When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency...

A new law expanding the government's spying powers gives the Bush Administration a six-month window to install possibly permanent back doors in the nation's communication networks.  The legislation was passed hurriedly by Congress over the weekend and signed into law Sunday by President Bush.

Close coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon is referred to in military lingo as "jointness." A retired high-level military official, familiar with the detainee abuse scandals, confirmed that such "jointness" requires orchestration at the top levels of government. "This says that somebody is acting as a bridge between the CIA and the Defense Department," he said, "because you've got the [CIA] side and the military side, and they are collaborating." Human-rights expert Scott Horton, who chairs the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association, also says that the cross-agency coordination "reflects the fact that the decision to introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level."

..."The irony -- and ultimately the tragedy -- in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions," says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the American Psychological Association. "The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions," he says....

An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given the first ever full insider's account of being seized by the CIA and bundled on to an illegal 'torture flight' under the programme known as extraordinary rendition.

"I would rather die than stay here forever, and I've tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I've been destroyed," Jumah al-Dossari, a 33-year-old citizen of Bahrain, told his attorneys in a suicide note.

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" asked Hennen.
"It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president 'for torture.'...

Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement, "What's really a no-brainer is that no U.S. official, much less a vice president, should champion torture. Vice President Cheney's advocacy of water boarding sets a new human rights low at a time when human rights is already scraping the bottom of the Bush administration barrel

Speaking publicly for the first time, senior U.S. law enforcement investigators say they waged a long but futile battle inside the Pentagon to stop coercive and degrading treatment of detainees by intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Detainees held in Afghanistan by American troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process, in the same way as those in Iraq, a Guardian investigation has found.
Five detainees have died in custody, three of them in suspicious circumstances, and survivors have told stories of beatings, strippings, hoodings and sleep deprivation.

A few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome paid a visit to the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, Admiral Gianfranco Battelli, to float a proposal: Would the Italian secret services help the CIA kidnap terrorism suspects and fly them out of the country?

In a just-revealed notation on a 2002 memo about interrogation tactics, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicated that making terrorism detainees stand for up to four hours was no biggie in the physical stress department. "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of aggressive interrogation techniques, such as the use of stress positions, forced nudity and dogs in the infamous detention prison in Guantanamo Bay, de-classified White House documents unveiled.

TORTURE AND PRESIDENT BUSH...
Andrew Sullivan tries to explain the deliberately confusing detainee bill. Then Anderson Cooper interviews -- the canadian that was detained, tortured, then found innocent.
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CLIPS EVER POSTED ON THE INTERNET.

"Today, 135 years to the day after the last American President suspended habeus corpus, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. At it's worst, the legislation allows President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld to declare anyone -- US citizen or not -- an enemy combatant, lock them up and throw away the key without a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law. In other words, every thing the founding fathers fought the British empire to free themselves of was reversed today with the stroke of a pen.
George Washington University Constitutional Law professor, Jonathan Turley, joins Keith to talk about the law that Senator Feingold said would be seen as "a stain on our nations history."