Dear My Not-So-Fictional Family Members of Facebook, Greetings. We really haven’t hung out since that family reunion in 1996 but it’s been great to reconnect on Facebook. I love the pictures of your dog and it’s cool to see how much you now look like our...
The film "Zero Dark Thirty" has touched quite a cord in this country, such as with Peter Henne's post below that responds to my own post further below. To his credit, he opens up another strand of...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious...
Anyone who did not see "Zero Dark Thirty" on its opening night was smart, as it was mayhem in theaters everywhere. The film shot to #1 at the box office overnight and is there still, for the plain...
The two different countries I call home (Canada and the UK) have recently had to deal with universal jurisdiction in relation to war crimes.First, as I’ve written about here, it has come to light that Canadian officials likely knew that Afghans captured by Canadian forces and subsequently transferred to Afghan prisons were being tortured. Failure to react to such allegations and relevations is a crime under the Third Geneva Convention Relative to Prisoners of War. Yet, what is interesting about this particular issue is that the Geneva Convention is quite clear that it is the government (as...
A few months ago fellow NYU inhabitant Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage asked what, if any, social science research had been done on the effectiveness of torture in obtaining valuable intelligence? Josh's primary question was an ethical one, that being if a researcher had a personal objection to the use of torture, but through an empirical analysis of data found that it in fact did extract valuable data, should the researcher attempt to get it published despite his or her personal objection? This touched off a very interesting discussion among Monkey readers, and I recommend it to all.Today,...
In the June 15 dead-tree version of The Nation (online since May 27), Jonathan Schell writes that the Iraq war was produced by torture. Everyone knows that the "war on terror" and the Iraq war produced torture, but few have focused on the reversed causal arrow. And we are still learning details of the prominent and apparently unprecedented role Vice President Dick Cheney played in approving torture and promoting war.To document his charge, Schell references a remarkable blog post at The Washington Note penned by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin...
My reaction to Obama's decision to block the release of detainee photos is up at LGM. In brief: It's not pictures that inflame anti-American opinion. Brutality has done that already. And trying to cover up that bad behavior only makes it look as if the new Administration is complicit. In short, this is the worst tactical decision I've seen Obama make so far, and I fear the grave consequences of associating his administration with the worst excesses of the past eight years.Read the whole thing.
President Obama said a lot of important things tonight, but he also regurgitated a disturbing Bushism or two.* One of these is the term "America does not torture." Stated in this particular way, an indisputible statement of principle is conflated with and therefore masquerades as an empirical "fact," one which is blatantly untrue. This trope was one of the Bush Administration's many brilliant inventions, and was designed as a public relations counter-response to growing acknowledgement that US military and intelligence personnel not only had tortured detainees, but had in fact been ordered...
Earlier this year I threw up some results from a survey of folks interested in the concept of "human security," in which my research team asked them to name the most important items on the human security agenda; and also to answer the question: "What problems do you know of that are not getting enough attention from the human security network?" A first cut at coding this data shows highly salient issues include the following:Problems not receiving enough attention, mentioned by at least one respondent, included megacities, leprosy, cyberterrorism, social exclusion, traffic accidents, high...
Sixty years ago yesterday, in response to the atrocities committed in World War II, the U.S. joined world leaders in supporting the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Campaign to Ban Torture asks us to celebrate by supporting a petition for an Executive Order by Barack Obama reversing US policies that violate those principles: "Over the past seven years, the use of torture and cruelty has resulted in a swift departure from the time-honored values and standards embodied in the Declaration which we signed in 1948. Respected leaders and citizens like you from across the...
Geez, get off the grid for ten days or so, come back to find Zimbabwe on the verge of civil war, the International Criminal Court indicting Bashir on charges of genocide (now that is a shocker), the zombies overtaking Norway, and Christopher Hitchens reversing himself on whether waterboarding is torture. (Makes a big difference in perspective whether you undergo the procedure yourself.)My favorite quote from his new expose in Vanity Fair, aptly entitled "Believe Me, It's Torture": "You're not being boarded, you're being watered." Hat tip to Hank at Eclectic Meanderings. That's all...