One Thousand Reasons

Articles filed under Torture

Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal
New York Times
Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It’s not torture if you don’t mean it to be. It’s not torture if you don’t nearly kill the victim. It’s not torture if the president says it’s not torture.

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A National Disgrace
New York Times
Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

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American Sues F.B.I., Saying He Was Detained in Africa
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A New Jersey man who contends that he was detained and mistreated in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia in 2007 with the approval of the United States filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against F.B.I. agents and other unidentified American officials who he says interrogated him and threatened him with execution.

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Italian Judge Convicts 23 in CIA Kidnap Case
New York Times
MILAN (AP) -- An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people involved in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program.

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Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails
New York Times
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ ” according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.

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What Torture Never Told Us
New York Times
PUBLIC bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.

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Dick Cheney’s Version
New York Times
After the C.I.A. inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage — not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation.

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The Banality of Bush White House Evil
New York Times
WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil.

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Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

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The Torturers’ Manifesto
New York Times
To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

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Crimes That Deserve Punishment
Washington Post
It's no longer possible to mince words, or pretend we didn't know. The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced" interrogation methods, used on "high-value" terrorism suspects, plainly constituted torture. The time for euphemisms is over, and the time for accountability has arrived.

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Tales From Torture’s Dark World
New York Times
ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency."

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The Tortured Memos
New York Times
We had two powerful reactions this week after the C.I.A. admitted to destroying 92 videotapes of interrogations that may involve torture and the Justice Department released several of the legal manifestos that former President George W. Bush used to justify mangling the Constitution after Sept. 11, 2001.

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The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act
Time
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

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The Torture Report
New York Times
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

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Pack of Liars
Washington Post
Yesterday's bipartisan Senate report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere doesn't just lay out a clear line of responsibility starting with President Bush, it also exposes the administration's repeated explanation for what happened as a pack of lies.

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Report Blames Rumsfeld for Detainee Abuses
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed Services committee said that top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bear major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military detention centers.

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Waterboarding: The psychological damage is indescribable
Times (UK)
Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the special forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as Sere (survival, evasion, resistance, escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva conventions. It was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

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‘John McCain was never tortured in my jail’, says Tran Trong Duyet
Times (UK)
On one bank of the Truc Bach lake a small electricity sub-station is plastered with flyers touting a local plumber. Along the road is an aerobics studio where youngsters lazily sip coffee and browse the papers. Thirty yards out across the water – rancid and bobbing with dead fish – is moored a handful of pedal boats shaped like swans.

It was within this unlikely triangle of landmarks – exactly 41 years ago this Sunday – that John McCain crash-landed and, say his captors, began his run for the United States presidency.

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The torture time bomb
Guardian
As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation - including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA - which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.

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The Torture Presidency
Harpers
The last hundred days of any presidency are frequently known as “legacy time.” The die may be cast, but the occupant of the White House begins making plans to leave and wonders inevitably about how he will be seen by posterity. So what image will dominate the Bush presidency?

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Torture's Smoking Guns
Washington Post
Had they embarked on a serious inquiry into the legality, morality or even utility of torturing terror suspects, members of the Bush administration would have had no alternative but to conclude that what they were authorizing was illegal, unconscionable, and ineffective to boot. But soul-searching, evidently, was not a high priority.

The people closer to the operational level did, however, spend plenty of time making sure their asses were covered.

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Gitmo Torture Tips
Slate
A recently obtained four-page guide describing approved "tactics and techniques" to "break" detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (see below and the following three pages) repeats verbatim the official language describing survival resistance and escape training by the U.S. Navy.

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McCain was not tortured, PoW guard claims
Guardian
The Republican US presidential candidate John McCain was not tortured during his captivity in North Vietnam, the chief prison guard of the jail in which he was held has claimed.

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Officer: Military Demanded Torture Lessons
CBS News
The Iraqi prisoner had valuable intelligence, U.S. special forces believed, and they desperately wanted it. They demanded that expert American military trainers teach them the same types of abusive interrogation techniques that North Korea and Vietnamese forces once used against U.S. prisoners of war.

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Bush Aides Linked to Talks on Interrogations
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

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DOD Ordered To Release Detainee Torture Photos
Huffington Post
A federal court today ordered the Department of Defense to release photographs depicting the abuse of detainees by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the government's appeal of a 2006 order directing the Defense Department to release the photos. Today's decision comes as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking information on the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas.

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Southern Evangelicals And Torture
The Atlantic
If you want to know why I cannot bring myself to call the base of the Republican party Christians, and instead use the term Christianist, a new poll helps explain why:

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Extraordinary Rendition, Extraordinary Mistake
FPIF
Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, was living in Sydney with his wife and four children when he took a trip alone to Pakistan to find a home for his family. When Habib boarded a bus for the Islamabad airport to return home, Pakistani police seized him and took him to a police station, where he was subjected to various crude torture techniques, including electric shocks and beating. At one point, he was forced to hang by the arms above a drum-like mechanism that administered an electric shock when touched. Pakistani police asked him repeatedly if he was with al-Qaeda, and if he trained in Afghanistan. Habib responded "No" over and over until he passed out.

After 15 days in the Pakistani prison, Habib was transferred to U.S. agents who flew him to Cairo.

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The Courts and Mr. Arar
New York Times
We were deeply disheartened in June when a federal appeals court panel dismissed, on flimsy legal grounds, the civil rights lawsuit brought by Maher Arar. Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was a victim of the Bush administration’s notorious policy of “extraordinary rendition” — the outsourcing of interrogations to governments known to use torture.

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Psychologists and torture
Boston Globe
FROM THE moment US military and civilian officials began detaining and interrogating Guantanamo Bay prisoners with methods that the Red Cross has called tantamount to torture, they have had the assistance of psychologists. This has been a source of anguish to many members of the profession, who want to join their colleagues in other professional organizations and draw a clear line against psychologists' involvement in interrogation of detainees.

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Does Bush Believe McCain Was Tortured?
The Atlantic
In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

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Edwards, McCain, Adultery
The Atlantic
A lively exchange on Fox News. Sean Hannity's head explodes, which is always good television at the thought that the same standards applied to Democrats should apply to Republicans.

