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Republican Senator John McCain has denounced the use of torture on terrorism suspects during the administration of former president George W. Bush. "I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan," said McCain. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, the Arizona senator said that the enhanced interrogation techniques also helped al Qaeda recruit additional members. "I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq,” said McCain, who added that he...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator John McCain, a torture survivor from his days as a captive during the Vietnam War, says his private comments about harsh interrogation methods were misrepresented by the Bush Administration in a recently released legal document intended to justify a six-day-long course of sleep deprivation for one CIA detainee in November of 2007. The newly declassified memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel mentions a secret briefing McCain and other members of Congress received sometime before October 17, 2006. The memo says the lawmakers were told about six CIA interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation....

Says Abuse of Detainees Helped al Qaeda Recruit Terrorists, But Opposes Investigation into "Enhanced" Interrogations. BY MICHELLE LEVI Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he thinks it is a "serious mistake" for the administration to focus on the past when investigating the interrogation techniques of the CIA under President Bush on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "For us now to go back, I think, would be a serious mistake. "I believe that the president was right when he said we ought to go forward and not back. I worry about the morale and effectiveness of the CIA. I worry about this thing...

And the Democrats have won. President Obama will use the emotional capital of the Senator's passing to push through--via reconciliation--legislation that SHALL include the public option that the Pelosi wing of the party wants. Any Republicans who dare to speak against this will be portrayed as heartless demagogues, spitting on the grave of a liberal legend.

WASHINGTON – A lecture by the woman who became the public face of the Abu Ghraib scandal was canceled Friday at the Library of Congress after threats led to concerns about staff safety. Former Army reservist Lynndie England had been scheduled to discuss her biography as part of a veterans forum on Capitol Hill. The book by author Gary S. Winkler is called "Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World." Members of the Library of Congress Professional Association, the employee group holding the talk, received an e-mail from president Angela Kinney saying the event was...

Five years after the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos came to light, Lynndie England says the government's "softening up tactics" are acceptable ways to get information from prisoners. In an interview with the BBC, England defends herself and fellow soldiers who posed Iraqi prisoners in degrading positions for photographs in 2004. "Compared to what they do to us, that's like nothing," England says in the BBC video, referring to instances where Americans were decapitated, burned, dragged through the streets or hung from a bridge by insurgents. She likens the physical degradation that appears in the Abu Ghraib photos to the...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. John McCain said Thursday the United States must recover from the "moral failures" of human rights abuses and called for Americans to stand on the "right side" of history as a leader of the free world. "I believe American leadership in opposition to human rights abuses, not silence, is the truest expression of our national character," McCain said in a speech to the Junior State of America, a civics education organization for high school students. "The United States since its founding has embraced a set of moral duties, among which I believe is the obligation to...

KEYSER, W.Va. – More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal spends most of her days confined to the four walls of her home. Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn't landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.

In this deeply disturbing interview, the trailer trash torturer who appalled the world by appearing in shocking 'souvenir' photographs remains utterly unrepentant and says she has 800 MORE torture photos that could rock the White House Normally, not much happens in Keyser, West Virginia, but today the folks in this quaint little railroad town, nestling in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, are spoilt for choice. Either they can whoop and holler along to fiddle music at the annual Strawberry Festival or head down to the bookshop, where a local 'celebrity' - as her agent-cum-lawyer describes her - is signing...

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

In our view May 14: Obama Flip-Flops By trying to hide truth about prisoner abuse, president abuses public's right to know Thursday, May 14 | 1:00 a.m. Much of President Barack Obama's success in last year's election was based on his promise to foster open government, transparency and accountability. Now he has reversed that course as he tries to block the release of hundreds of photos showing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan being abused. How many more times will Obama reverse or abandon positions that he articulated in his campaign for the presidency? His reasons for changing his mind in...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says the detainee abuse photos he wants to block from release are "not particularly sensational" and would do no good if published. He said he will not tolerate abuse of prisoners. But he also said Wednesday he had directed his legal team to fight the court-ordered release of the photos because he was concerned about how they might affect the safety of U.S. troops. Obama spoke on the South Lawn of the White House, not long after his decision to fight in court to block the photos' release was made public by aides.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will try to block the court-ordered release of hundreds of photos showing U.S. troops allegedly abusing prisoners, reversing his position after military commanders warned the graphic images could stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger soldiers. ... The White House announced Obama's decision Wednesday, after top military commanders in the two wars expressed fears that showing the pictures could put their troops at higher risk. ...

