This week on CounterSpin:
The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuses of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy versus bad guy story. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a case study; it tells the story of Ted Hall who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talk with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.