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Kafkaesque rendition
Guardian
Lawyers acting for Binyam Mohamed, a British resident incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, are asking the high court to order the government to disclose information that, they say, would show the evidence against him was obtained by torture.

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Would Obama prosecute the Bush administration for torture?
Salon
WASHINGTON -- On the campaign trail in April, Barack Obama was asked whether, if elected, he would prosecute Bush administration officials for establishing torture as American policy. The candidate demurred. "If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," he said. But he quickly added, "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems to solve."

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U.S. Diego Garcia Denials Take Another Hit
Daily Kos
Adam Zagorin in a story at Time magazine and the BBC’s "Newsnight" have today given fresh ammunition to the long-held view of human rights advocates and European investigators that the United States has used and may be continuing to use the British-owned atoll of Diego Garcia and its territorial waters as a rendition hub and detention center for suspected terrorists. Whether suspects have been tortured there remains unknown, but this also is widely suspected.

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A Torture Paper Trail
Washington Post
I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation's great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the U.S. government. But that's precisely what he did.

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UK torture coverup unravels
Daily Kos
The British governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been shockingly complicit with the Bush administration both in using, encouraging, and facilitating torture, as well as in helping to cover up the traces. Some CIA torture flights passed through the UK, and British-controlled Diego Garcia has served as one of the primary staging grounds for those flights and itself is one of the network of 'black sites'. Indeed MI5 agents have arranged the arrest of men who ended up at Guantanamo, and taken part in interviews there - as for example in the case of Bisher al Rawi.

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The Bauer of Suggestion
Slate
The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer, or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer's stunning The Dark Side and Philippe Sands' The Torture Team, I quickly realized that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television's 24: Jack Bauer.

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How to Get Away With Torture
Washington Post
Here's the official policy on torture from the administration that decries moral relativism: It's in the eye of the torturer.

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Documents Laid Out Interrogation Procedures
New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Central Intelligence Agency interrogators used waterboarding and other harsh techniques on Qaeda suspects, agency rules required detailed records of each method used, its duration and the names of everyone present, according to one of three heavily redacted government documents made public on Thursday.

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Previously secret torture memo released
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration told the CIA in 2002 that its interrogators working abroad would not violate U.S. prohibitions against torture unless they "have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," according to a previously secret Justice Department memo released Thursday.

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ACLU Obtains Key Memos Authorizing CIA Torture Methods
ACLU
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today obtained three redacted documents related to the Bush administration's brutal interrogation policies, including a previously withheld Justice Department memo authorizing the CIA's use of torture.

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Madness and Shame
New York Times
You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

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The Misdirection
Harpers
Last week the House Judiciary Committee conducted two further hearings into the formulation of Bush Administration torture policy. In the second, John Ashcroft was questioned and some significant progress was made. Ashcroft acknowledged that the White House had effectively co-opted the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and that its opinions were no longer being issued at arm’s length. While reiterating some absurd fantasies about torture (starting with the indefensible proposition that waterboarding has always been fine), he stated that it was “not hard” to rescind the original torture memorandum because it was a shoddy product.

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Ashcroft, Torture and the U.S.
CounterPunch
Is it possible for the U.S. to further degrade itself on the world stage? Only days after videos showing Canadian citizen Omar Khadr being tortured in a U.S. torture chamber, videos taken when he was only fifteen years old, the House Judiciary Committee members gathered themselves together to determine if any al-Qaida suspects in the custody of the U.S. had been tortured.

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John Ashcroft, Riding Back on a White Horse
Washington Post
The rehabilitation of John David Ashcroft has been a wonder to behold.

When he left the Justice Department three years ago, he was the left's favorite demon, the symbol of all the dark and sinister practices of the Bush administration. "Apparently he wants to spend more time spying on his family," David Letterman mused.

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Administration Wanted Loyalist As Justice Dept. Legal Adviser
Washington Post
Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft offered the White House a list of five candidates to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel in early 2003, but top administration officials summarily rejected them in favor of installing a loyalist who would provide the legal footing needed to continue coercive interrogation techniques and broadly interpret executive power, according to two former administration officials.

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Ashcroft defends waterboarding before House panel
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding has served a "valuable" purpose and does not constitute torture, former Attorney General John Ashcroft told a House committee Thursday.

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Torture for Torturers?
CounterPunch
I don’t believe in torture, but right now, I’d like to see a few people subjected to some of the torture techniques that they approved for use against US captives in the so-called War on Terror.

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The age of impunity is over
Guardian
There have been pre-emptive complaints that the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and his governmental accomplices for crimes against humanity would make diplomacy more difficult. People said the same thing about Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia's amputator-in-chief Charles Taylor. In all three cases, the argument does not hold water.

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Answering terror with terror
Salon
We can't say we weren't warned.

The very first Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney descended like a cloud on "Meet the Press" to outline the Bush administration's response. "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."

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Guantanamo Interrogation Tape Released
CBS News
Wrenching video of a teenaged Omar Khadr under interrogation by a Canadian spy service agent at Guantanamo Bay was released early Tuesday on the Internet.

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Detainee’s Lawyers Make Claim on Sleep Deprivation
New York Times
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A week before what could be the first American war crimes trial since World War II, defense lawyers claimed on Monday that an accused detainee might have been subjected to a program of systematic sleep deprivation that they said would constitute torture.

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Sleep deprivation raised in bin Laden driver case
Reuters
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A newly-released document suggests Osama bin Laden's former driver may have been subjected to 50 days of sleep deprivation at the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, the prisoner's defense lawyers said on Monday.

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Vice-President For Torture
The Atlantic
I haven't been able to read Jane Mayer's new book yet. But the reports, news stories and reviews confirm much of what this blog has followed obsessively for the past seven years - and adds new, dreadful detail.

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Mukasey Rejects Inquiry
Washington Post
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey rejected calls to appoint a special counsel to investigate Bush administration officials who approved the use of coercive interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects.

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Book Cites Secret Red Cross Report of C.I.A. Torture of Qaeda Captives
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

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Barney the purple torturer?
Los Angeles Times
Some months ago, Mother Jones magazine put together what it called a "torture playlist" of songs that American interrogators have used in their sessions with detainees during the last few years. "Torture's Top 10" was what one newspaper called it.

