Law-abiding US citizens have been appalled that Jose Rodriguez, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service until his retirement in 2007, was invited onto CBS’s “60 Minutes” program last weekend to promote his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, in which he defends the use of torture on [...]
An article in the July-Sept. 2004 edition of the journal Military Intelligence (PDF) sheds further light on the origins of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation, FM 2-22.3, HUMINT Collector Operations (PDF), that became operational in September 2006. The AFM became the de jure standard for government interrogations in the “Global War on Terror” [...]
Via Cryptocomb: In cooperation with Author/Journalist Douglas Valentine, Cryptocomb is publishing over 8GB’s of audio recordings that Mr. Valentine collected throughout his personal interviews with former CIA and U.S. Military Officers while researching for his book, “The Phoenix Program”. The Phoenix Program for the unacquainted was a CIA generated operation that sponsored mass arrests, terrorism, torture, [...]
In newly unclassified commentary from Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who has been held for ten years without charge or trial, has described how, in the last eight months, he has been subjected to routine sleep deprivation, and has been regularly prevented from cleaning himself, and from receiving any medical [...]
Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye have another exclusive over at Truthout on the origins of Bush’s torture program. Kaye and Leopold report: In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture [...]
Ten years ago, on the evening of March 28, 2002, the Bush administration officially embarked on its “high-value detainee” program in the “war on terror” that had been declared in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (more commonly identified as Abu Zubaydah), was captured in a [...]
Jason Leopold, lead investigative reporter of Truthout and author of News Junkie, discusses his article “US Subjected Manning to Cruel, Inhuman, Degrading Treatment, UN Torture Chief Concludes;” how Manning’s treatment highlights the State Department’s stunning hypocrisy when they finger-wag at other countries for human rights violations; why most Americans think Manning is a traitor and [...]
Truthout reports: The United States government subjected Bradley Manning to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment following his arrest in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret State Department cables and other documents to WikiLeaks, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture concluded in a long-awaited report. In an addendum [...]
This story was originally published on Truthout. The UK action charity Reprieve, whose attorneys represent over a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, reports that former Guantánamo prisoner, Algerian citizen Abdul Aziz Naji, has been sentenced to three years in prison in Algeria. Reprieve says the charges were “of past membership in an extremist group overseas [...]
It could have been big news, if U.S. torture weren’t so anathema to the press corps, such that reporting upon it is considered either a fruitless and unprofitable enterprise, or among most of those who do venture into such waters, the sine qua non for such reportage must be ignorance and/or cover-up for much of [...]
