Rebecca Gordon
Rebecca Gordon is the author of the new book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and previously, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, February 18, 2020 Impunity Guaranteed for Torturers (and Presidents) On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump's pre-election boast that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters" proved something more than high-flown... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 14, 2020 The 'Deep State' Does Not Mean What Trump Thinks It Means This seems like a strange moment to be writing about "the deep state" with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment , just as we had settled into a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 05, 2019 What’s Wrong With the Republicans? On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast , Carl Bernstein . It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 15, 2019 The True High Crimes and Misdemeanors of Donald J. Trump Recently a friend who follows the news a bit less obsessively than I do said, “I thought George W. Bush was bad, but it seems like Donald Trump is even worse. What do you think?” “Well,” I replied, “in terms of causing death and destruction, I suspect Bush still has the edge .” In fact, the U.S.-... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 15, 2019 How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis It's hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco's Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 15, 2019 I Had an Abortion and Now I'm Not Ashamed I have never said this publicly before, but in December 1974 I had an abortion. I was 22 years old, living in a cold, dark house in Portland, Oregon, spending my days huddled in front of a wood stove trying to finish my undergraduate senior thesis. I did not want to have a baby. I didn’t know what... Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 06, 2019 Clemency for the Lowly, Free Passes for the Mighty Memorial Day has come and gone and President Trump did not issue his pardons after all. There was substantial evidence that he was planning to use the yearly moment honoring the country's war dead to grant executive clemency to several U.S. soldiers and at least one military contractor. All have... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 02, 2019 Autocrats and Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa “Al-Shebab,” said my student Jerry early in the fall 2010 semester. “We’re calling our small group al-Shebab. It means ‘The Youth.’” From his name alone, I wouldn’t have guessed his background, but he was proud of his family’s Egyptian roots and had convinced his classmates to give their group an... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 26, 2019 Turning Our Backs on Nuremberg Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time , so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone! The Senate agrees with the House that the United States should stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen (... Read more |
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Views Thursday, March 07, 2019 From Mowing the Grass to Cutting the Flesh I’ll never forget the first time I saw my own menstrual period start. I was seated on the floor in a circle of women, legs bent in front of me, soles facing each other, a mirror resting on my feet. The flashlight directed at the mirror illuminated my vagina, which was held open by a plastic... Read more |