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Gov't, MI6 sued on torture complicity
A former Libyan anti-Gaddafi reformist has sued the British government and called for investigations into British spy agencies' involvement in rendition and torture.
Sami al-Saadi, his wife, and his four children were arrested in Hong Kong by Libyan intelligence officers and flown to Libya where the entire family was jailed and Sami and his wife were tortured.
Back in September, documents recovered from a government building in Tripoli revealed high-level cooperation between Britain's MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence arm on illegal arrest and transfer of Saadi to the African country in 2004
November 19th 2011
Donald Rumsfeld Stripped Of Immunity In Torture Case
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was stripped of immunity in a case involving the torture of two United States citizens.
Two FBI informants, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were detained and tortured by United States military personnel in Iraq in 2006. They filed suit against Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for violations of their constitutional rights. The Judicial View states:
“Plaintiffs seek damages from Secretary Rumsfeld and others for their roles in creating and carrying out policies that caused plaintiffs’ alleged torture. Plaintiffs also bring a claim against the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act to recover personal property that was seized when they were detained.”
Trained for Pain: Get your Torture Degree from School of Americas
It's been 30 years since Colombian soldiers kidnapped, beat, tortured, starved and electro-shocked Hector Aristizabal — but it's a memory he lives with everyday. Aristizabal said the Colombian military held and tortured him for ten days, all for having a "subversive book." "Few people have survived torture in Colombia, so I am very lucky to tell this story. Most people get tortured for ten days, that's the standard, and then they get shot and killed," said Aristizabal. "Many have been disappeared — more than 80,000." Aristizabal says that the Colombian soldiers who tortured him and later killed his brother were trained right here on American soil, at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. Retired Army Major Joseph Blair was an instructor at the School of the Americas, which has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. "I was very much in favor of the School of the Americas during the Cold War era,"
Major Blair said. But Major Blair said he was horrified to learn of what his former students did with their anti-communist training in their own countries. "The classified manuals that the Army School of the Americas used had the words interrogate, extortion, assassinate, neutralize — in common layman's terms, it all equates to torture," Blair said. Graduates from the School of the Americas have been implicated in massacres and torture throughout the hemisphere — including the murder of six Jesuit priests and four American churchwomen in El Salvador
Senior members of the Bush administration spoke out on Sunday to praise waterboarding and claim their share of the credit for bin Laden's capture.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said waterboarding 'probably' helped in tracking down Bin Laden.
Mr Cheney told Fox News Sunday: 'It was a good programme. It was legal programme. It was not torture. 'I would strongly recommend we continue it.'
Hard-liners: Former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney both used bin Laden's capture to talk up waterboarding
Speaking on CBS, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it 'a mistake' to rule out waterboarding, saying: 'It's clear that those techniques that the CIA used worked.'
The key to finding Bin Laden was locating his courier.
Captured terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave the courier's nickname in 2003 after being waterboarded 183 times.
Mohammed never gave up the real name, even under so-called 'enhanced interrogation.'
Opponents of torture believe normal questioning would have been more effective on Mohammed.
CIA Psychologist's Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush's Torture Program
 Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on "war on terror" detainees were the last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.
But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government's top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen's notes explain, torture was used to "exploit" detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to "collaborate" with government authorities. Jessen's notes emphasize how a "detainer" uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.(Visit Truth-Out.org to see the document it obtained)
Torture in American prisons
Policy of Abuse? 142 torture victims push for public probe in UK
Revelations of systemic torture by British military
 The Guardian newspaper has obtained access to training manuals that detail the interrogation techniques used by British military personnel in Iraq. In an exclusive report published Monday, the newspaper quotes from the documents, which are described as an “Introduction to Interrogation and Tactical Questioning”.
According to the Guardian,the documents advocate the use of “threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness”. Guardian reporter Ian Cobain writes that the training manuals urge interrogators “to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved”.
Israel Torture Palestinian Children by Electric-Shocking
 The August 5 incident involved four boys walking near a road used by settlers when an Israeli jeep approached. "Just for fun," one boy waved. The jeep turned, was joined by others, and chased the boys. They were seized, blindfolded, painfully shackled, detained, and taken to the Zufin settlement, then to the Ari'el settlement where one boy, Raed, was interrogated.