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Beware Bush's preemptive strike on torture
Salon
New revelations of the U.S. government's systematic use of torture in the "global war on terror," including communist Chinese "brainwashing" methods from the 1950s, have brought renewed calls from lawmakers and human rights advocates for the prosecution of senior Bush administration officials. While the legal and political obstacles to such prosecutions are steep, those implicated will not want to leave the enjoyment of their retirement years to the mercy of the federal judiciary.

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Sex Crimes in the White House
AlterNet
Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators of these crimes, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

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Forgotten lessons on torture
Boston Globe
THERE ARE several obvious reasons, both ethical and practical, for the United States to reject the use of torture. But a sad new reason was added during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, when it was revealed that US military trainers instructed Army and CIA interrogators at Guantanamo in 2002 on "coercive management techniques" derived from Chinese communist practices.

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Believe Me, It’s Torture
Vanity Fair
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.

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China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

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Abu Ghraib inmates sue contractors, claim torture
Miami Herald
HAGERSTOWN, Md. -- Three Iraqis and a Jordanian filed federal lawsuits Monday alleging they were tortured by U.S. defense contractors while detained at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

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Bush's top general quashed torture dissent
Salon
WASHINGTON -- The former Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, helped quash dissent from across the U.S. military as the Bush administration first set up a brutal interrogation regime for terrorism suspects, according to newly public documents and testimony from an ongoing Senate probe.

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Avoiding the Torture Taint: Advice from Military Lawyers
In These Times
Before the Pentagon’s detainee interrogation policy was finalized in 2002, military officials — both supporters and opponents of the controversial techniques it condoned — concerned themselves primarily with protecting their organizations from scrutiny rather than with preventing the techniques from being instituted in the first place. One senior Pentagon official even recommended removing detainees from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so that techniques that appeared to violate the U.S. Code of Military Justice could not be attributed to his agency.

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All Too Human
New York Times
Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

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Fuck You, He Explained
The Atlantic
Leave aside the gravity of the charges against David Addington. Just check out his attitude toward the elected congressmen and congresswomen in yesterday's hearings. The total contempt for democratic processes, for the most legitimate of questions in the face of proof that war crimes have been committed: it tells you a lot about the arrogance at the heart of the Cheney operation:

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Contempt of Congress
Washington Post
A House Judiciary subcommittee summoned David S. Addington out of the shadows yesterday in an attempt to get the vice president's furtive chief enforcer to enlighten the public about how the United States came to embrace torture as a valid interrogation technique.

But the accomplished puppet master showed he can shroud himself in obscurity even under the klieg lights. The only thing Addington made clear was his contempt for the members of Congress and their questions.

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Could The President Legally Bury Someone Alive?
The Atlantic
John Yoo wouldn't answer yesterday. But his answer has to be yes, right? Here he is in another venue:

"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

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Yoo Don't Say
TPM
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) didn't waste any time cutting to the chase in this morning's hearing featuring Vice Presidential Chief of Staff David Addington and former DOJ torture-memo attorney John Yoo.

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Torture a Big Problem Worldwide, UN Expert Says
Deutsche Welle
Despite a ban on torture, it remains widespread in many countries, the UN’s Manfred Nowak recently said in an interview with Deutsche Welle ahead of the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer who currently serves as the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Torture, sees reasons for both optimism and concern.

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Canadian judge: Teen detainee's rights were breached
Miami Herald
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A Canadian judge ruled Wednesday that the U.S. military's treatment of a teenage detainee at Guantánamo Bay violated international laws against torture.

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Occupations abroad always lead to the erosion of liberties at home
Guardian
Before his show trial in Hungary in 1948, Robert Vogeler spent three months in a cell sleeping on a board that hovered just above two inches of water. Day and night a bright light bathed his cell, and even then someone would bang on the wall next door just to make sure he couldn't get any sleep. "It is just a question of time before you confess," he said afterwards. "With some it takes a little longer than others, but nobody can resist that treatment indefinitely."

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Torturegate
CounterPunch
This has been one of the most extraordinary weeks in modern American history. The many isolated streams of evidence about the Bush Administration's torture system – and the direct responsibility of the Administration's highest officials for this vast crime – have now converged into a mighty flood: undeniable, unignorable, pouring through the halls of Congress and media newsrooms, lashing at the walls of the White House itself. In the course of the past few days, a series of events has laid bare the stinking sepsis at the heart of the Bush Regime for all to see.

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Guantánamo detainee describes sleep deprivation
Miami Herald
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- An Afghan detainee interrupted the testimony Thursday of a Harvard sleep disorder expert to describe first-hand a controversial Guantánamo sleep deprivation regime called the ``Frequent Flyer Program.''

''Give me time to talk about my sleeplessness,'' said Afghan captive Mohammed Jawad, about 23, before he practically rushed the war court witness stand soon after his military judge ordered his ankles unshackled.

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Bad Blood and an Empty Chair
Washington Post
The stage was set Wednesday afternoon at the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties to hear former deputy undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith testify about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees.

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How the Pentagon Turned an Interrogation Resistance Program into a Blueprint for Torture
AlterNet
In August 2004, a Defense Dept. panel convened to investigate detainee abuse after the Abu Ghraib scandal issued its much-anticipated report. Interrogation techniques designed for use at Guantánamo Bay, which President George W. Bush had decreed outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, had "migrated" to Iraq, which Bush recognized was under Geneva, concluded panel chairman James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary. Schlesinger's panel, however, did not explain which officials ordered the abusive techniques to transfer across continents -- or how and why they became Pentagon policy in the first place.

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Goodwill Hunting
Slate
It isn't easy to justify torture. It does, after all, violate centuries' worth of human rights norms and international and domestic law. It has famously been used by the Nazis and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-Sung—not really the kinds of folk we usually strive to emulate.

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US torture methods 'endanger troops'
News (AU)
THE use by the United States of harsh interrogation methods against suspected terrorists has stained the country's image and is putting US soldiers' lives at risk, experts say.

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The Great Torture Scandal
Informed Comment
McClatchy and other reporters are abruptly pulling the curtain away from the Bush team's illegal practices in arresting people arbitrarily, declining to offer proof that they were guilty of anything, detaining them indefinitely without trial or charges, and deliberately torturing them to the extent of leaving long-term scars and disabilities. The torture practices originated not with lower-level officers but with Donald Rumsfeld and others in Bush's inner circle, who then later blamed lower-level officials for developing the ideas that Rumsfeld ordered them to develop. Nothing they have done has survived a court challenge where one has been permitted.

