What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
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thabet
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thabet
In its annual report on human rights abuses, the Foreign Affairs Committee has told the British government it cannot rely on US assurances regarding torture and extraordinary rendition.
The FAC said there should be a thorough analysis of interrogation techniques used by the US given the differences in how torture is defined by the two countries. The committee also reminded the government that it was under a legal obligation to ensure flights entering UK airspace or land at UK airports are not used for extraordinary rendition, even if there are no detainees on board (e.g. refueling).
The report also called on the government to investigate Pakistan’s role in torturing British suspects who have dual (British/Pakistani) nationality.
The full report by the FAC can be found online (pdf).
Glenn Greenwald has some more on this from an American perspective.
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thabet
The US has Egypt and Jordan.
Britain has Pakistan.
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aziz
Daniel Larison on torture and detainees.
Of course, when the government is allowed to define who an “enemy combatant” is, up to and including U.S. citizens such as Padilla, it takes away the possibility of reviewing the very designation that strips the detainee of legal rights, and then without those rights he cannot contest his detention. Better still from the government’s perspective, because the detainees are charged with terrorism and would not have been uniformed members of any military, they cannot claim the status of prisoners of war and so the government tries to find a way to evade international legal obligations as well. The argument that these detainees should not have access to the courts relied on the belief that terrorist suspects should not be processed through civilian courts, which presupposed that their status as terrorist suspects had some basis in reality. The entire system was justified according to the assumption that the government never makes mistakes and always acts in good faith, when we know that the opposite is typically the case.
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baraka
Christopher Hitchens didn’t think waterboarding was torture - until he tried it.
Irving responds, “I wonder how he feels about capital punishment?”
[HT: Umm Yasmin]
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aziz
Willow recently threw down the gauntlet about waterboarding and torture over at Dean’s World.
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aziz
The strange case of Mohammad Qatanani, facing deportation from the US after allegations of terrorist ties, because of confessions made while in Israeli custody.
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muse
Amnesty’s water-boarding video. Extremely disturbing.
