PrairiePundit

  ISW: Russia is forcibly deporting Ukrainian civilians from occupied Ukraine to Russia while engaging in a deeply systematic and institutionalized policy of torture against Ukrainians held in Russian detention.  The Viktoriia Project,  a journalism collective comprised of 13 media outlets including   the  Guardian, Le Monde,  and the  Washington Post,  published an investigation on April 30 detailing Russia’s systematic use of torture against Ukrainian prisoners at 29 identified Russian-run prisons—18 in Russia and 11 in occupied Ukraine.[1] The investigation found that Russia is holding a majority of the 16,000 detained Ukrainian civilians for months or years without any formal charges except the allegation of “opposing the special military operation” at as many as 180 separate sites in occupied Ukraine and Russia, including the prison in Taganrog, Rostov Oblast, where Russia tortured and killed Ukrainian investigative journalist Viktoriia Roshc...

Washington Free Beacon: The Trump administration is leveling new economic sanctions against senior Iranian officials and its prison system for widespread human rights abuses, including the systematic torture of those being held in these facilities, according to White House officials familiar with the matter. The latest sanctions target the Tehran Prisons Organization and Sohrab Suleimani, a senior official in the prison system and the brother of Qassem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military figure responsible for operating Iran's rogue activities in Syria and elsewhere. Sohrab Soleimani is responsible for overseeing Iran's notorious Evin Prison, which is known for torturous interrogations, forced interrogations, and widespread mistreatment of inmates. The latest sanctions are certain to rankle Tehran, already the subject of a range of new sanctions under the Trump administration, which is currently conducting a widespread review of all matters related to the landmark nucl...

NY Post Editorial: It turns out Iran’s government was torturing former Marine Amir Hekmati for much of the 4½ years it held him hostage. The Obama administration apparently doesn’t care, so Hekmati has filed a lawsuit against the Tehran regime. The suit is a chilling read. Arrested in January 2011 while visiting his grandma, Hekmati faced solitary confinement for the next 17 months. His captors routinely whipped the bottom of his feet, Tasered him in the kidneys and beat him with batons. Glaring lights and a well-watered floor kept him from sleeping. They also dosed him with Lithium and other addictive substances, then put him through withdrawal. He faced psychological torture, too — “news” that his sister was dead, but he couldn’t talk to his family unless he confessed to espionage; a death sentence from a kangaroo court, and more. Meanwhile, the State Department was pushing his family to stay quiet — warning that US media attention to the case would put him in greater dan...

Reuters:   There was little about Sattar Beheshti that made him stand out in a working-class suburb south of Tehran called Robat Karim. Like many of his peers, the 35-year-old laborer was devout and lived at home with his mother. But his life changed when he started a blog called "My Life for Iran " last year. His entries often focused on the struggles of the working class as well as the political restrictions in Iran, sometimes mixed with personal anecdotes from Beheshti's daily life. As months passed, the tone on the blog became sharper and more political, with unveiled criticism of the establishment and even the Supreme Leader, a red line in the Islamic Republic. In one recent post, Beheshti criticized a speech made by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran with the title "You presented a bunch of lies instead of a speech" superimposed over a picture of the cleric. Other posts faulted Iran's unwavering sup...

The torture experts of Arabia show how it is done.

Marc Thiessen: It was disappointing to see  The Post’s editorial on waterboarding  this morning replete with so many discredited arguments.  Reasonable people can disagree about whether the United States should resume using enhanced interrogation techniques (as it appears it will if a Republican assumes the presidency in January 2013).  But we should at least debate this proposition based on facts. For example, The Post writes: “Imagine that a U.S. soldier is captured and subjected to waterboarding. Would Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann consider that torture?  Maybe not, given their disappointing responses to a question about waterboarding posed during Saturday’s Republican debate. And if they did object to the soldier’s treatment, they’ve lost the moral authority to argue against it.” Well, no.  It would be illegal for a foreign adversary to waterboard a U.S. soldier, even if the technique did not amount to torture. American troops are  l...

ABC News: President Obama said today that Republican presidential candidates are “wrong” to defend the practice of waterboarding, which he said is torture. “Waterboarding is torture. It’s contrary to America’s traditions, it’s contrary to our ideals, it’s not who we are, it’s not how we operate,” Obama told reporters at a press conference of the interrogation technique. Republican Presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain said in a debate Saturday night that they would support the renewed use of waterboarding. ... Killing is easier than capturing and interrogating  detainees, but the latter is more likely to prevent a terrorist attack on our non combatants.  Discomfort for the enemy is not the same as torture.  