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It Was Top Down, Stupid
Slate
When the Abu Ghraib scandal hit in the summer of 2004, two of the administration's most senior lawyers—White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the Defense Department's General Counsel Jim Haynes—stood before the world's media and laid out the official explanation for newly aggressive interrogation within the U.S. military: It was the result of a bottom-up request from an aggressive combatant commander at Guantanamo; it was implemented within the law and on the basis of careful legal advice; and it produced useful and important results. These new techniques had been essential in getting vital security information from men they labeled "the worst of the worst."

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General Accuses Administration of War Crimes
Washington Post
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

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Torture from the Top Down
Harpers
In a series of hearings, Congressional leaders are trying to get to the bottom of a simple question: who initiated torture techniques in the “war on terror”? What was the process by which it was done? On whose authority was it done? The use of torture techniques became a matter of public knowledge four years ago. In response to the initial disclosures, the Bush Administration first decided to spin the fable of a handful of “rotten apples” inside of a company of military police from Appalachia and scapegoated a handful of examples in carefully managed and staged show trials. When further disclosures out of Bagram and Guantánamo made this untenable, they spun a new myth, this time suggesting that the administration had responded to a plea from below for wider latitude.

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Abu Ghraib? Doesn't Ring a Bell.
Washington Post
If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday's Senate appearance by the Pentagon's former top lawyer.

William "Jim" Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee.

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Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

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Torture began at the top
Los Angeles Times
Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States.

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Seeking Answers on Detainee Abuse
Time
Despite years of investigation into alleged abuse and death of prisoners in U.S. custody since 9/11, the only Americans held accountable have been the low-ranking "bad apples" convicted for the worst atrocities at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. No official blame has been assigned to higher-ups for abuses at Guantanamo or in Afghanistan, much less for crimes allegedly committed by U.S. personnel in various secret CIA prisons around the world. The Senate Armed Services Committee sought to correct that on Tuesday by holding the nation's first public hearing into who at the top should be held accountable for the abuse of detainees held by the U.S.

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Clear Evidence of War Crimes: Stern Letters to Come?
Daily Kos
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

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Report: Exams prove torture in Iraq, Gitmo
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.

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CIA Played Larger Role In Advising Pentagon
Washington Post
A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

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A timeline to Bush government torture
Salon
WASHINGTON -- For years now, the Bush White House has claimed that the United States does not conduct torture. Prisoner abuse at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it has asserted, was an aberration -- the work of a few "bad apples" on the night shift. When the CIA used "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (simulated drowning), the abuse, according to Bush officials, did not add up to torture.

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture.

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Torture's Bad Seeds
Washington Post
The Bush Administration has long maintained that the overtly cruel and abusive treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was the conduct of a few "bad apples."

But a Senate investigation is tracking the rot to its source. And its findings add to the mounting evidence that the sometimes systematic torture of detainees at American hands was the result of decisions made at the highest levels of government -- and particularly within the office of the vice president.

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Democrat: Pentagon sought abusive interrogations
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Military officials tasked with training U.S. troops to evade enemy interrogations provided Pentagon lawyers a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat disclosed Tuesday.

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Senate report says Pentagon skewed timeline on interrogation
Salon
According to the official story, discussion of newer, harsher interrogation methods began in October 2002, when field commanders at Guantánamo Bay requested nontraditional methods to deal with detainees held there. But, the Washington Post reports Tuesday, a new Senate committee report questions that timeline, and says the discussion started higher up the chain of command.

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Ex-detainees allege that U.S. troops abused Quran
McClatchy Newspapers
KUWAIT CITY — Former Guantanamo detainees told McClatchy that American soldiers and interrogators mistreated the Quran in detention facilities at Bagram Air Base, Kandahar Airfield and Guantanamo.

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Military lawyers objected to harsh methods in 2002
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Military lawyers warned against the harsh detainee interrogation techniques approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, contending in separate memos weeks before Rumsfeld's endorsement that they could be illegal, a Senate panel has found.

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Documents undercut Pentagon's denial of routine abuse
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Although Defense Department officials deny that detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or in other American camps were routinely mistreated, official statements and court testimony undercut the claim.

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Soldiers blame lack of training, support for Bagram abuse
McClatchy Newspapers
WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — The guards at the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Base didn't know whether Habibullah had anything to do with terrorist attacks on America, but they knew that he was defiant.

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Elusive Starting Point on Harsh Interrogations
New York Times
WASHINGTON — In a flurry of oversight that some critics say comes years too late, Congress is pressing Bush administration officials on a still-unanswered question: How did the United States come to embrace harsh interrogation methods it had always shunned?

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Guantánamo Bay: Interrogators told to destroy torture notes, US lawyer claims
Guardian
Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were told to destroy their notes to stop them potentially being used to highlight the mistreatment of detainees, according to a US military lawyer.

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Justice Dept. Urged to Examine Authorization of Harsh Interrogation Tactics
Washington Post
Nearly 60 House Democrats yesterday urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists.

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Lawmaker: Panties OK to use in torture
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Dana Rohrabacher on Wednesday dismissed the idea that taunting terrorism suspects with women's panties is a form of torture.

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Where is the Outrage?
Huffington Post
Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It's a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department's inspector general.

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The Torture Scandal's Heroes
Washington Post
ALMOST EVERY scandal produces unlikely heroes, workaday or even flawed men and women who don't make headlines but perform courageous acts of conscience, often behind the scenes and in the face of enormous pressure.

Several such characters emerged recently from what has otherwise been a disgraceful chapter of American history involving the abuse of foreign detainees held by U.S. forces in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Justice Department's Revelations on Torture
CounterPunch
It has long been an accepted fact of life that the U.S. not only condones but also practices the torture of political prisoners. While President George Bush, Cabinet members and members of Congress decry the human rights violations of other nations, they are not nearly so critical of those violations when perpetrated under their orders.

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What the F.B.I. Agents Saw
New York Times
Does this sound familiar? Muslim men are stripped in front of female guards and sexually humiliated. A prisoner is made to wear a dog’s collar and leash, another is hooded with women’s underwear. Others are shackled in stress positions for hours, held in isolation for months, and threatened with attack dogs.

