August 2014 Archives

ISIS militants copy practices championed by the University of California:

James Foley was tortured by members of the militant Islamic State group who were modeling some of their techniques on those used by the CIA, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Foley was held by ISIS in Syria for nearly two years before his horrific beheading last week. The Post reported that, during that time, he and at least three others were "waterboarded several times."

Waterboarding became perhaps the most notorious method of torture practiced by American interrogators in the years after September 11th...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/28/james-foley-tortured-isis-waterboarded_n_5732098.html

John Yoo and the Senate Torture Report

By Ralph E. Stone

August 21, 2014

Professor John Yoo stepped away from his lectern at the UC Berkeley School of Law to send an e-mail to the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing the forthcoming Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) torture report saying that if "torture was used and it didn't work, she [Senator Dianne Feinstein] is flat wrong."

Yoo claimed the report failed to maintain "bipartisanship" that "will undermine its conclusions." This is a preemptive attack by Yoo as the release of the Senate torture report will probably place Yoo on the hot-seat again.

The SSCI Torture report has been approved for public release.  However, the SSCI and the CIA are fighting over the CIA's substantial redactions to the torture report summary. The torture report is 6,000 pages, adopted by the SSCI in December 2012. It is the most comprehensive report on the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," a euphemism for torture...

DownloadedFile.jpegThe United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday announced the appointment of experts to carry out an independent commission charged with investigating possible war crimes during the month-long assault on Gaza that has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians and 67 Israelis...


The announcement prompted immediate backlash from Israeli officials who charge that the author of Genocide in International Law holds an anti-Israel bias -- how dare he suggest that the military occupation of Palestinian territory is in some way wrong?

"It is dangerous to be outspoken against the war," says journalist Haggai Matar. Vigorous suppression of dissent within Israel makes outside pressure against the siege of Gaza all the more critical. 
Our friend Henry Norr has posted a comprehensive archive here; thanks Henry!

Five years after the Obama Administration released the Torture Memos, "no 'patriotic official' has been indicted, no judges have been impeached and no professor has been stripped of his academic tenure--not even the one who defined torture as 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.' In June, John Yoo was awarded an endowed faculty chair at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Bush appointee Jay Bybee remains on the federal bench. Cheney's legal alchemist David Addington is now creating alternative realities at the Heritage Center. Psychologist James Mitchell, one of the consultants who helped the Bush administration render the Geneva Conventions quaint, didn't lose his professional credentials, even after claiming, 'I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country.' Jose Rodriguez, who as head of the CIA's clandestine service personally ordered the destruction of dozens of interrogation videotapes, is a conservative hero who has smeared the soon-to-be-released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA torture program despite having never read a word of it...

President Obama and CIA chief John Brennan during his White House swearing in ceremony in 2013. (Photo: AFP/Brendan Smialowski)

The CIA chief's admission that the agency spied on the Intelligence Committee's panel investigating torture during the Bush years pressured Obama to concede "We tortured some folks."

Not that he's about to do anything about it. It's up to the people living in the United States to hold war criminals accountable. That's where we come in. Stay tuned for actions at Boalt's Hall of Torture.

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Important Reading

Physicians for Human Rights
Broken Laws, Broken Lives

NLG White Paper
ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...

The President's Executioner

Detention and torture in Guantanamo



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