Tag: Torture (page 7)

By a vote of 51 to 45 today, the Senate voted to ban waterboarding.

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

The House adopted the provision back in December. Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

As I wrote yesterday, Hillary Clinton wrote Bush Monday and urged him to withdraw his veto threat.

Today Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin and other senior Democratic Senators wrote to Bush and called on him to revise his Executive Order on CIA interrogation to comply with our treaty obligations and to prohibit explicitly a number of torture techniques that the Administration has used. The Senators wrote: [More...]

Here's a letter Hillary Clinton sent to George Bush today...I'm surprised I haven't read about it anywhere.

Clinton Calls on President to Support Humane and Effective Standards for Interrogation, Urges President to Remove Veto Threat from Intelligence Authorization Bill

Washington, DC—Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today called on President Bush to remove his threat to veto the Fiscal Year 2008 Intelligence Authorization Bill, which applies the U.S. Army standards for interrogation to U.S. intelligence agencies and contractors, and bans the practice of waterboarding. In a letter to the President, Senator Clinton urged him to live up to the standards that America has promoted around the world.

“Our nation and our President must strongly and unequivocally stand for the rule of law—especially when we are under threat from an enemy that embodies the antithesis of our values,” Senator Clinton wrote. “In the process of accomplishing what is essential for our security, we must hold onto our values and set an example we can point to with pride, not shame.”

The text of Senator Clinton’s letter is below the fold:

The D.C. Court of Appeals today upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit for damages filed by four Britons who had been detained at Guantanamo. Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith had sued Donald Rumsfeld and other top military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse during the two years they spent at Guantanamo before being sent back to Britain. The trial court dismissed all of the claims except the one over religious discrimination. The appeals court dismissed that as well.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the suit on behalf of the men, reports:

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The ACLU reports:

In the first decision of its kind, a federal judge today ordered the government to stop the deportation of Egyptian national Sameh Khouzam based on a secret and unreliable “assurance” from the Egyptian government that it will not torture him upon his return. The judge called for Khouzam’s immediate release from jail under reasonable conditions of supervision and granted his habeas corpus petition. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit on Khouzam’s behalf, applauded the judge’s ruling.[More....]

A federal judge in Washington has refused to order an investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes showing coercive techniques.

A federal judge yesterday declined to order a special review of the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes, saying that there is no evidence the Bush administration defied court orders and that Justice Department prosecutors should be allowed to proceed with their own investigation into the matter.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. said in a three-page ruling in Washington that a group of inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "offer nothing to support their assertion that a judicial inquiry" is necessary into the tape destruction. He said neither of the detainees whose interrogations were taped and later destroyed has an apparent connection to the prisoners who were demanding the review.

The Justice Department says it's investigating the destruction of the tapes of interrogations of two detainees, as has the House Intelligence Committee. But, the star witness for the House investigation is refusing to testify without immunity.

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The House of Representatives today passed a bill outlawing harsh interrogation methods.

The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding and require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, "mock" executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.

President Bush said he'd veto the bill, which now goes to the Senate. In related news, the ACLU wrote the Senate today (letter here, pdf)listing ten reasons why a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes.

The Washington Post has a disturbing revelation:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

Who were they? [More...]

The Bush Administration insists it does not torture. Former detainees say otherwise.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA's behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.

The Jordanians specialized in two tactics:

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

Former detainee Al-Haj Abdu Ali Sharqawi says:

"I was kidnapped, not knowing anything of my fate, with continuous torture and interrogation for the whole of two years," Al-Haj Abdu Ali Sharqawi, a Guantanamo prisoner from Yemen, recounted in a written account of his experiences in Jordanian custody. "When I told them the truth, I was tortured and beaten."

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You gotta love a good blog fight and there's a big one tonight about torture between Alan Dershowitz and Larisa Alexandrovna on Huffington Post. Even Huffpo weighs in, at the bottom of Dershowitz's post.

Here's Larisa's post that started it all, criticizing Dershowitz's op-ed in the Wall St. Journal on waterboarding and torture.

Throw in (on Dershowitz's part) a little "ticking time bomb theory," the assertion that Nazi torture was sometimes effective, a little praise for Rudy and some bashing of the Dems, liberals and (some) blogs -- and from Larisa, some thoughts on torture, morality, Israel, the Holocaust and Jews.

The gloves are off, let's see where you weigh in. As for me, with all due respect to Professor Dershowitz, I'm with Larisa.

Bump and Update (10/31): The show starts at 10:00 pm ET. It's Channel 107 on Comcast, check their website for other cable systems.

Original post (10/30)

Maybe someone will tell Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey to watch Current TV tomorrow night at 10:00 pm ET.

On Wednesday, October 31st at 10pm ET/PT, Current TV gives viewers a real look at what Waterboarding entails when two ex-Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) instructors administer a controversial interrogation technique to Current Vanguard Journalist Kaj Larsen.

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Via TPM:

President Bush's nominee for attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he does not know whether waterboarding is illegal. He pledged to study the matter and to reverse any Justice Department finding that endorses a practice that violates the law or the Constitution. "If, after such a review, I determine that any technique is unlawful, I will not hesitate to so advise the president and will rescind or correct any legal opinion of the Department of Justice that supports the use of the technique," Michael Mukasey wrote to the committee's 10 Democrats.

Incredible. Shameless. Outrageous. Disqualifying.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and other human rights groups filed a complaint in Paris against Donald Rumsfeld last night alleging he ordered and authorized torture.

Rumsfeld is in Paris to give a talk on foreign policy.

“The filing of this French case against Rumsfeld demonstrates that we will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in the torture program are brought to justice. Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide. A torturer is an enemy of all humankind,” said CCR President Michael Ratner.

“France is under the obligation to investigate and prosecute Rumsfeld’s accountability for crimes of torture in Guantanamo and Iraq. France has no choice but to open an investigation if an alleged torturer is on its territory. I hope that the fight against impunity will not be sacrificed in the name of politics. We call on France to refuse to be a safe haven for criminals.” said FIDH President Souhayr Belhassen.

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