Matthew Cole and Brian Ross | ABCNews.com

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.

Delvin Barrett | MiamiHerald.com

Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him, though he proudly took credit for more than two dozen other terror plots, according to newly released sections of government transcripts.

”I make up stories,” Mohammed said at one point in his 2007 hearing at Guantánamo Bay.

In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

”Where is he? I don’t know,” Mohammed said. ‘Then he torture me. Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don’t know him.’ I said no, they torture me.”

Yet at the same military tribunal hearing, Mohammed ticked off a list of 29 terror plots in which he took part.

The transcripts were released as part of a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking documents and details of the government’s terror detainee programs.

Previous accounts of the military tribunal hearings had been made public, but the Obama administration went back and reviewed the still-secret sections and determined that more portions could be released.

Most of the new material centers around the detainees’ claims of abuse during interrogations while being held overseas in CIA custody.

One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, told the tribunal that after months “of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries.”

Zubaydah was the first detainee subjected to Bush administration-approved harsh interrogation techniques, which included a simulated form of drowning known as waterboarding, slamming the suspect into walls and prolonged period of nudity.

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9/11 issue comes up at the 18:00 mark.

TheYoungTurks.com

Phil Rosenthal | ChicagoTribune.com

Erich “Mancow” Muller, responding to a report he faked being waterboarded on Chicago’s WLS-AM 890 a week earlier, said Friday that both his experience and subsequent newfound belief that the controversial interrogation technique is torture were “absolutely real.”

Muller went on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” for the second time this week on Friday night to discuss the latest developments (above), and Gawker.com then returned the volley.

Muller readily acknowledged in an interview with the Chicago Tribune earlier that the waterboarding stunt was not and never meant to be an exact re-creation of how the technique is administered to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

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Misleading report on Guantánamo and terrorismFair.orgWhile former Vice President Dick Cheney has been front and center in the media debate over the current White House’s national security policies, he’s not the only one trying to challenge the White House’s message. The New York Timespublished a front-page article (5/21/09) that bolstered the notion that former Guantánamo prisoners “return” to terrorist activity.The remarkably credulous Times story, under the headline “1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds,” was based on a Pentagon report leaked to the paper before its release yesterday evening. The article emphasized the notion that former prisoners “returned to terrorism or militant activity”–without adequately explaining the definition of either term, or examining whether those former detainees were ever “terrorists” in the first place.And as Talking Points Memo has noted (5/26/09), the Times’ front-page headline claiming that “1 in 7″ detainees had returned to the fight glossed over the DOD’s own distinction between “confirmed” and “suspected” cases.And missing from Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller’s account was a full explanation of the Pentagon’s long history of releasing similar studies, which have been widely challenged and debunked. Attorney H. Candace Gorman, who represents some Guantánamo detainees, has challenged the Pentagon’s findings (Huffington Post, 3/13/07), as has journalist and terrorism analyst Peter Bergen (CNN, 1/24/09). As one prominent critic, Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall, explained (Washington Independent, 1/23/09):

Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo–much less were they released from there. They have counted people as “returning to the fight” for their having written an op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning–except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

The Times quoted Denbeaux deep in its May 21 piece, but those comments failed to convey the serious problems with the Pentagon’s previous reports on Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »

Sherwood Ross | GlobalResearch.ca

American liberals stand betrayed. Their new president, the one they sweated to elect—-a brilliant, charismatic leader with a professional background in constitutional law—has transmogrified himself from the champion who denounced in his campaign the illegalities of the Bush White House into a president bent on their perpetuation.

Liberals are stunned by Obama’s plan to “restart Bush-era military tribunals” for some Guantanamo detainees, reviving what the Associated Press pointed out, is “a fiercely disputed trial system he once denounced.”(May 15). Liberals are appalled by Obama’s May 21^st proposal to hold terrorism suspects in “prolonged detention” inside the U.S. without a trial. “Such detention,” Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) wrote him, “is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world.”

If liberals chaffed over Obama’s centrist cabinet choices, they were dismayed by his decision not to release photographs depicting the sadistic tortures the Bush Gang inflicted on prisoners during a so-called “War on Terror” that was nothing but terror itself. A typical reaction comes from Joe Kishore, writing on the World Socialist Website (May 22): “Whatever verbal warnings Obama may make about the erosion of democracy in the United States, the actions of his administration facilitate and escalate its breakdown.”

