Jeff Kaye

A renewed hunger strike at California State Prisons has mushroomed to nearly 12,000 participants, as prisoners protest tortuous conditions, including a policy that makes inmates snitch on other prisoners or be held in solitary confinement indefinitely. The strike comes at a time when the California prisons are under attack for unconstitutional conditions of confinement, and in Federal receivership. But the prison authorities are threatening to punish strikers and have already expelled two of their attorneys from attending prison talks.

Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan has published a tell-all book about what he saw and experienced in his role as an FBI interrogator on some of the biggest pre and post 9/11 terror cases. But his biggest revelation is that he and other FBI investigators “were deliberately kept out of the loop” on the existence of Al Qaeda terrorists identified by the CIA. The result, these operatives were not found, nor their links to their associates, the other 9/11 terrorists, and, well, we know the rest…

A highly secret Pentagon intelligence unit was tracking Osama Bin Laden in 2000. They knew the targets included the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They suspected the use of planes to fly into buildings. They were told to fold their tent by higher-ups. A later Inspector General investigation, prompted by the protests of one of the intel unit’s leaders, covered up what really happened. But newly released documents are finally allowing the contours of the full story to come out.

A former Guantanamo guard speaks out to the press about the torture he saw during interrogations. The Army forces him to sign a statement about leaking classified information (though they won’t say what that is), and bars his re-enlistment.

The the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues have issued their findings in the scandalous revelations surrounding the Guatemalan syphilis studies ran by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1940s. Hundred were deliberately infected, dozens died, and it was all illegal and unethical. This is put the latest in a long line of scandals involving unethical and dangerous experiments on human beings by the U.S. government.

A new proposed “casebook” on psychologist ethics in national security settings, written by the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), tells psychologists that when assessing whether an interrogation technique is abusive or not, they should consider, among other factors, whether there are “data to support that the technique is effective in gathering accurate information.” This determination, which places the needs of the military or intelligence gathering entity above that of the person the psychologist is examining, demonstrates how blatantly unethical it is for psychologists to participate in these interrogations.

On August 18, Senator Dianne Feinstein put out a press release indicating that the Department of Defense should consider taking the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, also known as Lariam, out of the DoD drug formulary as it is too dangerous. Feinstein also indicated the drug has been administered to military personnel without the safeguards put in place by a 2009 Department of Defense protocol. But the drug was also used in massive doses on all the Guantanamo detainees, an unprecedented application of the drug on prisoners for supposed preventative purposes.

When considering the effects of unemployment, and the desultory, really uncaring response of the current Democratic administration, as well as Republicans in Congress, to the human devastation of joblessness, it is important to consider the terrible emotional and psychological effects of such unemployment. Such effects are well-documented, but rarely mentioned in articles or blog postings. Somewhere today, someone has taken their life because they felt useless, with no hope of gainful employment, their self-esteem ground down, the sense of meaning and connection severed by redundancy and societal disconnection.

Mamdouh Habib’s water torture in Egypt reminds us that evidence produced by extreme torture at U.S. rendition sites was used to justify the incarceration of innocent men at Guantanamo. The only effective remedy to that, habeas proceedings in U.S. courts, is legally available, but in recent months, has been mainly gutted.

As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn notes at CommonDreams, “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.” More than 3 million people, including Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, US veterans, and their children have either died, sickened or been disabled, [...]