If the United States will not allow its own people to be subject to the rule of law in such cases, how can others be held to account?

I have become rather used to being kicked in the stomach. Suddenly, the kicking has stopped. Yesterday, I learnt that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has agreed to investigate war crimes committed in Afghanistan, by United States forces. My American tormentors in the “dark prison” in Kabul, believed they had impunity to do whatever they wanted to me. Now there is a possibility that they may be held to account. Indeed, it is an historic moment: US torturers may face international justice for the first time.

I was one of a hundred people who filed the complaint, though the only one from Guantánamo Bay willing to be named in public. I understand why others wish to remain anonymous, but I have no fear of reprisals – what could they do to me, that they have not already done?

Last week was the launch of “Guantánamo [Un]Censored: Art from Inside the Prison,” a powerful new art exhibition featuring work by eleven current and former Guantánamo prisoners at CUNY School of Law’s Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice, in Long Island City in Queens, New York, which I wrote about in article entitled, Humanizing the Silenced and Maligned: Guantánamo Prisoner Art at CUNY Law School in New York. 

This is not a film review.  But see "Vice," starring Christian Bale as "Dick" Cheney.  You'll look at this photo differently after seeing the film.

One of the remarkable features of the film is the startling, realistic jumps to the violence of the U.S. war on terror precipitated by Cheney's actions.  Cheney co-ordinates the build-up to the attack on Iraq and suddenly the screen is filled with Iraqis being bombed.  Cheney authorizes the rendering of a cleric in one of the Baltic states, and bam, the cleric is thrown into a van within seconds, gagged and disappeared.  The concepts of human rights and democracy, U.S. style, get brought sharply to the viewer, as a public service.

Rule of Law, Not Rule of Trump

January 11, 2019, marks the 17th anniversary of the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, which was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It also marks the start of the prison's third year under the direction of the Trump administration. At the beginning of the Trump administration 41 people remained imprisoned at Guantanamo. Over the last two years, the Trump administration has released just one individual, leaving 40 people in detention while, at times, signaling interest in expanding Guantanamo. What will happen to the prison and its detainees in the remaining years of the Trump administration? Will anyone else be released? Will the prison ever close?

The Trump nominee for U.S. Supreme Court believed the author of notorious memos providing legal cover for those torturing human beings would be great as a lifetime pick for Ninth Circuit, reports Common Dreams staff writer Julia Conley on confidential emails released by Senator Cory Booker. The exchanges between Kavanaugh and Kyle Sampson occurred one day after the date of one of Yoo's torture memo drafts tweets journalist Mike Sacks: 

Kavanaugh referred to Yoo as his "magic bullet." Interpret that as you will, but I see this exchange as Kavanaugh's wanting to load up the judiciary with originalist, Unitary Executive folk; and as circumstantial evidence that Yoo knew the potential blowback for the torture memo.

When Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, one of his selling points was Kavanaugh's seat on the US Court of Appeals for the DC District. GW Bush appointed him to the court in 2006, bolstering a conservative majority which went on to decide against habeas corpus relief for dozens of prisoners held in Guantanamo without charge.Kavanaugh contributed to the ongoing argument over whether Bush, or any president could hold prisoners indefinitely without charge his opinion that "only rules explicitly enacted by Congress, not international laws of armed conflict, can constrain what an American president can do in wartime."

"I'll never forgive Trump and I won't stop talking about it," says Mike Mills, founding member of the alternative rock band R.E.M. "It's not just who he is and what he represents... It's what he's done to the American political process. He has allowed stupidity to be the coin of the realm, he has allowed thinking that has been and should always be marginalised and on the edges to become almost part of the mainstream...

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted 10-5 to support Gina Haspel's nomination for CIA director Wednesday. Haspel's defense of torture practices she facilitated at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002 -- that they were "legal" at the time -- disqualifies her from assuming the role of CIA director, argues professor emerita Marjorie Cohn. Failure to condemn the rescinded opinions of John Yoo invites a repetition of the brutality the professor authorized. Haspel provides little assurance that she wouldn't, like former vice president Dick Cheney says, "do it again."  

Intro., by Patrice Greanville: The appointment by Donald Trump of Gina Haspel, a CIA official directly involved in supervising torture, as head of the agency, has thrown the world of liberal pretensions and their mouthpieces into turmoil.  Liberals do not mind imperialist crimes as bloody and vicious as they come, provided that a mask of civility and deniability is maintained by the exceptional nation, something impossible in the case of Haspel, whom even some former colleagues find a questionable choice and whose offences remain a matter of record. This is nothing new, of course. This kind of pickle is inherent in the US empire, which requires refined hypocrisy and massive public ignorance—abetted confusion would be a more appropriate term— to conduct its criminal plutocratic agenda.  We are being literal here. Most American politicians earn their epaulettes by learning the craft of imposture, Obama being the most recent example of true mastery of this devious art, but Trump, a non-professional politician, and a clumsy oaf by nature, is incapable of delivering in that regard, his regime inevitably defined by coarse impulsiveness, pervasive chaos, and petulant recklessness, where the true, ugly and sociopathic face of imperial power is often revealed. 

The CIA nominee supervised detainee torture at a “black site” in Thailand 

Gina Haspel arrived to run “Detention Site Green” in late October 2002, after the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubeydah that reportedly reduced attendant personnel to tears. 

She supervised the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques during at least four separate periods.

Interrogators at the site sought to make terror suspects talk by slamming them against walls, keeping them from sleeping, holding them in coffin-sized boxes and forcing water down their throats — a technique called waterboarding. 

The U.S. "War on Terror" has always been about persecuting Muslims, torture being the modus operandi of a cruel system of institutionalized Islamophobia. The nomination of Gina Haspel to head the Central Intelligence Agency confirmed what we already knew: political impunity thrives in an authoritarian environment. And blaming the subjects of abuse endears you to white supremacists.