The UN Committee Against Torture has determined the use of taser stun guns can be a form of torture and violate the UN Convention Against Torture. Four men in the United States and three in Canada have died after being shot with tasers in the past two weeks.
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President Bush said we don’t torture.
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The Army general who investigated the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has said he was forced into retirement by civilian Pentagon officials because he had been “overzealous.”
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An army survey found that less than half the troops in Iraq think Iraqi civilians should be treated with dignity and respect, and more than a third believed that torture was acceptable if it helped get information about the insurgents.
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The al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, is believed to have been killed in a fight between insurgents north of Baghdad.
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A Pentagon advisory group has concluded almost no scientific evidence exists to support several harsh interrogation techniques used in the War on Terror.
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Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an new FBI report has revealed in which over two dozen cases of mistreatment were documented.
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Hundreds of British and Iraqi soldiers assaulted a police station in the southern city of Basra on Monday, killing seven gunmen, rescuing 127 prisoners from what the British said was almost certain execution and ultimately reducing the facility to rubble.
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A German citizen who suffered torture after being kidnapped by the CIA is in the United States to appeal the dismissal of his lawsuit against the US government. Three years ago, Khaled el-Masri was seized along the Serbian-Macedonian border and then flown to Afghanistan where he was tortured inside a secret prison. He was released without charge after five months.
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The former prison commander of Abu Ghraib reported in an interview that Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized mistreatment of detainees that went on there.
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A recently-freed prisoner from Guantanamo Bay has come forward with allegations of torture at the hands of the US military. In an interview from his home in Turkey, the former prisoner, Murat Kurnaz, said he was beaten, given electric shocks, submerged in water, starved, and chained to a ceiling for days. He said he saw several people die and often thought he would die himself. Kurnaz was held for four years before his release in August because of a lack of evidence against him.
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Maher Arar received a U.S. Human Rights award for his fight for justice in torture cases.
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In sharp questioning, a three-judge panel yesterday challenged arguments by federal officials seeking dismissal of a Pakistani man’s suit charging that because of his religion, race or national origin, he, like others, was held for months after 9/11 in abusive solitary confinement before being cleared of links to terrorism and deported.
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The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.
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Torture may be worse now in Iraq than under former leader Saddam Hussein, the UN’s chief anti-torture expert says.
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The number of prisoners in foreign US jails has now passed fourteen thousand. All but one thousand are being held in Iraq.
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The Supreme Court declared Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his authority in the war against terrorism, ruling he does not have the power to set up special military trials at Guantanamo Bay without the approval of Congress.
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Two U.S. soldiers, missing for three days since their abduction in an insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, were found dead, a military spokesman said Tuesday, and a top U.S. commander ordered an investigation into why the men were isolated from a larger force in such a dangerous part of Iraq.
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President George W. Bush acknowledged on Wednesday that the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where three detainees committed suicide, has damaged the U.S. image abroad and said it should be shut down.
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Three detainees at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves in their cells yesterday morning, the first inmates to die at the remote island prison since it opened in early 2002, according to military officials.
A top US official described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention”.
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