farahmoans

US law explicitly prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment". International law, including the Geneva Conventions, also bans torture.

Haspel is reported to have overseen a CIA "black site" in Thailand, where inmates were tortured.

Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Nashiri, Saudi al-Qaeda suspects, were harshly interrogated at the secret prison in what Amnesty International has called "crimes under international law".

A 2014 Senate report documented the case of Zubaydah to highlight the cruelty of post-9/11 CIA interrogation techniques and to demonstrate how the agency operated in a constitutionally grey area, after seeking legal assurances from Bush administration officials outside the court system.

An old article but helpful.

The heated exchange was not between anti-imperialists and pro-imperialists but between those who can’t see past one form of imperialism and those who are struggling against all imperialisms (or strive to). Crucially for our purposes, the former typically underestimates, or willingly ignores, Russian and Iranian imperialism in Syria and it does the same with regards to the regime’s daily atrocities. The latter sees it as its mission to remind the former of what countless Syrians have been repeating for nearly four years now, namely that it is utterly meaningless to speak of struggling for equality and justice when a fascist, neoliberal and imperialist-friendly dictatorship is overpowering anyone who wishes to fight against it. As long as this balance of powers remains unchanged, the rest is wishful thinking, with very serious repercussions on the ground.

The Trump election — because it upended countless political norms, because polls failed to predict it — was a psychologically destabilizing development. “When events happen that are so fucking out of the ordinary, people look for unifying events,” Greenwald tells me. “It becomes like a religion.” But Greenwald didn’t view the election as an aberration that needed to be explained. “Every time Trump says or does something that is xenophobic, or bigoted, or militaristic, or threatening, people always say, ‘This is not what America is about,’ ” he told the crowd in Sante Fe. “I always react to that by saying, ‘It’s not?’ ”

The findings, by Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an independent arms-tracking organization, are based on three years of meticulous documentation of weapons recovered from ISIS on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria.