The comprehensive review by the Senate Armed Services Committee Report (hereinafter Armed Services Report, released April, 2009) reveals that in Nov./Dec. 2001, after Administration officials suspended U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, they actively sought information about “enhanced interrogation” methods and detainee “exploitation.” “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to…
The highly critical CIA Inspector General’s Report about the CIA’s interrogation tactics was withheld from the public. In 2008, a highly redacted version was released only after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. A slightly less redacted version was released (Aug., 2009). The IG report is highly critical of the agency’s…
The authors of the book, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror, are two constitutional scholars; David Cole (Georgetown University Law Center) and Jules Lobel (University of Pittsburgh). They argue that the “war on terror” has not actually made us safer. The problem, they argue, is rooted in the “preventive…
Physicians for Human Rights Report, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations (2009), is a medical analysis of the CIA – Inspector General Report findings (2004, partly declassified in 2008; 2009). noted the central role that health professionals played in the CIA’s torture program. The IG report reveals a level of ethical misconduct that had not…
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 declared that there will be…
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 on a plane piloted by…
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 means ending the practice of…
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) found the lawyers, John Yoo…
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 and here) The High-Value Detainee…
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 who authorized and participated in…
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 than six million pages of…
