TruthOut.org / Andy Worthington (2009-11-17)
With just over two months to go until President Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison’s closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the [...]

San Francisco Chronicle / Jamie Rowen (2009-11-18)
I just returned from Sarajevo where there were daily updates on the trial of Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Amid efforts to consolidate the fragile state, constantly undermined by nationalistic leaders in the country, opening statements reminded the Bosniak (Muslim) [...]

A judge cited national security concerns in ruling Wednesday that the CIA does not have to release hundreds of documents related to the destruction of videotapes of Sept. 11 detainee interrogations that used harsh methods.

Seven former heads of the CIA on Friday urged President Barack Obama to end the probe into allegations of abuse of prisoners held by the agency, arguing that it would hamper intelligence operations.

detainee, who professed to be the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, has stated that he lied under harsh interrogations by the CIA. As reported by AFP, recently released government transcripts show that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told a military tribunal that he made false confessions after being tortured by interrogators.

The Raw Story / Stephen C. Webster (2009-06-13)
Former Bush administration attorney John Yoo was ordered on Friday by a federal judge in San Francisco to testify in an appeal brought by Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was held for more than three years and allegedly tortured while in U.S. military custody.
Yoo was one of [...]

With Usama bin Laden and his top deputies in hiding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the public face of the 9/11 conspiracy. But the U.S. government has no good options to try the confessed mastermind of the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

An investigation of torture would inevitably lead to questions about what 9/11 was really about. We know with certainty that the official version of events is a pack of lies; what if America had to confront the fact that 9/11 really was an inside job? The recent finding of nano-thermite in WTC dust is just one more compelling argument.

One of the overlooked aspects of Dick Cheney’s speech today was his extensive linking of 9/11 to weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons), Saddam Hussein, and Iraq. That Cheney would once again lie about Iraq is no big surprise, but the fact that he told those lies once again during today’s speech should raise even more questions about the veracity of his torture defense.

A former State Department lawyer has told NPR he believes the Bush White House sought to collect and destroy all copies of a 2005 memo he wrote arguing against harsh interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects. In an NPR interview, Philip Zelikow, a former State Department lawyer and adviser to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said he had been told by a colleague that his legal opinion had been ordered to be collected and destroyed. The memo argued against the legality of such techniques as waterboarding, or controlled drowning, and chaining suspects to ceilings for days at a time.