stress positions

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have [...]

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.
Ever since The Los Angeles Times reported last weekend that Attorney General Eric Holder is inching closer to investigating detainee torture that occurred during the “war on terror”, the debate over whether the Holder probe is a good thing has intensified — [...]

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 American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured by Afghan authorities in 2002, then [...]

New research finds that the psychological impact of captivity in a hostile environment, deprivation of basic needs such as food and sleep, isolation, psychological manipulation and other “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” is actually more damaging psychologically than is physical torture.
Science Daily reports the findings of Dr. Metin Başoğlu, Head of Section of Trauma Studies [...]

The New York Review of Books has published the complete 43-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing the gruesome torture and abuse of “high value” prisoners held by the United States government at overseas CIA prisons, known as “black sites.” Although confidential, journalist Mark Danner had obtained a copy of the [...]

As I wrote on Wednesday, there are already several lawsuits from torture victims pending against the United States, and some legal scholars predict many more to come. So what if an Obama-sponsored investigative commission set up a means for compensating torture victims? That could save the government a whole lot of money.
A slew of [...]