"I did not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed.”
—Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, on how he managed press coverage during the 1991 Gulf War.

Was Dick Cheney the father of modern warfare? If not, he at least helped birth the postmodern art of wartime press management as Defense Secretary during the first Gulf War in 1991. Now, along with his old White House mentor Don Rumsfeld and sidekicks Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney is no doubt looking forward to another lightning campaign against Saddam Hussein and another free pass from an obliging press corps.

The failure of many in the US antiwar movement to fight anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism is often rooted in conscious or unconscious acceptance of two interconnected racist ideologies—Islamophobia and Zionism. A good example of this is the anti-war movement’s wary response to Hamas’ overwhelming victory in this year’s Palestinian legislative elections.

American Methods is the latest from the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. In his latest book, Williams has produced a well-documented and extremely readable, if also extremely disturbing, piece of work that seeks to lay out the idea that torture works. He explains that torture is not something used to get information or punish, but is rather a system designed to control populations and is a base characteristic of state power. He writes, “Torture doesn’t represent a system of failure; it is the system.”