October 28, 2008

On extra-judicial executions

Since when is it okay for a state (or an individual) to set out to kill a person based solely on accusations against him that have never been publicized and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:50 PM | Fulltext link (23 comments)

September 04, 2008

HRW revising its Russian cluster bomb accusations

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch started to step back from the claims it made very loudly last month that during the fighting in Georgia,"Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:40 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

September 02, 2008

HRW's flawed 'Research' on Georgian cluster bombs

On August 15, Human Rights Watch issued a statement-- still published on their website without comment-- saying its researchers "have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:23 PM | Fulltext link (20 comments)

July 10, 2008

From that same Monticello portico: a sale

Amid writings about Jefferson and Bush, a friend alerted me to a compelling essay in our local "The Hook" weekly paper -- about another irony on the very portico where...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 10:57 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

June 15, 2008

US Diplomats and Boumediene Case

I too am encouraged by the US Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush ruling that detainees held at Gunatanamo Bay are entitled to Habeas Corpus protection -- the right to challenge...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 10:03 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

April 14, 2008

Weissglas, son of Earl Butz?

Longtime Israeli National Security Advisor Dov Weissglas, who in February 2006 argued openly for applying the "Weissglas diet" to the entire population of Gaza, certainly wasn't the first bullying imperial...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:12 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

March 31, 2008

Human Rights Watch opposes Egypt's political arrests

Kudos to Human Rights Watch for having issued a strong statement criticizing the Egyptian government’s continuing mass round-up of opposition activists and would-be candidates. This campaign, HRW said, "puts the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:59 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

September 19, 2007

"Rick Warren should be in jail"

"Rick Warren should be in jail." So should Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Robert H. Schuller, and perhaps even.... Helena Cobban. :-} I'm referring, if you haven't guessed, to prison libraries...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 01:03 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

September 07, 2007

Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?

I learned today of a particularly disturbing political cartoon published on September 4th in the Columbus (Ohio) Post-Dispatch. Drawn by Michael Ramirez, the cartoon very much illustrates themes I've written...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 11:14 PM | Fulltext link (17 comments)

August 08, 2007

Mia Farrow: "virtual hostage"

Irony alert Those familiar with Farzaneh Milani's path-breaking literary analysis will recognize the phrase "hostage narrative," a term she has been devloping over many years to apply to that best-selling...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 02:20 PM | Fulltext link (21 comments)

July 07, 2007

Jefferson & the Reign of Witches

Kudos to the Baltimore Sun for its July 4th editorial. Contrary to the keen imagination of another former "Jefferson Fellow" now at Oxford, I (Scott), as far as I know,...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 05:00 PM | Fulltext link (15 comments)

July 04, 2007

Just what did "The Declaration" Declare?

Here in the United States, it's July 4th, a day we commemorate with fireworks, cook-outs, concerts, and speeches. So what exactly is it that we celebrate? Nominally, today marks the...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 07:35 PM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

June 20, 2007

Failed States Index & "Failing the Faithful"

The July-August issue of Foreign Policy magazine features the 3rd installment of the annual "Failed States Index," (FSI) a tool intended to identify the world's "weakest links." A project of...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 07:27 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

March 05, 2007

Human rights, democracy, the US, and Syria

(This post has been cross-posted to The Notion.) I spent a few days in Damascus at the end of February, and was able to get a ground-reality view of the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:23 AM | Fulltext link (12 comments)

November 20, 2006

MESA and blogging in Boston

I'm at the MESA conference here in Boston this weekend. Sunday evening, we went to Juan Cole's presidential address on "Islamophobia and neo-orientalism". He talked mostly about the former, and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:53 AM | Fulltext link (16 comments)

November 08, 2006

The HRW report on Palestinian women, contd.

Amira Hass has a column marked by her usual perspicacity and deeply humanistic vision in HaAretz today, in which she notes that, There could not have been a worse time...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:11 AM | Fulltext link (20 comments)

November 07, 2006

Protecting Palestinian females: HRW misses the mark

I truly do not understand some of the decisions that my colleagues and friends at Human Rights Watch have been making. This week, to much fanfare, they rolled out a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:14 PM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

September 06, 2006

Bush preparing show trials for election run-up?

President Bush made news today by announcing that 14 alleged terrorists (ok, he didn't actually use the word "alleged", though these men have not yet been brought to trial) have...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:08 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

August 22, 2006

Haunting Images from Israel

Maybe I'm still too human. I resist viewing the many available web pictures of death in Lebanon and Israel in the recent carnage - even as my head tells me...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 01:10 AM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

July 10, 2006

A "Global Hunger Strike?"

A “Global Hunger Strike”? Commonly understood, “hunger strikes” are intended as a form of non-violent action, a voluntary fast with an intended political or human rights aim. Yet I confess...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 10:42 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

June 13, 2006

Guantanamo and soul-sickness

I need, as a US citizen, to place on record that I am completely sickened that my government continues to hold detainees in Guantanamo and other locations in complete defiance...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:23 PM | Fulltext link (23 comments)

May 30, 2006

More torture-related info

The New York-based organization Human Rights First has done consistently excellent work of fact-finding, analyzing, and seeking official accountability regarding the US government's use of torture since 9/11. I see...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:21 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

Hunger striking, human progress, and habeas

The number of Guantanamo detainees participating in the hunger strike there has now risen to 75. That report, by AP's Ben Fox, quoted Navy Commander Robert Durand as trying to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:39 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

January 15, 2006

News from Gitmo

The ACLU's Ben Wizner, who's observing the Guantanamo Military Commission sessions that resumed last Wednesday, has been blogging his work there. It looks like good reading. You can comment either...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:42 AM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

November 02, 2005

U.S. running secret prison in East Europe

Today's WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001. At least...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:14 AM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

August 10, 2005

What is 'the rule of law'?

