New Report Accuses CIA Doctors of Experimenting on Detainees

Physicians for Human Rights, an anti-torture non-governmental association, synthesizes a bunch of publicly available information to draw a gruesome conclusion: Medical personnel who participated in the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogations” for terrorism detainees are guilty of “complicity in intentionally harmful interrogation practices [that] were not only apparently intended to enable More…

Ex-CIA Director Joked About Destroying Interrogation Tapes

Porter Goss, director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006, previously gave the impression he was dismayed when his operations chief, Jose Rodriguez, ordered the destruction of dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. Perhaps not so:

Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order

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How CIA Officials Actually Waterboarded People

A few years ago, a pal of mine named Malcolm Nance testified to a congressional panel about how he was waterboarded. Nance used to instruct Naval Special Forces in how to resist torture, and part of their instruction was, inevitably, to undergo it themselves. Since the CIA’s contract psychologists essentially More…

‘Do We Know If Boo-Boo Is Allergic to Certain Insects?’

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility released its report on professional misconduct over torture authorized by ex-Justice officials John Yoo, Steve Bradbury and Jay Bybee today, and the results aren’t so good for them. While they avoided a formal recommendation for disbarment, Justice Department ethics officials found that More…

Did the FBI Want People Tortured?

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect tears through a weekend dump of torture documents and finds something disturbing in an FBI inspector general’s report about a Guantanamo detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was tortured in 2003:

[W]e also learned about a proposal advanced by certain officials from the FBI and

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Abu Zubaydah, Torture and Conflicts of Interest

Marcy Wheeler has a typically excellent post going through a remarkable annex to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s torture report: the psychological profile prepared (probably by former SERE psychologist James Mitchell) of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee to be subjected to what would become the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. More…

GOP Memo Misrepresents CIA IG Report on Effectiveness of Torture

It’s not just former Vice President Dick Cheney who misrepresented what the CIA inspector general’s report says about the effectiveness of torture. Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard reports on a “GOP memo” he says is being circulated on the Hill that’s a laughable tissue of decontextualized bullet-pointed More…

CIA Inspector General Report Implicates Justice Department Officials

I know Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he plans to investigate only the CIA interrogators that went beyond what the law allowed, as it was interpreted by the Justice Department’s torture memos, but what will he do about the fact that the Justice Department itself authorized exceeding those More…

Mitchell, Jessen & Abu Zubaydah: ‘You’ve Lost Your Spine’

Joby Warrick and Peter Finn’s Washington Post account of the 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah is the most detailed and nuanced journalistic report to date of how two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were experienced in the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape program, ended up decisively influencing More…

Interrogation Contracts That the CIA Won’t Let You See

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.

In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush More…