"The CIA is going through a huge morale problem," said US security expert Harlan Ullman in an interview with DW, commenting on the recent US Senate report on the CIA's interrogation methods, which has made serious torture allegations against the secret service. "CIA employees believed they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. They find this to be a devastating critique."

In the summer of 2004, I warned Tony Blair’s Foreign Office that Britain was using intelligence material which had been obtained by the CIA under torture. Two months later I was sacked as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the orders of Downing Street, bringing to an end my 20-year diplomatic career.

When I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Over 500 pages it details the CIA’s brutal abuse of Al Qaeda suspects, who were flown around the world to be tortured in a network of secret prisons. One of these was in Uzbekistan, where the US had an air base.

Since its founding in 1946, the School of the Americas has trained tens of thousands of police and military personnel in Latin America and the Caribbean. Not by coincidence, its graduates were involved in some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – from filling the ranks of Haiti’s brutal Tonton Macoutes to training the founders of Mexico’s paramilitary narco-cartel Los Zetas. It’s no exaggeration to say that the School of the Americas has painted an entire region in blood.

While the School left a permanent mark on countries throughout the hemisphere, the doctrine it expounded has also metastasized into an intellectual cancer infecting the way NATO countries in the post-Soviet era fight the Wars on Drugs and Terror. This is a story of studied incompetence, torture and murder. And judging by the militarized response of American police departments, from Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson, the trend isn't just going global: it's also coming home.

The Senate report on torture created a tsunami of media coverage this week. The American public hasn’t been so shocked by evidence of the U.S. torture program since the Abu Ghraib photos of 2004. The program is far worse than previously disclosed. Greater numbers of victims have been tortured for longer periods and in ways that rival the most infamous tortures in history (“rectal feeding”). But one falsehood gets repeated as fact by even in the most serious reporters, namely, that the torture program stopped years ago. It has not. The Appendix M of the 2006 Army Field Manual on interrogation methods allows military and CIA interrogators to continue torturing detainees, and the current force feeding of Guantanamo hunger strikers is so brutal it rises to the level of torture.

President Barack Obama is under fire this week for the way his White House has excoriated the previous administration for employing tactics it would categorize as torture all the while launching drone strikes on terrorism suspects abroad.

The enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration on 39 detainees resulted in just one death, Obama's critics have pointed out. Drone strikes conducted by the current occupant of the White House have killed more than 2,400 people.

After claiming all week that the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing the brutal tactics employed by the Bush administration to elicit information from terrorists was necessary in order for the U.S. to reassert it's 'moral authority,' the White House was forced on Friday to state on record that it doesn't believe its drone policy erodes the moral high ground on which it thinks it stands when it comes to human rights.

US peace activist Kathy Kelly has been sentenced to 3 months prison for her criticism of the US drone programme in Afghanistan on the 10th December.

Considered to be Human Rights Day, peace activist Kathy Kelly was sentenced on the 10th December to 3 months prison by the US Federal court.

According to the Centre for Global Research the defence said that “The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S”

"CIA official says former U.S. President George Bush was fully in formed of the intelligence agency's torture programme and Identified a number of Washington officials who were aware of programme." click here

Have we had enough yet? Are we ready to grab some courage and face the facts?

The information above comes from the British newspaper the Dailymail.co.uk

The Times.co.uk leads with the headline: "Bush knew all about torture, insists CIA" click here

Has any U.S. mainstream paper provided this information?

The censored summary of the U.S. Senate report on American torture released this week is a visceral document, despite efforts by Republicans to present what it describes as a distant dry bloodless thing about which there are “no easy answers.” CIA director John Brennan used management speak when he asked, post-report, that his audience “put aside this debate and move forward to focus on issues that are more relevant to our current national security challenge.”

He sounds like a CEO caught padding his expense reports, but the fact is, the U.S. is now the country most associated with “rectal feeding” and torturing prisoners to the point where they moved obediently to the waterboarding table after hearing two finger snaps. Pavlov’s dogs weren’t as well-trained. You say “CIA,” I say “Hieronymus Bosch,” who was notorious for anal stabbing. That was in the 15th century, so the CIA went retro out of purest revenge.

