Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a major new report detailing how the Bush Administration and other allied governments tortured and imprisoned opponents of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The prisoners were then rendered to Gaddafi’s own prisons where many of them were tortured. Perhaps the most explosive new information in the report concerns charges by one of the prisoners that he was waterboarded. Meanwhile, a new document released by a Canadian news outlet charges former Guantanamo child prisoner Omar Khadr was subjected to waterboarding-like torture while in U.S. custody.

A State Department internal memo opposing the Justice Department’s arguments for CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture—has been released. The memo from February 2006 was written by Philip Zelikow, who at the time was a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It was believed that all copies of the memo had been destroyed, but on April 3, [...]

As part of a follow-up from the CIA’s destruction of torture videotapes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been working to force the CIA to release cables that describe how the agency used waterboarding. The CIA asserts the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit should not induce the release of documents because waterboarding involves [...]

I was pleased to be asked to appear on the successful RT news program The Alyona Show earlier today. The interview was offered as a follow-up to an investigatory article published at Truthout last week, which showed that all protestations by Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. government authorities aside, the U.S. military did engage in torture remarkably similar to waterboarding, if not waterboarding itself. An accompanying article was also posted here at The Dissenter.

My investigation, based on multiple detainee accounts, news reports, doctor review of selected Guantanamo medical records, testimony before a Congressional committee, and Department of Justice and Department of Defense investigations, revealed that a number of detainees at different DoD sites, including Guantanamo, were held down and had streams of water from a hose directed for minutes at a time between their mouth and nose.

The article includes video of the interview.

Keith Olbermann opened his “Countdown” show on Current TV last night with a segment on new revelations on the use of water torture at American military facilities like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Olbermann specifically cited a story that ran on Truthout.org by Jeff Kaye, who regularly writes and publishes to this blog (although Olbermann did not [...]

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.”