Berkeley Says No to Torture Week (October 2010)

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.   I’ve recently been going through my (nearly) ten-year archive of articles about Guantánamo and related issues, in an effort to work out what […]

In another exclusive report for Truthout, my friends and colleagues Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye continue to shine an unerring light on the Bush administration’s torture program (see previous examples here and here), this time focusing on the role played by Bruce Jessen, the Air Force psychologist, who, with his colleague James Mitchell, established the […]

Holding Bush administration officials accountable for torture is an unfashionable thought in Obama’s America, as was signaled even before Barack Obama took office, when he told the New York Times about his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” After a promising early start for those seeking accountability, when the […]

Back in October, I traveled to the Bay Area for a fascinating week-long series of events, “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week (covered in detail here), and I’m pleased to report that videos of one of the panel discussions that week, “Torture, Human Experimentation and the Department of Defense,” have just been made available via […]

Last month, as I reported extensively at the time, I traveled to Berkeley to take part in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, an exciting series of events focused in and around Boalt Hall, the home of UC Berkeley School of Law, where torture lawyer John Yoo teaches, when he is not hiding out from […]

Getting up at the crack of dawn to visit a high school to discuss Guantánamo could hardly have been a less appealing idea after the exhausting events of the day before — four radio interviews, and a forum on torture — and the cumulative effects of five days of speaking and campaigning as part of […]

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo […]

In the five years that I have spent researching Guantánamo and writing about it, my aims have been simple: to close Guantánamo (with the remaining 174 prisoners either released or put forward for federal court trials), to make sure no experimental prison like Guantánamo is ever allowed to exist again, and to hold accountable those […]

Just up on YouTube (and posted below) are three edits of “The Giant John Yoo Debate,” which took place last Tuesday as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week. This excellent piece of political theater involved a group of legal experts and activists, introduced by Stephanie Tang of the World Can’t Wait, and led […]

Last Wednesday, on Day Four of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week — the largest gathering of anti-torture experts and activists since the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” began over nine years ago — one of the obstacles to attracting support for a mass movement against the crimes and human rights abuses of the Bush […]