From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

There are several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR’s Ombdusman, Alica Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR’s ban on using the word “torture” to describe the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics. Given the utter vapidity of her rationale (”there are two sides to the issue. And I’m not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?”), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches “Media Ethics” to graduate students at Georgetown University (my amazement quickly dissipated once I recalled that this is the same institution that, until last year, paid Doug Feith — Doug Feith — to teach students “national security policy” and that Berkeley Law School has John Yoo “teaching law” to its students; next semester at Georgetown: Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).

NPR’s “torture” ban and its Ombudsman’s incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR — and rightfully so. Yesterday, The Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard’s refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard’s refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR’s policy (indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR’s steadfast refusal to use the word “torture” and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that).

Also, along with her On the Media appearance this weekend, Shepard went on another NPR-affiliated show — Patt Morrison’s KPCC Southern California Public Radio program — in a quality segment that included several good questions from Morrison (and even better ones from callers); a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR’s repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics “torture,” juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of “using torture” against detainees; and, finally, the inclusion in the discussion of a Berkeley Professor of Linguistics explaining why it matters so much what the media does in this regard and how virtually all media around the world — other than what he called the “spineless U.S. media” — call these tactics “torture” (the KPCC program credits my criticisms of Shepard for catalyzing the controversy and the segment can be heard here). Amazingly, a caller asked Shepard about the advent of blogs and how it has diversified commentary, and in replying, Shepard put on her most condescending and self-glorifying voice to say this:

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From Harpers
By Scott Horton

Often enough, commentators talk about the prospect that some foreign prosecutors will open criminal cases against Americans involved in some of the Bush Administration’s criminal enterprises, such as the operation of the torture black sites. But such cases are not speculative. They are already pending, and the most advanced of them is now coming close to the conclusion of the trial phase. In Milan, Italian prosecutors are pursuing kidnapping and assault charges against 26 American officials—CIA officers, diplomats, and a military attaché—in connection with the seizure and torture of a radical Islamic cleric known as Abu Omar. According to some observers, the case will conclude by the end of the summer.

Now Robert Seldon Lady, the former Milan station chief of the CIA and a key defendant in the case, has surfaced with an extended interview in Il Giornale, an Italian newspaper.

According to a translation by the Associated Press, Lady has set up a defense that sounds remarkably familiar: he was just following orders.

”I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors,” Lady was quoted as saying by Il Giornale. “It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair. I find consolation in reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was at war with terrorism, and that I could not discuss the orders I received,” he was quoted as saying. “I have worked in intelligence for 25 years, and almost none of my activities in these 25 years were legal in the country in which I was carrying them out.”

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From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hendren reported that one Manadel Jamadi died “of blunt-force injuries” complicated by “compromised respiration” at Abu Ghraib prison “while he was with Navy SEALs and other special operations troops.” Another victim, Abdul Jaleel, died while gagged and shackled to a cell door with his hands over his head.” Yet another prisoner, Maj. Gen. Abid Mowhosh, former commander of Iraq’s air defenses, “died of asphyxiation due to smothering and chest compression” in Qaim, Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

After numerous delays sought by the Obama administration, it is expected that a 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report — aggressively questioning both the efficacy and legality of Bush’s interrogation tactics — will be released tomorrow. A heavily redacted version of that document was already released by the Bush administration in response to an ACLU lawsuit and it remains to be seen how much new information will be included in tomorrow’s version.

In anticipation of the release of that report, there is an important effort underway — as part of the ACLU Accountability Project — to correct a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability. So often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that “torture” is something that was confined to a single tactic (waterboarding) and used only on three “high-value” detainees accused of being high-level Al Qaeda operatives. The reality is completely different.

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least. While some of those deaths were the result of “rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be “torture” when used by others — because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we Look to the Future, not the Past — are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished. Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined.

Read more Torture

From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Take empathy out of the concept of justice and what you have left are rules: simple, mechanical, lifeless.

“Are we really going to insist,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn asked the other day, after President Obama talked about closing down the Guantanamo detention facility, “that the jihadist with a suitcase nuke captured in Times Square be read his Miranda rights . . .?”

In other words, who needs all this complication — the luxury of rights and other froo-frah — when we’ve got so much evil bearing down on us? Oh, Republicans! They operate on a spectrum that runs all the way from mockery to fear as they pursue their single-minded assault on the new president and the agenda he was elected to implement.

If you’re tired of the great American experiment, or never quite believed in it, or have too much to gain by circumventing it, then you’re on the team. The party platform is pretty clear: Let us hollow out every core American value, worship the shell (think Founding Fathers, think Our Precious Freedoms) and quietly keep wealth and power where they belong, in the hands of the entitled.

