On Election Day just over a week ago, as this city’s reporters and editors focused on whether the incumbent mayor with ties to the White House would win big or be forced into a historic run-off, an out-of-town newspaper produced a startling account of alleged abuse at a police facility called Homan Square.

The blockbuster story, published in The Guardian and written by Brooklyn-based journalist Spencer Ackerman, described the warehouse as the “domestic equivalent of a CIA black site,” where secretive police units operate and detainees are “disappeared,” with no access to lawyers or relatives and no immediate record of their whereabouts.

With its comparisons to war-on-terror practices and allegations of police brutality, the story landed big on the internet, with well more than 100,000 social shares and write-ups across the Web. The one place it didn’t get much traction: Chicago media.

In one month Chicago elects a mayor. Neither the mayor nor his opponent in the April 7th runoff election have yet bothered to take a position on the existence of the Chicago Police Department’s 3 torture facilities. These are ‘Black Sites’ where the cops are allowed to take people they kidnapped, to hold them without charges and to torture them until they confess to felonies that involve serious jail time.

The Corporate Media has ignored this story. The local news outlets in Chicago have sent reporters to the Police Department who asked the cops if they were kidnapping people off the street and torturing them. The Police said No. So that was the end of their investigations.

So John Vergara and Jose Garcia were taken to Homan Square with the deli manager and 2 others; they were detained for about 9 hours. They were, of course, denied access to a phone call, a lawyer, or any form of due process.

These six American war criminals have already admitted to authorizing torture. From left to right: President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet. Even the New York Times (see here) has called for their prosecution. Nobel Peace prize winner Barack Obama has refused to take action, since his own war crimes are even greater. Now Germany has decided to step in and start the ball rolling. (LD)

Top Afghan officials have presided over murders, abduction, and other abuses with the tacit backing of their government and its western allies, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

A grim account of deaths, robbery, rapes and extrajudicial killings, Today We Shall All Die, details a culture of impunity that the rights group says flourished after the fall of the Taliban, driven by the desire for immediate control of security at almost any price.

“The rise of abusive political and criminal networks was not inevitable,” the report said. “Short-term concerns for maintaining a bulwark against the Taliban have undermined aspirations for long-term good governance and respect for human rights in Afghanistan.”

Last night Israeli TV cut away from reporting on Netanyahu’s Washington fiasco to cover the leak of an outrageous video of Israeli soldiers inciting their trained “elite” dogs to attack and maul a captured Palestinian teen near an illegal West Bank settlement two months ago. The video appeared on the Facebook page of Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of Knesset of the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Strength”) party. And it is big news in Israel.

The footage shows a terrified Hamza Abu Hashem, 16, screaming while being mauled by the dogs as two soldiers, reportedly dog handlers from the Oketz unit wearing helmet cameras, record the scene. According to B’tselem, the video was “presumably available to their commanders during the routine debriefing held after such operations.”

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

The Obama administration has won the latest battle in their fight to indefinitely detain US citizens and foreigners suspected of being affiliated with terrorists under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

Congress granted the president the authority to arrest and hold individuals accused of terrorism without due process under the NDAA, but Mr. Obama said in an accompanying signing statement that he will not abuse these privileges to keep American citizens imprisoned indefinitely. These assurances, however, were not enough to keep a group of journalists and human rights activists from filing a federal lawsuit last year, which contested the constitutionality of Section 1021, the particular provision that provides for such broad power.

Palestinian officials say the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority is planning to lodge its first case with the International Criminal Court (ICC) later this year against the Tel Aviv regime’s crimes.

In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify "news" depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture.

Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn't it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn't know it was happening.

A Chicago man says he was confined for three days – shackled, interrogated and fed only twice, his whereabouts unknown – inside the police “black site” at the epicentre of public outcry over allegations of abuse said to focus on minority citizens.

Four black Chicagoans have now come forward to the Guardian detailing off-the-books ordeals at the facility, including another who describes being detained in “a big cage” with his wrists cuffed to a bench so he couldn’t move.

Israel used the “disappearance” of a soldier in Gaza as a pretext to kill 225 Palestinians over a three-day period last summer, a new study suggests.

A new inquiry will be conducted into claims that MI6 were complicit in the alleged torture of Michael Adebolajo, one of the two men later convicted of murdering British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May 2013.

The investigation will focus on how the British spy agency handled claims Adebolajo was beaten by Kenya’s security forces, who have close ties with the UK, while detained there in 2010.

Prime Minister David Cameron ordered the inquiry after a report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) criticized MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service.

The committee’s report found MI6 never asked the Kenyan authorities about Adebolajo’s claims, dismissing them as fabricated.