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Interrogation Tactics Were Challenged at White House
Washington Post
Five years ago, as troubling reports emerged about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a career lawyer at the Justice Department began a long and relatively lonely campaign to alert top Bush administration officials to a strategy he considered "wrongheaded."

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White House Ignored Torture Warnings
Washington Post
Top White House officials waved off early warnings from the FBI that interrogation tactics being used on detainees might be illegal, according to a new report from the Justice Department's inspector general.

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Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators
ABC News
U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

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Audit Finds FBI Reports Of Detainee Abuse Ignored
Washington Post
Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released yesterday.

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Report Details Dissent on Guantánamo Tactics
New York Times
WASHINGTON — In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

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Report Details Complaints Over Interrogations
New York Times
WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents complained repeatedly, beginning in 2002, about the harsh interrogation tactics that military and C.I.A. interrogators were using in questioning terrorism suspects, like making them do dog tricks and parade in the nude in front of female soldiers, but their complaints appear to have had little effect, according to an exhaustive report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

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Torture's Blowback
Washington Post
THE GHOSTS of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had he not been prevented from entering the country. The decision has been widely reported as a serious setback for the administration's quest to bring terrorists to justice. It is much more and much worse than that: It is a palpable reminder of the inhumane acts committed by U.S. personnel and sanctioned by top officials in the name of protecting Americans from extremists.

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The Tortured Law on Torture
Huffington Post
Ah yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation's commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks' 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the "evidence" he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.

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John Yoo: In His Own Words
Esquire
John Yoo is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Berkeley. He is also the main author of what has come to be known as "The Torture Memo," the long-sealed internal White House document that defined precisely which aggressive techniques could be legally employed by CIA interrogators against suspected terrorists.

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Judge May Make CIA Torture Memo Public
CBS News
The CIA must let a judge view a 2002 memo purportedly including waterboarding among interrogation methods to be used on prisoners in U.S. custody so he can decide whether it should be made public, the judge ruled Thursday.

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US judge orders CIA to turn over 'torture' memo-ACLU
AlterNet
NEW YORK, May 8 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday to submit to the court a 2002 memo said to specify harsh interrogation methods used on suspected terrorists held abroad.

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Abuse Claims Mount Against Pentagon, Contractors
Anti-War
As human rights groups demanded the release of a report on a long-running investigation of the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, new torture claims were leveled at two U.S. military contractors by a former Abu Ghraib "ghost" detainee who was wrongly imprisoned and later released without charge.

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Torture Showdown Coming?
Washington Post
Some of the leading architects of the Bush administration's torture policies have agreed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee. But anyone hoping for an accountability moment may be in for disappointment.

Just because they're willing to show up for questioning, doesn't mean they'll be willing to give straight answers -- or any answers at all, for that matter.

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Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal
CounterPunch
What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery, and wars of aggression? They are all jus cogens. Jus cogens is Latin for "higher law" or "compelling law." This means that no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a jus cogens prohibition.

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Gore: It Is ‘Obscene’ That Bush Has Dismissed ‘George Washington’s 200-Plus Year Prohibition On Torture’
Think Progress
On April 9, ABC News reported that in 2002, President Bush’s most senior advisers approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush confirmed to ABC he “approved” of the tactics. Since the ABC report, the media have largely ignored the story. Morever, it took 14 days for a reporter to raise the issue in a White House press briefing.

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The awfully nice guys allowing US torture at Guantanamo Bay
Times (UK)
The interrogation room in Guantanamo Bay, Christmas Eve 2002. Detainee 063 – an Al-Qaeda suspect called Mohamed al-Kahtani, who may or may not be that sought-after 20th 9/11 hijacker – is crying in his chair. It is his 33rd day of continuous interrogation – a month with almost no sleep – and the interrogators have started up with the white noise again and are pouring water over his head.

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Notes From the War on Terror
New York Times
For more than a year, President Bush has refused to honor legitimate requests from the Democratic majority in Congress for legal documents that he used to justify ordering the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners. This week, the Justice Department finally agreed to show some papers to members of the House and Senate.

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Bush admits he approved torture
Seattle PI
WASHINGTON -- The American people have heard President Bush and his spokespeople say many times that the U.S. government does not engage in torture.

Whether Bush was believed or not is another story -- especially in light of the photographic evidence of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It's understood that many of the photos are too sadistically graphic to be made public.

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The Torture Election
CounterPunch
As the presidential horse race grows more frenzied and absurd -- Flag pins! Bowling! Obliteration!-- it is important to keep in mind what the election is really about: torture.

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Scratch torture from U.S. rule book
Miami Herald
When it comes to torture, the Bush administration wants the United States to have it both ways. President Bush believes America can be a country governed by laws, even though it may break the law under special circumstances. This is a morally bankrupt position that diminishes America's stature in the world, and puts U.S. citizens and soldiers at risk. Moreover, it is not necessary. The United States can protect itself without breaking U.S. or international law.

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House Chair Threatens Subpoenas On Torture
CBS News
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Monday threatened to serve subpoenas on former Attorney General John Ashcroft and two others associated with the Bush administration's interrogation policies if they don't agree to testify.

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Administration Says Particulars May Trump Geneva Protections
Washington Post
The Geneva Conventions' ban on "outrages against personal dignity" does not automatically apply to terrorism suspects in the custody of U.S. intelligence agencies, the Justice Department has suggested to Congress in recent letters that lay out the Bush administration's interpretation of the international treaty.

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Letters Outline Legal Rationale for C.I.A. Tactics
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

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The Bush Team’s Geneva Hypocrisy
Dissident Voice
Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

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Torture of the law
San Francisco Chronicle
One of President Bush's most shameful failings is his stubborn insistence on the right to torture terrorist suspects. While claiming the country does no such thing, he's vetoed limits on CIA interrogators and shielded his outlook with clouds of rhetoric about protecting the nation.

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FBI: We Warned About Torture of Detainees
CBS News
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday recalled warning the Justice Department and the Pentagon that some U.S. interrogation methods used against terrorists might be inappropriate, if not illegal.

