black sites

Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, for years tried to track the deaths of “war on terror” detainees being held in U.S. custody. The author of the book “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” published in 2006 [...]

As Spencer noted, in responding to a federal judge’s order to turn over another batch of documents including President George W. Bush’s authorization of CIA secret prisons, and records of investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the Department of Justice instead opted to file a document yesterday explaining why it’s actually not [...]

In a story more baroque than could have been imagined, The New York Times reports that Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a senior former CIA official and key figure in the corruption scandals that brought down Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham — the guy even wanted to run for Cunningham’s congressional seat, if you can believe it — [...]

The New York Times has a blockbuster story this morning about the infamous secret prisons — or “black sites” — operated by the CIA for housing and interrogating high-value terror suspects. The article contains new details about the locations of the sites:
One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday, along with Alkarama for Human Rights, asked two U.N. special rapporteurs to investigate the “extraordinary rendition,” detention and torture of Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen and one of the victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the subsidiary of Boeing the allegedly helped the CIA carry out the Bush administration’s torture [...]

For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books piece.) The first annex to the [...]

Don’t miss Dafna Linzer’s ProPublica report — following up on her post last week about an inadvertently acknowledged secret CIA detainee — on so-called “ghost detainees” believed to held by the CIA but unreported to, say, the Red Cross. If another country did this, we’d probably call these detainees “disappeared,” with all the ugly implications [...]

A wealth of new information emerged Tuesday on interrogation practices.

Dafna Linzer at ProPublica has a fantastic find from her close reading of the CIA memos. What appears to be an inadvertent lack of redaction hints that CIA held a detainee called Hassan Ghul in one of its black site secret prisons. He wasn’t sent to Guantanamo Bay along with the 14 other black site [...]

Despite recent reports to the contrary, Spain’s attorney general has now reportedly decided not to prosecute the Bush Six — the top legal officials in the Bush administration who allegedly approved the torture of terror suspects.  Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpio said that the United States would be the proper forum for such a case.
“If there [...]