Former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, commented on recent statements by two GOP presidential candidates who created a stir by defending waterboarding: [Herman] Cain said, “I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture [...]
This story was written by Almerindo Ojeda and originally published on Truthout. On June 10, 2006, three Guantánamo prisoners were found dead in their cells. Two days later, a Department of Defense (DoD) news release described these deaths as suicides. The news release quoted Camp Commander Harry Harris, who described these suicides as acts of [...]
Reporting by Jason Leopold. Originally published on Truthout. Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA’s clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle‘s office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal. “I want you to go on a temporary assignment,” Carle recalls Richer telling him. “It’s [...]
A new proposed “casebook” on psychologist ethics in national security settings, written by the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), tells psychologists that when assessing whether an interrogation technique is abusive or not, they should consider, among other factors, whether there are “data to support that the technique is effective in gathering accurate [...]
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 [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a new report Tuesday. As they stated in the press release announcing the 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees” (HTML, PDF), there is “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration.” As a result, President Barack Obama is obliged “to order a criminal [...]
Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor at the UK Guardian reported earlier this week that the widely heralded 2010 announcement of a British government official inquiry into UK torture is facing a boycott by British human rights and attorney groups. The reason is undue secrecy. [British Prime Minister] Cameron also made clear that the sort of [...]
This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published at Truthout.org. Click here to listen to Jason Leopold discuss this investigative story on The Peter B. Collins show. Shortly after he was captured in March 2002 at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, following an early morning raid jointly conducted by the CIA, FBI, [...]
With the reported assassination of Osama bin Laden, one of the most alarming responses has been a kind of casual and widespread acceptance that the death of America’s number one bogeyman would not have been achieved without the use of torture, and without the existence of Guantánamo. This is wrong on both fronts, as Jane [...]
This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout. Imagine that the more than 700 Guantanamo files released two weeks ago by WikiLeaks contained information explaining how interrogators obtained “intelligence” from “war on terror” detainees captured or sold to US forces after 9/11, such as this firsthand account: On a couple of [...]
