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Pakistani police took custody of a 12-year-old girl allegedly tortured by her husband and sent her to a women’s police station. “We picked Shahnaz after receiving information that her husband was torturing her,” Sartaj Jagirani of the Waleed police station told Pakistani daily Dawn. She would be sent to hospital for a medical check-up, he added. Her husband Abdul Latif Brohi and brother Aijaz Siyal have been arrested. Shahnaz told Dawn that her brother Ismail had sold her in Hyderabad for 80,000 Pakistani Rupees (700 Euro) when she was only five years old. She was rescued about three months ago...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFbfAqJ4hRM I just read General Robbie Risner's book "The Passing of the Night - My Seven Years as a Prisoner or the North Vietnamese." I have also read "When Hell Was In Session" by Admiral Jeremiah Denton. These men were tortured to a point that Americans cannot even comprehend. Risner had his arms literally ripped from their sockets, and when he heard the inhuman high pitched screams, he didn't even realize at the time that they were his. The pain was that bad. McCain went through the same torture of being hung on a meat hook with his arms pinned...

John McCain has won an unusual endorsement for his presidential campaign - from the man who was his jailer in wartime Vietnam. John McCain was shot down and badly wounded while bombing a Hanoi power station on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam in 1967. He was a prisoner for over five years. Because Mr McCain's father was commander of all American forces in the Pacific theatre, the Vietnamese called him "the prince". Tran Trong Duyet, the commandant of Hao Lo prison in Hanoi from 1968-73, recalls Mr McCain "as a typical child of a traditional military family. He was...

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar? According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured. Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks...

Jonathan King told teachers at his north Georgia alternate public school that he couldn’t stand being locked within the four concrete walls of a small seclusion room. In 2004, just weeks after threatening suicide, the 13-year-old eighth-grader hanged himself in the room, using a cord a teacher provided him to hold up his pants, court records show. Now, four years later, as the Alpine Program in Gainesville starts its new school year, Jonathan’s parents are suing the program and the agency that oversees it. Don and Tina King of Murrayville, just outside Gainesville, say the treatment their son received at...

By now, we are all familiar with the specious European efforts to bring President Bush up on charges of "crimes against humanity" because of the authorized torture he and his administration supposedly instituted. Oh, the Euros are in high dudgeon over their assumed sense of moral superiority in their claims against the evil, evil America. Despite the rapidly improving situation in Iraq, the calls to throw our national leaders into some Euroweenie calaboose have surged unabated. Yet, as these same hypocrites have been funding a supporting torture (not to mention financing the exportation of terrorism) for decades and now there...

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Bush administration told the CIA in 2002 that its interrogators working abroad would not violate U.S. prohibitions against torture unless they “have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” according to a previously secret Justice Department memo released Thursday.

Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant urged Muslims to press on with their jihad against U.S. and Western interests in the "land of Islam," saying that Islamic nations must be allowed to run their own affairs without foreign interference. The Arabic language television network Al-Jazeera aired on Friday portions of the video by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 man in al Qaeda -- his first message in four months. "Kicking out the invading crusader forces and the Jews will not only happen by demonstrations and by shouting in the streets. Reform and expulsion of the invaders out of the Muslim land...

IT was a time of secrecy and fear. Fear of a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home. And it created a new terror. In the early 1950s, American troops were being killed and captured by the thousands in Korea. Panic spread that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war. The technique was called “brainwashing.” And suddenly it’s worth recalling what brainwashing was about. Because now we know, from an article in The New York Times last week, that in a new time of...

Dozens of teenage girls have been made pregnant after being taken into the bush and raped in torture camps by President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia operating near Mudzi, a town 100 miles northeast of Harare, human rights workers allege. Amid the continuing chaos, there are as yet no clear statistics, but the sharp rise in teenage pregnancies seems almost certain to have been repeated elsewhere in rural districts. Some of the victims will have contracted HIV-Aids, which has ravaged Zimbabwe for years and helped reduce average life expectancy to 34 for women, the lowest in the world. ... There are...

When a distinguished American military commander accuses the United States of committing war crimes in its handling of detainees, you know that we need a new way forward. “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated abuses in Iraq, declares in a powerful new report on American torture from Physicians for Human Rights. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we...

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure." 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. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the...

I read Joe Galloway’s columns and often disagree with him. But Joe usually makes points that deserve consideration. Joe is not weak or weak-minded; I’ve told him to his face that he’s a mean old man. But I respect Joe. He has fought in pitched combat side-by-side with our troops. Joe thinks we’re losing the Iraq War and I believe we’re winning. Even though we disagree about Iraq, Joe and I both believe that torture is wrong. Last week, I was invited by Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, one of the world’s leading experts on al Qaeda, to speak to a group...

