Part two of this series can be found here: Return of the Torture Monsters Part II: Remembering Abu Ghraib. Part three of this series can be found here: Return of the Torture Monsters Part III: Force Drift Across Administrations. Pete Hegseth, confirmed by the Senate on January 24 as US President Donald Trump’s Secretary of [...]
“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.” Cicero, The Laws During the coming year, the United States, in occasional concert with Israel, must confront expanding terrorist threats. Topping pertinent concerns in Washington and Jerusalem will be a sordid assortment of jihadi groups, some spawned by the al-Assad regime collapse in Syria and [...]
I turned on my TV on Inauguration Day, but avoided coverage of the event in a bid to depress the ratings. No doubt I will be arrested for that act of lèse–majesté in due course. Regardless, I spent that time watching the King Center‘s Celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day — on which this year’s [...]
The evidence is now irrefutable that Hamas and its confederates tortured the hostages released from Gaza in November 2023. A new hostage exchange deal has just seen the release of three Israeli women who had been held hostage by Hamas for 471 days. Make no mistake, despite braided hair, clean clothes, and “gift bags” for [...]
On Sunday, January 5, president-elect Donald J. Trump filed an appeal seeking to stay criminal proceedings against him based on claims of presidential immunity. This legal maneuver, just weeks before his scheduled inauguration on January 20, raises profound constitutional questions about the scope of Presidential immunity, its applicability to a President-elect, and its implications for [...]
The approval of establishment of a hybrid special tribunal in The Gambia represents a significant development in the field of transitional justice, offering a potential model for other nations grappling with legacies of human rights abuses. This innovative mechanism, blending elements of international and domestic justice systems, aims to address the widespread violations committed during [...]
With the sun of 2024 having scattered the last of its rays on Earth, it feels like freedom, independence and justice will soon be engulfed by darkness in Pakistan. Today, we find ourselves mired in a troubling quagmire of lawlessness and a hogtied judicial system. On Dec. 21, military courts in Pakistan sentenced 25 civilians [...]
On December 15, Israel announced the closure of its embassy in Ireland. Israel blamed extreme anti-Israel policies brought forth by the Irish government. The last straw may have been Ireland’s decision to join with South Africa in the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that accuses Israel of genocide. Ireland has asked the [...]
“I never wanted to study midwifery,” a 20-year-old woman from Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar told me. “But after the university ban, I couldn’t continue to study computer science – the major which was my dream and what I had worked so hard for.” December 20 marked the second anniversary of the Taliban’s ban on [...]
As the global community marked International Human Rights Day earlier this month, millions of Afghan women and girls remained trapped in their homes, cast out of their schools, work and public life by repressive Taliban policy. Last year, in response to these then-already-ongoing human rights violations, the US government announced new sanctions against Taliban officials [...]
