The American Civil Liberties Union called upon the U.S. Supreme Court this week to deny a petition the Obama administration filed in August that urged justices to review and reverse a lower court’s decision ordering the government to release more than four-dozen photos depicting U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan abusing prisoners.
Experiments by a CIA researcher on human subjects undergoing SERE training went unreported in the legal memos the Bush administration drafted to approve their torture program.
The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said Thursday, “The recent spectacle of Dick Cheney’s public effort to head off investigation of these matters makes clear how much work needs to be done to move this issue past politics. Mr. Cheney’s efforts are not surprising – such an investigation would obviously implicate his own actions and those of his underlings.”
The CIA said in court papers late Monday that it intends to withhold hundreds of pages of documents related to the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies on grounds that disclosing the information will threaten national security.
Did physicians and psychologists help the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency develop a new research protocol to assess and refine the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques?
This is the question being raised in a new report by a leading human rights organization. The group says that, if confirmed, it would likely constitute a “new, [...]
As someone who has conducted evaluations of torture victims, the “evaluation” of high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah is a fascinating, if sickening, look at how the CIA goes about their kind of business. In the course of this article, we’ll learn more about how this “psychological evaluation” was used to further torture, making its drafting an [...]
From the Archive: John Yoo, the author of one of the infamous Aug. 1, 2002, “torture” memos that formed the legal basis for so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques against high-level terrorist detainees, used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture.
Los Angeles attorney Robert A. Bailey, formerly a military JAG officer, and one of the lawyers in the Daniel King case, spoke to me a few weeks ago in some detail about the controversial King interrogation. Bailey described to me how the abusive interrogation King endured, and the betrayal of the military psychologist he thought would help him, led King to a suicidal breakdown.
Dick Cheney, in a defiant half-hour interview on Fox News Sunday, launched into a blistering attack on the Obama administration, saying the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a federal prosecutor to conduct a “preliminary review” of about a dozen cases of torture “offends the hell out of me.”
