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), [...]
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.
On Friday, the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional) gave hope to those seeking to hold accountable the Bush administration officials and lawyers who authorized torture by agreeing to continue investigating allegations made by a Moroccan-born Spanish resident, Lahcen Ikassrien, that he was tortured at Guantánamo, where he was held from 2002 to 2005. Spanish courts [...]
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 [...]
Just two weeks ago, as former US President George W. Bush was preparing to make his first visit to Europe since the publication, last November, of his biography Decision Points, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, with support from the International Federation for [...]
On January 11, 2011, Kuwaiti citizen Mohammad Ghazzai Al-Mutairi was reportedly beaten and tortured to death by members of the Kuwaiti police force (part of Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior). Of course, in the interest of “security,” what actually transpired will never truly be known. Nonetheless, this horrific example of how the Kuwaiti Ministry of Interior [...]
I’ve been struggling these past few weeks. I read a book written by a former Guantanamo detainee named David Hicks titled “Guantanamo: My Journey.” It’s a powerful and heartbreaking memoir and it made a profound impact on me emotionally. I interviewed Hicks after I read his book. We spoke about a half-dozen times over the past two months. This is the first interview he’s granted since he was released from the “least worst place” in 2007.
Editor’s Note: Click here to read Jason Leopold’s story on David Hicks and click here to read an excerpt from Hicks’ book, “Guantanamo: My Journey.” This report was originally published on Truthout.org David Hicks was one of the first “war on terror” detainees to be sent to Guantanamo the day the prison facility opened on [...]
A National Research Council (NRC) 2008 report on a conference on Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies examined briefly what it characterized as a “contemporary problem,” the possibility of doing research on “war on terror” detainees, removed by the U.S. government from Geneva protections against experiments done on prisoners of war. In a section of [...]
In a new report on torture, started considerably before Egypt’s current paroxysms, Human Rights Watch excoriates the Mubarak regime and demands fundamental changes that a transition government would do well to embrace. The report — “’Work on Him Until He Confesses’: Impunity for Torture in Egypt,” — documents how President Hosni Mubarak’s government “implicitly condones [...]
