Iraq

On Sunday July 13, I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel discussion, following a special preview screening at the Curzon Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue, of Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal by acclaimed film-maker Errol Morris. The event was organized by the Frontline Club, an excellent journalists’ club […]

Rather horribly, it seems, a former Guantánamo prisoner, Abdullah al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti who was repatriated in November 2005 and who later married and had a child, blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Mosul, Iraq, last month. According to the US military, al-Ajmi was one of three suicide bombers responsible for killing seven members […]

Blinded by the apparent allure of a tall, thin woman from France, Britain’s press completely ignored the forcible deportation, on Thursday, of 60 Iraqi Kurds, who were transported back to a decidedly uncertain future on a German plane from a UK airport. Each of the 60 “failed asylum seekers,” as they are officially known, was […]

I don’t normally post other people’s articles on my site, but I thought this article by Mike Otterman, author of American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was worth reproducing in full. Mike, a fellow Pluto Press author, who blogs at American Torture (named after the book), and who was also […]

Every war produces its own iconic protestors. Vietnam, for example, had Ron Kovic, disabled in combat, and part of the campaigning group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was eventually made into a movie by Oliver Stone. One day, if the United States ever gets to look back […]

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 […]

Despite claims last week by House Representative John Murtha (D-Pa.) that he would put forward amendments to the administration’s colossal Defense Appropriations bill (see article here), the House of Representatives rolled over last night and passed the proposed legislation by 395 votes to 13, and Murtha, who had actually prepared the amendments to close Guantánamo […]

In an update from Congressional Quarterly, just two days after Vice President Dick Cheney shuffled out from under his rock to declare on CNN that he thought that proposals to close Guantánamo were a bad idea and that operational plans for Iraq were not the business of Congress, staff writer John Donnelly reports that “House […]

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 […]