The most important part about this revelation may be the likelihood of there being several more locations like this all across America where police can secretly detain, disappear, and kill people illegally or legally under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

This could be the first instance of the NDAA being put to use; the first time authorities exercise their power to detain or kill anyone they want legally. Or maybe we just haven’t heard about this program because it’s been a closely guarded secret for a long time. There is a possibility that this secret detention center’s practices predate the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA, which was signed into law on New Years Day in 2012. This would mean the program was operating entirely outside of what is considered to be the law. Not exactly surprising.

“It’s Just A Matter of Time Before [Torture] Spills Back Into Domestic Territory. Historically, It Always Has”

What should we make of the news that Americans are being arrested and treated in Guantanamo-like conditions in Chicago … including:

Brutality

Being held in secret

Not even telling a suspect’s lawyer whether his client is being held?

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Normally, when one participates in a training exercise, all of the participants in said training exercise are well aware that they are, in fact, participating in a training exercise. In this case, however, the other soldiers were told that Baker was a prisoner who wasn't cooperating, and that he had already assaulted a sergeant.

Here's what happened next, in Baker's own words:

Twenty one years ago this week terror struck out in Hebron. Thirty Palestinians at prayer were slaughtered by one Judeo nazi. There were no solidarity marches, there were no massive outcries in the Western Press, after all, the dead were only Palestinians. Instead there were graveside ceremonies glorifying the terrorist and his acts. Twenty one years later a compatriot of the terrorist is a candidate for the Knesset.

ISRAEL MUST HANG ITS COLLECTIVE HEAD IN SHAME!

Israel's own criminal investigations into its conduct during the Gaza invasion in the summer of 2014 may bypass the ICC's own investigations

Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni says internal investigation of Gaza war is ‘sufficient’ to forestall one by international tribunal

Poland will abide by a European court ruling that ordered it to pay a total of $262,000 in reparations to two former inmates of a “black site” prison run by the C.I.A., the minister of foreign affairs said on Wednesday.

Shortly after the Senate’s torture report surfaced, the Canadian government quickly denied any complicity.

“It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Government of Canada,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in Parliament.

“Canada doesn’t torture anyone. Period! Period!” Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said, refusing to answer whether Canada uses torture-tainted information.

There’s a reason why he ignored the question. The facts tell us that Canada is complicit in the torture of detainees and has been doing everything it can to cover its dirty hands.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has today confirmed its judgement that Poland actively assisted the CIA’s European “black site” programme, which saw detainees held and tortured in secret prisons across the Continent.

In July 2014, the ECHR had ruled that Poland “facilitated” the torture, secret detention and unlawful transfer of Abu Zubaydah, who is now held in Guantanamo Bay.

Mr Zubaydah was flown from a secret site in Thailand to another CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty in northern Poland, where he was detained and tortured during 2002 and 2003. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) detailed in its recent report how Mr Zubaydah was subjected to torture numerous times by the CIA, before the Agency concluded that he was not a member of al Qaeda at all.

They were among at least 844 Palestinians killed as a result of airstrikes on homes during Israel’s summer war with the Islamic militant group, Hamas.

Under the rules of war, homes are considered protected civilian sites unless used for military purposes. Israel says it attacked only legitimate targets, alleging militants used the houses to hide weapons, fighters and command centers. Palestinians say Israel’s warplanes often struck without regard for civilians.

Saturday, February 14th, marks 13 years since the arrival of British resident Shaker Aamer at Guantanamo Bay, where he has been held without charge or trial ever since.

Mr Aamer, a father of four from London, has been cleared for release under both the Bush and Obama administrations, in a process which requires six government agencies to confirm that he poses no threat. However, he remains imprisoned in Guantanamo, despite repeated requests by the UK Government that he be returned to his family in South London.

Lawyers for the British Government will today argue in the Court of Appeal that a case concerning the 2004 kidnap, torture and ‘rendition’ of a man by UK and US forces should not be heard.

The case is being brought by legal charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day on behalf of Yunus Rahmatullah (32), who was captured in Iraq by the UK, tortured and held in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, before being ‘rendered’ to Afghanistan by the US. He then faced a decade of detention without charge or trial in Bagram prison, before being released in 2014.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Monday said the U.S. should be "proud" of how it treats the "savages" it detains at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.

"Terrorists need no excuse to attack us here. They've shown that for decades and decades," Cotton said on Fox News' "The Kelly File." "We should be proud for the way we treated these savages at Guantanamo Bay and the way our soldiers conduct themselves all around the world to include the people doing the very hard work at Guantanamo Bay."

Last year, a lawyer for one Guantanamo detainee said that videos of his client being force-fed were so disturbing that he had trouble sleeping after viewing them. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for the closure of the facility last month, saying that it had created a "psychological scar." A 2009 report by Amnesty International said detainees were subjected to incredibly harsh conditions, including sleep deprivation and force-feeding.

The 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker.

Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.”

“The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there,” he said.