Almost 60 House liberals, along with prominent lawyers, journalists, and retired officials and military officers, are lobbing an inflammatory charge--"war crimes"--toward a large number of the Bush administration's most senior current and former officials and lawyers. These critics accuse them of approving torture and other illegal interrogation methods. We are likely to hear a growing clamor for appointment of a special prosecutor, presumably by the next administration. And human-rights activists are already suggesting that their friends abroad should snatch and prosecute any former members of what they call the Bush "torture team" who dare visit Europe. These critics are right...

Protestors rallied Downtown yesterday to as part of the United Nations' International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The organization Pittsburgh Against Torture held a silent procession through Downtown to raise awareness of the on-going incarceration and torture of prisoners.

New York: A majority of Indians favour the use of torture on terrorists to help save innocent lives, going against the world's majority, who disapprove of torture methods in all cases, a public opinion poll in 19 countries has found. In India, 59 percent want an exception made for terrorists, that is more than the 54 percent in Nigeria and 51 percent in Turkey, the two other countries where majorities favour torture of terrorists, according to the WorldPublicOpinion.org survey of over 19,000 respondents. Also in the news: A Q Khan threatens to expose Musharraf | Column: Is the N-noose a...

Boy George's US solo summer tour is in doubt after authorities refused to issue him with a visa, citing looming overseas legal issues. A statement from the singer and DJ's management said it was in relation to a forthcoming London trial on false imprisonment charges. The 47-year-old denied the allegations in 2007 and was released on bail. The former Culture Club frontman's 24-date tour is scheduled to begin on 11 July in Las Vegas. "At the moment, Boy George cannot come to the United States of America because he has been refused permission to enter by the USA Administration," the...

A U.S. federal appeals court has struck down the U.S. military's classification of a Guantanamo Bay detainee as an enemy combatant. This is the first time the U.S. court system has overruled the Bush administration's designation of a detainee since the Guantanamo facility began operations in early 2002. The court ruled in favor of a Chinese Muslim, Huzaifa Parhat, who has spent the last six years in detention and is one of more than 100 detainees to challenge their enemy combatant status in the U.S. judicial system. The court directed the U.S. military to release Parhat, transfer him out of...

We can't tell you her name but she was able to tell a jury about what happened to her. And her determination to recount some of the most incredible savagery ever heard in a courtroom is testimony to her courage and her desire to see justice done. The recall of a Columbia University student that unfolded in a New York City hall of justice on Monday was almost too hard to hear. The 24-year-old victim sat in the witness box with her jaw clenched and her mind focused, as she retold the unimaginable ordeal she claims she suffered at the...

Tran Trong Duyet - a sprightly retiree and amateur ballroom dancer - must rank as one of John McCain's more unlikely supporters.Four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, Mr Duyet was in charge of the notorious Hoa Lo prison - the place where Mr McCain says he was brutally beaten and tortured during five-and-a-half years as an American prisoner of war. "McCain is my friend," said 75-year-old Mr Duyet as he feeds the caged birds he now keeps in his garden in this coastal city. "If I was American, I would vote for him." Informal chatsNavy pilot John McCain was...

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) has declared June 2008 to be “Torture Awareness Month.’ Churches are urged to hang a banner on their outdoor marquee insisting: “Torture is Wrong.” By “torture,” NRCAT is exclusively interested in the detention techniques of U.S. forces with terror suspects around the world. NRCAT is not very interested in the routine torture policies of countless regimes that torment not just the criminal but also regime opponents, among other countless victims. According to NRCAT, about 300 churches have agreed to fly the anti-torture banner. There are about 400,000 churches in America.

Why didn't the press ask Physicians for Human Rights about how weak most of their evidence of torture by Americans turned out to be? Despite claims uncritically repeated in some media outlets, medical examinations of 11 former detainees of U.S. military prison facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba advanced by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) do not provide open-and-shut examples of prisoner abuse. Instead PHR offers up one-sided accounts based largely upon allegations made by former detainees to an organization with a predefined political agenda and financed in part by Bush Administration opponent and convicted felon George Soros and his...

A seven-year-old boy was kept chained in a closet as relatives hacked off pieces of his flesh to eat, a court has heard. In a case with echoes of the Fritzl family horror in Austria, Ondrej Mauerova was partially skinned in the closet in a cellar at his home in Kurim near Brno, in the Czech Republic, according to reports. The abuse – involving members of a religious cult – was uncovered by chance last May when a neighbour's television baby monitor picked up graphic pictures of what was happening next door. Ondrej and his nine-year-old brother Jakub were locked...

High-Ranking Abuse by Ben Giles June 20, 2008 High ranking officials at the Department of Defense undertook the process of authorizing illegal interrogation tactics in the year following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in his opening statement. “In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives.” Assisted by questionable legal council from...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former terrorist suspects detained by the United States were tortured, according to medical examinations detailed in a report released Wednesday by a human rights group. The Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights reached that conclusion after two-day clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees, who had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The detainees were never charged with crimes. "We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering," said Dr. Allen Keller, a medical evaluator for the study. In a 121-page report, the...

