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…

John Yoo Wins Battle of ‘The Daily Show’

It’s a testament to Jon Stewart’s extraordinary abilities to speak sensibly in an age of insanity that we expect him to skewer knaves like John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel torture advocate, who appeared on “The Daily Show” last night. Stewart has a great command of the facts More…

Spencer Ackerman vs. Pat Buchanan on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’

If you weren’t watching MSNBC at around 7 a.m. EST today, you missed some great television. TWI’s Spencer Ackerman appeared on “Morning Joe” alongside NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan to talk about the failed Christmas terror plot. The conversation took a sharp turn, however, 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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Former N.Y. Gov. George Pataki: Investigating Torture Jeopardizes Rule of Law … Or Something

What?

In an interview with the Guardian for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, Pataki criticised current White House policies for sending wrong signals about US intentions around the world. In particular, he attacked the recent decision by the US justice department to launch an official investigation into alleged abuses

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The ‘Hard Takedown’

In a section of the 2004 CIA inspector general report about interrogation techniques that were used on detainees by the CIA but never approved by the Justice Department — including mock executions, blowing cigar smoke into someone’s face until he became ill, squeezing a detainee’s neck “to restrict the detainee’s More…

White House on Holder’s Torture Probe

Nothing surprising here. Here’s the statement in full:

The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted. Ultimately, determinations about

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Holder’s Statement Announcing the Torture Probe

Just released by the Department of Justice. He’s calling it a “Preliminary Review” into the interrogation of “certain detainees.” Notice that Holder did not rule out any course of investigative or prosecutorial action, which is exactly civil libertarians hoped:

“The Office of Professional Responsibility has now submitted to me

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GOP Senators to Holder: Don’t Investigate Torture

You know what Monday is, right? That’s the date, ordered by Judge Alvin Hellerstein, for the government to disclose the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report into the agency’s torture apparatus to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. That document, which according to reports More…

The Takeaway From Leon Panetta’s Op-Ed

Read Marcy Wheeler for a blistering takedown of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s Washington Post op-ed yesterday. The short version of Panetta’s argument is that he proved his good faith by informing Congress about the “significant actions” he shuttered, but Congress reacted with “a fresh round of recriminations about More…