Word: abu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...astounding news that the Bush Administration was involved in reinterpreting the rules for the use of torture-a fact that has been known since the relevant Justice Department memo was leaked last June-has occasioned ... nothing, not even a burp of public outrage. John Kerry chose not to mention Abu Ghraib once during the presidential debates and, further, chose not to raise the issue of Bush Administration complicity because, I am told, his advisers were afraid that the Republicans would paint him weak on the war on terrorism. Of course, Kerry's defining weakness was his unwillingness to say anything...
...generally support the thrust of the Justice Department's decision to severely constrict the definition of torture. Senator Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin elicited Gonzales' acknowledgment that the new Bush Administration policy on torture had "migrated" to the CIA and Pentagon and from there to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Not one of the Senators bothered to ask whether the President had been informed by his close aide Gonzales that the U.S. had changed its policy on torture. "Why ask?" said a staff aide. "He'd say he couldn't recall. He couldn't even tell us what his own definition...
...like sodium pentothal, may not be inappropriate to elicit information from those intent on the mass murder of civilians. But physical assault is something else entirely. The world now knows that the Bush White House at least tacitly approved the loosening of standards that led to the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo-and that no one of significance has been sacked for it. True, the offending memo was recently retracted, but the Administration's position on torture remains astonishingly fuzzy. When asked by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois if U.S. personnel could legally engage in torture under any circumstances...
Like a recurring nightmare, Abu Ghraib never quite goes away. The alleged ringleader of the horrors inflicted at the Baghdad prison, whose grin and thumbs-up over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner became an image of national shame, showed up for his court-martial in Fort Hood, Texas, last week, with a clean shave and a solemn face. A day earlier, President George W. Bush's choice for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, who played a large role in orchestrating, if not actually drafting, a change in the Administration's rules on torture, was asked to explain himself before...
...quickly became clear that the 17 techniques might not crack some among the well-trained gang at Gitmo. As the U.S. began to round up high-value targets like al-Qaeda's chief operating officer, Abu Zubaydah, who were held in undisclosed locations, CIA officials turned to Washington for guidance about how far interrogators could go against the new terrorist enemy. In the summer of 2002, the CIA and Gonzales asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion on the definition of illegal interrogation methods. On Aug. 1, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee sent Gonzales...