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed by the US Senate 89-11 on Friday, would fund the US Department of Defense through fiscal year 2015, but it prohibits the department from transferring prisoners from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, despite US President Barack Obama's promises to close down the detention facility.

British spies may have been aware of torture carried out by the CIA, a former security minister admitted last night.

In the most frank official acceptance yet of potential complicity, Lord West of Spithead accepted there may have been the ‘odd case’ where UK agents knew of mistreatment and may even have been in the building when it happened.

As Americans learned about the deeply disturbing tactics of the CIA's post-9/11 torture program this week, the government in Brazil released a report filled with its own history of systemic abuses. The nearly-2,000-page report by Brazil's National Truth Commission detailed a pattern of killings and torture during a period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

The report not only shed light on the brutal methods of Brazilian interrogators, but also showed that the United States and the United Kingdom had trained some of the perpetrators in torture techniques.

In the wake of a new report on US abuses post-9/11, calls have been renewed for the return of a British resident held without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay for the past 13 years.

Shaker Aamer, a Londoner with a British wife and four British children, was captured and tortured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2001 before his rendition to Guantanamo Bay in 2002. His ordeal has included a litany of abuses similar to those described in the US Senate report on CIA torture, a portion of which was released this week. The details of CIA torture revealed in the report have provoked widespread condemnation.

As one of the first five prisoners taken to Bagram Air Force Base in late December 2001, Mr Aamer was forced to stay awake for nine days, beaten, denied food, and tied up in such a way as to risk strangling himself if he moved. Other times, he was forced to stand up for over 16 hours a day.

Whipping with cables. Prolonged solitary confinement. Other unspeakable acts, committed against citizens with official blessing. Use of "information" gathered by torture considered legitimate.

No, no, I don't mean the Torture Report. I'm talking about Canada.

Let the other sordid drama play itself out in America. We've now learned more about "rectal feeding" (read: medically unjustified anal rape) than we ever wanted to know, and that's just for starters. Did the authorities raid every prison for the criminally insane to swell CIA ranks? Far worse, we're watching a desperate attempt to frame this whole series of vile acts as a period in (recent) history now thankfully ended. Don't you go believing that fairytale, now.

They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.

After initially helping to devise the “enhanced interrogation” efforts, they were designated as the only two contractors allowed to oversee these interrogations at sites around the world. In 2005, they formed a company to receive contracts from the CIA. According to the Senate report, the base value of their contract in 2006 was in excess of $180 million.

By the time the CIA terminated their contract in 2009, the consulting firm founded by the two men had collected $81 million in taxpayer money. In May of that year, ProPublica reported, the firm abruptly gave up the lease on its Spokane, Washington, headquarters and disconnected the phone.

Still, according to the Senate report, the CIA will provide $5 million in indemnity costs to the firm to cover all legal expenses for potential criminal prosecution and investigations through 2021.

For centuries, Indigenous people in various corners of the world have been thrown off of their property so their land and resources could be taken for aristocrats in far away lands. It was a war that began hundreds of years ago, and that war is still being waged today.

Just this week, it was announced that an indigenous leader from Ecuador was tortured and killed in the midst of a controversial fight against foreign mining companies who have unjustly taken land that has been claimed by indigenous people for centuries.

José Isidro Tendetza Antún, a former vice-president of the Shuar Federation of Zamora, had been missing since November 28th, and turned up dead just days ago, with some close to him saying that he was tortured.

The Senate’s report into CIA torture activities is facing criticism for lacking testimonies from the agency’s staff and the victims, professor Ben Davis told RT. He said that prosecuting low-level staffers isn't enough, as torture orders came from above.

Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and member of Advocates for US Torture Prosecutions, Ben Davis, called for everyone responsible for torture to be held accountable.

After listening to CIA director John Brennan’s long-winded attempt at community relations today, only three words come to mind…

Ya vol Commandant!

And then maybe these two words, “Verschärfte Vernehmung”. As it happens, those two German words are straight out of the Gestapo’s own manual on torture. Translated from German to English, it means, ‘enhanced interrogation’ - you get that fancy term we keep hearing about this week, you know, that thing that’s ‘keeping America safe’.

I SPENT this semester teaching creative writing at Lehigh University. I’ve been a soldier, a police officer and an interrogator. So hearing students call me “Professor” and assigning homework was a significant change of pace.

