I was a bit relieved reading this article after learning that our US torture agents learned their heinous craft from their Anglo counterparts in the current Anglo-American Empire. (Maybe Americans are good guys after all--they just shouldn't hang out with evildoers like the Brits.) In this blogger's review of the recently held literary festival in Oxford, he reports on a number of participants who disclosed many previously secret torture operations and other war crimes of the British Empire.
There is an unfortunate tendency in this country – including, perhaps especially, on the ‘left’ – to think of the ‘war on terror’ and its attendant horrors as a US crime. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, drone strikes…all have become bywords for US atrocities; virtually household names. But how many are aware that the modern system of secret prisons, the interrogation techniques used in the prison abuse scandals, and the use of aerial bombing to suppress resistance, were all pioneered by the British....