Rights advocates warn of backlash if President Trump pursues torture
It took more than a year’s worth of beatings, sleep deprivation, psychological abuse and threats to his family before former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said he cracked and confessed to being a member of the al-Qaida terror network. The only problem, he said, was that it was a lie.
Judge orders release of military detainee abuse photos
The U.S. must release photographs showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge has ruled in a long-running clash over letting the world see potentially disturbing images of how the military treated prisoners.
Bush officials did little oversight of CIA program
In July 2004, despite growing internal concerns about the CIA’s brutal interrogation methods, senior members of George W. Bush’s national security team gave the agency permission to employ the harsh tactics against an al-Qaida facilitator the agency suspected was linked to a plot to disrupt the upcoming presidential election.
Thomas Sowell: Tortured reasoning
Critics and defenders of the harsh interrogation methods applied to captured terrorists can argue forever over whether those methods were “torture.”
Jamie Stiehm: The California lady lights the dark
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, could not be bullied by the dark CIA.
CIA lied about torture, Senate report suggests
When CIA interrogators were torturing accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at a secret prison in Poland in March 2003, a top CIA analyst asked them to show him a photograph of an alleged terrorist named Majid Khan.
Bitter Mideast greets U.S. torture report with shrug
This week’s revelations about the CIA’s harsh treatment of terror suspects in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks have been met with a collective shrug in the broader Middle East.
CIA fights back after torture report
Top spies past and present campaigned Wednesday to discredit the Senate’s investigation into the CIA’s harrowing torture practices.
Senate torture report: Harsh tactics didn’t net bin Laden
After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency’s greatest successes.
Obama says after 9-11, U.S. ‘tortured some folks’
The United States tortured al Qaida detainees captured after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama said Friday, in some of his most expansive comments to date about a controversial set of CIA practices that he banned after taking office.
Senate panel votes to release CIA torture report
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to release parts of a hotly contested, secret report that harshly criticizes CIA terror interrogations after 9/11, and the White House said it would instruct intelligence officials to cooperate fully.
Woman pleads guilty to abusing, torturing her kids
A Moss Point woman has pleaded guilty to felony charges accusing her of abusing and torturing her three children.
Woman executed in Texas for 1998 torture killing
A woman convicted of torturing and killing a mentally impaired man she lured to Texas with the promise of marriage was put to death Wednesday evening in a rare execution of a female prisoner.
George Will: When solitude is torture
“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects.
George Will: Facing up to what we did in interrogations
“You,” said Jack Nicholson’s Jessep to Tom Cruise’s Kaffee, “have the luxury of not knowing what I know.” Viewers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty ” will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf.
Leonard Pitts: Does torture work?
Does torture work?
It is a Bush-era debate that has found Obama-era relevance because of a new movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” in which torture seems to work quite well.
Ex-Gitmo inmates claim Bin Laden movie excuses torture
Two former Guantanamo detainees on Thursday condemned “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden whose brutal interrogation scenes have sparked a discussion over the use of extreme methods in the U.S. campaign against terror.
Chance encounter leads to torture suspect’s arrest
A chance encounter at a restaurant in a Denver suburb led to the arrest of an Ethiopian immigrant who authorities say tortured political prisoners decades ago in his home country, according to testimony from a Department of Homeland Security official Tuesday.