Illinois Judge Allows Torture Suit to Procede

by | Mar 7, 2010 |

Okay, we all know there can never be such thing as a law that provides for people who have brown skin and believe in Islam having the ability to seek remedy in American courts for torture at the hands of the U.S. military or CIA. But what about two white, American, presumably non-Muslim, contractor whistle-blowers? Well, last Friday a federal district court judge in Illinois refused to reject a lawsuit by two such people against former Offense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld among others. [The...

Hold the Torturers Accountable

by | May 26, 2009 |

Or else we'll all be held accountable by Rep. Ron Paul, May 26, 2009 While Congress is sidetracked by who said what to whom and when, our nation finds itself at a crossroads on the issue of torture. We are at a point where we must decide if torture is something that is now going to be considered justifiable and reasonable under certain circumstances, or is America better than that? "Enhanced interrogation" as some prefer to call it, has been used throughout history, usually by despotic...

McChrystal, Copper Green, Torture and Assassination

by | May 13, 2009 |

Check out this great Esquire article about the torture occupation of Iraq and new Afghan boss McChrystal's role. How'd I miss this in '06? Muriel Kane wonders whether McChrystal ran Cheney's global assassination hit squads. Hersh: "...let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that..." Thanks to Douglas Valentine.

Oh, Poor Judge Bybee!

by | Apr 25, 2009 |

Pravda reports that Federal Judge Jay Bybee, who ‘interpreted’ the law to mean that it was perfectly okay for George W. Bush to slam people against the wall 30 times in a row after keeping them awake for a month chained to the ceiling and forced to evacuate on themselves when they weren’t being locked in tiny little boxes or drowned almost to death over and over again, feels really, really bad about it! He was under a lot of time pressure! That’s right. Bybee now says he ‘regrets that the...

The ICRC Torture Report

by | Apr 11, 2009 |

A few weeks ago, Mark Danner at the New York Review of Books published an article about a classified International Committee of the Red Cross report written for the CIA’s eyes only. It described in detail the tortures committed against those held in the CIA’s ‘Ghost Prison’ ‘Black Sites,’ including pretty much everything the Soviet GPU would have done. In my interview with Danner on February 18th, he explained that the U.S. government granted full access to the ICRC in the understanding that...

Torturing Democracy

by | Oct 15, 2008 |

I think they must mean Democracy Torturing People. Anyway, read The Other Scott Horton about how State TV is suppressing this great Frontline documentary about the War Criminal Bush/Cheney regime. Hear a credible account of a man who heard a woman tortured to death a few cells down from his. Documents at their site too.

Director of National Intelligence McConnell: Waterboarding is torture if you do it to me

by | Jan 13, 2008 |

Washington Post: The nation's intelligence chief says that waterboarding "would be torture" if used against him, or if someone under interrogation was taking water into his lungs. But Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture. "If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," the director of national intelligence told the New Yorker in this week's issue, released...