Rachel Maddow reports on the Senate report that provides further details about how the Bush administration had tried to force the CIA and the Department of Defense to put pressure on interrogators, and notes that the CIA used "extraordinary rendition" to get rid of detainees.
July 11, 2009
Posted by: Chris
The White House has posted the full report from the Special Counsel on the CIA's destruction of videotapes documenting its interrogations of detainees. The report concludes that "there was no reason for the officers who destroyed the tapes to have done so. The tapes should have been retained in the CIA's possession."
July 9, 2009
Posted by: Chris
As many of you are already aware, yesterday the Senate released its report on CIA interrogations post-9/11. As expected, some details on CIA torture techniques were redacted. This morning, the Washington Post is reporting that many of those names, titles, and details have been hidden within a set of dense footnotes, which only a handful of staff can access due to computer programs in need of an update.
July 7, 2009
Posted by: Chris
The president has ordered a review of all federal operations to find out if they were following the letter of the law. But the most important action on transparency has taken place in the White House: a new website where more than 13,000 pages of previously classified material are available to the public for the first time, with all of the associated redactions and restrictions. Most shocking was the announcement from Obama officials that "this site will be an ongoing project and will be filled with new information as it becomes available."
July 4, 2009
Posted by: Chris
There's been a lot of talk and outrage today about the CIA's use of waterboarding and other torture tactics on detainees in order to secure "reliable information." One of the best accounts, of course, came in this NY Times opinion piece by David R. Luban.
June 17, 2009
Posted by: Chris
Many of you may have heard that yesterday's Senate hearings on CIA interrogation tactics were, for a time, blacked out on C-SPAN's website. The New York Times quickly got to the bottom of this; it seems that someone didn't close a tag before posting some video of the footage. I find this a bit concerning, especially since some of the language that had been used in the hearings is highly critical of how people like Jose Rodriguez handled the tapes.
May 22, 2009
Posted by: Chris
"CIA interrogators forced prisoners to endure freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation, stress positions and sensory manipulation. They hooded, shackled and drugged some detainees. Amid all this, waterboarding was used to induce hypothermia and simulate drowning. The program has been described as barbaric. And it worked, at least in a narrow sense: prisoners began providing valuable intelligence, even after they were no longer being tortured. But now the CIA is claiming that the intelligence obtained from torture was completely worthless and did not save a single life.
"I am more than a little uncomfortable with that argument because of a little-known episode during the Carter administration that went almost entirely unreported for nearly thirty years. In July 1975, an American rescue party got trapped in a snowstorm in Iran. The Soviets were holding six American pilots in prisons scattered across the country, and the U.S. military was making an unopposed entry into Iran to rescue the pilots, whom the Soviets refused to release. The first group of American helicopters was hit by a volley of small arms fire and crashed. The U.S. military suffered another loss of life, and that's when the CIA and the Joint Chiefs got the idea of using torture to convince Iran that the pilots weren't worth saving.
"When the next helicopter landed in Tehran, instead of the expected search party, an armed mob approached and took the American pilot into custody. At this point the CIA had two options: it could continue with its plan to use torture to get the pilot back, or it could try the other thing it was good at. The CIA didn't hesitate.
"The program of torture they used to obtain intelligence on which the rescue mission was based was similar in many ways to today's programs. It involved prolonged isolation and confinement, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress positions, forced nudity, loud music played for endless periods, the use of various drugs, and, on one occasion, the stuffing of a detainee into a small box. (There's no need to go into how the box worked.)
"The effect of this torture on the U.S. prisoners was even more devastating than the effect of today's techniques, because the prisoners were not just tortured but abused, and then tortured again."
May 15, 2009
Posted by: Chris
A few weeks ago, I started a collection of photos showing the legacy of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. I was thinking about this just today, and it occurred to me that while the Western media is doing a good job of capturing the brutality of the conflict on its own, not much attention has been paid to the destruction caused by U.S. and U.K. forces in their hunt for Osama bin Laden. The latest news is this photo from the AP showing the remains of what used to be a home in Zard Khel.
May 14, 2009
Posted by: Chris
In Afghanistan on Monday, as part of her national address on Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put her finger on one of the key factors that make the war look so brutal for all sides: the presence of innocent civilians, who by definition are more vulnerable to attack than those who are responsible for causing harm to others.
May 12, 2009
Posted by: Chris
When Hillary Clinton said a couple of weeks ago that the war in Afghanistan was "a war of necessity," she was wrong.
This war began for two reasons. The first was to capture Osama bin Laden. That aim has been met. Now, everyone can celebrate the death of al Qaeda's leader.
The second reason for going to war, however, has nothing to do with terrorism or justice, and everything to do with money and empire: to turn Afghanistan into a strategic outpost for maintaining U.S. military bases in the Middle East and continuing to control the strategic energy resources and trade routes of central Asia.
May 10, 2009
Posted by: Chris
I was happy to see that U.S. soldiers who used to be known as "military interrogators" are starting to come out of the shadows. Today, one of them, Major Matthew Diaz, spoke on the record with PBS.org about his role in a case in Iraq in which U.S. soldiers "took [Abu] Jandal to a different location and basically did the same kind of torture that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Diaz said. "And that was cold water in a shower. Punching. Slamming of heads into walls. The kind of tactics and techniques that we've seen so much about in these hearings over the last few weeks."
May 1, 2009
Posted by: Chris
In an important report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has drawn on the testimony of military and civilian officials at the Defense Department who have direct experience with the CIA's interrogation program in Afghanistan to document a disturbing series of incidents in which U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base reportedly used unauthorized interrogation techniques that included humiliation, threats, and physical and psychological abuse, sometimes with a sadistic sexual component.
April 25, 2009