Obama’s latest policy reversals come as liberals are still reeling from his April 16^th speech to the CIA, ignoring its documented history of 60 years of overthrows and assassinations, and reassuring the Agency of its “right” to continue “covert activities,” as if such conduct was not prima facie illegality in the eyes of law-abiding nations.  Earlier, Obama’s pledge not to prosecute CIA torturers that followed orders likely brought relief to the throne room in Langley that is a throbbing heart of the Dark Side. Obama calls upon the nation to “look forward” as he ignores his presidential obligation to prosecute those who, like Bush and Cheney, trampled the Constitution when they ordered torture in violation of international laws that by treaty are America’s laws as well.

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NAFTALI BENDAVID and SIOBHAN GORMAN | WSJ.com

Speaker Claims Intelligence Officials Failed to Reveal Waterboarding Was Used; Spy Agency Denies Misleading Congress

The top congressional Democrat on Thursday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of deceiving her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

The accusation pits House Speaker Nancy Pelosi against the CIA in a war of words over whether she was specifically told in September 2002 that waterboarding was being used on detainees. Republicans accuse her of being hypocritical for criticizing Bush-era interrogation techniques, and say she should have spoken out against them when she was first briefed if she opposed their use.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is making an explosive charge against the Central Intelligence Agency. She’s responding to accusations that she was fully briefed on harsh interrogation technniques like waterboarding.

Pelosi Says She Was Misled about Waterboarding At a contentious news conference Thursday, Mrs. Pelosi said that during the 2002 briefing, “we were told that waterboarding was not being used.” Mrs. Pelosi acknowledged that as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, she was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, about waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that critics, including President Barack Obama, call torture. But she said CIA officials told her and other lawmakers only that the Justice Department had concluded the procedure was legal.

A CIA report released last week said that at the briefing, officials described the use of interrogation techniques on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah, who had been waterboarded 83 times the month before.
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Al Goodman | CNN.com

A Spanish judge Wednesday ordered an investigation into harsh treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay under the Bush administration on suspicion that there was “an authorized and systematic plan for torture,” according to a court document.

The case involves four former Guantanamo prisoners — a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Palestinian and a Lebanese — who testified before the judge, Baltasar Garzon, that they had been tortured while held at the U.S. detention camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Two of the four were acquitted in Spain of terrorism charges, while similar charges against two others were shelved, according to the 10-page court order from Judge Garzon on Wednesday, viewed by CNN.

The judge wrote there was sufficient evidence to open an investigation, based on the testimony from the four, plus news media reports about newly-declassified U.S. government documents.

The declassified U.S. documents, he wrote, revealed “an authorized and systematic plan for torture and harsh treatment of people deprived of their freedom without any charges and without the most basic elemental rights for detainees, set forth and demanded by international treaties.”
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Ray McGovern | InfoWars.com 

Well, well. The New York Times has finally put a story together on the key role that two controversial psychologists played in devising the Bush administration’s torture policies. Guess we should be thankful for small favors.

Apparently, a NYTimes“exposé” requires a 21-month gestation period; just by way of pointing out that the substance of the Times“exposé” appeared in an article the July 2007 issue ofVanity Fair.

Katherine Eban, a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes about public health, authored that article and titled it “Rorschach and Awe.” It was the result of a careful effort to understand the role of psychologists in the torture of detainees in Guantánamo.

She identified the two psychologists as James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who she reported were inexperienced in interrogations and “had no proof of their tactics’ effectiveness” but nevertheless sold the Bush administration on a plan to subject captives to “psychic demolition,” essentially severing them from their personalities and scaring them “almost to death.”

In Wednesday’s New York Times, reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti plow much the same ground. But please do not misunderstand. They deserve praise for finally pushing their own article past the Times‘ censors, but let’s not pretend the startling revelations are new.

The Times ought to allow the likes of Shane and Mazzetti to publish these stories when they are fresh. Alternatively, the “newspaper of record” might at least report the findings of the likes of Eban, rather than ignoring them for nearly two years.

It’s pretty much all out there now, isn’t it? Not only the Times‘ better-late-than-never “exposé,” but also:

–The (leaked) text of the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the torture of “high-value” detainees;

–The too-slick-by-half “legal opinions” under Department of Justice letterhead;

–The findings of the 18-month investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee highlighting that it was President George W. Bush’s dismissal of Geneva (in his executive order of Feb. 7, 2002) that “opened the door” to abuse of detainees.

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Paul Joseph Watson |PrisonPlanet.com 

The Obama administration is resisting an independent inquiry into the Bush torture program because top Democrats like Pelosi were complicit in approving illegal methods.

We now know why top Democrats are protecting Bush administration officials from facing an inquiry into the illegal torture program - because several of them were actually complicit in giving their approval for such methods to be used.

The White House stressed again yesterday that it would not be pursuing an investigation of key Bush administration officials, despite the manifestly provable fact that the order to torture came from the very top, which was re-affirmed with the recent release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs stated yesterday, “I think the last few days might well be evidence of why something like this would likely just become a political back and forth.”

