Hitchens, his head hooded, was subjected to this most terrifying of ordeals by veterans of the US Special Forces. Did the experience feel like torture? The “official lie” about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it “simulates the feeling of drowning”. In fact, “you are drowning - or rather, being drowned. Believe me, it's torture.”

So what did it feel like? Hitchens recounts how he was lashed tightly to a sloping board, then, “on top of the hood, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited until I abruptly felt a slow…

Inter Press is reporting that its correspondent in Gaza, Mohammed Omer, who is also working for the Washington Report, was stripsearched and assaulted at the border crossing from Jordan on Thursday. Omer, pictured here in London, where he lately won a Martha Gellhorn prize for his journalism, says he was forced to undress, then battered and kicked.

It is of course an article of faith for some people that the Israeli tails wags the big American dog. This rather ludicrous assertion is nothing more than the pernicious doctrine of “American exceptionalism” tricked out in…

Mixing haughty disdain with semantic quibbling, John Yoo & David Addington, two key legal architects behind George W. Bushs war on terror? tactics brushed aside congressional questions about how the administration fashioned its harsh interrogation policies that human rights experts say crossed the line into torture.

Resistance on Torture Yoo wrote that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) often clashed with the State Department over international laws banning torture. “In our arguments, State would authoritatively…

Scott Ritter is speaking out about what he sees as history repeating itself regarding U.S. policy toward Iran and the inevitability of a U.S.-led attack on the country, which he believes will happen prior to a new president being sworn into office in January 2009.
Were going to see some military activity before the new administration is sworn in.

Ritter had some tough words for Washington lawmakers for continuously failing to put any obstacles into place to block the Bush administration from even attempting to attack Iran without first consulting Congress. We see not only has Congress…

The trial against 29-year-old Mohammad Momin Khawaja, the first man charged under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, began Monday morning in a highly secure Ottawa court with an extraordinarily detailed prosecution statement. Crown prosecutor David McKercher spent nearly 90 minutes laying out the bomb-building, terrorist-training and . . .

The evidence was also that police teams discovered guns, knives, circuit boards, computer chips and literature with titles like ‘Terrorism and Self Sufficiency,” ‘Defence of The Muslim Lands,' ‘The…

As part of a series on The candidates and your money,? Fortune Magazine asked Senator John McCain what he perceived as the single greatest economic threat to the United States. McCains response, after several seconds of staring into the void,? was radical Islamic extremism.?

Ignoring everything you have seen and heard to brainwash you to the contrary in its aftermath, what are the odds that a man in a cave could beat all of the defenses of the United States of America by coincidentally timing his attack to coincide…

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan testified about reported efforts to cover up the role of the White House in the leaking of the informtion that Valerie Plame Wilson was a Central Intelligence Agency covert operative.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan testified about reported efforts to cover up the role of the White House in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a Central Intelligence Agency covert operative. Much of the questioning…

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

Rutten writes that, along with earlier revelations, “the current Senate investigation has established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration…

A previously undisclosed CIA report written in the summer of 2002 questioned the “credibility” and “truthfulness” of an Al Qaeda detainee who became a key source for the Bush administration’s claims about links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Comment: Again, as usual, governing bodies and allies are trying to deflect blame, pass the buck, shift responsibility orclaim down right ignorance of the facts. We as Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee, latte, cappucino or chai…

In a kind of Watergate in reverse, the Washington Post has rallied once again to defend George W. Bushs honesty, with the papers editorial-page editor swatting away the latest swarm of evidence showing how the President took the nation to war in Iraq via a series of lies.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons…

The secrecy of Groom Lake was threatened in early 1974 when the astronauts on Skylab disobeyed specific instructions, pointed their camera out the window and took pictures of a facility that did not officially exist. They returned to Earth and their photographs quickly became a headache for NASA, the CIA, and the Deft of Defense.

NASA had an agreement with the US intelligence community that dated from the beginning of the Gemini program. All astronaut photographs of the Earth would first be reviewed by the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Building 213 in the…

By Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.

In addition to providing armed forces for war and conflict zones and a wide range of military and police training services, Blackwater does a robust, multimillion-dollar business through its aviation division. It also has a growing maritime…

The United States has regarded him as one of the most dangerous men in the world, terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Now, the United States is asking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to safeguard some of its national security secrets.

Does anyone still believe the official story that this guy could be the 9/11 mastermind? If so ask him this: 1) Did you influence PNAC's statement released a year before 9/11 that a 'new pearl harbor' was needed in order to justify…

It is one of history’s great “what ifs.” What if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated 40 years ago and gone on to become president of the United States? It’s safe to say that his presidency would have followed a different course from that of Richard Nixon.

The real test of a presidency is how the chief executive responds in crisis. It is worth examining RFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis'the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union went to the brink. The Kennedys had the…

Bill O’Reilly became visibly angered while interviewing Scott McClellan about Iraq war propaganda and the CIA leak case. O’Reilly’s performance is reminiscent of another tirade where he yelled, “F*ck it! We’ll do it live!”

“If the director of the CIA believes it, British intelligence believes it, John Kerry believes it, Hillary Clinton believes it, and President Clinton believes it…” said O'Reilly, “If they all believe Saddam Hussein has weapons…

House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman is calling for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to hand over unredacted copies of FBI interviews with top White House officials, including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, regarding the Plame leak. Waxman’s committee has received partial transcripts of interviews with officials..

New revelations by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan raise additional questions about the actions of the President and the Vice President. Mr. McClellan has stated that ?[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out…

Normally placid Switzerland has been caught up in uncharacteristic intrigue since the government announced that it secretly destroyed highly technical blueprints for producing nuclear weapons. At a press conference on May 23, President Pascal Couchepin said the documents had been shredded to prevent them from falling into terrorists' hands…

The official stonewalling has fueled speculation that the United States, and specifically the CIA, has pressured the Swiss government to destroy the documents to aid its own efforts to stop nuclear smuggling, whatever the effect on the…

George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb?

On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would…

A former high-ranking member of the CIA, now retired, who was a career employee, contacted us this week. Due to our reporting on Halliburton and their corruption we were given 46 pages of testimony on how Halliburton, the CIA, the Pentagon and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been stealing billions of dollars.

The Criminal Investigation Unit was not willing to press charges even after being presented with the evidence that the Pentagon official had taken a foreign bribe! I could not press the issue any further because Rumsfeld had over ruled me. He had…

Shifting tides in the world of terror

The sense of shifting tides in the terrorism fight is shared by a number of terrorism experts, though some caution that it is too early to tell whether the gains are permanent. Some credit Hayden and other U.S. intelligence leaders for going on…