Originally published at Truthout and reprinted here with permission. Written by Truthout’s lead investigative reporter, Jason Leopold. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sat stone silent inside the courtroom at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, refusing to answer routine questions from the judge presiding over his arraignment for war crimes. Four other co-defendants, who are being [...]
May 16, 2012 | Filed under
World |
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This exclusive report was originally published by Truthout on March 30, 2010. It was written by investigative reporter Jason Leopold. The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration made about Abu Zubaydah the alleged al-Qaeda leader who was the first suspected terrorist subjected to the torture of waterboarding and other [...]
January 28, 2012 | Filed under
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A new report published by Truthout last week suggests that there may be much more to interrogation techniques and where they were used. This includes a little known testimony by former Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he described not waterboarding, but a form of water treatment. Jeffrey Kaye, [...]
August 8, 2011 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
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This report was written by Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US [...]
August 6, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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News certainly travels fast, sometimes. While it took the U.S. government two years to reply to a request by a Spanish judge regarding whether or not the U.S. has instigated any investigations or proceedings against six high-level Bush administration figures named in a complaint by the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners (see PDF), [...]
April 17, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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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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Danny Robbins at Associated Press reported last Friday that the Texas State Board of Examiners dismissed a licensing complaint filed by a Texas psychologist against former SERE psychologist James Mitchell. Mitchell was accused of “violating the standards demanded by the Psychologists‘ Licensing Act and the Board‘s Rules of Practice” (PDF). Specifically, the complaint cited Mitchell’s [...]
February 28, 2011 | Filed under
Torture |
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In the May 10, 2005 “techniques” memorandum by Steven Bradbury to CIA Senior Deputy Counsel, John Rizzo, Bradbury mentioned the waterboarding issue at the SERE schools, in a footnote (H/T Marcy Wheeler). “We understand that the waterboard is currently used only in Navy SERE training,” Bradbury wrote. He explained that the CIA Inspector General report on the Agency’s interrogation program mentioned that “individuals with authoritative knowledge of the SERE program” believed that waterboarding had been excluded from most of the SERE schools “because of its dramatic effect on the students who were subjects.”
April 11, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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With all the debate and controversy over the Obama administration’s policies on torture, no one had asked the military, and in particular those running America’s “terror” prisons, if they had been using the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M. But recently the Guantanamo’s Public Affairs Officer, Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, confirmed Appendix M interrogations were taking place at Guantanamo.
January 8, 2010 | Filed under
Torture |
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The Department of Justice is still working on the report prepared by an agency watchdog that probed several legal opinions John Yoo and two other former attorneys who worked at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) wrote for the Bush White House on torture, an agency spokeswoman said Wednesday. “The [review] process is ongoing and we hope to have [the report] complete and released soon,” Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler told Truthout.
January 8, 2010 | Filed under
Law |
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