TV News LIES

The CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on foreign terror suspects – a practice that has provoked international condemnation – was more widespread than the agency has publicly acknowledged, Senate investigators have learned.

Moreover, the CIA’s own internal documents confirm the agency’s culpability in the hypothermia death of one Afghan captive – an incident that also has never even been publicly discussed, McClatchy was told.

The possible declassification and release of a Senate report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program — begun in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — could have a huge impact on the controversial military tribunals happening at Guantánamo Bay, experts and lawyers believe.

The proceedings have been moving at a snail’s pace at the U.S.-held military base on the island of Cuba, amid widespread condemnation that they are being held in a legal limbo and outside the U.S. criminal justice system.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says if he had to make the same decisions and actions regarding the waterboarding of prisoners, he would.

Cheney was speaking to students at American University in Washington, D.C. when he said he had no regrets about the U.S. use of enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding on terrorism suspects.

Last week, 14-year-old Yusef a-Shawamreh and two of his friends left their village of Deir al-Asal al-Fauqa in the southern West Bank to pick plants on his family’s field, west of the separation fence.

The three youths passed through a wide gap in the fence, which had existed for at least two years and which the Israel Defense Forces hadn’t bothered to fix.

After crossing the fence, the boys heard three or four gunshots. The firing came from an IDF ambush, a few dozen meters away. According to an investigation by B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, released on Wednesday, the shots had been fired with no warning.

The UN has delivered a withering verdict on the US's human rights record, raising concerns on a series of issues including torture, drone strikes, the failure to close Guantánamo Bay and the NSA's bulk collection of personal data.

The report was delivered by the UN's human rights committee in an assessment of how the US is complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR], which has been in force since the mid 1970s.

The committee, which is chaired by the British law professor Sir Nigel Rodley, catalogued a string of human rights concerns, notably on the mass surveillance exposed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Several human rights and anti-death penalty groups have asked the American Pharmacists Association to prohibit members from participating in executions, a request that comes as states increasingly turn to pharmacists for lethal injection drugs.

The groups, which include Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, are targeting drugs made by compounding pharmacies. Such drugs, which are not federally regulated, are individually mixed versions of medications that prison systems are finding increasingly difficult to obtain.