Articles by Super User

In the aftermath of the nuclear tests in South Asia, the US State Department, CIA, and other agencies are scrambling to review South Africa’s multi-billion dollar armament industry, particularly its apartheid-era nuclear weapons program. "We are continually updating assessments," a CIA spokesman confirmed recently on the usual condition of anonymity. "But certain aspects are under increased scrutiny, and one of them is their nuclear capability."

In 1993, then South African Prime Minister F.W. De Klerk confirmed what had been an open secret. South Africa had the bomb – seven of the Hiroshima-style weapons to be precise. Manufactured by South African nuclear physicists at the Palindaba atomic complex near Pretoria despite anti-apartheid sanctions, the "Armageddon" devices were reputedly destroyed later that year. read more

Electric shocks, partial drowning, sleep depravation, and mental distress – torture comes in many forms. But increased exposure, modern communications, and the linking of development aid to a country’s human rights record are forcing change as the century draws to a close.

In 1982, I experienced torture. Born and raised a Kenyan of European descent, I came face to face with the dark secrets that all Kenyans knew, but were cowed into enduring. The bludgeoning death of President Jomo Kenyatta’s rebellious confidant J.J. Kariuki, the assassination of firebrand opposition leader Tom Mboya on Nairobi’s Government Road, and the free-fall death from an army helicopter of Robert Ouko, President Moi’s about-to-tell-all foreign minister, brought the message home. read more