The US attorney general named a prosecutor to investigate possible crimes in secret CIA interrogations amid disclosures of threats to kill suspects' children and rape their female relatives. The revelations came in a de-classified 2004 report by then-CIA inspector general John Helgerson which catalogued the harsh tactics used against prime terror suspects at secret overseas prisons. Its release coincided with Attorney General Eric Holder naming a prosecutor to review the interrogations and... Read Full Story
Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury Ignored More Than a Century of Court Precedents in Formulating Legal Opinions That Warterboarding Is Not Torture -- When, in Fact, It's a Crime Under Both U.S. and International Law; To Not Hold Them Accountable Would Be a Gross Miscarriage of Justice Previously-secret Justice Department memos written by former Bush administration lawyers John Yoo (left), Jay Bybee (right) and Steven Bradbury (not pictured) spelled out the legal justification for the administration's... Read Full Story
Torture and the CIA Laid out in the light Memos on CIA interrogation methods have been published. Could prosecutions for torture follow? “WE HAVE been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” said Barack Obama on Thursday April 16th, as he released memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel during the previous administration. Dark indeed. The memos lay out, in bland legalese, the reasoning that led Bush administration lawyers to approve the Central Intelligence Agency ’s use of... Read Full Story
Former US vice president Dick Cheney Friday slammed a Justice Department probe into alleged abusive interrogation techniques by CIA agents as an "outrageous political act." In an interview with Fox News Sunday to be aired at the weekend, Cheney said the investigation would do long term damage to America's ability to protect itself, adding the administration should not punish agents for doing their jobs. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday he had named assistant US attorney John... Read Full Story
With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency's arsenal. It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interrogation business. The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals... Read Full Story
A US-based medical rights advocacy group on Monday blasted health experts for playing a "central role" in advising and implementing the CIA's abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued its six-page white paper after shocking details about the range of techniques used by interrogators, including the simulated drowning known as waterboarding, came to light one week ago with release of a 2004 CIA inspector general's report. The... Read Full Story
In the seemingly interminable back and forth between Left and Right over enhanced interrogation techniques, the self-righteous fulmination of liberals over waterboarding was nearly matched by the efforts of more than a few conservative partisans to infinitesimalize the physical and psychological distress caused by the practice. The textbook example of this minimization is that of Sean Hannity offering to be waterboarded for charity. To be charitable, Hannity's point - well taken, if not well... Read Full Story
Justice Department Under Reagan Prosecuted -- and Obtained Convictions of -- Texas Sheriff and Three Deputies in 1983 for Waterboarding Prisoners to Force Them to Confess to Crimes; Case is One of Six Precedents Ignored By Bush Lawyers Who Came Up With Legal Rationale for Waterboarding Terror Suspects Officials of the Bush Justice Department continue to insist that waterboarding and other so-called "harsh interrogration techniques" were legal to use against alleged terrorist suspects. But... Read Full Story
By Jason Leopold On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon's top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," the directives said... Read Full Story
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her at a secret 2002 briefing on the use of harsh interrogations in the war on terror. CIA records suggest that Pelosi, D-Calif., was told at that time that the Bush administration was using waterboarding — a simulated drowning. Pelosi, however, said on May 14 that spy agency officials specifically informed her at that session that the practice was not used. The CIA's records on the subject are vague. Here... Read Full Story
