Waterboarding // Current TV

U.S. Legal Actions, UK Inquiry: Noose Tightens on Torture Criminals | The Public Record

Before taking up the question of the UK torture inquiry, announced the other day, we should consider other important developments on the anti-torture front today.

Omar Khadr, captured as a child, abused, mistreated and tortured for years at Guantanamo, has fired his military attorneys — most likely because he seeks some method to exert control over his situation. God knows how we would respond if placed in his situation.

Meanwhile, Daniel Shulman at Mother Jones has posted an article describing two new actions taken to strip licensure from two former Guantanamo psychologists, Major John Leso and retired Colonel Larry James. James is now dean of the professional psychology program at Wright State University in Ohio, and was the subject of a complaint against him in Louisiana, which was dismissed by the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, and subsequently brought to the Louisiana Court of Appeal. Leso is the infamous “Maj. L” in the interrogation log released by Time Magazine some years ago in the torture case of Mohammed Al-Qahtani.

Both Leso and James were members of the Behavioral Science Consultant Team, or BSCT, at Guantanamo. Indeed, James was in charge of the BSCT while he was there. The complaint against Leso, filed by the Center for Justice and Accountability, can be viewed here. The James filing — the work of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic — is available in PDF format. http://motherjones.com/files/LarryJamesComplaint.pdf

These filings were separate from yet another complaint(http://trueslant.com/toddessig/2010/06/17/psychology-and-torture-a-formal-complaint-filed-against-james-mitchell/), this one filed with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, against James Mitchell, one of the principals for CIA torture contractors Mitchell-Jessen and Associates, who has also been identified as one of the interrogators involved in reverse-engineering SERE techniques for the interrogation-cum-torture experiments made upon Abu Zubaydah in the spring and summer of 2002. (PDF link to full document here. http://trueslant.com/toddessig/files/2010/06/MIT-FINL.pdf)Before taking up the question of the UK torture inquiry, announced the other day, we... more

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YouTube - Waterboarding in the Media

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Why I Wanted to Get Waterboarded: Vanguard's Kaj Larsen

In this season of Vanguard, correspondent Kaj Larsen once again takes up a... more

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When newspapers reduced describing water-boarding as torture

A paper written by a group of Harvard Students looked into the decline of top... more

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Legal Groups Protest Guantanamo Lawyer Probe

The American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and numerous other... more

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/03/bushs-glib-waterboarding_n_599893.html

George W. Bush's casual acknowledgement Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh... more

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Spain Calls For 13 C.I.A. Agents' Arrest

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U.S. Interrogator Says Rape Threats Used Against Youth

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t r u t h o u t | Why Torture Is Necessary

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Cheney Waterboarding Production Still

Here's a peek at the stage in our animation program!

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Rove 'proud' of waterboarding terror suspects

Karl Rove, a senior advisor to George W Bush, has defended tough interrogation... more

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Karl Rove is Proud of Waterboarding

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8563547.stm

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Waterboarding for dummies

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House Strips Torture Prohibition From Bill

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Yoo Said Bush Could Order Civilian Massacres

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Obama Admin. Closes Torture Memo Case

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Cheney Admits to War Crimes, Media Yawns, Obama Turns the Other Cheek

An excellent article and worth a read, but here are a couple of key excerpts---

*Bush's Key Line of Defense Destroyed*

Those statements, both on Sunday and in his December 2008 interview with Karl, destroys a key line in the Bush administration's defense against war crimes charges. For years, Cheney and other Bush administration officials pinned their defense on the fact that they had received legal advice from Justice Department lawyers that the brutal interrogations of “war on terror” detainees did not constitute torture or violate other laws of war.

Cheney's statements, however, would suggest that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing objective legal analysis.

*Torture Preceded Legal Advice*

If ABC's Karl had a firmer grasp on the issues he queried Cheney about he would have known that as recently as last week, three UK high-court judges released seven paragraphs of a previously classified intelligence document that proved the CIA tortured Binyam Mohamed, a British resident captured in Pakistan in April 2002 who was falsely tied to a dirty bomb plot, months before the Bush administration obtained a memo from John Yoo and Jay Bybee at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) authorizing specific methods of torture to be used against high-value detainees, further undercutting Cheney's line of defense.
The document stated bluntly that Mohamed's treatment "could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities."

Under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the treatment of Mohamed and the clear record that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders.
In the case of the US's refusal to do so, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality.

More...An excellent article and worth a read, but here are a couple of key excerpts---... more

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"Corporate Water-Boarding Services"... coming soon to an office near you.

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Behind Liz Cheney's group, a weird legacy of torture

Financing Cheney's pro-torture front is Melvin Sembler, who once enabled "enhanced interrogation" of American teens

By Joe Conason

The arrest of an Army sergeant (and Iraq veteran) who allegedly waterboarded his 4-year-old daughter for failing to recite the alphabet is sickening. Yet it may be the kind of news we must come to expect if, as a society, the United States determines that torture is an acceptable method of securing information and inducing obedience. Physical abuse of children is nothing new, of course, in certain right-wing quarters, as Max Blumenthal reminded us by exposing the pedagogical sadism of Focus on the Family in Republican Gomorrah.

For a sergeant who tortures his child, however, the relevant model probably comes from somewhere high in the chain of command. At the center of today’s propaganda promoting the torture state are former Vice President Dick Cheney, his family and many of his friends, working through an organization called Keeping America Safe that is run by his daughter Liz Cheney. The financier behind that outfit is one Melvin Sembler, a curious character whose résumé indicates that he is all too familiar with the "enhanced interrogation" of children.

Sembler is best known as a Florida shopping center magnate and Republican fundraiser whose success in amassing funds for the Bush family won him two ambassadorial appointments. Such patronage is a sordid aspect of national politics, but seems trivial when compared with the truly dark side of Sembler’s biography. Long before he achieved prominence in national politics, he was the driving force in the "boot camp" movement that popularized the use of psychological and physical abuse of "troubled" children and teenagers.

His own creation was a federally funded outfit known as Straight, Inc., which eventually fell apart amid multiple lawsuits and accusations of torture by teenagers abused in its secretive facilities.

The best reporting on Straight’s frightening history in recent years has appeared in Reason, the libertarian magazine, under the byline of Maia Szalavitz. Some of the techniques that eventually brought Sembler’s organization to the attention of law enforcement authorities will be eerily familiar to anyone who remembers what happened at Abu Ghraib: humiliating punishments, broken bones, starvation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, verbal assaults, eight-hour sessions of questioning, and so on.

According to Szalavitz, "Straight’s national clinical director ... admitted to authorities in 1982 that he had kept teenagers awake for 72-hour periods, put them on peanut butter-only diets, and forced them to crawl through each other’s legs to be hit in a 'spanking machine' ... Straight ultimately paid out millions of dollars in dozens of lawsuits related to abuse and even kidnapping and false imprisonment of adults."

Continued...Financing Cheney's pro-torture front is Melvin Sembler, who once enabled... more

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Soldier charged with "waterboarding" daughter

An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his... more

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