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CIA Foresaw Interrogation Issues
Washington Post
The CIA concluded that criminal, administrative or civil investigations stemming from harsh interrogation tactics were "virtually inevitable," leading the agency to seek legal support from the Justice Department, according to a CIA official's statement in court documents filed yesterday.

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Yoo refuses to testify about torture memos.
Think Progress
Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo, who wrote controversial legal memos authorizing the administration’s torture programs, will not testify voluntarily before the House Judiciary Committee, ABC reports, “paving the way for a possible subpoena and showdown over Executive Privilege. In a letter to Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), Yoo’s lawyer said his client was “not authorized” by the DOJ to discuss internal deliberations:

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Duped About Torture
Washington Post
Career military men know better than anyone that torture violates American principles, puts American soldiers at risk and just plain doesn't work. But when the White House adopted torture as an interrogation tactic, senior military officials didn't resist.

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Bush Team Pushed Torture behind Myers' Back
Informed Comment
The Guardian, basing itself on a soon-to-be-published book by Philippe Sands (Torture Team) reveals that torture was implemented at Guantanamo Bay in the face of opposition from Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, by White House lawyers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes, as well as Jay Bybee and John Yoo, (two assistant attorney generals).

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Which came first: memos or torture?
Los Angeles Times
John C. Yoo likes the limelight, but it's causing him some grief. Of the half a dozen lawyers who played important roles in a Bush administration decision to legalize the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, only Yoo has emerged as the public face -- and target -- related to the policy.

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Torture victim's records lost at Guantánamo, admits camp general
Guardian
The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain's top human rights lawyers.

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The Torture Sessions
New York Times
Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

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Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture
Guardian
America's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.

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Torture: the 'rot' began at the top
Workers World
The Bush administration has been caught in another lie.

Remember how the president looked earnestly into the television cameras on Oct. 6, 2007, and said, “This government does not torture people.”

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Justice Department investigating torture memo
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is investigating whether agency lawyers improperly advised the military it could use harsh interrogation methods and concluded that President Bush's wartime authority could not be limited by domestic law or international bans on torture.

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Military details methods used on Afghan detainees
CNN
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Military interrogators assaulted Afghan detainees in 2003, using investigation methods they learned during self-defense training, Pentagon documents released Wednesday show.

Detainees at the Gardez Detention Facility in southeastern Afghanistan reported being made to kneel outside in wet clothing and being kicked and punched in the kidneys, nose and knees if they moved, according to the documents.

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Torturers in the White House: Why Is This Story Being Ignored?
AlterNet
The biggest news of the last week went virtually uncovered by the mainstream, print media. ABC News first reported last Wednesday that top Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.

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Documents Obtained By ACLU Describe Charges Of Murder And Torture Of Prisoners In U.S. Custody
ACLU
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents today from the Department of Defense confirming the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods on detainees held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The documents from the military’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), obtained as a result of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include the first on-the-ground reports of torture in Gardez, Afghanistan to be publicly released.

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Would Obama investigate the Bush gang?
Salon
Recent revelations that the president and his top cabinet members "discussed and approved" specific interrogation techniques, including torture, has renewed speculation about possible criminal activities in the Bush White House.

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Radio silence on Bush's torture admission
Salon
ABC News reported a few days ago that a group of so-called Principals -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice -- met dozens of times in the White House to "discuss and approve" specific interrogation techniques to be used against suspected terrorists.

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Bush OK'd Torture Meetings
Washington Post
President Bush says he was aware that his top aides met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other widely-condemned interrogation techniques. And he says it was no big deal.

"I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved," Bush told ABC News' Martha Raddatz on Friday. "I don't know what's new about that; I'm not so sure what's so startling about that."

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Torture: Beyond the pale
Seattle PI
The image of CIA officers demonstrating and detailing torture techniques considered for use during detainee interrogations in the White House is one most Americans could probably never conceive. And yet, ABC News reported last week that senior Bush administration officials were privy to such presentations in the Situation Room as they discussed and approved the brutal treatment (such as waterboarding) of terror suspects. They also approved combining various techniques to be used on a suspect.

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The Torture Memo
The Nation
The Justice Department is investigating the lawyers whose memos gave the Bush Administration the legal support it needed for waterboarding and other brutal interrogation techniques. We are "examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote to two Democratic senators in February.

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The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook
New York Times
THE night before last week’s Senate hearings on our “progress” in Iraq, a goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment assembled in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. There were cocktails; there were waiters wielding platters of hors d’oeuvres; there was a light sprinkling of paparazzi. Then there was a screening. We trooped like schoolchildren to the auditorium to watch a grueling movie about the torture at Abu Ghraib.

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Bush Approved Meetings on Interrogation Techniques
Washington Post
CRAWFORD, Tex., April 11 -- President Bush said Friday that he was aware his top national security advisers had discussed the details of harsh interrogation tactics to be used on detainees.

Bush also said in an interview with ABC News that he approved of the meetings, which were held as the CIA began to prepare for a secret interrogation program that included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and other coercive techniques.

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Bush Aware of Advisors' Interrogation Talks
ABC News
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisors discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

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The Torture Drawings the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to See
AlterNet
Sami al-Haj is a journalist, but one unlike any other. For over six years since December 15, 2001 -- when he was seized by Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border while on assignment as a cameraman for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera -- he has been in a disturbing but unique position: a trained journalist held as an "enemy combatant" on the frontline of the Bush administration's "War on Terror," first in Afghanistan, and then in Guantánamo.

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Cheney, others OK'd harsh questioning
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

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The real anti-torture president
Seattle PI
Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the establishment candidates.

No, I'm not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association.

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White House Torture Advisers
Washington Post
Top Bush aides, including Vice President Cheney, micromanaged the torture of terrorist suspects from the White House basement, according to an ABC News report aired last night.

Discussions were so detailed, ABC's sources said, that some interrogation sessions were virtually choreographed by a White House advisory group. In addition to Cheney, the group included then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then-secretary of state Colin Powell, then-CIA director George Tenet and then-attorney general John Ashcroft.

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Conyers Wants Yoo, Too
Washington Independent
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), head of the House Judiciary Committee, has asked John Yoo, former Bush administration attorney, to testify at a hearing on May 6 on his role as author of the now-infamous 2003 "torture memo." The memo provided the Bush administration the legal wiggle-room to torture detainees during one stretch of the war on terror. That document was released publicly Apr. 1 amidst howls from Democrats and human rights groups.

