waterboarding

For those, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who want to argue that CIA torture “worked,” a footnote on page six of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture provides a blueprint for muddying the waters. Rarely if ever, according to the report, did torture occur by itself. The CIA also used the rapport-building [...]

There has been some confusion for years over what exactly “waterboarding” has meant in practice. Does it induce the sensation of drowning? Or does it actually replicate it? The differences between the two may seem academic, but the CIA inspector general report on torture says that the way the agency practiced waterboarding was different from [...]

The CIA has already copped to destroying videotapes in 2005 that detail brutal interrogations. All in all, as the American Civil Liberties Union forced the CIA to identify 92 destroyed tapes. That destruction warranted the empanelment of a special prosecutor, John Durham, whose brief Attorney General Eric Holder has now expanded to cover the torture [...]

The Justice Department still hasn’t officially announced it, but The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon, based on anonymous sources, that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to go ahead and open an investigation on those controversial CIA interrogations we’ve been talking about for weeks now.
According to The Post’s Carrie Johnson, Holder is set to [...]

As I will note in a forthcoming piece, Monday is the deadline set by a federal judge for the Obama administration to release a much-anticipated CIA inspector general report about the agency’s detentions and interrogations practices. Only the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to get the report released, has had to endure four different [...]

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 is filled with grisly tales of [...]

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 [...]

Andrew Sullivan calls the reported impending torture probe by Attorney General Eric Holder “the worst of both worlds,” arguing that investigating only those who exceeded the overly-broad bounds set by the Bush administration “risks essentially legitimizing the torture it does not prosecute.”
On one hand, Sullivan’s right that prosecuting only the individual interrogators who went beyond [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly getting closer to appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration. That’s making some CIA employees nervous.
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that [...]