These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.
Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t [...]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
In essence, the classified memo cited by Cheney stated that the CIA torture of Abu Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla in 2003. But as Isikoff reports, the newly-released docs point out that Padilla was arrested in 2002 — so torture couldn’t have secured his capture.
This also appears to [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your…
CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…
KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding?
CHENEY: Yes.
He just admitted being an accomplice. To date approximately 100 detainees (at minimum), including CIA-held detainees, have died during [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Caught on Tape, CIA, Crime, Dick Cheney, Evidence, Guantanamo, Iraq War, JSOC, Military, Torture, War Crimes, Waterboarding
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Monday, February 15, 2010
There are times when governments fight to keep documents secret to protect sensitive intelligence or other vital national security interests. And there are times when they are just trying to cover up incompetence, misbehavior or lawbreaking.
Last week, when a British court released secret intelligence material relating to the torture allegations of a former Guantánamo prisoner, [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Binyam Mohamed, CIA, Courts, Crime, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Law, MI5, Rendition, Torture, War Crimes
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A new investigation by journalist Anand Gopal reveals harrowing details about US secret prisons in Afghanistan, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Gopal interviewed Afghans who were detained and abused at several disclosed and undisclosed sites at US and Afghan military bases across the country. He also reveals the existence of another secret prison [...]
Three developments last week show the growing gap between the Obama Administration and its NATO allies with respect to the legacy of torture from the Bush era. They also demonstrate that, contrary to Obama’s promises faithfully to uphold the Convention Against Torture and Geneva Conventions, his Justice Department has no intention of doing so when [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Alberto Gonzales, Canada, Cover-Ups, David Addington, David Margolis, DOJ, Douglas Feith, Eric Holder, Ethics, Guantanamo, Jay Bybee, Jim Haynes, John Yoo, NATO, Spain, Torture
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The practice that Sher Khan describes here, first used in classical antiquity and later by American soldiers battling the Filipino insurgency around the turn of the last century, is called the “water cure.” One of the JAG School textbook cases of prosecution for torture involves this procedure. The case became notorious in the United States [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Anand Gopal, DOD, DOJ, FOIA, Geneva Conventions, International Law, International Red Cross, JSOC, Law, Noor Agha Sher Khan, Robert Gates, Secret Prisons, Torture, Waterboarding
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In February 2004, David J. Evans, a marine biologist and photographer, was engaged as part of a team working on the Pentagon’s Legacy Program, which documents the cultural and environmental aspects of Defense Department operations. His assignment was to survey and photograph the rich array of wildlife and vegetation at Guantánamo Naval Base. After publication [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A major new report on secret detention policies (.doc) around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan, CIA, Disappeared, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Iraq, JSOC, Rendition, Secret Detention, Secret Prisons, Torture, UN
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Saturday, January 23, 2010
“A commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves… When injustice anywhere is ignored, justice everywhere is denied. Acknowledging and remedying mistakes does not make us weaker, it reaffirms the strengths of our principles and institutions.”
Not Amnesty International’s words, but those of US Secretary of [...]
Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not [...]
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Also tagged Army Field Manual on Interrogations, Dennis Blair, DNI, Geneva Conventions, Human Rights, Intelligence, John Ensign, Law, Military Tribunals, Miranda Warning, National Security, Secret Prisons, Terrorism, Torture
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
Scott Horton speaks with Keith Olbermann about The Guantánamo “Suicides”—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he was direct. “They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,” he said. “They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut [...]
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
A federal appeals court in New York ruled on Wednesday that US government agencies may refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request that might disclose sensitive intelligence activities, sources, or methods.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Attorney Client Privilege, Courts, Espionage, FOIA, Guantanamo, Intelligence, Law, Nondisclosure, NSA, Privacy, Secrecy, Surveillance, Transparency, TSP
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Saturday, December 26, 2009
This is not where the Obama administration imagined it would be 11 months ago, when the president signed an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010.
That day, the president set in motion an interagency task force to determine which detainees could be released and whether any could be prosecuted. Obama [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Barack Obama, Courts, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Indefinite Detention, Iraq War, Law, Military, Military Tribunals, Prisons
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Listening To
