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torture

Originally published 01/30/2017
To Torture or Not to Torture? Are We Seriously Still Asking this Question?

James Stejskal

While our new president contemplates the renewed use of enhanced interrogation techniques, we would do well to remember where the discussion of the Law of Land Warfare and torture originated. It was in Washington DC 155 years ago.

Originally published 01/27/2017
Torture works . . . to produce Fake News (and that’s how we Got into Iraq)

Juan Cole

The psychopaths in the White House will be perfectly happy to run with the fake news gained from torture and use it to bamboozle the public for their own nefarious purposes.

Originally published 08/04/2016
French Historian Accuses Khmer Rouge Defense Lawyers of "Cold Torture"

Henri Locard, retired academic from the Université Lumière - Lyon, is testifying about the brutality of the regime at a trial in Phnom Penh.

Originally published 07/27/2015
The History Lesson the American Psychological Association Forgot

Sarah Bridger

The APA needed a debate about torture just as physicists during the Cold War had to decide if scientists should be held accountable for the consequences of their research.

Originally published 06/16/2015
Historian Peter Linebaugh says Magna Carta provisions were violated at Guantanamo Bay (interview)

"You take chapter 39 of Magna Carta, probably the most famous clause. That is, you can still find it on courthouses in the United States. You can still find it in old constitutional books. It prohibits torture."

Originally published 06/03/2015
The Secret Origins of the CIA’s Torture Program and the Forgotten Man Who Tried to Expose It

Barbara Myers

Anthony Russo, the “other conspirator” of the Pentagon Papers, shouldn't be left in history’s trash bin.

Originally published 05/19/2015
Skulls Suggest Violence Used as a Tool of Political Control

Three skulls found in Bolivia have revealed that torture for reasons other than religious rituals and trophy-head taking was not just an iconographic feature of the pre-Columbian cultures in the region, but a very real practice.

Originally published 12/22/2014
Are We a Great Nation?

Steve Hochstadt

Now we know a lot more about the role of torture in America.

Originally published 12/21/2014
Current and Former Intelligence Officers Have Been Playing Americans for Chumps

John Prados

The CIA gave access to secret documents to former employees that it denied to the public, so they could trash the Senate report.

Originally published 12/21/2014
How to Read the Senate Report on CIA Torture

Alfred W. McCoy

With the release of this Senate report and the media’s pursuit of the facts behind its obfuscations, the full story of abuse, fabrication, and dissimulation inside the CIA is finally starting to emerge.

Originally published 12/18/2014
The Forgotten Futility of Torture - An Analysis

Lawrence Davidson

It has long been known that torture does not work. One can go back to the Enlightenment.

Originally published 12/17/2014
What's It Like to be Waterboarded? This Is How It Was When We Tried It in the Philippines.

William Schroder

A novelist's re-creation of an awful practice.

Originally published 12/17/2014
A history of torture (video)

The long nightmarish history of man’s inhumanity to man.

Originally published 12/16/2014
The CIA Twisted The Legacy Of A Vietnam War Protest To Justify Torture

The CIA insists it didn’t torture people. But in defense of its actions, it claimed the right to break the law.

Originally published 12/16/2014
They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years

Jon Wiener

Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate.

Originally published 12/14/2014
The CIA's Phony Defense

John Prados

When does an intelligence agency become worthless?

Originally published 12/12/2014
The Torture Debate Is Missing This: The Fact that We Did this Before

Paul Kramer

We should be haunted by the history of the war we fought using torture in the Philippines more than a century ago.

Originally published 12/12/2014
What we learned from the CIA Torture report: An interview with Tom Blanton

Tom Blanton

What we didn't know until now.

Originally published 12/11/2014
Brazil faces the truth about its military dictatorship

National Security Archive hails efforts by investigators, victim's families to uncover truth.

Originally published 12/10/2014
The Water Cure

Paul Kramer

Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

Originally published 12/10/2014
Why the Founding Fathers thought banning Torture Foundational to the US Constitution

Juan Cole

The Bill of Rights of the US Constitution is full of prohibitions on torture, as part of a general 18th century Enlightenment turn against the practice.

Originally published 12/09/2014
The CIA, Interrogation, and Feinstein’s Parting Shot

Max Boot

"Feinstein’s report merely rakes up history and for no good purpose beyond predictable congressional grandstanding."

Originally published 08/03/2014
Why President Obama Can No Longer Afford to Put Up with the CIA's Brazen Lies -- And Neither Can the Country

John Prados

"President Barack Obama must rue the day when he renounced initiating an inquiry on CIA behavior during the war on terror in favor of moving forward into the future."

Originally published 06/17/2014
How to Forgive Your Torturer

Ariel Dorfman

The River Kwai Passes Through Latin America and Washington.

Originally published 04/23/2014
Does torture really (still) matter?

Rebecca Gordon

Tolerating torture corrupts the moral character of the nation.

Originally published 04/17/2014
Bush: "Why Didn't I Know This?"

Mark Danner

"What did the third member of the triumvirate, Vice President Cheney—who had known about the conflict for weeks—say at this moment?"

Originally published 04/17/2014
5 Explosive Revelations Leaked from Senate Report Exposing CIA Torture

While the official inquiry has not been published, dogged journalists have published key—and disturbing—details of what is contained in it.

Originally published 10/10/2013
Isaac Newton Died A Virgin And 9 Other Facts About The Brilliant, Bizarre Physicist

Huffington Post Science features the strange background of Isaac Newton.

Originally published 10/09/2013
Q&A: William Ruckelshaus ’55 on the Watergate Scandal

William Ruckelshaus was deputy attorney general during the Watergate scandal.

Originally published 05/09/2013
Mau Mau victims to be compensated

The British government is negotiating payments to thousands of Kenyans who were detained and severely mistreated during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency in what would be the first compensation settlement resulting from official crimes committed under imperial rule.

Originally published 04/16/2013
U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

Originally published 03/15/2013
A Primer on America’s Forgotten "Nasty Little War": An Interview with Gregg Jones

Robin Lindley

An interview about his new book, "Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream."

Originally published 02/19/2013
Washington Tortures Everywhere ... Except Latin America

Greg Grandin

Map of CIA rendition sites. Countries in red cooperate with the CIA to detain and allegedly torture terror suspects. Drawn from data first published in the Washington Post. Map credit: HNN staff/Wiki Commons.Originally posted on TomDispatch.com

Originally published 09/06/2009
What People Are Talking About: Torture

This page features links to articles on HNN.

Originally published 11/06/2007
U.S. Water Boarding, 1899 Style

William Loren Katz

Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that causes excruciating pain.

Originally published 06/11/2007
Studies show enlightenment has no bearing on torture

Two recent examinations suggest that torture arises not because of individual barbarity and sadism, or even because of the presence or absence of enlightened laws, but because of social and psychological structures. The 20th century provided more avenues for such structures to flourish, these analyses suggest, which is why so much more torture took place in the last 100 years. Sociologist Christopher Einolf recently compiled a history of torture. He limited his study to cases involving conduct t

Originally published 12/16/2014
Who Knows Eric Fair?

There's No There There

The recent revelation about unaccountable Americans using torture on prisoners have again raised the question of morality and legality.

Originally published 12/14/2014
Dick Cheney’s David Frost Moment

Mark Byrnes's Facing Backwards

“I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.”--Dick Cheney on Meet the Press