But the course’s title, Writing War, kept me from straying too far from the memories that have haunted me over the last decade. I am grateful to Lehigh for the opportunity to teach the course. The school’s willingness to put a veteran in the classroom is the very thing this country needs to be doing in order to collectively process what the last 13 years of war have wrought. But teaching a class about war reminded me daily that I am no college professor.

I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday compared U.S. operatives who employed enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists to Nazis and the dreaded Khmer Rouge.

“It is shocking,” Cooper said, referring to a report released Tuesday by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats that detailed the CIA’s and government contractors’ treatment of suspected terrorists.

"When you read this, if you envision Nazis doing this, and I even hate to say this, if you envision the Khmer Rouge doing this, it all – you can imagine that,” Cooper said.

The incident took place on July 7 near the village of Nil'in which has been the scene in recent weeks of almost daily violent demonstrations against the construction of the West Bank security fence nearby.

According to the videotape, which the military said was reviewed by Judge Advocate General Brig.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, a Palestinian demonstrator - Ashraf Abu Rahma - is seen handcuffed and blindfolded and being led to a jeep by a high-ranking IDF officer

The video clip shows a soldier aim his weapon at the demonstrator's legs from about 1.5 meters away and then fire a rubber bullet at him. Abu-Rahma said the bullet hit his left toe and that he received treatment from an army medic and was then released by the soldiers.

The Senate says that torture didn’t produce any actionable intelligence.

The CIA and a handful of those who ordered torture say that it was necessary.

Who’s right?

We don’t have to guess, get in a personality conflict, or engage in a partisan fight.

There is an overwhelming consensus among top interrogation experts of all stripes …
Torture INTERFERES With Our Ability to Fight Terrorism, Obtain Intelligence Information and Protect Our National Security

CIA Director John Brennan recounted the horrors of the 9/11 attacks in defending his agency’s use of enhanced interrogations.

Mr. Brennan made the remarks in a rare press conference in the wake of a Senate report released earlier this week the outlined aggressive tactics used by CIA officers to extract information from suspected terrorists.

On November 9, 2005, CIA Director of National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez, Jr. authorized the burning of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and ’Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In response to the destruction of those tapes, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to review the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program on March 5, 2009. With access to over six million pages of CIA documents, the Committee merely provided a superficial summary without bothering to interview any participants or victims of the RDI program.

The newly-released report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA’s use of torture says that CIA lawyers used Israel as a justification for building a legal case for torture of Al-Qa’ida suspects after the 9/11 attacks.

Critics of waterboarding have said for years that the practice endangered Americans, putting them at risk of being subjected to the same brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy.

“Waterboarding dates to the Spanish Inquisition and has been a favorite of dictators through the ages, including Pol Pot and the regime in Burma,” Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) said in an op-ed in 2008. “Condoning torture opens the door for our enemies to do the same to captured American troops in the future.”

“Imagine if we didn’t go down that road [of using torture]. Imagine. We played into the enemy’s hand,” said Ali H. Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who clashed with the C.I.A. over its interrogation tactics. “Now we have American hostages in orange jumpsuits because we put people in orange jumpsuits.”

In other words, ISIS is putting American hostages in orange jumpsuits because the U.S. put Muslim detainees in Guantanamo in orange jumpsuits.

And because the U.S. waterboarded Arab detainees, ISIS is waterboarding Western hostages.

Glenn Greenwald tells Salon how the torture report exposes true evil — and a nation drowning in hypocrisy

Over the past six years, Chicago has become a top potential target for international terrorists, a top security expert said Friday, making the posting of a veiled threat by Islamic radicals on Twitter a higher cause for concern.

"McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps."

Last spring, Palin appeared before an NRA convention crowd and laughed about how liberals supposedly coddle America's mortal adversaries. "Oh, but you can't offend them, can't make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen," said Palin. "Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists," The NRA audience roared with approval, but even some conservative commentators who saw the tape of Palin's wisecrack took offense, upset that she had linked bodily torture with a Christian sacrament. ("It's disgusting.")

Palin, of course, hardly stands alone among conservative media commentators who have spent years not only downplaying the grievous practice of torture adopted by the Bush administration, but who have routinely made light of the cruel tactic previously banned by the United States.

