Sold to the United States for Cash

By LEONARD C. GOODMAN, IN THESE TIMES

In May, President Barack Obama began floating the idea that his administration might seek the power to "preventatively detain" terrorism suspects who "are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried." The rationale is: These folks are bad. We can't tell you how we know this because of national security concerns. So trust us. This is in effect what the Bush administration told us for more than five years, and it is nonsense.

I am an attorney representing one of the 230 remaining Guantanamo detainees who are subject to this preventative detention. Shawali Khan has been imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center for more than six years without charges. Khan is a small man with sad eyes, about 40 years old, who comes from a small farming village near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

District Attorney Drops Charges Against John Yoo Protesters

Op-Ed by Adam Marletta, The Maine Campus

September 28, 2009

Earlier this month, Attorney General Eric Holder launched a preliminary investigation into CIA officials who may have engaged in torture or other heinous forms of "enhanced interrogation techniques" under the Bush administration.

While many progressives, such as myself, believe this urgent investigation into un-Constitutional abuses of power is long overdue, there is growing concern Holder's "torture probe" may be too narrow in scope to amount to anything.

Of particular concern is the announcement Holder's investigation will focus exclusively on low-level CIA interrogators. This ignores administration lawyers and officials who authorized the use of torture in the first place, including Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, both of whom have eagerly confessed to allowing torture on national television within the last year.

In Sept. 14 edition of The Nation, John Nichols effectively sums up the problem posed by such a narrow investigation: "There is nothing Dick Cheney and his allies in Congress and the conservative media would prefer more than a narrowly defined investigation of low-level CIA operatives. The right knows how to make 'heroes' of those who dutifully carry out orders -- even lawless and inhumane ones." Nichols goes on to note the support of Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Sen. Russ Feingold who concur that "a proper investigation must target those who initiated and authorized wrongdoing."

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Berkeley would become the first city in the United States to independently try to comply with U.N. treaties on torture, civil rights and racial discrimination, if the City Council passes a measure on the issue tonight.

Torture at Guantanamo Bay: Excerpts and Extras Now Online

Preview clips and extras from the upcoming Spectacle film 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo', which documents the treatment of those held in Guantanamo Bay prison and other 'dark prisons', are now available to view online. As a lot of the material filmed for 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo' will not be included in the final edit, it has been made available on the Project Page and in the Archive pages of the Spectacle website to make it widely accessible. The material includes interviews with lawyers, campaigners and ex-prisoners, plus longer interviews with ex-detainee Omar Deghayes, who describes his interrogation by British intelligence agent 'Andrew', and James Yee, former US Army Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, who underwent intense investigation.

 Stumble it

John Yoo's commentary in the Contra Costa Times is ridiculous

What do we do about John Yoo?

Law professor John Yoo, author of the infamous Bush administration torture memos, is a controversial presence here at Berkeley. Did Yoo really write those memos in good faith?

Brad DeLong

Condi Can't Shake the Torture Rap

By JESSICA GREENE nbcbayarea.com

NBC Bay Area

Group claims Rice, Cheney, Bush, Yoo are war criminals

Yes, we are debating whether to torture in 2009. This is not right. Torture is morally beyond the pale. Period. Full stop. It is also unambiguously illegal. The Geneva Convention clearly prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

To those who ask "What if it did work?": I ask what does a world look like where you can pretty much do anything you want and justify it as "keeping people safe"? Where do you draw the limits? Is that a world you would want to live in? - Aaron Leonard

see History will judge our torture record

Al Jazeera Debates Torture

Josh Rushing joins a panel of experts in front of a live studio audience for a town hall debate on torture, asking what it will take to dismantle the Bush administration's legacy of torture and if those responsible will be held to account.video here

Bound, hooded captives, being flown to Guantanamo.

photo c/o Examiner.com

The Public Record has an exclusive report from Jeffrey Kaye, an expert in the psychology of interrogations, detailing the findings of the recent Physicians for Human Rights report.

 JEFFREY KAYE @ THE PUBLIC RECORD 09/09/2009:  A number of new articles highlight evidence of illegal human experimentation on U.S.-held "terrorism" prisoners undergoing torture. The articles follow the release of a "white paper" by Physicians for Human Rights [PHR], Aiding Torture: Health Professionals' Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General's Report.

This article looks at those recent charges, and reveals that experiments by a CIA researcher on human subjects undergoing SERE training went unreported in the legal memos the Bush administration drafted to approve their torture program. It will also connect major military and intelligence figures to the SERE experiments, and tie some of them to major science and "experimental" directorates at the CIA and Special Operations Command.

Did the Defense Department Stop Reporting Deaths of Detainees in U.S. Custody?

By DAPHNE EVIATAR 9/4/09 4:40 PM

Latest John Yoo Protest at UC Berkeley Passes Without Arrests

He didn't get the memo

Would you like to see the next generation of American jurists learn their trade at the feet of a war criminal? Most citizens of the modern world outside Zimbabwe -- and parts of New Jersey, strangely enough --  would likely answer that question with a resounding "no." But in the world of legal academia, nothing is simple -- especially when it's open to question whether the alleged war criminal is just your garden-variety conservative with a penchant for provocative opinions.

UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law has been convulsed in recent months with debate over whether there's room in the academic community for John Yoo, the professor and former Bush Administration Justice Department official who authored an infamous memo justifying the torture of American-held detainees. We reported recently that Boalt administrators were adjusting this year's class schedule following complaints from students who didn't want to enroll in Yoo's class. On Aug. 17, a big protest took place outside Yoo's classroom, which culminated with the arrests of four demonstrators.

Another demonstration took place this afternoon -- and was a much more low-key affair, according to Stephanie Tang, an organizer with World Can't Wait, the group that put on the protest. (Tang was among those arrested on charges of trespassing and disturbing the peace at the August rally.) Nobody was thrown in the police wagon today. Instead, Tang said, a group of demonstrators provocatively dressed in orange jumpsuits and hoods resembling those of suspected terrorist prisoners hung out on Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, talking to passing students about their opinion that Yoo should be fired, disbarred, and prosecuted.
 
"We're going to try to keep the protests frequent," Tang said. "Sometimes they'll be bigger and more dramatic, and sometimes they'll be basic and trying to communicate with students." She added, "A lot of the people on the campus don't even know who John Yoo is."

The question of Yoo's culpability in the Bush Administration's torture practices is certainly an interesting one. As a senior lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, he wrote a highly controversial opinion -- called a "golden shield" by administration officials -- authorizing wide latitude for interrogators. Some argue that his opinion was responsible for subsequent abuses of detainees at overseas prisons, while others say he shouldn't face criminal penalties for offering professional legal advice.

Some light may be shed on this question as the Obama Administration's Justice Department commences its recently announced investigation into detainee interrogation practices. In the meantime, expect more protests.

Photo Jim Linwood

An emergency duress button mounted on the wall of an interrogation room