Two investigating judges from the Spanish national security court,
the Audiencia Nacional, are asking the U.S. Justice Department for
details about the role played by Bush Administration lawyers in the
development and approval of torture practices that were apparently
applied to a number of Spanish subjects held in Guantanamo.
A federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit Friday against CACI International that accused the firm's employees of taking part in the torture and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In a 2 to 1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit dismissed the case on the grounds that CACI should be
immune from prosecution because the company's employees were under U.S.
military authority.
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has referred an unidentified case involving alleged complicity in torture to the Attorney General who has in turn referred it on to the Metropolitan Police, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The police are already investigating MI5, the Security Service, over allegations that they colluded in the torture of the former Guantanamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed.
It is the first time that the foreign intelligence service and domestic security service have been the subject of police investigations.
On Christmas morning in 1776, upon crossing the Delaware River and securing victory in the Battle of Trenton, George Washington sat astride his horse and issued instructions to his lieutenants. "Treat surrendering prisoners with humanity,'' he told them. "Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army.''
It is ironic that these words uttered by an American general would lay the ground rules for the humane treatment of prisoners worldwide.
NEW YORK – Mohammed al-Hanashi was a 31-year-old Yemeni citizen who
was held at Guantánamo Bay without charge for seven years. On June 3,
while I was visiting Guantánamo with other journalists, the press
office there issued a terse announcement that al-Hanashi had had been
found dead in his cell – an “apparent suicide.”
WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency's defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations.
NEW YORK - 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 organisation. The group says that, if confirmed, it would likely constitute a "new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists".
The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end
our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same
interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not.
This past weekend, the former vice president said he knew about
waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA
personnel on terror suspects and even defended officers who went beyond
authorized methods. He said they were “absolutely essential in saving
thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the
United States.’’
First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting
to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA
operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised
it to criticize the Bush administration's lie-filled, one-way
propaganda train to the Iraq war).
