Italian Court Ups Sentences for 23 CIA Agents
The AFP reports, via Yahoo! News:
An Italian court on Wednesday upped the sentences for 23 CIA agents convicted in absentia of abducting an Egyptian imam in one of the biggest cases against the US “extraordinary rendition” program.
The 23 CIA agents, originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison, had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal in what one of the defence lawyers described as a “shocking blow” for the US.
They were also ordered to pay 1.5 million euros (2.0 million dollars) in damages to the imam and his wife for the 2003 abduction.
Washington has refused to extradite the agents, who all remain at liberty but now risk arrest if they travel to Europe.
Osama Mustafa Hassan, a radical Islamist opposition figure better known as Abu Omar, was snatched from a street in Milan in 2003 in an operation coordinated by the CIA and…
WikiLeaker Bradley Manning’s Brutal Detention
Here’s what America has in store whistle-blowers — Despite not being charged with a crime, 22-year-old Army private and alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning has spent the past seventh months imprisoned under some of the most extreme, brutal conditions possible: total isolation for 23 hours a day, every day, while being dosed with antidepressants to prevent his mind from snapping. Salon takes a look at Bradley’s background and his current fate, which it says is undoubtedly torture:
Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.
Interviews with several…
WikiLeaks Revelation: The U.S. Tortured an Innocent Man and Threatened Germany to Not Prosecute the Torturers
While the U.S. media simultaneously wrings its hands over whether Julian Assange should get life imprisonment or the death penalty and claims WikiLeaks revealed nothing important except about Iran’s WMD ambitions, Scott Horton reports at Harper’s:
Over the Christmas-New Year’s holiday in 2003, Khaled El-Masri traveled by bus to Skopje, Macedonia. There he was apprehended by border guards who noted the similarity of his name to that of Khalid al-Masri, an Al Qaeda agent linked to the Hamburg cell where the 9/11 attacks were plotted. Despite El-Masri’s protests that he was not al-Masri, he was beaten, stripped naked, shot full of drugs, given an enema and a diaper, and flown first to Baghdad and then to the notorious “salt pit,” the CIA’s secret interrogation facility in Afghanistan.
At the salt pit, he was repeatedly beaten, drugged, and subjected to a strange food regime that he supposed was part of an experiment that his captors were performing on him. Throughout this time, El-Masri insisted that he had been falsely imprisoned, and the CIA slowly established that he was who he claimed to be. Over many further weeks of bickering over what to do, a number of CIA figures apparently argued that, though innocent, the best course was to continue to hold him incommunicado because he “knew too much.”…
WikiLeaks Revelation: The U.S. State Department Obstructed Spanish Torture Investigations
More from Scott Horton at Harper’s:
In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.
These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations. High-ranking U.S. visitors such as former Republican Party Chair Mel Martinez,…
Did The U.S. Conduct “Pharmacological Torture” At Guantanamo?
Truthout claims that the military forced prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to take dangerously large doses of a controversial anti-malarial drug, as a form of “pharmaceutical waterboarding.” Was this a medical error? Being overcautious in regards to a potential malaria outbreak? Or the use of drugs as a tool for torture?
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.
The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.
Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by…
No Holiday at Fort Benning, Home of the School For Terror
This past weekend saw the annual protest at Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the notorious School of the Americas, a/k/a the School for Terror (famous alumnae include Manuel Noriega). According to the New York Times, the number of protesters this year was far lower than a few years ago when Martin Cohen included Fort Benning in his disinformation book, No Holiday: 80 Places You Don’t Want To Visit. To help try to boost interest in the effort to end the School of the Americas, now renamed as the “Department of Defense Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (Blackwater and other criminal corporations aren’t the only ones who play that game), disinformation is pleased to bring you Martin’s advice on attending next November’s protest:
#28 No Holiday: Fort Benning, Georgia
Join the annual protest at the notorious School for Terror
How to get there:
Fly or take the train to Atlanta, Georgia, and rent a car and drive to Fort Benning, about 85 miles (137 kilometers) southwest. The Commandant’s door is always open to visitors:
We invite you come to our campus, meet our students and faculty, and see our programs in action. Our motto is “Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad,” which means Freedom, Peace, and Brotherhood. Together we will make a difference in the region and the world.