The CIA director said that enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), condemned in a Senate Intelligence Committee report as ineffective, did help thwart terrorist attacks against the United States, capture terrorists, and save lives.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced that US President Barack Obama shares the US Department of Justice decision that no prosecutable crime had been committed by the CIA officers.

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) blasted both the CIA and the White House on Wednesday over what the lawmaker considers to be complicity with regards to propagating long-standing lies about the United States’ use of torture against foreign detainees.

Speaking on the Senate floor merely 24 hours after the chamber’s Intelligence Committee released its long-awaited report on the CIA’s past use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Udall – an adamant critic of the torture program described in detail within this week’s report – called on CIA Director John Brennan to resign from his role, while also urging US President Barack Obama to ensure that the full truth about the agency’s past policies be officially acknowledged.

The CIA’s claim that there was medical need to rectally feed detainees in the aftermath of 9/11 came under withering criticism Wednesday as “sexual assault masquerading as medical treatment.”

New York-based Physicians for Human Rights, taking aim at the evident complicity of health professionals in procedures inflicted upon at least five terror suspects in CIA custody, said the antiquated practice of rectal rehydration or feeding amounted to wilful torture.

“Contrary to the CIA’s assertions, there is no clinical indication to use rectal rehydration and feeding over oral or intravenous administration of fluids and nutrients,” said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical adviser.

After a review of the Senate Intelligence Committee's full report, the Justice Department is not expected to initiate any criminal charges against any CIA officers who participated in or authorized the Retention, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program.

This means the Justice Department is standing by its earlier decision not to pursue criminal charges.

Its investigators also reviewed the Committee's full report and did not find any new information that they had not previously considered in reaching their determination.

The admissible evidence, the Justice Department concluded would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions beyond a reasonable doubt.

The words “possible criminal actions” by CIA employees is used in the report.

The terms unethical and immoral are mentioned. The criminality of those who ordered these actions at the highest levels of government, however, is not acknowledged.

The actions directed against alleged jihadists are categorized as ineffective in the process of revealing intelligence. This in itself is a red herring. The objective of torture was not to reveal intelligence.

What of course is not acknowledged is that the alleged terrorists who were tortured were framed by the CIA.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture reveals that the agency regularly misled the White House and Congress about the information it had obtained from detainees and used techniques that are far more brutal than it — or former Bush administration officials — had previously acknowledged.

For instance, President George W. Bush insisted that “[t]his government does not torture people” and claimed that the intelligence it produced was instrumental to preventing terrorism on American soil and capturing high-value targets, including Osama bin Laden. But the Committee’s five year investigation — and examination of more than six million CIA documents — reveals all of those assertions to be false.

The UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) [official website] released a report [text, PDF] on Friday finding that Canada was complicit in rights violations against three Canadians who were held prisoner in Syria, and against Omar Khadr, who is currently detained at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive]. All four of the detainees are Arab-Canadians who were detained post-9/11. The committee condemned Canada for refusing to apologize and give compensation to the individuals who were tortured in Syria, and recommended that the country do so immediately.

The release of the so-called CIA torture report will likely create momentum that will lead to justice, UN special rapporteur for torture Juan Mendez told RT. He said the UN will not “take no for an answer” and that each torturous act must be investigated.

The damning report on CIA torture has forced Poland to finally admit that it hosted a secret American prison, with former President Aleksander Kwasniewski coming forward with the revelation. However, Kwasniewski claimed that Polish officials were not informed of the torture tactics being used in the secret jail.

Early this year, in Denver (Colorado) ex-Israeli soldier Eran Efrati, explained how Israel Occupation Force (IOF) have militarized foreign law enforcement agencies in countries like the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, India, etc. “Israeli soldiers are intensely trained for a war, whilst their actual military duties are to subdue and control Palestinians,” he said.

US officials are compiling what one called “growing” evidence that other hijackings may have been planned for September 11. Officials from both the government and the airline industry tell TIME Magazine that a knife-like weapon was found on each of two separate Delta Airlines aircraft later that day, although neither plane took off due to the nationwide grounding after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on hijacked United and American airlines planes.

Investigators are not yet certain how these weapons came to be on board the aircraft. But they increasingly believe that the weapons may have been prepositioned by accomplices for use by others. As one US official told TIME, “These look like inside jobs.”

