Algeria is the post-colonial wound that still bleeds in France Algeria. Long before the identity of the murder suspects was revealed by the French police – even before I heard the names of Cherif and Said Kouachi – I muttered the word “Algeria” to myself. As soon as I heard the names and saw the […]

L’apparition d’Amedy Coulibaly dans les attaques de Montrouge et de la porte de Vincennes, après le massacre de Charlie Hebdo, prouve l’implication d’un groupe structuré qui va au-delà des frères Kouachi. Selon les documents obtenus par Mediapart, une enquête antiterroriste de 2010 sur une tentative d’évasion de l’artificier des attentats de 1995 laissait déjà entrevoir […]

A peine plus d’un an après qu’il ne découvre le corps sans vie du numéro 3 du SRPJ de Limoges, le numéro 2 du service s’est donné la mort hier sur son lieu de travail avec son arme de service. On l’a appris ce matin, un commissaire du SRPJ de Limoges s’est donné la mort […]

Police Commissioner Helric Fredou, Number Two Police Officer of the Regional Service of France’s Judicial Police (JP), Limoges, (Haute-Vienne), “committed suicide on the night of Wednesday to Thursday at the police station.” Commissioner Helric Fredou was part of the police investigation into the Charlie Hebdo terror attack. Terror suspects Cherif and Said Kouachi who were […]

In the days since the siege at the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, the press and social media sites have been consumed with the possible answers to one question: Beyond the two shooters, Said and Cherif Kouachi, who is responsible for the attack that killed 12 people at the magazine’s offices? On Friday, shortly after the […]

Les investigations se concentrent sur ce pays de la péninsule arabique. Saïd Kouachi y aurait séjourné pendant deux semaines après son arrivée à Oman le 25 juillet 2011. Ce qui a justifié sa surveillance par la DGSI entre novembre 2011 et juin 2014. Et si la clef du “11 septembre français” se trouvait à 5 […]

A report in the New York Times claims in its opening paragraph: The younger of the two brothers who killed 12 people in Paris last week most likely used his older brother’s passport in 2011 to travel to Yemen, where he received training and $20,000 from Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, presumably to finance attacks when […]

PARIS — The bloody denouement on Friday of two hostage crises at different ends of a traumatized Paris means attention will now shift to the gaping question facing the French government: How did several jihadists — and possibly a larger cell of co-conspirators — manage to evade surveillance and execute a bold attack despite being […]

UPDATED — A source within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has provided The Intercept with a full statement claiming responsibility for the attack against the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris: Some ask the relationship between Al-Qaeda Organization and the (brothers) who carried out the #CharlieHebdo operation. Was it direct? Was the operation supervised […]

* Una versión muy resumida de esta nota, escrita ayer “en caliente” ni bien enterado de los hechos, fue publicada en el día de hoy, 8 de Enero de 2015, por Página/12. Ahora, con más tiempo, la doy a conocer con todos sus detalles. (Atilio A. Boron ) El atentado terrorista perpetrado en las oficinas […]

After the Charlie Hebdo attack, dozens of world leaders marched arm in arm with President Francois Hollande during a unity march in Paris. But many of these leaders aren’t exactly supporting free speech and a free press back home. So what’s the deal? Dena Takruri of AJ+ explains JANUARY 13, 2015 Find this story at […]

Media coverage of the Paris shootings is typical of previous incidents involving Islam and free speech in the West. Much of it has veered between the misleading, sensationalist and absurd (such as a ‘terrorism expert’ on Fox News branding Birmingham a “Muslim-only city”). Journalists have jumped on the “Je Suis Charlie” bandwagon. Many would never […]

Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke […]

During Thursday night’s ‘Daily Show,” Jon Stewart took on the “Monsters of Money” — the business and financial leaders who flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in a fleet of 1,700 private jets to discuss topics such as climate change. “As in… can you believe how much climate we’ve changed?” Stewart wondered […]

A briefing of top Obama national security officials in the Situation Room of the White House, October 2009. (Photo: White House/Pete Souza) As 2015 begins, let’s take a trip down memory lane. Imagine that it’s January 1963. For the last three years, the United States has unsuccessfully faced off against a small island in the […]

White people don’t like to admit it, but those cartoons upheld their prejudice, their racism, their political supremacy, and cut it how you will — images like that upheld a political order built on discrimination. In less than an hour of the dreadful shooting of 12 people at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the politicians had already […]

There is no “but” about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it. Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane […]

I am Charlie because 12 people were executed in cold blood. I am not Charlie because I am troubled by the crowd of mostly white middle class liberals who took to the streets in Paris to protest the killings, many of whom apparently feel their culture and values are superior to others. Many of them […]

A lot can change in five years. In December 2005 the Guardian opened its pages for me to respond to a leak – the Bush-Blair memo in which both leaders discussed the possibility of bombing Al-Jazeera’s Qatar HQ, where more than 1,000 people work. While those who leaked the memo were imprisoned, its detailed contents […]

An al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network, the files disclose. Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman, was detained in Pakistan after working for the network in Afghanistan after 9/11, and flown to the prison camp where he was allegedly beaten and sexually […]

