by BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds. Paul Reynolds, BBC world affairs correspondent, says (Introduction): “President Obama’s speech is divided into a number of sections. He starts by urging greater mutual understanding between the United States and Islam. He then considers seven issues that have to be, in his view, confronted. “These are violent extremism, the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, nuclear weapons …

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the “war on terror” that Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law “quaint” and “obsolete” — so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis. The …

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information — the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured U.S. pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane delivering aid to U.S.-supported Contra forces, they should not have tried him, found …

An argument can be made that implementation of the CIA’s “torture paradigm” never violated the 1984 Torture Convention, at least as Washington interpreted it. McCoy points out that the highly sophisticated CIA paradigm developed at enormous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, based on the “KGB’s most devastating torture technique,” kept primarily to mental torture, not crude physical torture, which …

Alas! It is a great and terrible world. – the Lama in Kipling’s Kim. My purpose in this article is to argue that the West has done incalculable harm to Sri Lanka, though without any malevolent intent, through its over-indulgent attitude towards the LTTE. That attitude bred in the LTTE what might be called a victim syndrome which became a …

Dear friends,  this is a fascinating article. The commonsense of the matter is given in the Egyptian Grand Mufti’s view that the Koran , more specifically parts of it, should be read through “the prism of the era”, meaning that some Koranic provisions take into account varying cultural practises in different societies at different times. The most potent argument against …