Though innocent, "Threat of electrocution" made him confess to stone throwing, after which his head was slammed against a cupboard. He was also punched in the stomach, and a second interrogator shocked him with a handheld device, making him dizzy and shiver. He then signed a confession in Hebrew he couldn't understand, was transferred to Salem Interrogation and Detention Center, after which he was taken to Megiddo Prison, in violation of Fourth Geneva's Article 76, pertaining to the rights assured protected persons detained under occupation.
Doc who ‘inspired’ torture program gets $31 million Army contract
 A psychologist whose research was used in constructing the US's program to torture terrorism suspects has been granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide "resilience training" to US soldiers.
Mark Benjamin at Salon.com reports that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman's research "formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program."
Police release shocking CCTV video of officer inflicting water torture on suspect
 Shocking video footage of a 'cowardly' Austian police officer abusing detainees has been released.
Ben Price is first shown throwing a 21-year-old woman to the floor, then pulling her up by her hair.
The ex-Queensland police officer is then shown committing an horrific five-minute assault on a 23-year-old man.
Price can be seen punching and kneeing a bleeding, handcuffed Timothy Steele, 23, in May 25, 2008.
He puts Mr Steele in a brutal spine lock and leaves the commercial diver with a broken nose and two blackened eyes, cuts and bruising to the face.
Other police officers look on - but none intervene - as Price stuffs a running fire hose into his victim's mouth, nearly drowning him
The U.S. Soldier Who Killed Herself After Refusing to Take Part in Torture
With each revelation, or court decision, on U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo -- or the airing this month of The Tillman Story and Lawrence Wright's My Trip to Al-Qaeda -- I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who died seven years ago today. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what most would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, on September 15, 2003.
Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the US Senate committee probe and various press reports, that the "Gitmo-izing" of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.
Ex-CIA Agents Confirm Torture at Polish Black Site
 Former CIA agents have confirmed rumors that the agency tortured terror suspects at a detention center in Poland. One agent allegedly held a drill to a prisoner's head while he was naked and hooded.
Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a "black site" detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as "Albert" tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.
Study: CIA doctors ‘gave green light to torture’
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that physicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) played an even greater role in facilitating the torture of detainees than was previously recognized.
As described in the (subscription required) study, "In 2003, partially in response to a CIA Inspector General investigation that questioned the use of enhanced interrogation methods and criticized the agency’s failure to consult with OMS about the risks to detainees of waterboarding, OMS physicians assumed another role, providing opinions to the agency and lawyers whether the techniques used would be expected to cause severe pain or suffering and thus constitute torture."
UK Army 'involved in torture mission with US troops'
Claims that British soldiers used water torture on a badly beaten Iraqi man before unlawfully handing him over to US interrogators are being investigated by the Ministry of Defence. The troubling case includes the first evidence before a UK court of British soldiers being directly involved in a joint torture operation with US forces.
Ali Lafteh Eedan, 37, says that for three hours British and US soldiers attempted to drown him by pushing his head into a bucket of water in August 2008. His case is the latest of 100 allegations being investigated by the Ministry of Defence's Iraqi historic abuse team
July 17th, 2010
HRW Report Says Britain, France, Germany Use Foreign Torture Intel
Britain, France and Germany use foreign intelligence obtained through torture in the fight against terrorism, a new report from Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
The use by three heavyweight European powers of information from secret services in countries that routinely rely on torture was damaging the reputation of the entire European Union, said the rights group.
"Berlin, Paris and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, Western Europe researcher for HRW. "Taking information from torturers is illegal and just plain wrong."
The report, "No Questions Asked: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture," found: "The actual practices of these leading EU states contradict the EU's anti-torture guidelines, which make eradicating torture and ill-treatment a priority in its relations with other countries."
Spies told to reveal instructions which 'turned blind eye to torture'
MI5 and MI6 have been ordered by a High Court judge to release secret guidelines which human rights groups claim instructed spies to turn a blind eye to the torture of British terror suspects abroad.