“We’re not talking about anyone being burned or stabbed or cut or anything like that. We’re talking about people being made to stand in awkward in positions, have water put into their nose and into their mouth. Nobody suffered any lasting injuries from this.”

The CIA and several of its past leaders, along with former vice-president Dick Cheney, are stepping up a campaign to discredit a five-year U.S. Senate investigation into the CIA's harrowing interrogation practices after 9/11, concerned that the historical record may define them as torturers instead of patriots and expose them to legal action around the world.

A United Nations "expert" on human rights on Wednesday stated that Sen. Dianne Feinstein's Senate report on torture by the CIA coincides with what he and others at the U.N. suspected for years: that Bush Administration allowed the use of interrogation methods that reached the level of torture, according to reports on Wednesday. The U.N. expert is also calling for criminal charges to be filed against all involved.

Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The term “enhanced interrogation” was coined by the Nazis…or Verschärfte Vernehmung, in the original German.

You know what was done with the Nazis who supported these kinds of evil acts after the war, right? So when is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. trial before an international tribunal?

We might as well start wearing black and putting skulls on our caps. The Senate Torture Report (it’s chilling that we even have to have a “torture report”) has been released, and it’s just full of the evil crap the CIA has been doing.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

Condoleezza Rice, the former US secetary of State, has rejected claims she approved the use of torture when she was US national security adviser.

Rice, who held the positions under the administration of George Bush, the former US president, triggered controversy recently when she said at Stanford University that if torture techniques including waterboarding were authorized by Bush, then they were not illegal.

The Nazis called it “Verschärfte Vernehmung,” German for “enhanced interrogation.”

“It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ by the president,” The Atlantic wrote in 2007.

Considering the early history of the CIA and its post-war collaboration with Nazi party members, including Gestapo butchers, this similarity should not be surprising.

According to author and researcher Annie Jacobsen, former Nazis were at the forefront of developing torture techniques for the United States government.

When human rights workers, lawyers and doctors get a chance to speak with Palestinian detainees about their treatment in Israeli prisons, the standard response is ‘?di, meaning “as usual.” After a little prodding, sometimes they will get the details of what exactly is “usual.” (See Bana Shoughry-Badarne’s “Torture in Israel – A Question of Getting Away With It.”)

One man tells of being violently beaten for 80 hours while being told his mother was dying.

Another man was allowed to sleep for two hours every three days for a total of 40 days, while interrogators shouted directly into his ears. (Examples from Shoughry-Badarne’s article.)

When the brutal “interrogation” is exhausted, officers may send the prisoners to a foul-smelling cell, where mold lines the walls and there is a hole in the floor to use as a toilet.

In the aftermath of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s bombshell Torture Report, both Democrats and Republicans are now jockeying for position to occupy the moral high ground. On one side you have apologists for CIA torture, and on the other are half-hearted partisan Democrats desperate to protect their own administration’s sins overseas – and in the middle is a small minority who still believe in doing what’s right to preserve America’s integrity internationally.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The US Defense Department announced it has closed the Bagram detention center and now has zero detainees in its custody in Afghanistan, Reuters reported.

However, the 528-page "summary version" of the report's "Findings and Conclusions" has, by the admission of Feinstein herself, been heavily redacted and is focused only on CIA torture. It reports only one prisoner death and does not include more damning information and photographic evidence on US torture and prisons operated by the US Army, US Navy and other Department of Defense (DOD) agencies.

For example, in March 2005, CBS's "60 Minutes" reported that 108 prisoners had already died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan prisons. A July 5, 2005, follow-up review of government documents on torture from multiple DOD agencies and the CIA, including the results of criminal investigations by the US Army and Navy, was conducted by Steven H. Miles, M.D., under the joint auspices of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under the heading, "How Many Detainees Died of Homicide by Torture?"

Senior U.S. officials who authorized and carried out torture as part of former President George W. Bush's national security policy must be prosecuted, a top United Nations special investigator said Wednesday.

Ben Emmerson, the UN's special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, said in addition that all CIA and other U.S. officials who used waterboarding and other torture techniques must be prosecuted.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has defended the CIA’s torture program, describing enemies of the United States as “bastards.”

