Tag: Abu Ghraib

  AS we begin dropping bombs in Iraq once again, the one thing we don't ask ourselves is this: What could go wrong? Where to begin? In...

The CIA-versus-Dianne Feinstein and Mark Udall story has got everything -- lying, stealing, bullying, spying, mendacity, audacity, betrayal and, of course, because it's 2014, hacking.

The world has the story of the mission that delivered death to Osama bin Laden. It has the details of his burial at sea. It has clunky animated video reenactments of the raid at his Abbottabad compound. It has the realtime twitterized witness account and the New York Times narrative of events. It has the cable news punditry and it has President Obama's speech after the fact. It does not have the photos of Bin Laden's corpse because it does not need the photos and because releasing the photos is not at all the kind of thing the Obama administration would do. If we didn't know that before the death of Bin Laden, we know better now.

The Centennial Institute conservative think tank at Colorado Christian University is hosting a "Tribute to the Troops" Monday, where the featured speakers will be Sarah Palin and General William "Jerry" Boykin. Although both figures in the past have been associated with an aggressive Christian politics known as Dominionism, Boykin is one of the people at the heart of post-9/11 U.S. religious militarism. For years he has been giving talks in which he conjures a Christian America targeted by hundreds of millions of violent Islamic jihadists, rallying support for the most hawkish variety of anti-terror U.S. foreign and domestic policies. If Boykin's past presentations are any measure, attendees at Monday's rally are in for tough talk peppered with statistics that sound official and scary but that fail to stand up to the kind of mathematical fact checking you can do in your head as you listen to him speak.

The New York Times and Sunday morning political talk shows are contorting themselves into linguistically-torturous positions in a feeble attempt to avoid using the word "torture" to describe the immoral and criminal techniques employed at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites against suspected al Qaeda-linked prisoners. Now, Foreign Policy magazine has produced the euphemism-free "ultimate guide to the Bush Administration's journey to the dark side."