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Click Here for Torture
Vanity Fair
Two unnaturally sexy activists (at least that’s how they appear online) are trying to raise awareness of the horrors of Guantánamo Bay by inviting visitors to experience it for themselves—inside the virtual world of Second Life. Is this the future of political discourse, or just another game no one wants to play?

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Man claims CIA tortured him, goes to international court
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — A German citizen thwarted in the U.S. courts is taking his allegations of abduction and torture at the hands of the CIA to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

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Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
ABC News
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

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Arrogance, indiscipline come down from the top
Miami Herald
Return with me to Abu Ghraib. You remember it. You may not want to, but you do.

The Iraqi prison was the epicenter of an international scandal in 2004 when it was revealed that U.S. soldiers were mistreating detainees, forcing them to stand in stress positions, sexually humiliating them, menacing them with dogs, denying them clothes, dragging them on leashes, threatening them with electrocution.

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What Happens When the Gloves Come Off
Findlaw
"Why Jordan?" The question puzzled Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi citizen who claims that US agents arrested him in Afghanistan in December 2001 and, after interrogating him in Pakistan, flew him in a private jet to Jordan. Because he was not Jordanian and had no past connection to Jordan, he did not understand why he was sent there.

"Why wasn't I sent to America since I was arrested by Americans?" al-Tabuki asked, in a narrative he sent to contacts in Jordan after he was released.

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The Yoo Torture Memo: Break the Silence of the Lambs
Jurist
A series of events over the past two weeks prompts me to write again in this space, breaking the silence of the lambs and inviting all of us to revisit together the “severe pain” analysis of the newly released March 14, 2003 Yoo memo.

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HRW: CIA Sent 14 Suspects to Jordan
Time
(AMMAN, Jordan) — A human rights group said Tuesday that the CIA transferred at least 14 terror suspects to Jordan for interrogation after September 11.
RELATED ARTICLES

Human Rights Watch said in a new report that the U.S. ally in the Mideast served as a proxy jailer for the CIA until at least 2004.

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Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
Washington Post
Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?

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Memo to the next president
Los Angeles Times
In all the tangled wreckage George W. Bush will hand off to his successor, there's nothing quite as perilously convoluted as the questions surrounding torture and the fate of the Al Qaeda terrorists currently in U.S. hands.

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Ashcroft Didn't Sign Off on Yoo Pentagon Torture Memo
TPM
More evidence that John Yoo was the most powerful deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's history. The Washington Post reports this morning that when Yoo issued his now-infamous March 14, 2003 memo to the Pentagon, neither Attorney General John Ashcroft, nor his deputy Larry Thompson "were aware."

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Tortured Logic
Washington Post
SOMETIMES IT'S best to let an author's words speak for themselves. The following is from a 2003 Justice Department memorandum on the legal standards governing military interrogations of terrorism suspects: "As we have made clear in other opinions involving the war against al Qaeda, the Nation's right to self-defense has been triggered by the events of September 11. If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions. This national and international version of the right to self-defense could supplement and bolster the government defendant's individual right."

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There Were Orders to Follow
New York Times
You can often tell if someone understands how wrong their actions are by the lengths to which they go to rationalize them. It took 81 pages of twisted legal reasoning to justify President Bush’s decision to ignore federal law and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners.

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EXCLUSIVE: "Torture Memo" Author John Yoo Responds to This Week's Revelations
Esquire
In his first interview since the release Tuesday of a 2003 memo he authored providing legal authority for the use of aggressive interrogation techniques by the U.S. military, John Yoo denied to Esquire that his memo applied to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or that it authorized the kinds of abuses that were revealed at Abu Ghraib. “I did not think as a matter of policy that it was a good idea for the military to use aggressive interrogations of the kind that would be permitted to the CIA,” he said, adding that he expressed those reservations “to officials higher up the chain of command.”

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Call It the Abu Ghraib Memo
Washington Post
The Justice Department memo released yesterday is a key link in the chain of evidence connecting the monstrous abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere straight to the White House.

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John Yoo's war crimes
Salon
Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not. As the result of a FOIA lawsuit the ACLU filed and then prosecuted for several years, numerous documents relating to the Bush administration's torture regime that have long been baselessly kept secret were released yesterday, including an 81-page memorandum (.pdf) issued in 2003 by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (currently a Berkeley Law Professor) which asserted that the President's war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized the use of torture:

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John Yoo: A Touch of Evil
Rolling Stone
I’m still trudging through John Yoo’s newly declassified memo that gave the greenlight to torture as a natural extension of Executive Privilege in 2003.

But the logic is laid out in all its evil circularity early on.

It goes like this:

The Fifth Amendment’s due process protections and Eighth Amendment’s prohibitions against cruelty do not apply a) to aliens abroad and b) are rendered meaningless by the president’s totalitarian powers during time of war.

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The March 2003 Yoo Memo Emerges! (not an April Fool's Joke): The Torture Memo to Top All Torture Memos
Balkinization
On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee left his office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. The very next day -- a Saturday -- John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees.

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The War Criminal President
The Atlantic
I posted about Philip Gourevitch's and Erroll Morris's superb and disturbing recent piece on Abu Ghraib here. What it shows once again is how Abu Ghraib was never, ever an exception. It was permitted, enabled, authorized and pre-meditated by Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Miller, and Addington, among many others. The techniques testified to correspond with chilling accuracy to techniques authorized by the president, for which we now have overwhelming evidence. Scott Horton reminds us what exactly some of the techniques were:

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Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him
CBS News
A German resident held by the U.S. for almost five years tells 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that Americans tortured him in many ways - including hanging him from the ceiling for five days early in his captivity when he was in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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Tapes’ Destruction Hovers Over Detainee Cases
New York Times
WASHINGTON — When officers from the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations in 2005, they may have believed they were freeing the government and themselves from potentially serious legal trouble.

But nearly four months after the disclosure that the tapes were destroyed, the list of legal entanglements for the C.I.A., the Defense Department and other agencies is only growing longer.