“We have a lot going for us that our enemy doesn’t. We’re actually good people, and they’re bastards,” Graham told Fox News on Tuesday.

Well, I think some of the details of who were mistaken identity detainees, for example Gul Rahman, who was frozen to death on the floor of a prison in Afghanistan in 2002, this report acknowledges that he was a case of mistaken identity. There was another guy named /d??n?t?gu?l/, who was the subject of a 2005 Steven Bradbury memo. Again, we had no reason to hold him. He was hallucinating. We made him crazy. So not just that they shouldn't have been detained, but the people we kept and killed and tortured, incredibly, were among those we kept.

President-elect Barack Obama tells George Stephanopoulos he's not interested in a broad investigation of Bush-era intelligence programs, saying, "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

After the recent release of six long-term detainees in indefinite detention from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp to Uruguay and the release of the CIA Torture Report, we are reminded once again of the abuses that our own government has committed in the so-called "War on Terror."

RT’s Harry Fear spoke to the iconic filmmaker John Pilger about the damning revelations of the Senate’s CIA torture inquiry.

Pilger said the report will not fulfill its purpose if no one is held culpable for the actions of torturous CIA officials.

“We have crimes laid out in for us,” he says, “but where are the prosecutions? That’s all that matters now, where are the prosecutions?”

Pilger says knowledge of the torture methods was widespread, but that people were never held responsible for the “disgusting things they’ve done.”

Included in the hideous details of the executive summary version of the torture report released Tuesday is the news that the company founded by two former military psychologists who urged waterboarding and other coercive methods against suspects secretly imprisoned by the CIA and Department of Defense was paid $81 million for work with the agency's interrogation program from 2005 until 2009.

CIA SECRET DETENTION AND EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and the Other Framers Made It Clear that Torture Is Never Permissible

The Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to torture.

For example, George Washington – the father of our country – was against torture.

And he wasn’t the only one …

The Halliburton subsidiary KBR (formerly Brown and Root) announced on Jan. 24 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps. Two weeks later, on Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds (an increase of 32 percent over 2006). This $400 million allocation is more than a four-fold increase over the FY 2006 budget, which provided only $90 million for the same purpose. [Pacific News 2/21/06]

All senior U.S. officials and CIA agents who authorized or carried out torture like waterboarding as part of former President George W. Bush's national security policy must be prosecuted, top U.N. officials said Wednesday.

It's not clear, however, how human rights officials think these prosecutions will take place, since the Justice Department has declined to prosecute and the U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court.

On CIA torture horrors – note that the report does not include torture by groups other then by the CIA! It doesn’t include rendition to black sites where torture took place by others. It doesn’t include what goes on at Guantanomo (still). Who are these psychopaths that do this? And who orders it done? I once asked what the profile of a torturer is and the answer was, your next door neighbor if he is convinced you are a threat. That is probably true but the answer is incomplete. I think there are sadists out there who do wind up in the military. And, it is a tool of terror which makes many very hesitant to join the opposition. Today many aren’t opposing anything – they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the scum in power that ordered all this are free to lead lives in luxury, no legal action against them, while innocent Black men in America die in the hands of police at the rate of about 2 a week.

In other words, Guantanamo is being kept open – and innocent detainees imprisoned forever – in order to try to cover up the torture of innocents. Prosecuting – instead of covering up for – the torturers would allow the innocents to be released … thus taking away one of the main causes of terrorism: indefinite detention.

Evidence for this theory is contained in the following passage from the Senate’s torture report:

One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.”

While parts of the programme had been known – and much more will never be revealed – the catalogue of abuse is nightmarish and reads like something invented by the Marquis de Sade or Hieronymous Bosch.

Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing, sometimes with their arms shackled above their heads.

Prisoners were subjected to “rectal feeding” without medical necessity. Rectal exams were conducted with “excessive force”. The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and “symptomatic rectal prolapse”.

The report mentions mock executions, Russian roulette. US agents threatened to slit the throat of a detainee’s mother, sexually abuse another and threatened prisoners’ children. One prisoner died of hypothermia brought on in part by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.

