Geneva conventions

New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad, an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but also interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that — like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president’s cabinet — he thinks President Obama was right when he said “we ought to go forward, not back.”
But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I [...]

On the same day that the government produced the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations, it also turned over seven more memos and letters from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.
If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]

A wealth of new information emerged Tuesday on interrogation practices.

Despite last week’s release of four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos, at least one Department of Justice opinion is still undisclosed.

From an MSNBC interview today with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who’s slamming the Obama administration for its recent release of Bush-era memos justifying various methods of torture on suspected terrorists:
You never tell your enemy what you know or what you’re going to do, and this is an example. Regardless of the fact that there may [...]

The Pentagon’s report yesterday that the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp meet all the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, was, not surprisingly, met with a mixture of skepticism and downright hostility.
Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of all the camps at the prison and [...]

Earlier today, Eric Holder called waterboarding out-and-out torture. But later, when asked about other kinds of interrogation techniques (dogs, painful stress positions, nudity, and mock executions), he said he wouldn’t call those actions torture.
Instead, he refreshingly reminds the committee that Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions requires that the detainees be treated in a [...]