Back in the late 1970’s, many governments in Latin America waged coordinated campaigns of major criminality within their respective borders and against their own citizens….

By Michael J.W. StickingsKarl Rove says he is “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists… Yes, I’m proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They’re appropriate, they’re in conformity with …

JERUSALEM — Israeli riot police dispersed a crowd of masked Palestinian youths throwing stones in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday, in a violent reminder of tensions at the holiest site in the contested city.

In the past, eve…

In close investigation of the OPR report, Marcy Wheeler has uncovered another gruesome element of the Bush/Cheney torture regime.

CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.

PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval….

The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

Now, it’s not clear whether Mitchell and Jessen ever did use mock burial with Abu Zubaydah. Zubdaydah didn’t mention it in the narrative he gave to the ICRC of his treatment.

But there are two more reasons why Yoo’s refusal to approve mock burial is dangerous for the CIA. First, an FBI agent told CIA and DOJ that the technique was borderline torture. Nevertheless, the CIA asked to have the technique available to it.

Also, any legal discussion of why mock burial would be a problem would focus on how torture statutes prohibit the threat of imminent death. Yet after mock burial was specifically excluded as a torture technique, CIA torturers went on to threaten detainees with a power drill and a gun. In other words, someone at that CIA had already been told, specifically, that they could not use the threat of imminent death on detainees. But on at least two occasions, they did so anyway.

Marcy has a follow-up post here.

Via Jason Linkins at HuffPo, Michael Isikoff had a critical article this weekend, following the release of the OPR report.

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions,  according to Justice Department investigators.

Cheney has publicly called for the release of the CIA’s still classified memo and another document, insisting their disclosure will bolster his claim that the rough interrogation tactics he vigorously pushed for while in the White House yielded actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots against the United States.

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

…One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

Greg Sargent discusses this, too and ask a key question. There was wall-to-wall media coverage last spring of Cheney’s claims that these memos would show that torture worked. Will there be wall-to-wall media coverage of the fact that the memo was “plainly inaccurate” and that Cheney was, and is, full of shit?

Gen. David Petraeus, the military hero of the Republican (and even non-Republican) masses and the current leader of U.S. Central Command, cast himself as decidedly outside the Dick Cheney school of counter-terrorism thought on Sunday.

Appear…

It has been two months since my husband, Abdullah Abu Rahmah was arrested. We miss him more every day. This letter from was conveyed from his prison cell by his lawyers.

Via Crooks and Liars:

From C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, torture monger Marc Thiessen claims that waterboarding is not torture and that it worked because Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times in one month, thanked his interrogator after the fact and said “you must do this for all the brothers” and that a “moral burden” was lifted from his shoulders to resist talking during his interrogation.

To refresh your memory of the Zubaydah horror story, the link included above, from Marcy Wheeler, is a must read, with a devastating conclusion: “Abu Zubdaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a month. And for all that torture, he only revealed 10 (perhaps 9) pieces of intelligence deemed useful by the 9/11 Commission.”

That is what Fred Hiatt is endorsing for his editorial page: Cheneyism at it’s most extreme. Horrified by that? If so, there’s a simple remedy. Join New Security Action in petitioning Hiatt to reverse this deplorable hiring.

Buried in a recent Washington Post article is an interesting fact that Harry Shearer points out in a blog on the Huffington Post today: that…

Guest post by Gen. Donald Edwards (Ret.)General Edwards served in the U.S. Army for 37 years, including two tours with eight campaigns in Vietnam. He served as a congressional staffer from 1997-99. He is a resident of Maine and Ashburn, Virginia.This p…