A scathing editorial in today's New York Times denounces a US appeal court for having "brushed off" a lawsuit by Canadian Maher Arar. As the paper put it,  Arar "was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials," and "held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go." Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping...

11 November, 2009

The British High Court has ruled that, pending appeal, it will finally publish seven paragraphs detailing the torture CIA agents inflicted on Binyam Mohamed. The court had earlier redacted the passage from a decision about Mohamed at the request of  British officials, who said it would jeopardize US-UK cooperation on security matters. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, quotes an anonymous official describing the explosive contents of the passage: The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated...

18 October, 2009

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald offers a blood-curdling precis of the just released (but still redacted) CIA Inspector General's report (.pdf) on the agency's torture techniques. He concludes: The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting...

25 August, 2009