So, empathy. Can controversy get more inane? The Republicans are aghast that Obama would impose an “empathy standard” on his nominee for the Supreme Court, as though this word could be removed from anything that is human.

Well, it can, of course. This was the George W. Bush era. In case you’ve forgotten: “Once off the plane, they were ordered to assume kneeling positions for hours on end; those who tried to sit back were hit and kicked. These men had just been subjected to a nauseating 20-hour flight from Afghanistan and were now hunched over in the night air without the faintest idea of where they were.” Thus did civil rights attorney Marc Falkoff describe conditions at the Guantanamo detention facility, in an interview back in 2005, when the world was first learning about the hideous U.S. abuse of prisoners.

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From Mother Jones
By David Corn

Dick Cheney, as vice president, was once the president of the Senate. Now he could become the target of a Senate investigation, for the Senate intelligence committee is in the position–and perhaps has the obligation–to answer this question: did Cheney tell senior members of Congress the truth about the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation practices (a.k.a. torture) during hush-hush briefings on Capitol Hill?

Last week, The Washington Post revealed that in 2005 Cheney oversaw at least four classified briefings of congressional leaders about the interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. This was part of an effort to bolster congressional support for the program. Curiously–or not so curiously–the CIA didn’t note Cheney’s participation in these sessions when it recently released a list of the briefings the agency had provided to Congress regarding its interrogation methods.

Cheney’s involvement in the CIA briefings began at a time when several senior Democrats were calling for an investigation of these interrogation techniques. In one of these sessions, Cheney met with Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller III (D-WV), then the senior Democrat on the committee. (Also present were Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the top Democrat on that committee.) And it is this particular meeting that falls within the boundaries of the investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program now being conducted by the Senate intelligence committee. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the current chair of the intelligence committee, is not saying whether her probe will cover Cheney’s participation in these briefings.

Read more Torture Probe

From The Consortium News
By Phil Rockstroh

Even as President Barrack Obama waxed eloquent in Cairo, Egypt, on the moral imperatives of the community of nations, public opinion polls released in the United States revealed that, by a substantial percentage, its citizens believe torture is an acceptable option for interrogation of suspects deemed terrorists by various U.S. governmental agencies.

In addition, other polls show a majority of the American public hold the opinion that the all-American theme park of state torture, located at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open for business and continue to welcome guests from around the globe, taking them for the ride of their lives through the dark id of the American psyche.

These revelations should not come as a shock. Torture, official secrecy, and other sundry apparatus and accouterments of the national security state are about the only viable enterprises remaining in this declining nation.

Moreover, one of the defining traits of the insecure (both among men and nations) is to stand, bristling in a paranoid posture, with feet planted in stubborn defiance of changing circumstances, snarling at invisible threats and imagined affronts, as life moves on with indifferent grace.

Read more Toxic Innocence

From Tom Dispatch
By Alfred W. McCoy

If, like me, you’ve been following America’s torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can’t help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.

Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.

Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the Abu Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of torture, covertly developed by the CIA over decades using countless millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America’s secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

Despite the 24 version of events, the Bush administration did not simply authorize traditional, bare-knuckle torture. What it did do was develop to new heights the world’s most advanced form of psychological torture, while quickly recognizing the legal dangers in doing so. Even in the desperate days right after 9/11, the White House and Justice Department lawyers who presided over the Bush administration’s new torture program were remarkably punctilious about cloaking their decisions in legalisms designed to preempt later prosecution.

Read more Mind Maze

From TruthDig
By Jason Leopold

Dick Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington, pressured the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2005 to quickly approve a torture memo that authorized CIA interrogators to use a combination of barbaric techniques during interrogations of “high-value” detainees, despite objections from senior DOJ officials, according to emails written by James Comey, the agency’s former deputy attorney general.

In the emails, Comey also wrote that then Attorney General (AG) Alberto Gonzales was “weak” and had essentially allowed Cheney and Addington to politicize the DOJ. The emails can be found here: Documents: Justice Department Communication on Interrogation Opinions.

“The AG explained that he was under great pressure from the Vice President to complete both memos, and that the President had even raised it last week, apparently at the VP’s request and the AG had promised they would be ready early this week,” Comey wrote. Gonzales “added that the VP kept telling him ‘we are getting killed on the Hill.’”

“It leaves me feeling sad for the Department and the AG … I just hope that when this all comes out, this institution doesn’t take the hit, but rather the hit is taken by those individuals who occupied positions at [Office of Legal Counsel] and [Office of the Attorney General] and were too weak to stand up for the principles that undergird the rest of this great institution.”

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From Global Research
By Paul Craig Roberts

America has lost her soul, and so has her president.

A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.

The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.

The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to third world prisons to be interrogated is to be continued.

Read more Policy