A 5-year-old Los Angeles boy is fighting for his life after police say he was severely tortured with burns and food deprivation by his lesbian mother and her live-in girlfriend. Officials say the child has countless cigarette burns all over his body, including his genitals, and can't open his hands because he was forced to put them flat on a hot stove. The boy was also repeatedly beaten and forced to sit in his own urine, police said. "In my time in policing in 27 years, I have never seen anybody with these kinds of injuries that has lived," Los...

About a year after his release from a North Vietnamese prison camp, McCain sat down to address one of the most vexing questions confronting his fellow prisoners: Why did some choose to collaborate with the North Vietnamese? Mr. McCain blamed American politics. “The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted to the National War College and never released to the public. Prisoners who questioned “the legality of the war” were “extremely easy marks...

Actor calls soldiers 'wimps,' says they go into the Army to torture prisoners Apparently, the actor has now apologized:Rupert Everett apologises for calling soldiers 'wimps' "The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000ft above the war zone to avoid getting hit. I don't think there is any point in having wars if that's how you're going to behave. It's pathetic. All this whining!" He went on to say: "The whole point of being in the Army is going to war and getting...

WASHINGTON, June 7 (UPI) -- A group of Democratic members of Congress Saturday asked U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to name a special counsel to investigate torture. The request came an a letter signed by 56 members of Congress -- including John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., who heads the House Judiciary Committee, and Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who sit on the Intelligence Committee -- The Washington Post reported. The letter said "information indicates that The Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law." Conyers said...

If you thought we hit bottom when Kos went after McCain's teeth, another popular liberal blog has picked up the shovel and is going after McCain's war injuries: First off, I find it fascinating that John McCain, who is refusing to vote for the GI Bill for our troops because "it's too generous," is himself getting $58,000 a year, tax-free, from the US government for his military service. Had McCain been getting that amount every year since Vietnam, that would total $2,000,000 for the man who isn't into overgenerous government. I just find that interesting. His staff responded with the...

Nearly 60 House Democrats yesterday urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists. In a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, the lawmakers cited what they said is "mounting evidence" that senior officials personally sanctioned the use of waterboarding and other aggressive tactics against detainees in U.S.-run prisons overseas. An independent investigation is needed to determine whether such actions violated U.S or international law, the letter stated.

The time crept by so slowly and painfully that the 23-year-old Columbia University journalism student had decided it was time to end her life. Over many torturous hours, she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to perform oral sex, a prosecutor told a jury on Thursday. The accused, Robert A. Williams, 31, had doused the woman’s face and body with boiling water and bleach, forced her to swallow handfuls of pills and to chase them with beer, sealed her mouth with glue, and bound her wrists and legs with shoelaces, cords and duct tape, said the prosecutor, Ann P....

TORTURE OR REASONABLE FORCE? Okay, torture sucks. So, too, does the idea of people being detained without right to counsel, without the freedom to protest their status, etc. Now let’s move on to a hypothetical. Picture yourself in a situation in which you have excellent reason to believe that your family has been targeted by some fanatical, religious nutcase and the nutcase’s buddies. You have irrefutable information that their plan is to execute you, your wife, kids, grandkids, friends, neighbors, everyone you know, and they’ve already shown their expertise at such executions by killing thousands of others. Their Nutcase Army...

NEWARK, New Jersey: A Muslim cleric on Monday graphically described the torture to which he claims he was subjected in Israeli custody, as he fought to block U.S. efforts to deport him on grounds he lied on his residency application. The issue of torture is at the heart of the deportation proceedings against Mohammad Qatanani, a Palestinian who has been the spiritual leader at the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey since 1996. U.S. officials, in rejecting his bid for permanent U.S. residency, said Qatanani failed to disclose on his green card application a 1993 arrest and conviction...

"There were marks of torture (on the suspects) and we expressed our displeasure to Islamic Jihad and told them what happened must not be repeated,".....

Like John McCain, Col. George E. "Bud" Day spent over 5 yrs in Vietnamese POW camps. Day and John McCain were cell-mates for about 2 and a half years. Day is a legendary military hero with more medals and ribbons than anyone since General Douglas MacArthur.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Between 5 and 10 percent of inmates freed from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay have returned to terrorism since their release, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday. Gates was briefed on the statistics after a Kuwaiti man released in 2005 from the U.S. prison on Cuba carried out a suicide bomb attack in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. "I was told today that the recidivism rate ... those who return to the battlefield, is probably somewhere between 5 and 10 percent -- maybe 6, 7 percent, something like that," Gates said. "We...

