President Donald Trump’s assertion last week that he wanted to send the New York City terror suspect to Guantanamo Bay to be held as an enemy combatant has civil liberties groups worried about the administration’s continued faith in the controversial detainment practice.
The CIA has been forced to declassify some 270 memos from its secret torture facilities in Afghanistan. The story these memos tell is horrific and jolting. The people tortured were not terrorists. They were suspects. Some may say this is all ancient history but consider the current president’s view on torture. He said he’s torture in a heartbeat. Are we still “torturing some folks”?
Top photo | An American flag flies behind the barbed and razor-wire at the Camp Delta detention facility, at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (Photo: Brennan Linsley/AP)
A new batch of 274 CIA documents connected with Bush-era torture has just been made public as a result of a lawsuit brought by families of victims.
Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.
Nearly three years after the Senate chronicled how the CIA tortured detainees, a federal judge ordered the government Wednesday to disclose certain documents referenced in the report.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s attorney Dror Ladin applauded another crack in the secrecy of the discredited CIA program.
On occasion of the CIA’s 70th anniversary, Lars Schall talked with US researcher Douglas Valentine about the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Valentine, the CIA is “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”, doing the dirty work for the rich and powerful. Douglas Valentine is the author of the non-fictional, historical books The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, and The CIA as Organized Crime.
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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government agencies have no right to “resist disclosure” if a requester fails to adequately describe records they are seeking in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They also must make a “good faith” attempt to define a request properly, a federal appeals court ruled.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a decision by a district court, which maintained a FOIA request for records on CIA personnel or affiliates that engaged in torture “constituted a question” instead of a legitimate request.
The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.
The erasure of the document by the spy agency’s internal watchdog was deemed an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.
