The age-old question, "WWJD?" might have a hand in people's perception of the war on terror — or at least how information is gathered. A new poll shows that 57 percent of Southern evangelicals believe that torture is justified as a means of gaining important information from suspected terrorists.
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Folks trekking out to Coney Island are looking for a little summer diversion involving water — but the newest attraction to grace the boardwalk takes that expectation and adds a political message. Called the "Waterboard Thrill Ride," the sideshow is decorated with SpongeBob, advertises that "it dont [sic] Gitmo better" and charges $1 for a look through a barred window onto what appears to be an interrogation scene.
Robots portray a prisoner and an interrogator.
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Trust, a crucial component of most healthy relationships, has become an elusive ingredient in the transatlantic alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States. England's House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee just issued its annual human rights report, which states that America's word can no longer be trusted when it comes to torture and human rights abuses.
The committee recommended the following:
The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future.
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Ashcroft Defends Waterboarding Before House Panel
The controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding has served a "valuable" purpose and does not constitute torture, says former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Testifying on the Bush administration's interrogation rules before the House, Ashcroft said, the "value of the information received from the use of enhanced interrogation techniques — I don't know whether [Tenet] was saying waterboarding or not, but assume that he was for a moment — the value of that information exceeded the value of information that was received from all other sources."
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The August issue of Vanity Fair is set to clear up an important question once and for all: is waterboarding torture? No scientists or military experts were needed for this: just a self-proclaimed "wheezing, paunchy" 59-year-old scribbler. Christopher Hitchens, VF columnist and controversial panelist extraordinaire, who's written previously on the difference between "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture," submitted himself to the technique to make the call.
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Does an interrogation class covering "coercive management techniques" like sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, and exposure sound like something that would be conducted in modern America, or 1950s communist China? The answer is both!
During the Korean War, the US Air Force studied Chinese "torture" tactics used to obtain often false confessions from captured Americans.
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Abu Ghraib Inmates Sue Contractors, Claim Torture
Former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are suing US contractors in four states for alleged torture. The complaints allege that innocent people who were arrested and taken to the prison were subjected to forced nudity, electrical shocks, mock executions, and other inhumane treatment by employees of defense contractors CACI International and L-3 Communications, formerly Titan Corporation.
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Conyers to Yoo: Could President Order Suspect Buried Alive?
In front of the House Judiciary Committee today, when it was Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) turn to ask questions — he went toe to toe with Yoo, the former DOJ attorney and torture-memo author extraordinaire, asking: "could the President order a suspect buried alive?"
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"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong." So says John Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA's counter-terrorism center, explaining in minutes of a 2002 meeting released yesterday, concluding that torture "is basically subject to perception". The minutes were released in conjunction with the Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into the origins of harsh interrogation tactics used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
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David Addington, Cheney's Chief Of Staff, Subpoenaed To Discuss Interrogation Practices A former Justice Department lawyer who wrote a now-repudiated memo allowing harsh interrogations of military prisoners has agreed to testify to Congress about those practices, say House Judiciary Committee officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the panel has not yet made the announcement.
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