Al-Jazeera quits Iraq as Americans accused over deaths The Arab satellite television channel al-Jazeera is to pull its reporters out of Iraq after one of them was killed during a US air raid on Baghdad. “I cannot guarantee anyone’s safety,” the news editor, Ibrahim Hillal, told reporters. “We still have four reporters in Baghdad, we […]

The channel says everybody knew where the office was, including the Americans The Kabul offices of the Arab satellite al-Jazeera channel have been destroyed by a US missile. This office has been known by everybody, the American airplanes know the location of the office, they know we are broadcasting from there Al-Jazeera Managing Director Mohammed […]

On Wednesday morning, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen, armed with kalashnikovs, who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently understood to be Muslim extremists. This attack came minutes after the paper tweeted this drawing of ISIS leader Abu […]

It goes without saying that the inconceivable tragedy in Paris yesterday brought out the best and worst in people, and nowhere was this more evident than on social media. The Je Suis Charlie hashtag may have been a misrepresentation of what yesterdays attacks constituted, a point to which I’ll return, but the outpouring of solidarity […]

Many journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo have been murdered by bampots brandishing what appear to be machine guns at close range. It is too soon to have a complete, coherent political narrative of these killings. All one can have at this point are the correct but platitudinous points about there being no justification […]

IRBIL, IRAQ — As French police and security forces scoured the country for the two brothers suspected of massacring 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, intelligence officials in Europe and the United States were conducting a search of their own – for evidence that would link the two to international terrorism organizations. French […]

‘Abu Zubaydah is exhibit A of the Senate’s report. He is mentioned no less than 1,001 times.’ Photograph: AP Even for those accustomed to the horrors of the CIA’s secret detention, torture and extraordinary rendition regime, the summary of the US Senate select committee on intelligence report makes chilling reading. It chronicles a systematic programme […]

The doctors subjected American soldiers to ‘coercive interrogation techniques’ They are the most unlikely architects of the CIA’s programme of torture. Two psychologists who swore to heal not harm. Now it has been revealed that two doctors, identified by the pseudonyms Dr Grayson Swigert and Dr Hammond Dunbar, were paid $81 million by the CIA […]

They told CIA to use waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation Senate report says ‘enhanced’ techniques did not thwart terrorist plots But Mitchell says the report is a politically-motivated ‘load of hooey’ Doctors charged as much as $1,800 for their help with interrogations CIA contract was worth $180million but was cancelled by Obama in 2009 […]

Dr. Bruce Jessen’s handwritten notes describe some of the torture techniques that were used to “exploit” ”war on terror” detainees in custody of the CIA and Department of Defense. Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to […]

Matthew Zirbel’s home in Great Falls, Virginia is filled with oriental carpets, perhaps collected from his time spent working in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The million dollar home has “LOTS of “WOW!” You will “Oooh & Ahhh”, says this recent description on Zillow. This isn’t the first time Zirbel’s surroundings have wowed someone. […]

Senior agent in torture programme was recommended for censure decades earlier for “inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” The CIA officer tasked with interrogating the most important prisoners in America’s secret detention programme allegedly abused captives during the agency’s covert operations in Latin America in the 1980s, it has emerged. The US Senate’s three-year inquiry into […]

Filed Under: U.S., Torture, torture report, CIA, U.S. Foreign Policy, Barack Obama, George Bush, Dianne Feinstein, 9/11, Cold War “The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary […]

(Reuters) – Poland threatened to halt the transfer of al Qaeda suspects to a secret CIA jail on its soil 11 years ago, but became more “flexible” after the Central Intelligence Agency gave it a large sum of money, according to a U.S. Senate report. U.S. President Barack Obama discussed the report’s forthcoming publication during […]

Detailed picture of how CIA flew terror suspects to Szymany has emerged Officials later flew them to a nearby ‘dark site’ for brutal interrogations Mariola Przewlocka says anonymous officials paid six times the landing fee Believes she witnessed arrival of 9/11 ‘mastermind’ on CIA Gulfstream jet Cars with darkened windows secretly took travellers to Polish […]

WASHINGTON — For several months before the Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its controversial report on the CIA’s torture program on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicized battle with the executive branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the document. But even as the White […]

World prepares for moment America comes clean on its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – with which much of the world is complicit After years of waiting, the US is about to publish a report exposing the “enhanced” interrogation techniques used by its intelligence service around the world – in other words, what many class as CIA […]

The public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA detention program refers to the agency’s post-Sept.11 “black sites” as color-themed codes. Other details in the report, however, help indicate the locations of the secret prisons. Note: This does not include Morocco, which was not a CIA-controlled facility. By Adam Goldman and Julie […]

The Big Story Torture Everyone Is Missing While the torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is very important, it doesn’t address the big scoop regarding torture. Instead, it is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report that dropped the big bombshell regarding the U.S. torture program. Senator Levin, commenting on a Armed Services Committee’s […]

Some of the first questions asked of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed upon his capture and during the time during which he was waterboarded were about possible connections between al Qaeda and Iraq, according to a review of several reports on U.S. intelligence operations. The mastermind of the September 11 attacks was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on […]