The crazy paving entrance and the pink stucco mansion of the main block look more appropriate to a college summer camp than the school for assassins and torture techniques that it really is.
What to see
Not that you can see that from outside. But at least every November at Fort Benning there is a protest outside one of the gates, attended in past years by over 10,000 people, some of them bearing crosses with names of civilian victims of Fort Benning’s graduates carefully inscribed on them…
Torture In The Middle Ages: Revisited
Torture rack in the Tower of London
A German researcher has studied medieval criminal law and found that our image of the sadistic treatment of criminals in the Dark Ages is only partly true. Torture and gruesome executions were designed in part to ensure the salvation of the convicted person’s soul.
Peter Nirsch would have been seen as a monster at any time in history. While traveling south through Germany, he had a penchant for cutting open pregnant women and removing their unborn babies. Nirsch butchered more than 500 people before he was captured near Nuremberg in September 1581.
The courts were not squeamish in their treatment of the serial killer. First he was tortured, and then hot oil was poured into his wounds. Then the culprit was tied to the rack, where his arms and legs were broken. In the…
Could ‘Decision Points’ Rewrite History?
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern published a brilliant and damning piece regarding former President Bush’s upcoming memoir, Decision Points. In his essay, McGovern points out W’s little talked about “damn right” remarks he made when authorizing the waterboarding of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Not only did W sign off on the form torture as an acceptable practice, but added “damn right” and asserted that the torture saved lives.
McGovern not only points out the glaring falsehood in that assertion, but shows exactly how the torture of prisoners became a recruiting tool for insurgents in Iraq. In addition, he rightly states that the under-reporting of the torture issue in the media, coupled with plenty of support (or shoulder shrugging) of the American public at large implicates us all. The essay comes on the heels of Bush’s related comments regarding the “lowest point” in his presidency, when Kanye West…
LA Prisons To Use Burning Heat Ray On Unruly Inmates
As if beatings from wardens and guards weren’t bad enough… from Salon.com:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” is a stripped-down version of a military gadget…
Federal Judge Rules That CIA Can Cover Up Torture
Press release from the ACLU, via Common Dreams:
NEW YORK – July 15 – A federal judge today ruled that the government can withhold information from the public about intelligence sources and methods, even if those sources and methods were illegal. The ruling came in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation filed by the American Civil Liberties Union for Justice Department memos that authorized torture, and for records relating to the contents of destroyed videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of detainees at CIA black sites.
The government continues to withhold key information, such as the names of detainees who were subjected to the abusive interrogation methods as well as information about the application of the interrogation techniques. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York today ruled that the government can continue to suppress evidence of its illegal program.
The following…
How To Uncover CIA Spies
Nick Baumann and Daniel Schulman tell how human rights advocates investigating torture ended up snooping on the CIA—and in hot water with the feds, in Mother Jones:
The CIA probably doesn’t want you to know this, but unmasking its covert operatives isn’t as hard as you’d think. Just ask John Sifton. During a six-year stint at Human Rights Watch, the attorney and investigator was hot on the trail of the CIA and some of its most sensitive Bush-era counterterrorism programs, including extraordinary rendition, secret Eastern European detention sites, and the legally dubious and brutal methods used to extract information from detainees. “Even deep-cover CIA officers are real people, with mortgages and credit reports,” Sifton once told CQ Politics. For researchers with a trained eye for the hallmarks of a CIA alias, there are obvious giveaways: “A brand new Social Security number, a single P.O. box in Reston, Virginia. You disregard those…
Two Minutes Hate: Spill, Baby, Spill
Nick Pell at Red Star Times writes:
How many of you have woken up over the last couple weeks and almost immediately thought: damn, the world is in the toilet? Me too. The last month or so has been perhaps one of the most horrible times I have ever experienced, with the beginning of the Iraq War being one of the few things that even comes close.
Whether or not it’s a Chinese curse, the adage about living in “interesting times” becomes more and more apt with each passing week. Despite how awful things are, there seems to be a lingering scent of resistance in the air. I concede that this could entirely be wish-fulfillment and solipsism on my part, but it seems as if things could explode at any second.