The rule of law: In a democracy, does it apply to everyone, including the highest in the land? Lawyers for Maher Arar argue that it should. Arar is the Canadian...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:02 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

July 14, 2005

Faiza's son, Bastille Day

Faiza's son Khalid has been arrested in Baghdad. His brother Raed wrote today, If your child or sibling vanishes for two days then calls from the secret service jail in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:59 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

June 14, 2005

Lech Walesa on detention issues

The International Committee of the Red Cross's flagship publication, the International Review of the Red Cross has devoted most of its latest issue to the question of detentions. All the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:18 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

One small window into Gitmo

The best definition of torture that I know of is one I heard from a physician at the renowned Danish center for treatment and rehabilitation of torture victims. He said,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:21 AM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

May 31, 2005

Guantanamo detainees sold into bondage?

How many of the roughly 530 detainees in the US detention center in Guantanamo were actuially sold into bondage by bounty-hunters eager to make a fortune from US rewards programs?...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:46 PM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

April 17, 2005

Detentions / Hostage-taking

There have recently been a bunch of news reports about alleged Sunni extremists in Iraq having taken hostage "up to 100" (though no-one really seems to know the real number)...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:51 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

March 24, 2005

Legacies of torture, South Africa

This week, I have been focusing mainly on reviewing/revising the three South Africa chapters of my book on Violence and its Legacies. I find much of this project (South Africa,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:44 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

December 19, 2004

Forward to-- a new Dark Age?

"Progress" comes slowly in the affairs of humankind, and it's by no means a unidirectional or linear business. One significant series of steps forward occurred in the 1860s, when European...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:59 PM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

December 06, 2004

Meanwhile, in the gulag

Attentive reader Christiane has been following some of the news stories about developments in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo cases. Since she figured that I was out of touch while...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:12 AM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

October 12, 2004

Men behaving very badly...

... and what women think of them: First, from Saudi Arabia, the horrific news that the eponymous royals have decided not to let women take part in the (partial) municipal...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:09 AM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

September 27, 2004

Support a prisoner of conscience

I got the following letter recently from my friend Chuck Fager, of Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC. I hope some JWN readers may be moved to join me in sending...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:02 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

September 17, 2004

Life under occupation

To get a glimpse of how tough life is in a country under foreign military occupation, do read Faiza's blog today. One exciting prospect: her son Khalid posted there that...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:45 AM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

September 09, 2004

"Up to 100" ghost detainees

[Update to the following, added Fri a.m.: Excellent lead editorials on this subject today in both the WaPo and the NYT. The NYT also led with the news story on...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:12 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

August 22, 2004

Health professionals and U.S. torture

My friend Maureen's son is a newly graduated medical doctor who paid for his med school through a U.S. Army-run scheme and as a result is soon going to be...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:09 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

August 03, 2004

U.S. torture revelations: Gitmo & Abu Ghraib

As I've predicted a few times, further revelations about Uncle Sam's terrifying record of detainee abuse have continued to come out throughout the summer. Today, we had the news about...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:03 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

August 01, 2004

Rolling Stone on Abu Ghraib

Rolling Stone has an article by Osha Gray Davidson that describes some of the info in the 160 "annexes" (6,000 pages) to the US Army's internal Taguba report into conditions...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:51 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

July 31, 2004

Al-Libi's coerced 'information' = crud

Douglas Jehl has a piece in today's NYT about the fact that the information "gleaned" from CIA interrogations of high-ranking Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was subsequently recanted by him--and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:50 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

July 07, 2004

CSM column on Darfur

My column Safeguard Darfur refugees with unarmed UN monitors, which is running in Thursday's CSM, can be found here. Tell me what you think....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:49 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

July 05, 2004

Darfur crisis links

Today, I wrote a column for the CSM about the Darfur crisis. It'll run on Thursday. I did a bunch of research on-line for it, and a little bit off-line....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:45 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

June 01, 2004

Zero tolerance for torture: the column!

Yes!!! The life of a humble scribe like myself has its frustrations and disappointments. But every so often, I feel unbelievably blessed by being able to do what I do....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:29 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

April 04, 2004

Human Rights Watch, on Israel

So many of Israel's blindly ardent defenders in the west make the claim that Amnesty Internatinal and Human Rights Watch criticize Israel "disproportionately". This past week, HRW executive director Ken...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:07 PM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

March 14, 2004

Ignatieff's "mea not-quite-culpa"

Thoughtful human-rights theorist Michael Ignatieff has a one-year-after piece in the NYT mag today. He starts off with an apparently frank and engaging admission: A year ago, I was a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:33 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

April 26, 2003

RELIGION AND ATROCITY

RELIGION AND ATROCITY: I know full well that many terrible actions have been undertaken in the past in the name of "religion", and that this tendency continues to this day....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:29 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

February 17, 2003

Iraq Democrats Disappointed

Back last summer, I got into a heartfelt exchange with a friend of mine who's an Iraqi democrat. His name is Siyamend Othman. He's a wise and good person, an...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:48 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)