Author of Torture Memos Admits Some Techniques Were Not Approved By DOJ
Thursday 15 July 2010
by: Jason Leopold, reprinted from TruthOut.org
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Jay Bybee, who as a senior Justice Department lawyer signed two memos in 2002 authorizing CIA interrogators to torture “war on terror” prisoners, told a congressional panel that more than a half dozen other brutal methods were used by the CIA without legal approval.
In a closed-door interview with members of the House Judiciary Committee on May 26, Bybee said his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not allow the CIA to use diapering, water dousing, blackout goggles, extended solitary confinement, daily beatings, forcing a detainee to defecate on himself, hanging a detainee from ceiling hooks or subjecting prisoners to loud music or noise.
Bybee, who is now a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco, did sign off on a variety of other torture techniques, including the near-drowning experience of waterboarding. Prolonged diapering was included in a list of torture techniques that the OLC initially approved in 2002, but it was removed possibly because it might have resulted in a lengthy legal review.
Some of the techniques, including diapering, were permitted by CIA Director George Tenet and other senior agency officials despite the lack of clear OLC sign-off in 2002. Diapering and other abuses, such as water dousing, were cleared by the OLC later after Bybee left to become a federal judge. Continue reading
Reprinted with permission (and creative commons) from TruthOut.org Don’t forget, it is very important to support independent journalist sites like TruthOut.org
by Jason Leopold – Sunday, June 6, 2010
PHR Reports Experiments in Torture
High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” who were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as “guinea pigs” to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors’ organization.
PHR, based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the US Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal interrogations. Continue reading
Guantanamo detainee report is out. It states that 126 detainees should be sent back home or handed over to a third party country. The report states that 36 should be prosecuted and that 48 be detained further under “laws of war”. The 30 Yemenis are left in limbo until the U.S. Government decides further.
This basically means that 156 people have been cleared for release. Will the U.S. government release these detainees or come up with more ways than Dick Cheney to hold innocent people?
ANSWER coaliton SeizeBP campaign – Media Matters on BP/Halliburton spill and Andy Worthington Segment 1 –
Matthew Alexander – How To Break A Terrorist Segment 2 – (note: there are portions of the audio which dropped out and were boosted from remaining low volume. They were included to retain as much of what Mr. Alexander shared as possible.)
Our listening link will be available before airtime. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN Tonight’s show features Matthew Alexander, Author of How To Break A Terrorist, Andy Worthington on British Elections and Guantanamo Bay detainees, Media Matters discussion on Elena Kagan and BP, and a visit with ANSWER coalition about their Seize BP campaign.
Documents By Chronology:
The attacks on September 11, 2001 were the catalyst for the “war on terror”– and for a legal revolution in assertions of broad powers for the Commander-in-Chief. In this chronological library of 34 documents, it is possible to chart the decision-making that led to interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody that were “at a minimum, cruel and inhuman treatment and, at worst, torture,” in the words of the former general counsel of the United States Navy, Alberto Mora. Continue reading
