Journalist Michael Otterman, author of the excellent book, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was kind enough to forward to me some months ago a document he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The document consists of the after-action reports made by Colonel Steven Kleinman and Terrence Russell, two of [...]
In 2005, I wrote an essay, published in the journal Logos, entitled “Torture in our Time.” In it I laid out the historical evidence for the conclusion that torture rarely works. This position goes back at least to the Enlightenment when Cesare Beccaria wrote a famous pamphlet, “ On Crimes and Punishments” (1764) in which he [...]
This report was originally published on Truthout. A lawyer for the most high-profile resident of Gitmo sheds light on what a voluminous secret report on the CIA’s torture program approved by a Senate panel Thursday may contain. On a cold day in February 2009, Brent Mickum arrived at the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility in Washington, DC and went [...]
Last Friday, November 9, Elisa Massimino, President and CEO of Human Rights First (HRF), hosted a press call with retired Rear Admiral Don Guter. HRF, along with a number of other human rights and legal groups, are calling upon President Barack Obama to fulfill his January 2009 pledge to close Guantanamo’s detention facility. Admiral Guter [...]
Gregory B. Saathoff M.D. is the latest mental health professional to weigh in on the Manssor Arbabsiar case. Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel has been dissecting aspects of Saathoff’s narrative of events surrounding Arbabsiar’s interrogation and confession (see here, here, and here). I want to look more closely at the claims Saathoff makes in an October 3 “Forensic Psychiatric Evaluation” on Arbabsiar’s [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a major new report detailing how the Bush Administration and other allied governments tortured and imprisoned opponents of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The prisoners were then rendered to Gaddafi’s own prisons where many of them were tortured. According to a HRW press release, the 154-page report, “Delivered into Enemy [...]
A 2010 FBI interrogation “primer” (PDF), apparently a fifth version of earlier FBI manuals dealing with “Cross-cultural, Rapport-based” “intelligence-oriented interrogations in overseas environments,” repeatedly draws upon advice from two CIA torture manuals, the 1963 KUBARK Counter-intelligence Manual and the 1983 Human Exploitation Resource Manual. According to the National Security Archive, the KUBARK manual “includes a detailed [...]
Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold’s latest exclusive on the treatment of detainees in custody of the Department of Defense. Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information,” according to a declassified Department of Defense (DoD) inspector [...]
In 2010, the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP), along with the Soros-financed Open Society Institute (OSI) convened a Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers. On June 1, 2012, I received an email notification that the TF report “is now complete.” But much to my surprise, the report was [...]
A Truthout analysis of historical records concerning government research and nonmedical use of antimalarial medications has revealed that such drugs were the objects of experimental research under the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Even more, one of these drugs, cinchonine, was illegally stockpiled by the CIA as an “incapacitating agent.” Antimalarial drugs were studied as part of [...]