Explosions in and of themselves go nowhere, however. A political analysis and direction is necessary to make an explosion travel in the right direction.…
Paul Schaefer, Nazi Preacher Who Led Torture Cult In Chile, Dies
Dead at 89, Paul Schaefer sounds like a monster out of a horror movie, but he was terrifyingly real. Strangest detail: “He had a glass eye, having accidentally gouged out his right eye while trying to untie a shoelace knot with a fork.” The Washington Post reports:
Paul Schaefer, 89, a German-born evangelical preacher who was convicted of sexually abusing 25 children while leading one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semitic and apocalyptic sects, died April 24 of a heart ailment at a prison hospital in Chile.
His enclave in southern Chile, Colonia Dignidad…doubled during the 1970s and ’80s as a detention and torture center for opponents of right-wing dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
At the time of his death, Mr. Schaefer was still under investigation in the 1985 disappearance of mathematician Boris Weisfeiler, an American citizen who went missing while hiking near Colonia Dignidad.
Mr. Schaefer turned to preaching after serving in the German military…
Game of Death: France’s Shocking TV Experiment (Video)
From Yahoo News:
Is a crusading French documentary maker striking a blow at the abusive powers of television — or simply taking reality TV to a new low of cynicism and bad taste? That’s the question viewers across France are asking in light of Christophe Nick’s new film Game of Death, which aired on French television Wednesday night. The documentary has generated a massive amount of attention — and naturally, courted controversy — because of the dilemma that faced contestants on a fake game show in the film: Would they allow themselves to be cajoled into delivering near-lethal electrical charges to fellow players, or rather follow their better instincts and refuse?
Game of Death is an adaptation of an infamous experiment conducted by a team led by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In order to test people’s obedience to authority figures, the scientists demanded that subjects administer increasingly strong electric shocks to other participants if they answered questions incorrectly. The people delivering the shocks, however, didn’t know that the charges were fake — the volunteers on the other end of the room were actors pretending to suffer agonizing pain. The point was to see how many people would continue following orders to mete out torture.
Waterboarding For Dummies
MARK BENJAMIN writes on Salon:
Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking — and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a…
Bush’s CIA Torture Psychologists Sought To Use ‘Mock Burials’
Documents reveal that burying detainees alive was sought as an interrogation method by the Bush’s torture psychologists, but rejected by the Department of Justice “in the rush to approve waterboarding”:
CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.
PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval.
The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.
There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page…
Human Bones Could Reveal Truth of Japan’s ‘Unit 731′ Experiments
Julian Ryall writes in the Telegraph:
The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.
Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews. The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.
Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit. A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.
Soldier Waterboards Daughter Over Failure To Recite The Alphabet
Sounds like some soldiers are bringing the lessons of war home with them. The Raw Story reports:
A 27-year-old Washington state soldier allegedly admitted Sunday to having held his daughter’s head in a bowl of water because she couldn’t recite the alphabet — “submerg[ing] her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.”
His girlfriend told police that the girl had been found in a closer with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.
Tabor was arrested after being seen in his neighborhood in a Tacoma suburb wearing a Kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows.
Church of Scientology Accused Of Torture And Forced Abortions
Sophie Tedmanson in Sydney reports for the Times:
The Church of Scientology faces the prospect of a police investigation in Australia after being accused of torture and embezzlement and of forcing employees to have abortions.
Nick Xenophon, an independent senator, presented letters to the Australian Parliament from seven former Scientologists which he said showed that the secretive church was a front for physical violence, intimidation and blackmail.
“I am deeply concerned about this organisation and the devastating impact it can have on its followers,” he told the Australian Senate in Canberra. He called for a Senate inquiry…
Lawsuit Accuses Psychologist of Ignoring Guantanamo Torture
From Truthout: 
The state board responsible for licensing – and disciplining – psychologists in Louisiana is “fighting awfully hard to turn a blind eye to serious allegations of abuse” brought against one of its members, who is being accused of complicity in beatings, religious and sexual humiliation, rape threats and painful body positions during his service as a senior adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
That is the view expressed to Truthout by Deborah Popowski, cooperating attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), part of the legal team representing Dr. Trudy Bond, an Ohio-based psychologist, who is suing the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists to compel it to investigate the behavior of Louisiana psychologist and retired US Army Col. Dr. Larry C. James, a former high-ranking adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
“We wish the…
