Newly declassified Defense Department documents describe a pattern of “abusive” behavior by U.S. military interrogators that appears to have caused the deaths of several suspected terrorists imprisoned at a detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002, just two days after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in that country.
But the declassified Pentagon documents, coupled with a report issued last December by the Senate Armed Services Committee, tell a different story and lend credence to claims by civil libertarians and critics of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that refusal to release a fully classified version of the Church Report several years ago amounted to a cover-up. The two pages from the Church Report obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush Administration and the Pentagon were released Wednesday. The documents state that the interrogation and deaths of detainees held at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan was “clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance.”
A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of...
In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased...
Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who...
