon to investigate abuses at Abu Ghraib by the 800th Military Police Brigade, Taguba was belittled by Rumsfeld and his acolytes after the report was [...]

While I’m working on The Guantanamo Files, here’s something relevant to the whole topic: a review I did of Mark Danner’s excellent analysis of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Torture and Truth, which was featured on the Nth Position website:
‘Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror’ by Mark Danner (Granta, 2005)
On April [...]