WELCOME HOME CREW OF THE 'SPIRIT OF HUMANITY'!

BEHOLD THE DAY OF FREEDOM!

Virtually every tactic which the article describes the Iranians as using has been used by the U.S. during the War on Terror, while several tactics authorized by Bush officials (waterboarding, placing detainees in coffin-like boxes, hypothermia) aren't among those the article claims are used by the Iranians. Nonetheless, "torture" appears to be a perfectly fine term for The New York Times to use to describe what the Iranians do, but one that is explicitly banned to describe what the U.S. did.

The Department of Defence released redacted documents Thursday related to abuse and torture of detainee held e in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas prisons.

The 12 documents were released as part of the American Civil Liberties Union's long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the government.

"These documents provide still more evidence of the widespread and systemic abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas locations," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. "They further underscore the need for a congressional select committee to examine the roots of the torture program as well as an independent prosecutor to investigate issues of criminal responsibility.

Torture is a prosecutable war crime under US domestic laws: The Convention Against Torture(CAT) and the 1996 War Crimes Act. It is also a prosecutable war crime under the Nuremberg & Tokyo Protocols written by the United States of America after WWII. It is a prosecutable war crime under the Geneva Conventions General Article III of 1949. And all it takes to be charged, convicted and imprisoned-or hanged, is for anyone who is convicted in a court of law for violating any one of these laws. And it only takes the commission of ONE single offense for the wheels of justice to roll over the offenders. Not 100. Not 180. Just one.

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday accused the Obama administration of using statements elicited through torture to justify the confinement of a detainee it represents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The ACLU is asking a federal judge to throw out those statements and others made by Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who may have been as young as 12 when he was captured. His attorney argued that Jawad was abused in U.S. custody, threatened and subjected to intense sleep deprivation.

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the US resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in US custody ? at least [see "Command?s Responsibility," a Human Rights First report from 2006, PDF]. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that?s one reason we?ve always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others ? because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people.

The Justice Department is again delaying the release of an internal CIA report on the agency's secret detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration.

Former US CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady has confessed to his role in the abduction of a Muslim Egyptian cleric for questioning.

In an interview with the Italian Il Giornale newspaper, the former CIA operative admitted to his involvement in the 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr known as Abu Omar under the suspicion that he had links to 'terror' groups.

The former US spy said that Abu Omar was temporarily held in US bases in Italy and Germany before being transferred to Egypt for interrogation.

He acknowledged that Abu Omar had been tortured as part of CIA's 'rendition program' in Egypt before being released.

Jalal Sharafi's psychiatrist says the diplomat is constantly reliving the trauma of his torture, including mock executions by his US and Iraqi captors.

Doctors treating the second secretary of Iran's embassy in Baghdad Jalal Sharafi say the psychological and physical damage the Iranian diplomat endured are "overwhelming."

Reports have emerged that former Iraqi intelligent operatives had been involved in Sharafi's torture under the aegis of CIA.

Former POW John McCain knows torture, and he has consistently condemned its use by government agents. Nonetheless, in April he warned that any probe into the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques would amount to a "witch hunt." The senator was surely unaware of the considerable historical irony involved in his invoking this phrase.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, former Reagan administration Associate Attorney General Bruce Fein lamented President Barack Obama's decision to shut his eyes to open confessions of war crimes by members of the prior administration.

"It's at the highest levels that the rule of law finds its greatest majesty," he told reporters. "That's why the United States was so idolized after Nixon left. We said that the most powerful man in the world is subject to the law. He cannot defy it."

No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as the result of mistreatment. In the first case, an unnamed detainee under C.I.A. supervision in Afghanistan froze to death after having been chained, naked, to a concrete floor overnight. The body was buried in an unmarked grave. In the second case, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad. A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs.

Spending U.S. tax dollars for private groups aiding torture victims supposedly compensates for Obama's coverup of the evidence of U.S. government torture and his de facto pardon of all the torturers and torture policymakers.