Suddenly, around two in the morning, the image materialized in my head. I made my way down the hall to my computer and typed in: “Waco, Texas. Lynching.”

Sure enough, there it was: the charred corpse of a young black man, tied to a blistered tree in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt. Next to the burned body, young white men can be seen smiling and grinning, seemingly jubilant at their front-row seats in a carnival of death. One of them sent a picture postcard home: “This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe.”

Click for larger image

For Americans, confidence in government is at a low. Growing numbers of people now question nearly any declaration made by the US government, particularly when its assertions are either

1) addressing terrorism or

2) addressing domestic policies.

Recent statements by David Bitkower, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, statements made during the review by that body of the US and its torture policies during the past five years, could be considered as subsumed under both of the above two categories. And sadly, Bitkower misrepresented actions taken by the US DOJ.

Among the dead were children, and the atrocity — or “error” as the Israeli military would later call it — portended what would become one of the deadliest tactics of the fifty-day assault: destroying Palestinians’ homes.

A new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem examines how Israel came to permit the widespread targeting of homes last summer. The report concludes that Israel violated international law but suggests it may not have violated its own policies.

For almost a century, the United States practiced a unique cultural ritual that was as least as gruesome as the "medieval" punishments meted out by ISIS against its foes.

What is now known as "spectacular lynching" involved the ceremonial torture, murder--and yes, burning alive--of black Americans by whites. Like ISIS's use of digital media to circulate images of the torturous death of Muadh al Kasasbeh by fire, the spectacular lynchings of the black body were shared via postcards and other media.

Palestine will join the International Criminal Court on April 1, announced UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday. The Palestinians will be able to sue Israel for war crimes, a move the Israeli administration has consistently opposed for decades.

A federal court insists it wants the Department of Defense to supplement the 2,100 pictures showing US military abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan with an individual reason for not making each of them public.

We need to look much deeper here to see who may have had a hand, albeit indirectly, in the horrific death of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Jordan is far from innocent when examining who is responsible for the creation of ISIS.

Former US drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant admits he “couldn’t stand” himself for his participation in the country’s drone program for six years – firing on targets whose identities often went unconfirmed.

Amnesty’s statement came before images of what appeared to be the severed heads of two civilians’ started circulating on social media today, identified by Russian news channel NTV as the heads of rebel hostages.

Shortly after, Kiev-based news network Pravilnoe TV reported that it had spoken with one of the mothers of the victims who confirmed her son was a rebel, captured during fighting in Donetsk.

She said she had received her son’s head in a wooden box in the post, blaming nationalist volunteers for her son’s death. Newsweek has not been able to verify the report independently.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday called for scrapping a U.N. commission, which is tasked with investigating potential war crimes committed last summer in Gaza, after the inquiry's chief resigned amid accusations from Israel that he was biased against the country.

The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that U.S. and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on Feb. 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.

He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.

CIA and Mossad tracked senior Hezbollah figure for months before killing him in 2008, former U.S. officials tell Washington Post.

The UK government is facing renewed pressure to make a full disclosure of its involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 kidnap and torture programme after another leading Bush-era US official said suspects were held and interrogated on the British territory of Diego Garcia.

The Sterling case – especially in light of Obama’s complicity in the cover-up of torture during the Bush administration – sends a clear message to people in government service: You won’t get in trouble as long as you do what you’re told (even torture people). But if you talk to a reporter and tell him something we want kept secret, we will spare no effort to destroy you.

The new Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to make sure that a scathing 6,900-page report about the CIA's torture of terrorism suspects captured after 9/11 is never publicly released.

Senator Richard Burr asked the White House to return all copies of the document that were disseminated last month to executive branch officials by his predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, according to a copy of a one-page letter [pdf below] Burr sent to President Barack Obama.

The purpose of Burr's unusual request for a mass recall was allegedly to prevent the document from being subject to release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), according to US officials and congressional sources who said the issue is "sensitive," and who declined to discuss it on the record.

A little over a week ago Petro Poroshenko ordered an all out assault on Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Faced with massive losses during the first few days the Poroshenko regime has resorted unsuccessfully to get both republic’s listed as terrorist organizations by the EU and United Nations.

It started with the Volonavaha bus attack after which the bus driver states in an interview with theKorrespondent that a mine exploded and killed his passengers in Ukrainian controlled territory. Images from the scene taken by the Ukrainian army shows a soldier carrying what appears to be a claymore mine. Claymore mines are directional explosives that are set off remotely or by a trip wire.

Kiev is engaging in a game of escalating crimes against humanity. Each attack on civilian populations has been followed by an all out media blitz trying to place blame on the fledgling republics.

