This report was written by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. The White House has categorically denied that it set up a task force to address the psychological well being of military families and had First Lady Michelle Obama appoint as one of its members the former chief psychologist at Guantanamo, [...]
March 29, 2011 | Filed under
Politics |
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The civil war in Libya has been an unexpected gift to Saudi Arabia: It has diverted the eyes of the world away from how the House of Saud is dealing with its own version of Arab Spring. The oil-rich kingdom is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is to provide citizens with financial incentives [...]
March 29, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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Long ago, individuals from around the world came to America to escape kings and monarchs that had the power to treat people with utter distain, sending their children to wars on a whim, and imprisoning people without charge or judicial review, sometimes for life. For many, the behavior of these rulers became so intolerable that [...]
March 29, 2011 | Filed under
Law |
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The good news is that momentum against the death penalty is gaining ground around the world. The bad news is that the number of people executed in 2010 — at least 527 – does not include China, the numbers are in the thousands. These are two of the conclusions of a database survey carried out [...]
March 29, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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I haven’t had this much fun since Grandma let all the cousins, nieces and nephews rummage through her big Brooklyn house in our fierce competition for the title “Scavenger of the Month.” Well, imagine the sheer glee, the unbridled joy that an unreconstructed scavenger feels when you let him/her loose in the archives of the [...]
March 28, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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Pro-democracy protesters filled Tahrir Square in central Cairo and an estimated 2000 gathered outside the State Radio and TV headquarters in the Maspero section last week to express their anger over a new law approved by the Egyptian cabinet that would criminalize demonstrations that “disrupt society or business.” The demonstrations in Tahrir Square and many [...]
March 28, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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The investigation by the “Amerithrax Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel” on “the mental health issues” of accused anthrax mailer Dr. Bruce Ivins purports to have been undertaken with “no predispositions regarding Dr. Ivin’s guilt or innocence.” Yet the report (PDF here of the released partial redacted version) says the Panel’s review of sealed psychiatric records “does [...]
March 26, 2011 | Filed under
Nation |
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I know this sounds like something out of Torquemada in the 15th Century or Mengele in the 20th. But it’s neither. It’s post-Mubarak Egypt in the second decade of the 21st Century. Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army [...]
March 24, 2011 | Filed under
World |
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The handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.
March 24, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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Click here to watch a high quality version of this interview. Be sure to read the accompanying investigative report by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye.
March 24, 2011 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
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