The Psychologists of Torture
Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.
Frederick Clarkson
One of the key, if underreported, findings in Tuesday’s bombshell Senate committee report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving “aggressive” interro gation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon’s torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA “black” sites..
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How Torture Worked to Sell the Iraq War
Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Three cheers for Dick Cheney. The former vice president has urged, however rhetorically, that the Obama administration release more of the torture memos. “One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” the former vice president told FoxN ews. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.” News reports differ as to whether Mr. Cheney has formally made the request, but he is absolutely right that the American people need to see the complete record. He is wrong about what the record will show. From the material already released or ferreted out by journalists, it is clear that he and Mr. Bush succeeded in using torture, not primarily to secure needed intelligence, but to create the propaganda they used to sell their invasion of Iraq…
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Sameh Akram Habeeb: Transcript One of My Talks in the UK
Sameh Akram Habeeb
…The war in Gaza, it wasn’t a war, but a genocide, an entire genocide against everything. There was a big psychological war, no shelters, no food, no water, no power, no fuel, no medicines, nothing in time of war in the Gaza Strip. And they have launched a psychological war from Day 1, in which they have dropped tens of thousands of leaflets. They have asked the people to leave the border areas to other areas but unfortunately they didn’t tell t he people where to go, because the border is totally closed and the sea is totally controlled by the Navy forces, and the soldiers came into the Gaza Strip. So the people tried to flee inside the Gaza Strip. But they were hit and they were killed. And when they tried to kill some of the commanders of Hamas, they have killed many other people. When they have hit the Hamas Interior Minister, and as you know the assassination policy is even forbidden, it is not allowed, they have killed that guy, and they have killed more than 20 people with him, they have killed … from Hamas, they have killed his family, the children and the people around him. If you are going to travel with him you are going to have the highest hi tech… They were targeting everybody. They are not targeting Hamas people as such, they have targeted all the people…
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Prisoners’ center appeals for enabling Palestinian mother to see her kids
PIC
The prisoners’ center for studies appealed to all institutions concerned with the issue of prisoners to enable a Palestinian mother called Fatima Azzak imprisoned with her one-year child in the Israeli Telmond Hashron prison to see her husband and eight children living in Gaza. The center also called for pressuring Israel to release her and her little child and to lift restrictions imposed on visits and on sending and receiving letters to and fr om female prisoners’ families. Mohamed Azzak, the husband of the prisoner, told the prisoners’ center that his wife was detained two years ago at the pretext of planning to carry out a human bombing operation inside Israel, pointing out that his wife gave birth to their son Yousuf in jail and he was not able to see him till this moment…
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Israeli Holocaust museum fires employee who mentioned Palestinians’ Nakba
Ma’an News
The Israeli museum Yad Vashem has fired an employee who compared the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors to that of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 from their land in what is now Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported on Thursday. Jerusalem resident Itamar Shapira, 29, was relieved of his position as a teacher after a group of Jewish students from the settlement of Efrat made a complaint to the museum…
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Video: Palestinians struggle to preserve heritage
AljaeeraEnglish
The few operational museums in the occupied West Bank are small and underfunded, while scores of archaeological sites have been abandoned. Archaeologists say there are important sites they cannot reach. Some have been left to the elements, and others have been confiscated by Israeli authorities…
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Americans Accused of Stealing Fuel in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, NYTimes
In a confidence game that made a mockery of the United States military’s most secure compound in Iraq, a ring of Americans posing as contractors and their Nepalese drivers used tanker trucks, forged documents and sheer brazenness to steal at least $40 million worth of jet and diesel fuel from an Army depot, according to an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Virginia on Friday. Until they were caught, the dozen or so men in the ring operated an astoundingly successful con game in a war zone, the papers contend, apparently showing up in Iraq with nothing more than fake IDs and a talent for forging official requisition forms. Each time they filled up the tanker trucks at the depot in American headquarters near the Baghdad International Airport, the men would simply drive downtown and sell the fuel on the local black market, the court papers say…
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Qassem: “They kept me in the company of criminals and murderers”
By Khalid Amayreh
Just released from a PA lockup ostensibly in connection with his outspoken criticisms of the Palestinian Authority, Abdul Sattar Qassem has accused his incarcerators of mistreating and humiliating him. “They kept me in the company of criminals and murderers all these days.” Qassem was arrested by the Preventive Security Force (PSF) last week on what seemed to be fabricated libel charges filed against him by two members of PA security agenci es. Qassem, a former presidential candidate and Professor of Political Science at al-Najah University in Nablus in the northern West Bank, said he believed his detention was meant as a warning against criticizing the PA government and security apparatus…
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From Aggression to Victimhood: David Aaronovitch (or How the Mighty Fall)
Mary Rizzo, Palestine Think Tank
Like anybody, we love to watch false idols crumble, and when rabid Zionist and war advocate Aaronovitch hit the floor with a crash, it was actually one of the most amusing moments in recent political public events. We got to hear, and in some cases, to see the man who considers himself to be an iconoclast living the role of the icon tossed to the floor. And he’s stomping-foot mad about it! Aaronovitch isn’t what one might consider well known outside of the UK, his argument is actually quite provincial if one can wade through his less than captivating prose, but in his own eyes, he’s quite something…
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About 50 Palestinians wounded in confrontations with IOF troops, settlers
PIC
Jewish armed settlers backed by Israeli occupation forces fired at Palestinian citizens in Ourif town, south of Nablus, wounding 13 civilians amidst widespread confrontations between West Bank Palestinians and IOF troops and settlers on Friday. Local sources in the Ourif village said that six masked settlers opened fire at the citizens wounding six of them, and added that IOF troops then barged into the town, imposed a curfew and fired bullets a nd teargas canisters wounding seven more citizens…
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Fruit of the Poisoned Tree
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
ANDY WORTHINGTON
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constitu ted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee…
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Sa’adat calls on PA to stop its attacks on resistance and provide political protection for prisoners in Israeli jails.
PFPL – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Comrade Ahmad Sa’adat , General Secretary of the PFLP called on the PA to stop its arrest and attacks against the Palestinian resistance and the mass arrest in which PA security agencies carried in the West Bank. “It is impossible to demand freeing the detainees from the Israeli prisons while the Palestinian Authority prisons are full of jailed politica l prisoners for resistance background or internal disputes,” comrade Sa’adat said in a message from his cell in Israel’s Asqalan prison…
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