Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Good Coverage of Torture through Kleinman

The best coverage of torture at Abu Ghraib, the DoD torture memos, and the Bush administration's authorization of the use of torture is at Mark Kleinman.

Through Kleinman, there are links to:

The Daily Telegraph: The Red Cross has leaked documents to the U.S. media that will show that Pentagon officials authorized the interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib.

U.S. News: The U.S. was trying to keep some prisoners 'secret'. Also, General Barbara Fast was probably responsible for the Army's refusal to release prisoners who were known to have done nothing.

A discussion on his own blog: On whether and when it might be appropriate to suspend Constitutional liberties. He cites a supreme court opinion in 1949 by Justice Jackson, suggesting that suspending constitutional liberties to free association might be appropriate if the U.S. faced a problem like that of the Fascist thugs that took over the streets of Germany in the early 1920s. Though interesting, Kleinman argues, such arguments are not appropriate to the current conjuncture.

This story on Yahoo news: The testimony of a Sgt. Samuel Provance, who witnessed the abuse and intimidation of a 16 year old Iraqi boy, in order to get the boy's father to talk.

A Dana Priest article in the Washington Post: Priest finds that the Pentagon approved 24 interrogation techniques for use in Guantanamo Bay in August 2003. The list is, as Kleinman points out, pretty tame. None of the things we've seen in the photos were authorized in the August '03 list. There is also some debate about whether the memo leaked last week was actually approved in the end by the Pentagon.