Youngest inmate from Guantanamo was released chadean Muhamed Gharran, he was taken from Pakistan he was around 15 years old, but that didnt stop pakistani "muslim" state nor afghani "muslim" state to hand him over to the american cross- and of course they beated him, electrocuted him, called

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) calls for an investigation into the death of Haitham 'Amru, 33, from Upper Beit al-Roush village southwest of Hebron. ‘Amru died while in the custody of the General Intelligence Service (GIS); it is suspected that he was subject to torture, which may have caused his death.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon led United Nations officials in calling on governments to go on the offensive in the fight against torture, stressing there can be no justification under any circumstances for such “cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment,” in a message marking the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

“I urge all United Nations Member States that have not yet done so to ratify and implement in good faith the Convention against Torture (CAT),” Mr. Ban said in the message.

A British man suing the Home Office over claims MI5 colluded in his alleged torture, has accused security officers of coercing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 London bombings.

Conservatives are protesting a federal judge’s ruling that torture victim Jose Padilla’s civil lawsuit against former Justice Department attorney John Yoo be permitted to continue. The conservatives feel that Yoo, who authored some of the infamous torture memos for the Bush White House, should be immune from lawsuits from Americans who were tortured as a natural consequence of such memos.

The Palestinian prisoner club accused the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) of committing new crimes of corporal torture against children through giving them electric shocks and beating them severely.

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights

Prisoners at the US military base at Bagram outside the Afghan capital Kabul were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs there, former detainees have told the BBC. The broadcaster interviewed separately 27 former inmates of Bagram around the country over a period of two months and asked them the same questions. Only two said they had been treated well.

The BBC findings were shown to the Pentagon, which has denied the charges and insists that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.

The Israeli doctor, Yoram Blachar, has been the head of the Israeli Medical Association since 1995, and became the head of the WMA of November of last year.

The physicians, who signed the protest letter, are senior professors and physicians from England, Europe and the United States.

They stated that Blachar had failed to respond to charges that a number of Israeli doctors are involved in the torture of Palestinian detainees during interrogation in Israeli prisons.

Hundreds of doctors belonging to World Medical Association are demanding its Israeli president, Dr. Yoram Blachar, be dismissed as Israeli physicians 'form part of a system in which detainees are tortured'

Torture is ineffectual, but vastly more importantly, it is wrong. There is no instance when it is OK to torture. There is no person who it is OK to torture. Whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish or, like myself, Unitarian Universalist, basic rights of common decency apply. These religions all teach that we should treat others as we wish to be treated.

Since the story first emerged last month that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (whose real name was Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri) had died in a Libyan prison, speculation has been rife that the Libyan newspaper Oea, which claimed that he had died by committing suicide, was covering up the fact that he had actually been murdered.

Once the Bush administration?s most famous "ghost prisoner," al-Libi had been the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, but his notoriety stemmed not from his own activities, but from the fact that, after his capture in December 2001, he was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he made a false confession that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons, which was subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

For tortured detainees, U.S. considered life sentences on boats

We've been lobbying the Department of Justice all these months without realizing that the key to justice lay in the Department of the Interior, and specifically in the National Park Service, which has told activist Steve Lane he will be prosecuted if he attempts to demonstrate waterboarding at Thursday's anti-torture rally in Washington, D.C. The permit for the rally reads "Waterboarding exhibit will not be allowed for safety reasons."

In a move that didn’t receive much attention, the Senate on Wednesday passed by unanimous consent the Graham-Lieberman bill, which seeks to make it illegal to make public any images of US prisoner abuse and torture from the Bush era. Specifically, the bill bans the release of images “taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.” The Obama White House supports this outrageous legislation whose sole purpose is to make it illegal to reveal the truth about US torture.

In a move that didn?t receive much attention, the Senate on Wednesday passed by unanimous consent the Graham-Lieberman bill, which seeks to make it illegal to make public any images of US prisoner abuse and torture from the Bush era. Specifically, the bill bans the release of images "taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." The Obama White House supports this outrageous legislation whose sole purpose is to make it illegal to reveal the truth about US torture.

Tony Blair was aware of the ­existence of a secret interrogation policy which ­effectively led to British citizens, and others, being ­tortured during ­counter-terrorism investigations, the Guardian can reveal.

A key US Senator said Wednesday that the White House had assured him that photographs allegedly showing US troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan will "not see the light of day."

The U.S. government’s case for embargoing the release of photographs said to depict abuse of detainees rests largely on a questionable claim that disclosure of the images would endanger U.S. troops.

Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is urging President Barack Obama to forestall efforts aimed at releasing parts of confidential torture memos seen as 'damaging.'

