Surprise!

Sit down and get rid of all liquids in your mouth before reading on. Will wonders never cease?

Gonzo Backs Torture Probe

Eric Holder is getting support for his decision to announce a criminal probe of torture from an unlikely source: Alberto Gonzales. The former Attorney General told a radio interviewer for the Washington Times: We worked very hard to establish ground [...]

Technorati Tags: torture, Gonzales

Well, Consider Me Duly NOT Surprised

It seems our former VPOTUS has been trying (unsuccessfully) to blow a bit of smoke our way again. Sadly, I can probably come up with a handful (or two) of friends and family who regularly watch Fox News and will argue, until we're all blue in the face, that it's all true, simply because Cheney SAYS it's true. I just don't believe there's anything wrong with questioning what comes out of the mouths of elected officials.

 

Townsend Admits CIA Documents Don’t Back Up Cheney’s Claims About Torture

On Monday, the CIA released two memos from 2004 and 2005, which Vice President Cheney said would “show specifically what we gained” from the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. As people like Spencer Ackerman noted, those documents didn’t end up showing that at all, however: Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the [...]

Tales of Torture

Call it what you will, but I'm thinking that all of this is getting set to really explode into a continuing story of boundaries being broken by the Bush Administration. Chime in, please. Is this truly trouble or something blown out of proportion?

Interrogator Revved Power Drill In Front of Hooded Detainee -- Report Details More Abuses

CIA interrogators racked an unloaded handgun close to the head of a high-value detainee, and revved a power drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded, according to the just-released CIA IG report. They also threatened to bring in the mother and family of the detainee, al Nashiri, as well as using a stiff brush to induce pain, and standing on Nashiri's shackles, causing cuts and bruises. And interrogators threatened another detainee, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, that they would kill his children if [...]

Don't Say Nobody Warned You!

If these stories keep coming out, we're gonna forget there's a recession/depression underway!

Military agency warned Bush administration in 2002 that its interrogation program was ‘torture.’

In a July 2002 document uncovered by the Washington Post, the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency warned that the Bush administration’s interrogation program was “torture” and that it would produce “unreliable information.” JPRA is the military agency that ran the program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), “which trains pilots and others to [...]

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The Torture Memos

Every once in a while, a little item comes across my desk that makes me chuckle. Tonight’s is political in nature and comes in the form of what was probably a slip of the tongue, but that just makes it all the better, consider who’s tongue slipped.

Boehner accidentally tells the truth

Once in a great while, the House Minority Leader strays from the script. It's safe to assume he'd like to take this one back. While cable news outlets and major newspapers continue to use euphemisms [...]

Today's Torture Tales

Image via Wikipedia

Now we're being told that, basically, waterboarding was WAY down the torture list at Gitmo. That's pretty grim stuff.

Gitmo Detainee’s ‘Genitals Were Sliced With A Scalpel,’ Waterboarding ‘Far Down The List Of Things They Did’

Last week, two British High Court judges ruled against releasing documents describing the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. The judges said the Bush administration “had threatened to withhold intelligence cooperation with Britain if the information were made public.” But The Daily Telegraph reported over the [...]

Lazy Day

After a busy weekend, we chilled today, getting a few things done around the house NOT involving computers or blogs! So, I'm a bit late to the table this Monday afternoon. It hasn't been a particularly busy news day, but there are some interesting bits of analysis floating around.  Such as:

LA Times 'Punked': Obama NOT Continuing Bush 'Extraordinary Rendition' Program

From Scott Horton at Harper's... In a breathless piece of reporting in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama “left intact” a “controversial counter-terrorism tool” called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed “current and former U.S. intelligence figures,” Obama may actually be planning to expand the [...]

The Obama Administration And Torture

The Obama Administration seems to have made things quite clear: torture is out. Plain and simple. Open and shut. Or are there outs?

WSJ Insists Obama Is Leaving Door Open For A ‘Jack Bauer Exception’ To His Torture Ban

Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in all military and CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. The order specifically revoked the legal memos written by the Bush administration to justify the use of torture on detainees. Today, the Wall Street Journal editorializes that Obama “wants to have it both ways [...]

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The Torture Lies Continue

I know it's the duty of a press spokesman to stand by the boss, but Dana Perino is setting a new level of lying. Is it really THAT bad? If you buy into this argument, it is.

Perino: ‘I absolutely feel comfortable’ lying about the Bush administration’s torture record.

Last week, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said unequivocally, “We did not torture.” This is a lie. In a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, Perino refused to retract her claim: When a reporter asked last week about reports that Obama’s team plans to review techniques for interrogating terror suspects, Perino said that the [...]

The Changing Rules

After all the arguing in FAVOR of waterboarding, etc. look what's happening.

New DOD guidelines prohibit waterboarding, use of dogs.

The LA Times reports that the Pentagon has issued a new directive on detainee interrogations, explicitly prohibiting the use of dogs in interrogations. The directive also bans techniques taught at the U.S. military’s survival schools (SERE), which, as Steve Aftergood noted, includes waterboarding: – No dog shall be used as part of an interrogation [...]

Under The Radar

With all the chatter about the Financial Bailout, you may well have missed something.  Something quite big.

Condi Rice admits that Senior Cabinet members held meetings in the White House to discuss torture

OK, it’s not like we didn’t know about it, but it’s still horrifying..."Senior Bush administration officials held a series of meetings in the White House in 2002 and 2003 to discuss allowing the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods on Al Qaeda detainees, according to a written statement Secretary of State [...]

Redacted

Simply amazing. They're burning through black markers like crazy!

Yoo-Bybee II

Yesterday the ACLU finally got hold of the infamous August 2002 "Yoo-Bybee II" memo, which outlines acceptable interrogation techniques for CIA prisoners held outside the U.S. I figure you probably want to know what's kosher and what's not, so [...]