Late last week, in a decision that got some attention over the weekend, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that a Pakistani man who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison since 2004 has the right to submit written questions to self-described 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh More…
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 More…
The headline of a just-released Senate Republican Policy Committee document on what to do with Guantanamo Bay detainees:
Meet Your New Neighbor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?
There’s actually nothing in the 15-page paper suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad could be released into American society. There is, however, an exposition of the More…
Apropos of this post about Lawrence Wilkerson‘s charge that the torture apparatus built by the Bush administration was concerned with manufacturing an al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein link as a pretext for invading Iraq, look what HuffPost’s Sam Stein pulls out of the memory hole. This is an account of the More…
I guess we should have seen it coming. First, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate on Thursday that the government might want to continue to detain indefinitely up to 100 of the 241 prisoners currently at Guantanamo Bay, so he needs $50 million to build a new prison for More…
According to Andy McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the idea of calling waterboarding torture is just silly. And the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was waterboarded 183 times just reinforces how ridiculous calling it “torture” really is.
As he said on a conference call with reporters organized More…
You know an op-ed’s going to be good when it starts out like this:
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified.
A lot of material from the declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report (pdf) couldn’t fit into my piece last night, so we take to the blogs. Take a look at page 41, which gives an account of some of the pressures that Guantanamo Bay interrogators were More…
A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.
Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…
After digging through the newly-disclosed Office of Legal Counsel memos, my friend Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake discovered that CIA interrogators waterboarded 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times in one month. The New York Times piece that follows up today appropriately acknowledges Marcy’s discovery. (Full disclosure: my personal blog More…
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