President Obama issued an executive order indicating that any legal interpretation of the law governing torture and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody issued by the Department of Justice between Sept. 11, 2001 and Jan. 20, 2009 were unreliable. (DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report, July, 2009) President Obama also…
Dennis Blair Director of National Intelligence disclosed that President Obama authorized the intelligence community to assassinate American abroad who are considered terrorist threats to the U.S. Some House members raised concerns about these latest developments. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who criticized the intelligence community for misconduct surrounding the 2001 attack…
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama sharply criticized the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program—i.e., outsourcing torture. In an article in he wrote in Foreign Affairs, he stated: “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This…
After a five year investigation, the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility released its report, Investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel’s Memoranda Concerning Issues Relating to the CIA’s Use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” on Suspected Terrorists, accompanied by internal memos on July 29, 2009. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)…
Although most Americans mistakenly believe that President Obama ended the use of torture in interrogations, the reality is that he merely shifted the operations from the CIA, created a newly christened agency, but entrusting its research operation to the same individual that President Bush had appointed. (Read more here, here…
Following a two-year review of declassified government documents related to detainee interrogation, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a report, documenting evidence of illegal and unethical human subject experimentation:
“Doctors Without Morals” an OpEd in The New York Times authored by Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer and visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army Brigadier General, calls for independent investigations into the ethical breaches by doctors and psychologists…
After a two year tug of war between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Chair of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the CIA, the “redaction—studded version” of the Executive Summary (500 pages of the 6,000 page report) was released on December 9, 2014. The Committee staff had reviewed more…
Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terroris a report by The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism, an independent panel of 20 high ranking professionals with expertise in medicine, ethics, psychiatry, public health, military medicine, and law charged that the military and the CIA, “required…
Former CIA analyst, John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. He was officially convicted for leaking the name of a covert officer, but Kiriakou said he was really being targeted for being a whistleblower and revealing the details about post-9/11 torture tactics in the US. Kiriakou was…
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author James Risen, whom Newsweek called “the finest national security reporter of this generation,” infuriated government intelligence officials with his article about massive, surveillance without a warrant by the National Security Agency (NSA) which The New York Times shelved in 2004 for more than a year, having succumbed to…
In Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches, (Oxford University Press, 2014), Rebecca Gordon argues that the 9/11 attacks reopened a question that many Americans had assumed was a settled ethical question, which is: Is torture ever morally permissible? She notes that defenders of torture often defend a practice of purely vicious evil…
