So it’s finally over. Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident from Qatar, who was held as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland for five years and eight months without charge or trial, was finally sentenced in a federal court last Thursday. The prosecution was seeking a 15-year sentence, following al-Marri’s guilty plea in April, when, as part of a plea bargain, he accepted that he had receiving training in al-Qaeda camps and had come to the United States on a mission for al-Qaeda on the day before the 9/11 attacks.
November 2, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured after 9/11, is expected to finally gain access to diaries he wrote during the years while he was being brutally tortured at secret black-site prisons by CIA interrogators. A federal court judge has ordered the government to turn over unredacted volumes of the diaries and other “specified” writings to defense attorneys representing Zubaydah.
November 1, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
The 15th anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media here. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty.” For example, the organization said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.
October 27, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
Well, that took a while. Nearly a year after George W. Bush’s Republican party was voted out of office, and at least five years after reports first surfaced that music was being used in “War on Terror” facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo as part of a package of “enhanced interrogation technique,” — which, in any world other than the reality-defying one inhabited by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, would have been defined as torture — several noted musicians have spoken out to condemn the practice.
October 25, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
A declassified ruling by a federal court judge reveals that Fouad al-Rabiah, an innocent Kuwaiti prisoner who was ordered released from Guantanamo last week, was brutally tortured into making false confessions by U.S. interrogators and repeatedly threatened until he confessed to terrorist activities he was not involved in.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
A close reading of the CIA’s Inspector General Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s narrative on the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memos reveals a more detailed picture of the CIA’s involvement in the construction of those documents.
September 27, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
Professor Shane O’Mara at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin has written an article which has caught the attention of the mainstream media. Associated Press reporter Pamela Hess described Prof. O’Mara’s article,”Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques’” as showing that the CIA’s “severe interrogation techniques appear based on… a layman’s idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.”
September 25, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
As rumors swirl, suggesting that a number of the remaining 13 Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) may soon be relocating to the tiny Pacific island state of Palau, a court case related to nine of these men threatens to hurl a number of other prisoners in Guantánamo, who have also been [...]
September 22, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
The Bush administration gave its initial clearance for CIA interrogators to brutalize an al-Qaeda “high-value detainee” through verbal guidance and didn’t follow up with a formal legal opinion until “months later,” the CIA’s former inspector general said.
September 13, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
The federal Appeals Court decision to toss a lawsuit claiming contractors tortured detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is what you’d expect from a tyranny.
The new ruling brushes off the charges by 212 Iraqis who said they or their late husbands were abused by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. The suit charged private security firm [...]
September 13, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