Murder at Camp Delta is a new book by Joseph Hickman, a former guard at Guantanamo. It's neither fiction nor speculation. When President Obama says "We tortured some folks," Hickman provides at least three cases -- in addition to many others we know about from secret sites around the world -- in which the statement needs to be modified to "We murdered some folks." Of course, murder is supposed to be acceptable in war (and in whatever you call what Obama does with drones) while torture is supposed to be, or used to be, a scandal. But what about tortures to death? What about deadly human experimentation? Does that have a Nazi enough ring to disturb anyone?

The new Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman sent a letter to the White House and several federal agencies last week demanding the return of every copy of the Committee’s entire classified CIA torture report. The new chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, also intends to return the notorious Panetta Review to the CIA. Critical of the agency’s false statements regarding the reliability of information obtained through torture, the Panetta Review’s release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been blocked by the CIA.

Years before the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing the C.I.A.’s use of torture and deceit in its detention program, an internal review by the agency found that the C.I.A. had repeatedly overstated the value of intelligence gained during the brutal interrogations of some of its detainees.

The internal report, more than 1,000 pages in length, came to be known as the Panetta Review after Leon E. Panetta, who, as the C.I.A.’s director, ordered that it be done in 2009. At least one of its authors won an agency award for her work, according to a recent briefing that the agency’s inspector general gave to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It wasn’t enough that the CIA were caught hacking into the computers of Senator Diane Feinstein’s Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigative team- a crime which CIA head John Brennan was forced to ‘apologize’ for (with no punishment, of course). Now the new Republican (GOP) Senate will be asking that all federal agencies to return important torture documents to them.

In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He said he had told his bosses he had “serious reservations” about the program and no longer wanted to be associated with it “in any way.”

The bitter infighting in the C.I.A. interrogation program was only one symptom of the dysfunction, disorganization, incompetence, greed and deception described in a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. In more than 500 pages, the summary, released on Tuesday, paints a devastating picture of an agency that was ill equipped to take on the task of questioning Al Qaeda suspects, bungled the job and then misrepresented the results.

The story of Guantanamo Bay Sergeant Joe Hickman is featured on MSNBC's 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann.'

A Dutch court on Tuesday blocked the extradition of a man accused of having fought against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying it could not be ruled out that the CIA had been involved in his torture after his arrest in Pakistan.

A former Guantanamo Bay prison guard and Marine explained in details what makes him believe three problematic detainees were killed at CIA black site in Guantanomo and their death was covered up as a triple suicide.

Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman was on duty at the notorious prison camp when the three men died, and insists the official version of events is “impossible,” he told Vice News.

The three men were Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, 37, from Yemen, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, 30, from Saudi Arabia, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, 22, also from Saudi Arabia. None of them had been charged with any crime.

He explained in an incendiary interview with Vice News that the three men would have had to have committed suicide at exactly the same time in a cellblock where guards check on detainees every four minutes.

Israeli politicians are calling on the 122 member states of the International Criminal Court to cut its funding in response to the beginning of its inquiry into possible war crimes in Gaza last year.

The ICC announced Friday it would investigate "in full independence and impartiality" crimes that may have occurred in the conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014.

During his visit to Germany earlier in January, Yatsenyuk was questioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine on the cluster bombs and Grad multiple rocket launchers against town and villages in southeast Ukraine.

But the prime minister rejected the allegation, saying that “there is no evidence to that. No evidence,” and suggested that more attention should be paid to the Republic of Crimea, which reunited with Russia in March 2014.

However, Roth told RIA-Novosti news agency that Yatsenyuk lied to the German media as Human Right Watch (HRW) had “published a lot of evidence that Ukraine refuses to distinguish between military targets and civilians as required by the laws and customs of war."

The rights watchdog has presented detailed information on those violations during meetings with the Kiev authorities in November and December last year, he said.

A staff sergeant at Guantanamo Bay claims to have solved one of the military prison’s greatest mysteries: Three men the Pentagon says killed themselves were actually tortured to death by the CIA.

The official government line was that Yasser Talal al-Zahrani of Yemen, and Salah Ahmed al-Salami and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, both of Saudi Arabia, killed themselves in 2006 in a suicide pact.

Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, called the deaths “an asymmetric warfare committed against us.” The men were said to have hanged themselves.

Al Jazeera has learned that the ICC chief prosecutor may be close to opening investigation into last summer's Gaza war.

New analysis and previously unpublished documents released by legal charity Reprieve show that the CIA held prisoners in Lithuania in 2005 and 2006, contrary to official denials.

In a dossier and briefing submitted to the Lithuanian Prosecutor today, Reprieve reveals how the newly declassified US Senate Report on CIA detention correlates with flight data and contracting documents; and demonstrates that prisoners were moved into Lithuania in February and October 2005, and out of Lithuania to Afghanistan in March 2006.

A previous investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors, shelved in 2011, concluded that the CIA built a facility in a converted stable outside Vilnius, but argued there was no evidence that prisoners were ever held in it.