jane mayer | Pandaemonium

INVASION OF PRIVACY WE SHOULD TRULY WORRY ABOUT

May 16, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, a seminal account of the CIA, extraordinary rendition and torture, has an interview in the New Yorker with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who is about to be tried for violating the Espionage Act by leaking to a journalist secret documents about America’s covert surveillance of its own citizens. Drake, as Mayer puts it, is effectively being charged with being ‘an enemy of the state’. But it’s a state […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, cia, jane mayer, liberties, privacy, usa, war on terror

TORTURE WORKS? SO OPPOSE IT.

May 6, 2011 by Kenan Malik

There is a growing debate about whether the use of torture played a critical role in allowing America to obtain information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Stories in the New York Times, Time, Haaretz, AP and elsewhere have suggested that it may have. And this in turn has emboldened those who see the use of what is euphemistically called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as an essential tool in the war against terror. According to the AP report: The revelation that intelligence gleaned […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: ethics, jane mayer, liberties, osama bin laden, torture, usa, war on terror

‘HE WAS NOT SQUEAMISH, BY THE WAY’

January 30, 2011 by Kenan Malik

New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on Egypt’s new vice president Omar Suleiman: He was the CIA’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the CIA snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances… Edward S. Walker, Jr., a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, described Suleiman as ‘very bright, very realistic’, adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to ‘some of the negative things […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: cia, egypt, jane mayer, rendition, torture, usa, war on terror