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

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...