“By (definition), an independent commission would probably not be something that I would weigh in on if Congress were to create one of those,” he told reporters, according to AFP.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also said he opposed an independent torture probe, stating, “I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are.”

In addition, upon the recent release of the torture memos, Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told ABC News that top Bush administration officials “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.” Obama’s statement that accompanied the release of the torture memos stated, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

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Marc A. Thiessen, President Bush’s former speechwriter, is defending torture in the Washington Post. Apparently, this is the level of clout Dick Cheney and George Bush have, when the only people out defending them are speechwriters and people who are implicated in torture.

Here is what Mr. Thiessen writes:

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists “did not make us safer.” This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public — in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

Right. The reason the section Mr. Thiessen cites has gone underreported is because it is written by the same fabulists within the DOJ who authored legal permission that gave the Executive Branch all but-dictatorial power. Plus, if Mr. Thiessen had actually ever read a CIA brief of any sort, he would understand how laughable his argument is. Here is the part of the DOJ memo he cites, which claims the CIA credits torture with keeping us safe since the attacks of September 11, 2001:

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that “the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001. . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.” The memo continues: “Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will find out.’ ” Once the techniques were applied, “interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

This is like a bad science experiment on how to best pretend that reality does not exist. I don’t know where to begin with this nonsense. Obviously claims that KSM is a success story are idiotic – not because KSM is innocent, no he is absolutely a terrorist. But because any expert will tell you that torture does not provide actionable intelligence. Don’t take my word for it. Call on any expert from the FBI to the CIA and ask them if torture works. Really, go ahead. In addition to this glaring problem, because this is not something that any expert would say, there is also the following – now pay close attention to this sentence:

the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001

That is absurd. No CIA analyst would ever make such a broad claim, because this is an unknown. You cannot possibly know what was planned in every corner of the world and what failed for reasons US intelligence had no control over. CIA analysis is always measured, from everything I have ever read and seen. It is almost as though the people at DOJ authoring these claims need someone to take responsibility for these assertions, a sort of get out jail card should these memos see the light of day.

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Steve Watson | InfoWars.net

A newly released Senate Armed Services Committee report is garnering much media attention today, however it only confirms what we first reported in 2005 - that high-ranking Bush officials were responsible for torture of detainees and tried to shift the blame to low-ranking army officers.

The report is “a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse — such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan — to low ranking soldiers,” said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who led the investigation.

It names former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as approving an initial December 2002 memo that was taken as an approval for torture methods in U.S. run prisons worldwide.

Procedures approved in the memo were adopted in Iraq in a memo issued almost one year later in September 2003 by the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

The report (PDF), which has been described by some media sources as “explosive“, reveals nothing new, however, and confirms what we’ve already known for over three and a half years.

In October 2005 former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski appeared on the Alex Jones Show to make these very revelations. We subsequently produced an article detailing her claims and also the fact that she was deliberately kept out of the loop and scapegoated to protect higher ups.

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‘Primetime’ Re-Creates a Famous Experiment to Understand How Ordinary People Can Perform Unthinkable Acts

Caroline Borge | ABCNews.com

Most of us have struggled to understand how seemingly ordinary people can sometimes do morally questionable things.

Two years ago, the photos of young American soldiers smiling while torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib horrified the world and raised the question of who was to blame.

Some of the soldiers defended themselves by claiming they were just doing what their superiors had instructed. But the smiling faces in the photos seemed to imply that they followed the orders without protest.

Are those soldiers inherently bad people? Or is it more complex than that? Do you have to be an evil person to do evil things?

The Experiment
In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked those same questions. That was the year Nazi Adolf Eichmann, on trial for his war crimes, denied responsibility for his actions by saying he was simply doing what his superiors told him to do.

Contemplating this rationalization, Milgram came up with a famous and controversial experiment to examine what happens when ordinary people are faced with morally questionable orders. What he learned shocked not only him but the entire world.

In the experiment, conducted at Yale University over a period of months in 1961, an authority figure — “the experimenter” — dressed in a white lab coat and instructed participants to administer what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person.

Although no one was actually receiving shocks, the participants heard a man screaming in pain and protest, eventually pleading to be released from the experiment. When the subjects questioned the experimenter about what was happening, they were told they must continue.
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John Byrne | RawStory.com 

The Senate is quietly preparing plans to investigate allegations of torture under President George W. Bush, according to comments published Wednesday by Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The Senate Judiciary Committee could announce a hearing to consider various plans to probe allegations of torture as early as today, according to Salon’s Mark Benjamin, citing Committee Chairman Pat Leahy and members of his staff.