The officials say the CIA is urging the suppression of passages describing in graphic detail how the agency handled its detainees, arguing that the material could damage ongoing counterterrorism operations by laying bare sensitive intelligence procedures and methods.

The Times story added, “In order to ease Democratic concerns, the president on Thursday sent Congress a letter saying he would take ‘every legal and administrative remedy’’ to keep the photos sealed. Mr. Graham, who has warned that release of the photos could incite anti-American attacks overseas, said he just wanted the president to go a little further and make an explicit promise of an executive order.”

In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the CIA released a series of heavily redacted documents which detail new allegations of torture made by terror war prisoners.

The documents posted online by the ACLU have red highlights to mark what was unredacted from the previously released version.

As the deaths mount, we will continue to beat our breasts about the treatment of detainees. The outcry is not unjustified. My point is not to relativize torture: We should not torture anyone. But we do, and have done so, both directly and with the help of client states, for many years. Just as in war after war, the alleged costs of our well-being have been borne by people we will never see, most of them noncombatants.

This is the price of global sovereignty, of being, in Colin Powell's words, "the biggest bully on the block." President Bush and Dick Cheney knew this, and they were unapologetic. Obama knows it too, but he has worked hard to let us believe otherwise, to patch up the tattered fantasy that we are the country we imagine ourselves to be.

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of "the old Filipino method."

With Dick Cheney and the infamous torture memos making headlines, President Obama and our nation face a choice. Should they prosecute or protect those responsible for the torture of detainees in secret CIA detention centers? If our leaders wish to steer our country back to the right side of the law, they must act immediately and unequivocally to prosecute.

In potentially another blow to advocates of torture and harsh interrogation, transcripts released yesterday show that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says he made up stories to appease his interrogators.

Mohammed says he told his questioners he didn’t know the location of Osama Bin Laden, and was tortured as a result.

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past ten years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses.

Weeks after President Barack Obama took office, the Central Intelligence Agency renewed a contract with a firm that helped orchestrate the torture of American-held detainees during the Bush Administration.

Two months later, according to the magazine, the agency fired them.
It raises questions of whether the terminations only came after the contractors’ role was exposed.

The two men, who ran a consulting company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, had recommended that interrogators apply to detainees theories of “learned helplessness” that were based on experiments with abused dogs.

"It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

A federal judge has ruled that John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who wrote crucial memorandums justifying harsh interrogation techniques, will have to answer in court to accusations that his work led to a prisoner’s being tortured and deprived of his constitutional rights.

In the book, the authors use the documents to show that the torture policies enacted by the White House began on Jan. 25, 2002, when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised Bush in a memo to deny al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales’s memorandum says that by denying Geneva Conventions protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act” and “provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”

Apparently, people who inflict torture under U.S government orders are entitled to their good name, regardless of how many innocent people they kill. It is ironic to see such solicitude for the rights of individuals who may have violated the Geneva Convention. Perhaps privacy rights are the only rights that government respects any more. But the only people who are entitled to privacy are those who followed orders and committed horrendous crimes.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC that while the Senate has indeed been examining finer details of CIA torture authorized by the Bush administration, there are “chain of command” issues still to come.

So, I guess, stand by,” he told Rachel Maddow on Thursday night.

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

The Obama administration increased its defense Friday of secrecy surrounding an alleged CIA program of torture flights, asking a federal appeals court to set aside its ruling allowing foreign captives to sue a Bay Area company that reportedly helped plan the flights.

But I'm no longer trying to persuade anyone of anything. Those people smart enough to have seen what went on during the Bush administration have figured things out a long time ago, and the remaining die-hards who have been sniping at Obama's attempts to clean up the mess will never see the truth of what happened to our nation during the Bush years. But in view of all the harm that's been done, most of us aren't nearly angry enough. We were screwed, blued, tattooed and lied to.

The American Civil Liberties Union had strong words on Friday for the Obama administration’s efforts to block the release of torture photos and its attempts to end a lawsuit over extraordinary rendition.

Congressional negotiators reached tentative agreement on Thursday on a $105.9 billion spending measure that would provide money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September but would drop a ban on the release of photographs showing abuse of foreign prisoners held by United States forces.

The deal was concluded after Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went to the Capitol to assure Senate Democrats that President Obama would use all administrative and legal means to prevent the photos’ release.