‘Well Worn’ Waterboards

The CIA has previously said that only three detainees were ever waterboarded: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. But records uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee suggest there may have been more than three subjects. The Senate report describes a photograph of a “well worn” waterboard, surrounded by buckets of water, at a detention site where the CIA has claimed it never subjected a detainee to this procedure. In a meeting with the CIA in 2013, the agency was not able to explain the presence of this waterboard.

Near Drowning

I came across sketches made by former prison inmates of interrogations conducted by the Gestapo and was stunned to see two scenes in particular that resembled the enhanced interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use on suspected terrorists.

In the first picture a prisoner lies huddled in a ball on the floor of an office while two dogs tear at his clothes, a third dog is being held back in reserve by a uniformed Nazi. The image irresistibly calls to mind Abu Ghraib:

Millions of pages have been released but very little information has trickled down to the broad public. And this trickle has been presented in a way calculated to minimize public awareness of the extent to which the Nazi apparatus was recruited in order - literally - to *become* the US covert operations and intelligence apparatus (the CIA etc.)

“In fact, Comey repeatedly approved Bush-era surveillance and torture operations, including waterboarding.The surveillance program he refused to sign off on was continued in a slightly different form under Bush and expanded under Obama.”

Some call Bush-era tactics a “stain” on U.S., while others say release of long-awaited report will endanger American lives.

Despite more than 500 pages of excruciating, awful detail, there’s much about the CIA’s interrogation, rendition, and detention programs that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report doesn’t address.

None of the interrogators were interviewed. The roles of dictatorships like Syria and Libya in the CIA rendition programs were left unexplored—or least hidden behind layers of confounding redactions that make many passages of the report incomprehensible. There’s no concrete answer about who really gave the torture orders. And the role of the Obama administration, which slow-rolled the release of the report for five years, was all but ignored.

The Senate report is also filled with redaction after redaction, with the names of many CIA officers entirely blacked out rather than described by pseudonyms.

A Mossad surveillance team made quite a public spectacle of themselves on 9-11.
The New York Times reported Thursday that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards. (1)

Police received several calls from angry New Jersey residents claiming "middle-eastern" men with a white van were videotaping the disaster with shouts of joy and mockery. (2)

"They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me" said a witness. (3)
[T]hey were seen by New Jersey residents on Sept. 11 making fun of the World Trade Center ruins and going to extreme lengths to photograph themselves in front of the wreckage. (4)

Witnesses saw them jumping for joy in Liberty State Park after the initial impact (5). Later on, other witnesses saw them celebrating on a roof in Weehawken, and still more witnesses later saw them celebrating with high fives in a Jersey City parking lot. (6)

The Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute anyone connected to the brutal torture techniques outlined in a Senate report released on Tuesday, but the one man already sitting in jail in connection with the CIA's interrogation program tried to draw public attention to it.

In an interview with ABC News in 2007, former CIA agent John Kiriakou was one of the first to acknowledge the existence of the CIA's torture program. Federal authorities brought criminal charges against him in 2008 for revealing the name of a covert agent to a reporter. Kiriakou pleaded guilty to those charges in 2012 and is currently serving a 30-month federal prison sentence.

"I believe I was prosecuted not for what I did but for who I am: a CIA officer who said torture was wrong and ineffective and went against the grain," Kiriakou said last year. Federal authorities say Kirakou had caused a security breach by leaking the name of another agent.

Please accept my personal compliments. I have the honor hereby to file with you and the International Criminal Court this Complaint against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice , and Alberto Gonzales (hereinafter referred to as the "Accused") for their criminal policy and practice of "extraordinary rendition." This term is really a euphemism for the enforced disappearancesof persons, their torture, severe deprivation of their liberty, their violent sexual abuse, and other inhumane acts perpetrated upon these Victims. The Accused have inflicted this criminal policy and practice of "extraordinary rendition" upon about one hundred (100) human beings, almost all of whom are Muslims/Arabs/Asians and People of Color. I doubt very seriously that the Accused would have inflicted these criminal practices upon 100 White Judeo-Christian men.

Radio host and former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh suggested on Wednesday that anyone who participated in torture techniques like rectal forced feedings or chaining prisoners naked to the floor were “American heroes.”

Human rights organizations reacted angrily Thursday to the Obama administration's announcement that CIA officials would not be prosecuted for past waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics.