Obama Opposes Releasing Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse President Obama has decided not to release the photos which the Pentagon had planned to release by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. A senior administration official told FOX News that President Obama told his legal advisers last week that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos because he believes they would endanger U.S. troops, and that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented in federal court. "Obama would be...

If President Obama wanted to refrain from releasing these photos in order to protect the military forces he commands or promote the security of Americans — his two highest obligations as president — he could do so by simply issuing an executive order. The applicable statute expressly allows for it, just as it provides for Congress — now in the firm control of the president and his party — to withhold the photos from disclosure. Instead, Obama and congressional Democrats are choosing to release the photos. They are making that choice fully aware that it will cost lives. It is...

News reports described the meeting as a touching and powerful coming together of the president and these long-suffering families. Mr. Obama had won over even those who opposed his decision to close Gitmo by assuaging their fears that the review of some 245 current detainees would result in dangerous jihadists being set free. “I did not vote for the man, but the way he talks to you, you can’t help but believe in him,” said John Clodfelter to the New York Times. His son, Kenneth, was killed in the Cole bombing. “[Mr. Obama] left me with a very positive feeling...

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White House says Holder will decide on prosecutions; Obama opposes special commission on Bush-era policies. BY WILL DUNHAM WASHINGTON, April 26 (Reuters) - Releasing classified memos showing whether harsh Bush-era interrogation methods yielded useful information from terrorism suspects is not necessary, Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday in a public disagreement with former Vice President Dick Cheney. After President Barack Obama released four memos this month revealing the Bush administration's legal justification for methods such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning -- Cheney called for declassifying any memos showing that these techniques succeeded in producing valuable information....

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Democratic senator said Sunday independent investigators should determine whether Bush administration officials ought to face charges over the harsh interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists. The White House had hoped to put the matter behind it by letting the attorney general make that call. Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogations policies. But they stopped short of demanding charges against the Bush-era lawyers and other officials who devised the policies that critics have denounced as torture....

America is bracing itself for another Abu Ghraib-style scandal as Washington agreed to release fresh pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Defense Department will release a 'substantial number' of photos before May 28, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The move is in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the group in 2004 and will include images from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan at locations other than Abu Ghraib, the group said. 'These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far...

FYI: The org "World Can't Wait" is an "anti-war" front for the Revolutionary Communist Party. The RCP, on their website, calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Former Abu Ghraib Brigadier General, Janis Karpinski, is listed as an "endorser" of the WCW movement on the World Can't Wait website. House Judiciary Committee chairman/Bush administration "torture investigators", democrat John Conyers Jr of Michigan, and HJC member, Maxine Waters, have also each given their endorsements to the Revolutionary Communist Party movement/organization, "World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime" (they'll probably be dropping the "Drive Out the Bush Regime" portion of...

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to...

Sen. John McCain warned that a pursuit for charges against Bush administration officials who helped design harsh interrogation tactics used on terrorist suspects would turn into a "witch hunt." Speaking on CBS' The Early Show, the former Vietnam POW and Republican opponent of President Barack Obama in the 2008 election, said there is no evidence that he knows of that shows the officials who approved the tactics weren't giving plausible legal advice. This will have a "chilling effect on legal counsel," McCain said. McCain, who was himself tortured as a U.S. soldier by his North Vietnamese captors, was a vocal...

Janis Karpinski, the former commander of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison who was demoted in the wake of the revelations of abuse there, tells Al Jazeera about her reaction to a report that says senior Bush administration officials were involved in approving torture. Report also says Cheney and Rumsfeld were behing the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib. Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and writer on national security issues based in New York, tells Al Jazeera's Shihab Rattansi a new senate report links the White House to the abusive techniques used in US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an attempt to win sanctions against a former top Bush administration official over brutal interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a lawyers group deployed a strategy Monday that worked against Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II is the first of several former policy makers the National Lawyers Guild wants reprimanded, suspended or disbarred for their roles in detainee abuse, said Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area guild chapter that filed a complaint against Haynes with the California Bar Assn. Haynes, now an attorney with Chevron Corp....