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In Iraq, Was I a Torturer?
AlterNet
The prisons in Iraq stink. Ask any guard or interrogator and they'll tell you it's a smell they'll never forget: sweat, fear and rot. On the base where Ben Allbright served from May to September 2003, a small outfit named Tiger in western Iraq, water was especially scarce; Ben would rig a hose to a water bottle in a feeble attempt to shower. He and the other Army reservists tried mopping the floors, but the cheap solvents only added a chemical note to the stench. During the day, when the temperature was in the triple digits, the smell fermented.

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The Ultimate Casualty
Washington Post
You know him well. His nickname was Gilligan, and he was a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein's vast prison transformed into a vast American one and then transformed again by the Bush administration into a vast national disgrace. Gilligan was deprived of sleep, forced to stand on a small box, hooded like some medieval apparition, wired like a makeshift lamp and told (falsely) that if he fell he would be electrocuted. He was later released. Wrong man. Sorry.

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Y’ALL TORTURE ME HOME
New Yorker
I was overjoyed that Congress refused to override President Bush’s veto of a bill outlawing the washboarding of prisoners, a technique that some have described as torture—a ridiculous notion if I’ve ever heard one. We’re involved in a war here, people, with some very nasty individuals who would like nothing better than to kill us, and the idea that washboarding—an ancient technique, used routinely in many cultures around the world—is somehow cruel and unusual shows just how infantile this discussion has become.

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Torture Is Un-American
Hartford Courant
President Bush has often said the United States doesn't torture people. He nevertheless vetoed a bill last week that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding, electric shock, beatings and other coercive interrogation techniques that are disallowed by the U.S. Army Field Manual.

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Manacled, starved, beaten: a rendition victim's story
Independent
Khaled al-Maqtari's nightmare began when American troops arrived at the al-Ghufran market in Fallujah in January 2004. He was arrested along with other terrorist suspects and taken to Abu Ghraib jail. For the next four years he was held captive, moved from country to country and suffered, he says, appalling torture.

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Giving up the Ghost: Detainees, Doctors and Torture
Jurist
How does a torturer know a prisoner being ‘waterboarded’ is not so close to death that they will die before the tap is turned off?

One way is to have a medical professional standing by. The same with beatings, sleep deprivation, starving, extremes of heat and cold, and use of deafening sounds or blinding lights.

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In Torture We Trust
CounterPunch
The U.S. Congress sent President Bush a bill that would have banned the CIA from using ‘harsh interrogation methods,’ which most of the world sees as torture and which even the military is forbidden to use. Said Mr. Bush: “The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.”

It is not surprising that the irony of that statement is lost on Mr. Bush. Terrorist tools that he allows the Central Intelligence Agency to use are a ‘valuable tool’ in the war against terror.

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Wrong decision on waterboarding
Miami Herald
President Bush had a chance last weekend to sign legislation that would make it clear once and for all that the interrogation technique known as waterboarding is a crime. Yet instead of enacting a law that would limit interrogations to only those techniques outlined in a U.S. Army manual, he vetoed the proposal, sending it back to a Congress that on Tuesday tried but failed to override him. Once again, Mr. Bush made the wrong decision.

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Pentagon reviewing interrogation tapes: report
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Department of Defense is conducting a review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and so far has identified nearly 50 tapes, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

One of the tapes showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect, the newspaper said in the article, posted on its Web site on Wednesday.

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Effort to Prohibit Waterboarding Fails in House
New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Tuesday failed to overturn President Bush’s veto of legislation that would have prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from using waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on terrorism suspects.

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McCain Retreats on Terror
Village Voice
On February 13, in a historic vote, the Senate—following the lead of the House—for the first time explicitly prohibited the CIA from using torture in its interrogations. A section of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act mandates that the CIA, despite the special powers given it by the president, is bound by the rules of the Army Field Manual, thereby setting a single standard for all interrogations by U.S. forces.

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Bush's shameful legacy of torture
Toronto Star
U.S. President George W. Bush stumbled into office as the "accidental president" after losing the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 but winning the electoral college. Then Al Qaeda made him the "9/11 president" who fought terror. Now, as Bush prepares to bow out early next year, he is rebranding himself again as the "torture president."

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Tortured logic
San Francisco Chronicle
President Bush seems to think the end always justifies the means when it comes to fighting terrorism - but sometimes the method works against the objective. That contradiction lies at the heart of his veto of a congressional bill to bar the CIA's use of waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods.

In a bizarre rationalization, the president views the proposed ban as a limit on his official powers. It goes to his view that the White House has lost ground to Congress.

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Bush's tortured veto
Los Angeles Times
We do not torture," President Bush insists, yet that assurance is accompanied by an unspoken "but." In vetoing legislation,1,218858.story that would require CIA interrogators to abide by the same humanitarian standards imposed on their counterparts in the U.S. military, Bush again has drowned out his denials with an ominous silence about just what "enhanced" interrogation tactics he considers appropriate.

In a shameful Saturday radio address justifying his veto, Bush argued that CIA interrogators can't be confined to techniques allowed by the Army Field Manual "because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet."

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Override Vote Could Draw Line Between Democrats, McCain on Torture
CQ Politics
House Democrats hope to score some political points Tuesday during an attempt to override President Bush’s veto of intelligence authorization legislation, even if the vote is all but certain to fail.

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Guantanamo trials called tainted by coercion
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military commission trials of Guantanamo terrorism suspects will be tainted by coercive tactics such as waterboarding used to obtain evidence and should be scrapped, human rights groups said on Monday.

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Obama says Clinton is trying to 'hoodwink,' 'bamboozle' Americans
Los Angeles Times
Sen. Barack Obama accused rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton today of attempting to "hoodwink" and "bamboozle" voters into thinking she was the front-runner by offering him the second slot on her ticket.

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A Legacy of Torture
Washington Post
The headline of the top story in Sunday's New York Times story was promising: "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy."

But in the lead paragraph, Steven Lee Myers pulled his punches: "President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques."

I'll be a little more blunt: The legacy that Bush affirmed with Saturday's veto was one of torture.

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Just Waterboarding Under the Bridge
IPS
NEW YORK, Mar 9 (IPS) - U.S. President George W. Bush appeared headed toward another train wreck with Congress as he carried out his threat to veto an intelligence bill that would have banned the Central Intelligence Agency from using waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" in questioning terrorism suspects.

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The Unstudied Art of Interrogation
New York Times
Washington

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.

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