Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest prisoner held at Guantánamo, has written a
memoir of his time there, the lead up to his imprisonment, and subsequent release years later.
posted by gman
on Dec 14, 2011 -
65 comments
Getting Away with Torture. "Overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials,
Human Rights Watch said in a
report released today. The Obama administration has failed to meet US obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees."
[more inside]
posted by ZenMasterThis
on Jul 12, 2011 -
67 comments
The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow... the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave… Sixteenth-century Europe, Jingle Cats, and the 2008 Housing Bubble:
The Birth of Sampling [more inside]
posted by waterunderground
on May 29, 2011 -
20 comments
Inside the Detainee Abuse Task Force On 28 Jul 2004, the Detainee Abuse Task Force, was formed by USACIDC to investigate all allegations of Iraqi Detainee abuse involving Coalition Forces.
One of the special agents in charge describes the task force as under-resourced and
hampered by a bureaucracy unable or unwilling to facilitate its investigations.
PBS and The Nation investigating journalist
states “One thing that shocked me was that the ID/DATF agents that I interviewed said there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of allegations of detainee abuse and torture that likely didn’t reach them.”
In 2009 President Obama stated “Individuals who violated standards of behavior in these photos have been investigated and held accountable.” and concluded
"I ran for President because I believe that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together."
posted by adamvasco
on May 27, 2011 -
9 comments
Dickens condemned it over 160 years ago: "I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying 'Yes' or 'No,' I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree." But this very moment, over
25,000 prisoners in the U.S. are being subjected to it. Its
horrific effects are
well known.
[more inside]
posted by storybored
on Mar 15, 2011 -
60 comments
George Bush
cancels a trip to Switzerland citing “threat of demonstrations” . However
two victims of torture in U.S. detention have prepared a criminal complaint against Bush backed by a coalition of international human rights groups, two former United Nations rapporteurs, and two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
His legacy continues with the death in Guantanamo of Abdul Gul held without trial for 9 years.
The official cause of Mr Gul's death is
"Heart attack during exercise".
The Obama administration has decided
to continue to imprison without trial nearly 50 detainees at Guantanamo.
posted by adamvasco
on Feb 7, 2011 -
85 comments
The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding". The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 2, 2010 -
73 comments
A
description of the CIA's waterboarding techniques and the practical applications of other physical interrogation practices to enhance its effectiveness.
posted by artof.mulata
on Nov 9, 2010 -
30 comments
In Gitmo Opinion, Two Versions of Reality. "When Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. ordered the release of a Guantánamo Bay detainee last spring, the case appeared to be a routine setback for an Obama administration that has lost a string of such cases. But there turns out to be
nothing ordinary about the habeas case brought by Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni held without charges for nearly eight years. Uthman, accused by two U.S. administrations of being an al-Qaida fighter and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, is among 48 detainees the Obama administration has deemed too dangerous to release but 'not feasible for prosecution.' A day after his March 16 order was filed on the court's electronic docket,
Kennedy's opinion vanished. Weeks later, a new ruling appeared in its place. While it reached the same conclusion,
eight pages of material had been removed, including key passages in which Kennedy dismantled the government's case against Uthman."
posted by homunculus
on Oct 13, 2010 -
92 comments
A French, state-run TV channel appears to be stirring controversy by airing a documentary about a fake game show in which contestants torture eachother, called
"Game of Death." Based on the well-known
Stanley Milgram experiments of the 1960's that, in the wake of Nazi Germany, sought out to measure man's willingness to obey orders.
[more inside]
posted by phaedon
on Mar 17, 2010 -
33 comments
Questions for John Yoo. Q. Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture? A.
No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered. NY Times, via Andrew Sullivan [more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac
on Dec 29, 2009 -
47 comments
Detainee 063. This is the interrogation log of Mohammed al-Qahtani. It is being published in real time: each entry will appear exactly seven years after it was first recorded. The interrogation took place at Guantanamo Bay.
posted by chunking express
on Dec 7, 2009 -
28 comments
A Truly Shocking Gitmo Story: "the U.S. government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth." His lawyer notes, "The Obama Department of Justice, with Attorney General Holder piously proclaiming that this Administration repudiates torture, and follows the rule of law, in fact is following the Bush playbook to the letter."
Unbelievable Evidence, but Good Enough for Seven Years in Prison notes, "Al Rabiah's treatment is reminiscent of what happened to Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan who was captured as a young teenager and held for almost seven years before he was released last month. Both detainees were locked up based mainly on coerced confessions that appear to have been false, and it looks like both might have remained imprisoned but for the intervention of the federal courts. " Also:
Judge's Order to Release Kuwaiti Detainee Puts Obama in a Bind.
posted by shetterly
on Oct 1, 2009 -
39 comments
"After six years of humiliation, of indignity, of killing and violations of sanctity, and desecration of houses of worship, the killer comes, boasting, bragging about victory and democracy. He came to say goodbye to his victims and wanted flowers in response.
"Put simply, that was my flower to the occupier, and to all who are in league with him, whether by spreading lies or taking action, before the occupation or after."
Muntadhar al Zaidi, the journalist sentenced to three years of prison for assaulting a foreign leader after
throwing his shoes at President Bush, has been
released from prison after serving only nine months.
[more inside]
posted by orville sash
on Sep 15, 2009 -
53 comments
Demanding that you alone be held accountable and no one else be scapegoated would itself be an act of honor. It would draw a line between the past and the future in the same way that Lincoln’s defense of his brief suspensions of habeas corpus conceded Congress’s sole right to remove this core constitutional provision, but defended his action as a necessary emergency measure because a mass rebellion “had subverted the whole of the laws.” You do not deserve to go down in history as the president who brought torture into the American system and refused to take responsibility for it..
An Open Letter to George W Bush
posted by empath
on Sep 14, 2009 -
113 comments
Scott Horton discusses the latest reports about the pending appointment of a torture special prosecutor with Keith Olbermann.
Last week,
British judges revealed that the British Secret Services fed questions to the CIA in the full knowledge that the Agency was systematically using torture in interrogations; a clear violation of international law.
Meanwhile BBC Newsweek airs "
Confessions of an Uzbek KGB officer". Shortly after 11.00 mins in the video Yakobov refuses to comment more on Secret Rendition claiming his life could be in endangered. In a
Sept. interview Yakubov's most interesting evidence is that he accompanied a CIA man to an interrogation, and that the CIA man was actually in the room during the torture of a detainee.
bradblog attempts to unravel the web of deceipt.
posted by adamvasco
on Aug 12, 2009 -
11 comments