Two weeks ago, I was among a small group of USS Cole and 9/11 victims’ families who met with President Obama at the White House. Despite President Obama’s assurances that the safety and security of the American people is his number one priority, I left the meeting with little confidence that the President appreciates the grave consequences of shutting down Guantanamo or the complex problems associated with adjudicating detainee cases in the federal court system. Indeed, he told us that he is “not at all concerned” about the security issues of bringing the detainees to the U.S. His rationale for...

Abu Ghraib prison is reopening under Iraqi control(video). Abu Ghraib prison is reopening under Iraqi control. The prison was closed in 2006. It was handed over to the Iraqis and never used in any significant way until now. Abu Ghraib will now be called the "Baghdad Central Prison". We can all sleep well knowing the Iraqis treat their prisoners in a more humane manner than the Americans did. If you believe that, you have stopped drinking the Cool-aid and started eating the powder straight from the package.

Academic Creeds by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 18, 2009 It’s one thing when jaundiced observers such as your servant dissect higher education. It’s quite another when the dissection is done by insiders, particularly when they haven’t left their day jobs yet. “Here is the question: Are we really free today, or are we now becoming more and more enslaved by the constructs of the Übermensch-the superman-the power brokers, the elites, the ‘fittest’ who have survived in the political arenas of campaigns or campuses?” Oklahoma Wesleyan University president Everett Piper asks in the January 2009 issue of Perspective magazine. “Are we...

BAGHDAD – Iraq will reopen the notorious Abu Ghraib prison next month, but it's getting a facelift and a new name, a senior justice official said Saturday. The heavily fortified compound of gray, stonewalled buildings and watchtowers has come to symbolize American abuse of some prisoners captured in Iraq after photos were released showing U.S. soldiers sexually humiliating inmates at the facility. The scandal stoked support for the insurgency and was one of the biggest setbacks to the U.S. military effort to win the peace in Iraq. The renovated facility will be called Baghdad's Central Prison because the name Abu...

A resident of Abu Ghraib shops in the market, Jan. 3. The Abu Ghraib market, west of Baghdad, is in the process of a facelift. Plans are in place to expand the current market and refurbish existing structures. Photo by Benjamin Roark, 25th Infantry Division. ABU GHRAIB — As the sun crests the horizon and local merchants open their doors for another business day, a line of dump trucks forms in the city market here. This caravan sits waiting to receive their cargo of mangled steel, rubble and concrete lying nearby. The foreman issues sharp, quick commands to the drivers....

Sen. John McCain (?-Ariz.), joining with liberal Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), issued a report last week on the abuse of terrorist detainees. The report accuses former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes, and David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, of causing the torture of terrorist detainees. But the report is a clumsy calumny, contradicting the factual conclusions of earlier, far more credible investigations. Predictably, it was enough for the New York Times to call for the appointment of a prosecutor to consider criminal charges against Rumsfeld and the others....

A Senate committee report makes clear that top officials were responsible for abuse and torture A naked Iraqi detainee is attacked by dogs held by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. It wasn't just a few bad apples. It never was. Of course, the Pentagon and the Justice Department wanted us to believe that the abuses that Americans carried out at Abu Ghraib were strictly the excesses of a small group of poorly trained and inadequately supervised reservists. But consider cases such as that of Imad Khudair, swept up in a raid and held for nine months in 2003, before being...

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to portions of a report released on Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The report's executive summary, made public by the committee's Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on Dec. 2, 2002.

BAGHDAD — For years, the western Baghdad District of Abu Ghraib has been synonymous with violence and unrest. Tales of prisoner abuse, convoy ambushes and Soldiers missing in action were associated with the small Baghdad suburb. With the security situation becoming more stable in Baghdad and the surrounding areas, and the Iraqi security forces assuming more security responsibility each week, efforts to improve and revitalize areas such as Abu Ghraib are now starting to move forward. Local tribal and religious leaders, along with Government of Iraq, Iraqi security forces and Multi-National Division – Baghdad leaders, gathered to celebrate one such...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

Thirteen East Bay priests, rabbis and ministers asked Congressional leaders from California on Wednesday to urge President-elect Barack Obama to ban the use of torture by U.S. agencies as one of his first acts in office.Meeting with the top staff of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein in San Francisco, the group of pastors also asked them to form a Select Committee of Congress to investigate the use of torture by the U.S. government during the past seven years. "It's with that sense of new possibility with the new administration coming in," said the Rev. Karen Stokes of...