With the Bush administration gearing up for a “preemptive” war against Iraq, Washington this week dispatched a senior US diplomat, Marisa Lino, to Europe to demand that the governments of the European Union (EU) agree to a blanket exemption of all US citizens from the jurisdiction of the newly formed International Criminal Court.

So, because every other problem in America has been resolved, Obama’s Department of Justice requested that the Bush Gang be granted procedural immunity. DOJ claims that in planning and waging the Iraq War, the Bushies acted within the legitimate scope of their employment and are thus immune from suit. This is the “Westfall Act Certification,” defense, submitted pursuant to the Westfall Act of 1988. The Act permits the Attorney General, at his or her discretion, to substitute the United States as the defendant and essentially grant absolute immunity to individual government employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment.

Just as President Barack Obama has refused to prosecute any of the bankers and swindlers responsible for the 2007-08 financial collapse, he has likewise refused to prosecute any of the Bush-Cheney Administration officials responsible for the torture and abuse of prisoners carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan—even though, in the past, the United States has always treated such practices as war crimes.

Columnist Glenn Greenwald, now writing in Britain's Guardian, notes that Obama's "aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the 'war on terror' crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete" with Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement last week that the last two torture-death cases from the Bush-Cheney era have been closed without prosecution.

The big news of the moment is the Torture Papers; which has mostly to do with Bushligula but… of course, Howdy Doody factors in. The heat of the inferno is doing a wax job on the back of the neck of the Bozo of the moment. The word is that he’s drunk and angry. When that happens to a man in his position it means; pressure. Yes, it means pressure and pressure translates into stress and it comes from down below. It’s not something you can easily get away from because it is coming from inside and its hard to know what to do about that. If it’s from outside you can react on it or call in your chief of staff and instruct him to go to the military and have them bomb the shit out of someone. These things he is doing but… it ain't helping. You can chalk it up to Mr. Apocalypse because everyone, infernal and supernal, has to integrate with him because he is the atmosphere in the enveloping phase in which we find ourselves.

The problem wasn’t carrying out torture. It was that releasing a report into torture might increase the chance of terrorism.

That was the deliberately obtuse response from the media to a report examining the CIA’s use of torture.

Struggling to control the CIA’s crumbling torture narrative, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, attempted to derail US Senator Diane Feinstein today live on CNN, by interrupting the Senator repeatedly, insinuating that the report was wrong, almost acting as an apologist for Washington’s 13 year-long torture boondoggle. What followed in their exchange is some of the most explosive revelations yet…

British Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed dismay over a US Senate report describing CIA torture methods of al-Qaeda suspects.

"Let us be clear: Torture is wrong. Torture is always wrong," AFP quoted Cameron as saying at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, on Tuesday.

Why the release of the damning, horrific Senate torture report could be a bright spot for American democracy.

A U.N. human rights expert said a report that the U.S. Senate released on Tuesday revealed a “clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration” and called for prosecution of U.S. officials who ordered crimes, including torture, against detainees.

Ben Emmerson, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said senior Bush administration officials who planned and authorized crimes must be prosecuted, along with as CIA and other U.S. government officials who committed torture such as waterboarding.

“As a matter of international law, the U.S. is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” Emmerson said in a statement issued in Geneva. “The U.S. Attorney General is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible.”

Nazis Called Their Torture “Enhanced Interrogation” Too

Just ran across an older piece documenting that the CIA and crew did the exact same things the Nazis did to torture people … and even called it the exact same thing.

The Nazis’ “enhanced interrogation” – just like America’s – included:

Sleep deprivation
Cold
Blows
Hard surfaces

Sadly, American officials apparently took a page from the Nazis … and the Communists.

Throughout our history, the United States of America has done more than any other nation to stand up for freedom, democracy, and the inherent dignity and human rights of people around the world. As Americans, we owe a profound debt of gratitude to our fellow citizens who serve to keep us safe, among them the dedicated men and women of our intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the horrific attacks of 9/11, these public servants have worked tirelessly to devastate core al Qaeda, deliver justice to Osama bin Laden, disrupt terrorist operations and thwart terrorist attacks. Solemn rows of stars on the Memorial Wall at the CIA honor those who have given their lives to protect ours. Our intelligence professionals are patriots, and we are safer because of their heroic service and sacrifices.