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.

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.

A new examination of waterboarding and other “water treatment” torture practices by the Department of Defense, published today at Truthout, seriously calls into question the accepted narrative around waterboarding by the U.S. government. Up until now, it’s been accepted that only the CIA waterboarded detainees at black sites in the “war on terror,” and only three prisoners at that. But a new investigation of available materials from Congress, Inspector General reports, first-hand and second-hand accounts in the press, as well as other documentary evidence, shows that use of waterboarding-style torture was likely used widely by U.S. forces, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantanamo.

In the RT video, Kurnaz talks about his stay in Kandahar, imprisoned by the U.S. military before he was shipped to Guantanamo. He was age 19.

“In Kandahar,” Kurnaz says, “was happening all kinds of things, what you can just imagine under torture. I saw many people get killed under torture in Kandahar.”

Alex Koppelman and Benjamin Wittes, both of whom wrote hit pieces attacking Scott Horton’s award-winning article in Harper’s, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” won a bit of infamy by having their attacks cited in a government brief seeking a denial of a lawsuit filed by the parents of two of the dead prisoners. What’s even more galling is that their articles were poorly researched and basically government apologia. The U.S. government appears to have taken notice, and used their articles for their own purposes, making Koppelman and Wittes, wittingly or not, government proxies in the matter of the Guantanamo suicides controversy.