NEW YORK — A man was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday for conspiring to blow up a busy Manhattan subway station. James Elshafay, had pleaded guilty and testified against the mastermind of the plot, Shahawar Matin Siraj, at a trial last year in federal court in Brooklyn. Elshafay, the son of an Egyptian father and Irish mother, testified that after meeting Siraj at an Islamic bookstore, they hatched an initial scheme — later abandoned — to blow up the four bridges connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn and New Jersey. He also told jurors at Siraj's trial that...

On Evil Bethany Stotts, June 23, 2008 Is evil the result of human choice or manufactured by social circumstances? Professor Philip Zimbardo, known for his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, opted for the latter explanation at a recent CATO book forum. Zimbardo told the audience that he believes Lucifer was expelled from heaven not for sinning, but for disobeying an authority figure. “It’s really a story about what happens when you challenge authority—you go to hell,” said the Stanford University professor. The author of The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo believes that any person has the capacity for terrible deeds, torture,...

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to...

he two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement. Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of...

Stone took over a military detention system in April 2007 that was known mainly by the legacy of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison west of Baghdad that was given back to the Iraqis in 2006. The detention facilities had become a breeding ground for extremism, hardening the radical beliefs of those held, U.S. officials have acknowledged. But under Stone, the military’s new focus on counter-insurgency operations was brought to the detention system, said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. "[Stone] revolutionized the way we perform detainee operations in Iraq,""Petraeus said. Calling Stone a man of...

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2008 – Four years ago, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison was center-stage amid allegations of detainee abuse, and coalition forces suddenly cast as conquerors instead of liberators, losing the trust of the Iraqi people. Video Conscientious decisions and new detainee programs have helped the coalition turn the corner on the road to regaining that lost trust, Multinational Force Iraq’s commander of detainee operations said yesterday in a Baghdad news conference. “Today, we are still trying to regain that trust, and I want to tell you once again there was no justification for what happened at Abu Ghraib,”...

Unfriendly Fire From Left by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 13, 2008 In World War II and even into the Cold War, academics, journalists and politicians tempered their criticism of American foreign policy with a concern for U. S. troops serving in harms way. Sixty years later, men and women in U. S. military combat fatigues can count on no such sympathy from American elites. This treatment is on vivid display in the new book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Perhaps not too surprisingly,...

An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors Monday, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months. Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003. Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as "Big Steve." The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics. Phone messages left...

Of Georgetown Law and Abu Ghraib by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 14, 2008 A gathering of academics and human rights activists at Georgetown Law last week delivered some predictable broadsides at the Bush regime but also some unexpected critiques of the Clinton Administration, from which nearly half of the panelists came. Of the seven Clinton alumni to hit the podium, more than half made the case for American relativism and brought up Abu Ghraib, frequently in the same sentence: • President Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, now a visiting law professor at Georgetown, evoked the “image of Iraqi civilians...

This is a scattered editorial. Rich begins by puffing an Abu Ghraib film supposed to excite the masses. It doesn't sound interesting and, to Rich's credit, he gives up on this score. He then confesses his confusion and unhappiness and blames the American people for disinterest in his and the NYT's preoccupation with Iraq an alleged atrocities. "...This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the...

The release of another previously classified Justice Department memo on the interrogation of terrorists (here and here) has reignited the specious “torture narrative,” propounded gleefully by Bush-administration critics. The narrative holds that the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was the direct and even intended consequence of a set of executive-branch legal opinions on the status of terrorist detainees and the president’s wartime authority. The New York Times announced in an April 4 editorial that the latest declassified memo leaves no doubt that the “abuse of prisoners” was “calculated policy” rather than “rogue acts.” “When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became...

Was just over on IMDB and saw the trailer for an upcoming flick titled "Standard Operating Procedure." It's about Abu Ghraib. Another anti-American, anti-military film coming our way. Hey, no worry though - they support the troops./sarc. On a related note, I'm sure everyone has heard the latest inane utterings of the insane Ted Turner. Not the idiotic bs about us being canibals ten years from now but his slanderous comments on our troops, our mission, our military. But hey, we can never question their patriotism, right! It makes me boil with anger.

Bush's War Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9 P.M. (check local listings) From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge-for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March...