The guidelines will be released to six British former Guantanamo Bay detainees who are suing the Government for allegedly being complicit in their torture by the Americans.
The guidelines were issued to agents in 2002 and 2004.
‘We believe they will reveal a policy of complicity to torture, which explains all these cases over the years of MI5 agents knowing a Briton is being tortured but doing nothing about it,’ said Katherine O’Shea of Reprieve, a charity which has given legal help to former Guantanamo Bay detainees
Did the CIA Conduct Medical Experiments on Detainees?
As time goes by, the record of the Bush administration gets worse and worse. It could turn out that the most egregious offense of the Bush-esque Obama administration will be that its Justice Department let Bush-Cheney & Co. off scot-free.
It’s not enough that the last gang to occupy the Executive Branch got us into two illegal wars, accumulated autocratic powers, violated our civil liberties, and tortured suspects. Now it appears that it kicked things up a notch.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says it has unearthed “evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody.”
Why would the U.S. government do this?
 An old cliché says that anyone who has herself for a lawyer has a fool for a client. Nevertheless, going to trial in Washington, D.C., this past June 14, I and twenty-three other defendants prepared a pro se defense. Acting as our own lawyers in court, we aimed to defend a population that finds little voice in our society at all, and to bring a sort of prosecution against their persecutors.
Months earlier, on January 21st, we had held a memorial vigil for three innocent Guantanamo prisoners, recently revealed to have been in all probability tortured to death by our government with what would turn out to be utter impunity – and because we had wished the culpable parties to take notice, we’d staged a vigil where they worked, specifically on the Capitol Steps and in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building. We had been charged with causing a “breach of the peace,” a technical legal term for a situation that might risk inciting people to violence. In abetting Administration use of torture, Congress had been inciting others to horrendous violence, and we’d been protesting perhaps one of the gravest imaginable breaches of the peace. Now we were making our small attempt to take these crimes to court, in the course of defending ourselves against what we felt to be a misdirected charge
Court Allows Torture Suit Against Rumsfeld
 Federal Judge Wayne R. Andersen issued a historic ruling Friday allowing a suit charging former Defense Secretary with authorizing torture.
Rumsfeld asked the court to dismiss the case because he is a high-placed governmental official and argued that he was immune from suit even for allegations of torture. Mr. Rumsfeld also argued that due to his position, the Constitution permitted him to order interrogation techniques that are widely considered by human rights experts to be torture. The Court rejected both of Rumsfeld's arguments and held that high-placed placed cabinet officials can be held personally liable if they authorize the use of torture.
While many previous civil suit attempts to prosecute Bush-era cabinet officials for authorizing torture have failed, the suit brought by Chicago-based Loevy and Loevy Attorneys at Law, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, United States of America and Unidentified Agents, will now proceed to discovery and a trial.
Donald Vance, a Navy veteran, accuses U.S. forces in Iraq of imprisoning him without charges for over three months in 2006, and torturing him during much of that time. Vance, a private security employee at the time of his arrest in Baghdad, named former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a defendant for his role in overseeing the military prison system in Iraq.
Rumsfeld allegedly issued orders allowing torture techniques which allowed Vance to be subjected to extreme sleep deprivation, interrogation for hours at a time, held in an extremely cold cell without adequate clothing or blankets, and periodically denied food and water for long periods of time. During virtually Vance's entire three month imprisonment at the notorious Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, he was held in solitary confinement in a continuously lit, windowless cell.
Obama's Expanded Military Spying and Torture Network
Despite promises to the contrary, the Obama administration has consolidated, even expanded privacy- and civil liberties killing programs launched by the Bush government.
From warrantless spying and driftnet surveillance to the indefinite detention and torture of foreign suspects held in U.S. gulags, and from the murderous drone wars in Pakistan to threats to assassinate American citizens merely on the suspicion they might be terrorists, 18 months into Obama's new "change" order, facts on the ground paint a grim picture indeed.
As egregious as these central facts are in demolishing the veracity of the President's long-forgotten campaign pledges, when it comes to enlisting the services of defense and security corporations for waging America's bogus "War On Terror 2.0.1," the current regime delivers!
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