The Telegraph kerfuffle

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking to reporters on Saturday, took time to distribute a Salon article in which Ret. Gen. Antonio Taguba “corrects” a report last week by U.K. newspaper Daily Telegraph.

Problem is, the report was only inaccurate on a technicality.

Children Raped at Abu Ghraib, General Taguba Calls it a War Crime

‘Reports of children being raped to force their parent to give information have long been alleged by award winning journalist Sy Hersch but now a report via the Telegraph reveals that this allegation is true, and that their were even pictures.’

John Yoo Says President Bush Can Legally Torture Children

Gen. Taguba Says Telegraph Quoted Him Correctly on Prisoner ‘Rape’ Photos

Just a day after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs smeared the entire British media over a damning report in one British paper, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba says that Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted him correctly when he told the paper last week he had seen pictures depicting heinous acts commited against prisoners by US personnel that “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” On Friday, Gibbs said “you’re not gonna find many of these [British] newspapers and ‘truth’ within say 25 words of each other.” While standing by his on-the-record remarks to the Telegraph, Taguba, however, now says that the photos to which he was referring were not among 44 pictures the ACLU is fighting to have released but which the Obama administration has blocked. He told Salon’s Mark Benjamin Friday night, “The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen. According to Benjamin, “The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.” At present, the Obama administration is blocking the release of some 2,000 photos allegedly depicting prisoner abuse and torture…

Fake Rape Photos Re-Emerge Again To Discredit Real Torture Scandal

Staged photos lifted from porn websites purporting to be images of U.S. troops raping female detainees at Abu Ghraib are again circulating at the height of the torture scandal, discrediting the very real and admitted accounts of rape described in Major General Antonio Taguba’s military report into the Abu Ghraib prison.

MI5 faces fresh torture claims

According to The Guardian newspaper, Mr Rahman says he was tortured over a two-year period in Bangladesh and two MI5 officers turned a blind eye to his treatment, leaving the room while he was severely beaten and return to resume their interrogation.

At one point he says his wife was held in the next room and Bangladeshi officers threatened to rape her.

Torture is a Form of Terrorism

An article today in Der Spiegel describes a study on the use of torture over the last couple of thousand years:

A new book, [“Extreme Violence in the Visuals and Texts of Antiquity”] by Martin Zimmerman, a professor of ancient history in Munich, looks at current research into the kinds of violence that inspired “loathing, dread, horror and disgust.”

In the ancient Far East, where there were large states peopled by many different ethnicities, leaders demonstrated their might by inventing ingenious new tortures and agonizing methods of execution — as a way to keep the population obedient…The issue of state-sanctioned torture to achieve political goals is still a current one.

Dan Choi Is Gay

John Oliver acknowledges that Dan Choi may be a valuable Arabic translator, but he’s gay.

Moral Kombat

Barack Obama blocks the release of detainee photos, and refuses to intervene in the dismissal of a gay lieutenant.

Leaked torture photos published in 2006 went largely unseen (GRAPHIC)

A little over three years ago, SBS Dateline, an Australian television program, released leaked photographs from the U.S. prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib.

It is believed that the pictures being held back by the Obama administration may include some of these shots that most of the US press ignored, although RAW STORY ran them in 2006.

One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

A special report from NBC news states:

The NBC News analysis shows that more than one quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al-Qaida operatives who were subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques. In fact, information derived from the interrogations is central to the Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks. The analysis also shows – and agency and commission staffers concur – there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission.

9/11 Commission controversy

The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its landmark report was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives – interrogations that many critics have labeled torture. Yet, commission staffers never questioned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second round of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same operatives, NBC News has learned.

Obama will continue Bush-era military tribunals

Breaking a key promise from his campaign, President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday the return of military commission trials for a small number of terrorism suspects. Obama had previously promised to abolish them.

The tribunals, often criticized as overly protective of state secrets and willing to accept evidence obtained while defendants were allegedly tortured, were suspended mere hours after Obama took office.

Al-Qaeda chief commits suicide in Libyan prison, report says

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohammed al-Fakheri, 46, took his own life in his prison cell, according to the Libyan newspaper Oea.

Information gained from the interrogation of al-Libi was cited on several occasions by the Bush administration as justification for the war in Iraq.

Jesse Ventura on CNN – Waterboarding Cheney & Legalising Drugs

U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent’s Southern Cone.

Gonzales Says Torture May Be Necessary Again In Future

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has told an interviewer that he believes the use of torture “may be necessary” in the future, while president Obama has refused to rule out so called “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

The comments came as Gonzales joined another former Attorney General – John Ashcroft – on a panel at American Jewish University, chaired by MSNBC’s Dan Abrams.

Gonzales described the recent decision by the Obama administration to disclose Bush era memos regarding torture of detainees, as providing “important information to the enemy”

Former British Ambassador Testifies On Torture

Court allows landmark torture renditions case to proceed

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday to reinstate an ACLU lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA transport terror war prisoners to so-called black sites where they were tortured. The Obama administration had argued the case’s very existence would endanger national security and pressed the court to dispose of it.

“Today’s ruling demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed ’secrets’ in a court of law,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, in a media advisory.

Scarborough: ‘Rational fear’ justifies torture

In debating the use of torture on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski expressed a concern that “fear and reality will overtake morality.” However, host Joe Scarborough did not see that as a problem and seemed to believe it was completely appropriate for what he called “rational fear” to far outweigh morality.

“They’re not going to get any intelligence,” Scarborough said of President Obama’s recent declaration that the United States no longer uses torture. “You have FBI agents that have come out — and it’s laughable — them criticizing the CIA. … The CIA has to rely on what the CIA and people have relied on for years, what American interrogators in every war have relied on.”

America’s Shame

Nations that use torture disgrace themselves. Armed forces and police that torture inevitably become brutalized and corrupted. “Limited” use of torture quickly becomes generalized. “Information” obtained by torture is mostly unreliable.

I learned these truths over fifty years covering dirty “pacification” wars, from Algeria to Indochina, Central and South America, southern Africa, the Mideast, Afghanistan, and Kashmir in which torture was commonly used.

In spite of all the historical evidence that torture is counterproductive, the Bush administration encouraged torture of anti-American militants (aka “terrorists”) after the 9/11 attacks. The full story has not yet been revealed, but what we know so far is revolting and shameful. Britain and Canada were also complicit as they used information derived from torture and handed suspects over to be tortured.

‘New’ evidence of secret CIA detention site in Poland reported by Raw Story 2 years ago…

Der Spiegel reports this morning of ‘new’ evidence of a torture prison housed at the Polish military airbase of Stare Kiejkuty, north of Szymany. It’s certainly an important revelation, and it was just as important in March 2007 when Raw Story originally identified Stare Kiejkuty as being part of the CIA’s secret rendition and detention program.