extreme interrogation

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

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 carotid artery … [until he] [...]

That’s what I asked Joshua Dratel, Chair of the John Adams Project Advisory Committee and a prominent defense lawyer who has represented numerous terror suspects before. Speaking this morning after the news broke that the Department of Justice is investigating military defense lawyers representing terror suspects, Dratel said he couldn’t talk about the specifics of [...]

A military commission judge has ruled that the types of abusive techniques U.S. interrogators used on a suspected 9-11 conspirator are irrelevant to determining his competence to stand trial, the Miami Herald reports.
Ramzi bin al Shibh is one of five men charged by the U.S. military commission with having participated in planning the Sept. 11 [...]

The New York Times’ front-page story Sunday reporting the unanimous agreement among Justice Department lawyers that the “harsh” interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel for use by the CIA were legal relies on the classic journalistic “battle of the experts”: one “outside” expert says the CIA interrogation techniques like slamming, sleep and food [...]

While the Republicans in Congress are up in arms about the possibility that a handful of Uighurs will be released into the United States, it’s worth noting that these Chinese Muslims could have some disturbing stories to tell about their treatment at Guantanamo Bay.
Buried in a 2008 Justice Department inspector general report is the strange [...]

Former Vice President Dick Cheney isn’t satisfied with the release of the latest batch of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos by the Obama administration last week. Now, he says, the government should release more memos — this time not just the ones describing the torture, but also the ones that say how successful [...]

Even with the Obama Justice Department on the side of John Yoo, the former Bush administration deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel, a federal judge hearing former enemy combatant Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Yoo on Friday seemed wary of dismissing the case, The New York Times reports.
The Obama administration is now [...]

The CIA has reportedly just confirmed — conveniently late on a Friday afternoon — that 12 of the videotapes it destroyed while its interrogation methods were under investigation and the subject of a pending lawsuit depicted the “enhanced interrogation methods” that detainees’ advocates were worried about.

Maybe it was the recent Gallup poll showing that more than 62 percent of Americans favor some sort of investigation into alleged Bush administration lawbreaking, but a source on Capitol Hill said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is considering launching an inquiry into the CIA’s “extreme” interrogation practices [...]