On 11 January 2012, protests marked 10 years since the first prisoners were sent to America's most controversial prison, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Barack Obama's promise on his first day in office to close it, remains unfulfilled. As long as the infamous prison in Guantanamo Bay is open, it remains a symbol of lawlessness and harms the US’ reputation, says Human Rights Watch Counter-Terrorism Counsel, Andrea Prasow. © RT Editor's Note: You might also be interested in this...
Earlier this week, President George W. Bush spoke at an economic summit in Canada. Amnesty International called on the Canadian government to arrest Bush and either prosecute or extradite him for the torture of prisoners in the so-called "war on terror." Meanwhile, four men who say they were tortured in US prisons under the Bush administration lodged a private prosecution against the former president in a Canadian provincial court. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the...
Tom Engelhardt - In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Other countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers. As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.” As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and...
Speaking on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002, contends that "there were many mistakes made in response to those terrible attacks. The worst in my view was to start a war on terrorism. I pleaded at the time that we should treat these terrible atrocious acts as crimes against humanity and focus on going after the criminals." "When you declare a war, its easier to erode standards,...
In the run up to 9/11, high ranking CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence (head of the CIA), George Tenet, were aware that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered America in the year 2000. However, they withheld this information from the FBI and "more or less lied" about it to the US Congress and the 9/11 Commission in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism adviser to the Bush...
Noam Chomsky - We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo. A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He...