Leahy’s office told Raw Story Wednesday morning that a press release would be sent out shortly.

Sen. Whitehouse said he’s “convinced” the investigation will move forward.

“Stay on this,” he told Benjamin. “This is going to be big.”

Whitehouse, Senator from Rhode Island, is “spearheading” the efforts, and as a member of both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, “is

privy to information about interrogations he can’t yet share,” the magazine noted.

Plans to establish the commission still remain in their infancy, as senators and staff look at previous panels, such as the 9-11 Commission, and investigations following Watergate. Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney, noted that a torture commission might need the power to immunize witnesses on a case-by-case basis. The prospect of future prosecutions, he said, are beside the point. Most important was putting a spotlight on abuses committed by the Bush administration.

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A Justice Department inquiry has found that the Bush administration’s legal opinions justifying the torture of “war on terror” detainees were hastily drafted after one prisoner was already subjected to waterboarding, a practice that creates the sensation of drowning, according to several sources familiar with the still-classified report.

Jason Leopold | ConsortiumNews.com

The implication of the finding is that John Yoo and other lawyers for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel violated ethical standards by collaborating with senior White House officials to create legal cover for violating anti-torture and other federal statutes after the fact, rather than providing objective advice for future actions.

The finding also undercuts President George W. Bush’s chief legal defense for authorizing abusive treatment of detainees, that he and other administration officials were following what they regarded as independent legal opinions from the OLC, the office that advises the White House on the limits of its constitutional authority.

As more becomes known about the genesis of those OLC opinions, the evidence increasingly points to a different reality, that Bush and his top aides essentially worked with Yoo and the OLC to fix the legal opinions around their desired policy, even to justify actions that had already occurred.

The criticism of Yoo and his OLC colleagues is contained in a draft report by the Justice Department’s watchdog agency, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The sources say the OPR report was completed late last year but was kept under wraps by Bush’s last Attorney General Michael Mukasey, supposedly to give Yoo and two other former OLC officials time to respond.

The report is now being reviewed by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, who may not accept some of the report’s conclusions or may change the “tone” of the draft, the sources said. Newsweek’s correspondent Michael Isikoff also has reported on the contents of the draft report.
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Mohamed Farag Bashmilah  | Alternet.org

From October 2003 until May 2005, I was illegally detained by the U.S. government and held in CIA-run “black sites” with no contact with the outside world. On May 5, 2005, without explanation, my American captors removed me from my cell and cuffed, hooded, and bundled me onto a plane that delivered me to Sana’a, Yemen. I was transferred into the custody of my own government, which held me — apparently at the behest of the United States — until March 27, 2006, when I was finally released, never once having faced any terrorism-related charges. Since my release, the U.S. government has never explained why I was detained and has blocked all attempts to find out more about my detention.

What I do know is that the Jordanian government — after torturing me for several days — handed me over to a U.S. “rendition team” in Amman, which then abducted me, forced me onto a plane, and flew me to Afghanistan. During this, and several other transfers between CIA prisons, I was subjected to a brutal and deeply humiliating “preparation” ritual. I was stripped naked, dressed in a diaper, shackled, blindfolded and hooded, and then boarded onto a waiting plane. I was forced into painful positions, often reeling from the blows and kicks of the men who had “prepared” me for flight.

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Bob Egelko | SFGate.com 

President Obama’s Justice Department signaled in a San Francisco courtroom Monday that the change in administrations has not changed the government’s position on secrecy and the rights of foreign prisoners - and that lawsuits by alleged victims of CIA kidnappings and torture must be dismissed on national security grounds.

“Judges shouldn’t play with fire,” Justice Department lawyer Douglas Letter told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which is considering a suit accusing a San Jose company, Jeppesen Dataplan, of arranging so-called extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA.

Once the judges privately examine the government’s classified evidence, Letter said, “you will see that this case cannot be litigated.”

Letter said the Justice Department’s position, previously argued by the administration of former President George W. Bush, has been “thoroughly vetted with appropriate officials of the new administration.”

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“Buff” Hoon over the US attempts to BLACKMAIL Britain into silence over evidence of Torture.

Information Clearing House

Posted February 07, 2009

Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held at the American base, has launched a legal challenge in the High Court in London for documents detailing his treatment to be made public.

However, two judges ruling on the case said that David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had advised that releasing the documents could lead to America withdrawing intelligence co-operation.

This, it was warned, could lead to Britons facing a very considerable increase in the dangers they face from terrorism.

The judges reveal that the secret documents at the centre of the case give rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It is also disclosed that a British intelligence official may have been present when Mr Mohamed alleges he was tortured. The judgement raises the prospect of criminal charges being brought against British officials.