A man awaiting trial on a murder charge is suing Benton County, Arkansas, complaining that the “skimpy rations” he has been fed in the county jail caused him to lose more than 100 pounds during eight months in jail. “I used to be a sturdy 400-plus pounds,” Laswell boasted. “Now, I’m practically skin and bones. It’s cruel and unusual punishment.” Laswell is being assisted in his suit by the ACLU. “This is but another sorry example of the pattern of torture and abuse that has overtaken the U.S. penal system under the Bush Administration,” said ACLU spokesman, Bertram Petty. “Starving...

The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA's controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law -- and it is law -- we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key. It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also...

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj returned home to Sudan on Friday after more than six years in the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison, urging Washington to respect human rights and branding torture as terrorism. Haj said he and the other Guantanamo detainees had been subjected to all kinds of torture, but the worst had been when his jailers insulted Islam or desecrated the Koran in front of prisoners. "Security and human rights are inseparable issues -- you cannot have one without the other," he told Reuters in an interview. "Human rights are not only for times of peace...

An article by The New York Times's Mark Mazzetti this morning discloses a letter (.pdf) from the Justice Department to Congress which asserts "that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law." In other words, even after all of the dramatic anti-torture laws and other decrees, the Bush administration insists that American interrogators have the right to use methods that are widely considered violations of the Geneva Conventions if we decide that doing so might help "thwart terrorist attacks." There are two reasons, and two reasons only,...

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon...

The defense in the case of an accused accessory to a fatal carjacking rested its case in U.S. District Court just before noon. Defense attorney Phil Lomonaco sent only two witnesses to the stand, one of whom was a government witness from Monday. The first witness was a carpenter whose sole job was to measure the distance from the Chipman Street house where a Knoxville couple was slain to the parking lot of a nearby business where an employee earlier testified he saw a car linked to Eric Dewayne "E" Boyd soon after the January 2007 fatal carjacking. The second...

Before Dick Cheney passes from this life to the next, he ought to receive another Presidential Medal of Freedom for boldly protecting this country while interminably catching holy hell for doing so. (He already got it once, for his exceptional service as Secretary of Defense.) But you know he won’t. It is a measure of Cheney’s selfless devotion to the United States that he obviously does not care. Headlines blared on Friday that Cheney made the call – in consultation with the highest-ranking White House staff, but excluding the president for what I guess were reasons of plausible deniability –...

Three months ago, Gregory J. Zanetti was a stockbroker and financial advisor in New Mexico. Today, he is an Army National Guard brigadier general who helps lead a multi-branch team of 2,200 personnel in what he describes as the "most misunderstood assignment in the military." "It is a mission misunderstood by most, reviled by some and unique to everyone," said Zanetti, deputy commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, the organization that has held and interrogated enemy combatants and terrorism suspects from the global war on terrorism since 2002. Last Tuesday, General Zanetti addressed more than 1,000 members of the American...

9 April 2008 [For Immediate Release] Tortured monk released in unstable mental condition Around fifteen Tibetan monks today defiantly briefed a group of foreign media personnel on a government managed tour currently in Sangchu County (Ch: Xiahe) in Gansu Province. The monks revealed the grave situation in the area and also delivered a clear cut message to the media group, concerning human rights abuses by the authorities in the area. According to a report by Reuters today (Protesting monks storm media tour in western China, By Lucy Hornby), "They said eight monks were still being held by authorities, but did...

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...

The California Senate is preparing to weigh in on the hot-button topic of torture, with a twist that combines elements of the Hippocratic oath and the military oath. Under a resolution that state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas plans to put to a vote Thursday, California regulators would notify physicians and other health professionals that they could lose their license and be prosecuted by the state if they are involved in the torture of suspected terrorists. The Los Angeles Democrat chairs the Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development, which oversees boards that license health professionals in the state. During a...

In his first interview since the release Tuesday of a 2003 memo he authored providing legal authority for the use of aggressive interrogation techniques by the U.S. military, John Yoo denied to Esquire that his memo applied to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or that it authorized the kinds of abuses that were revealed at Abu Ghraib. “I did not think as a matter of policy that it was a good idea for the military to use aggressive interrogations of the kind that would be permitted to the CIA,” he said, adding that he expressed those reservations “to officials higher...

Will Barack Obama accept the endorsement of a woman who helped torture John McCain? ...AND THE FACT THAT I HAVE TO EVEN *ASK* THIS SHOULD FILL HIS SUPPORTERS WITH SHAME. By Moe Lane Posted in Anti-war liberals Note the use of the word "should." Via Constant Reader fatimabrown we see this link of Jane Fonda announcing her support of Senator Barack Obama in the upcoming elections. Fonda, as all people know - and all decent people admit - is an actress who used her celebrity to first voluntarily engage in propaganda attacks by the North Vietnamese against the United States...