As someone who has conducted evaluations of torture victims, the “evaluation” of high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah is a fascinating, if sickening, look at how the CIA goes about their kind of business. In the course of this article, we’ll learn more about how this “psychological evaluation” was used to further torture, making its drafting an [...]
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that former Vice President Dick Cheney has his facts wrong on the Obama administration’s policies for terror detainee interrogations.
The lead story in today’s Washington Post, headlined “How a Detainee Became An Asset,” provides a one-sided and distorted account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the urgent need for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive and authoritative narrative of the eight years of misgovernment of the Bush administration.
President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also [...]
By sheer coincidence, I had just been alerted to the publication of a number of documents relating to the ongoing habeas corpus cases of the Guantánamo prisoners last Thursday, and was reading, with mounting disbelief, the government’s supposed case against Khalid al-Mutairi, one of the last four Kuwaiti prisoners, when I received an email notifying [...]
Rejecting arguments from both the Bush and Obama administrations, a federal judge has ordered the release of an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 when he was detained 6 ½ years ago for allegedly wounding two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator by throwing a grenade at their unmarked jeep. U.S. District [...]
Former Vice President Dick Cheney Cheney pressured George W. Bush and other top administration officials to deploy U.S. soldiers to a Buffalo NY suburb to arrest suspected terrorists, according to a report. Using American soldiers for domestic law enforcement purposes would have been unprecedented. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the armed forces [...]
Faced with impending defeat in a U.S. District Court habeas corpus case, the Obama administration devised a new strategy for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 in 2002 when he allegedly wounded two U.S. soldiers with a grenade. Justice Department lawyers announced Friday that they [...]
The House Intelligence Committee formally announced Friday that it will probe whether the CIA broke the law by failing to inform Congress about a top secret assassination program reportedly aimed at targeting leaders of al-Qaeda. Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the probe will be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which [...]
A prominent human rights group is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate why the administration of former President George W. Bush blocked three different probes into war crimes in Afghanistan where as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks and then buried in a mass grave by [...]