Image via Wikipedia Washington Post: The boy’s head was swollen, purple and disfigured. His body was a mess of welts, cigarette burns and wounds from bullets fired to injure, not kill. His kneecaps had been smashed, his neck broken, his jaw shattered and his penis cut off. What finally killed him was not clear, but it appeared painfully, shockingly clear that he had suffered terribly during the month he spent in Syrian custody. Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was 13 years old. And since a video portraying the torture inflicted upon him was broadcast on the al-Jazeera television network Friday, he has rapidly emerged as the new symbol of the protest movement in Syria. His childish features have put a face to the largely faceless and leaderless opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime that has roiled the country for nine weeks, reinvigorating a movement that had seemed in danger of drifting. ... This is what real torture looks like. the pretensions of torture raised against the U...

Washington Times: Several Republicans on Sunday condemned a potential Justice Department criminal investigation stemming from George W. Bush administration interrogation policies, warning that such a move could be threat to national security and one advocating a "scorched-earth policy" against the Obama administration in retaliation. "The question is: Do we want America's image harmed more by dragging this out further and further?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We don't want to give the terrorists and the radical Islamic extremists more tools and bullets to shoot against us and help their recruiting in this ongoing struggle we're in," said Mr. McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War and has consistently criticized U.S. abuse of detainees in the war on terrorism. Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and ranking mem...

Guardian: He came to my shop around 10.30am. You could tell straight away that he had just been released. His face was bruised all over. His teeth were broken and he could hardly open his eyes. He was not even into politics. He was just an ordinary 18-year-old in the last year of school. Before the election he came to me and asked how he should vote. He looks up to me. His father is an Ahmadinejad supporter. He had gone home directly after his release, but his father did not let him in. He didn't mention he had been raped. At first, he didn't tell me either. It was the doctor who first noticed it and told me. When he came to my shop he collapsed in a chair. He said he had nowhere to go and asked if he could stay with me. I called a friend of mine who is a doctor to come home and see him. Then I brought him home. His shoulder blades and arms were wounded. There were some slashes on the face. No bone fractures, but he was bruised all over the body. I wanted to take some photos bu...

Times: The Iranian regime has appointed one of its most feared prosecutors to interrogate reformists arrested during demonstrations, prompting fears of a brutal crackdown against dissent. Relatives of several detained protesters have confirmed that the interrogation of prisoners is now being headed by Saaed Mortazavi, a figure known in Iran as “the butcher of the press”. He gained notoriety for his role in the death of a Canadian-Iranian photographer who was tortured, beaten and raped during her detention in 2003. “The leading role of Saeed Mortazavi in the crackdown in Tehran should set off alarm bells for anyone familiar with his record,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch. As prosecutor-general of Tehran since 2003 and as a judge before that, he ordered the closure of more than 100 newspapers, journals and websites deemed hostile to the Establishment. In 2004 he was behind the detention of more than 20 bloggers ...

From Dick Cheney's speech at AEI: ... Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after September 11th, 2001 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America … and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse. That attack itself was, of course, the most devastating strike in a series of terrorist plots carried out against Americans at home and abroad. In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, hoping to bring down the towers with a blast from below. The attacks continued in 1995, with the bombing of U.S. facilities in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killing of servicemen at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in East Africa in 1998; the murder of American sailors on the USS Cole...

Andrew McCarthy: T here was a little noticed bombshell in Washington’s waterboarding melodrama last week. And it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi’s implosion in a Capitol Hill press room, where she yet again tried to explain her inexplicable failure to protest the CIA’s “torturing” of detainees. No, this one detonated in the hearing room of the House Judiciary Committee. There, Attorney General Eric Holder inadvertently destroyed the warped basis for his claim that waterboarding, as administered by the CIA, amounted to torture. As originally reported by Connie Hair of Human Events , Holder’s undoing was the result of deft questioning by two committee Republicans: Dan Lungren, California’s former state attorney general, and Louie Gohmert, the former chief judge of a Texas appeals court. The two congressmen highlighted a fatal flaw in Holder’s theory. Moreover, they demonstrated that — despite having accused the CIA and the Bush administration of war crimes by cavalierly branding waterboarding as “t...

CNN: As congressional Republicans continued Monday to stoke the flames over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's accusation that the CIA lied to her about waterboarding, House Democrats appeared to be standing behind their leader. One of Pelosi's closest allies in the House, Connecticut Democrat John Larson, acknowledged to CNN that the speaker's news conference last week could have been better, but insisted there hasn't been any fallout among Democrats. "Perhaps it wasn't one of her best press conferences. But certainly everyone in this caucus stands behind her to be the lead in our caucus. I don't know if it could have been done better or not, but our caucus is entirely behind her, " Larson said. Several Democratic sources told CNN that privately, some congressional Democrats are baffled by Pelosi's decision to escalate the controversy last week by going after the CIA . But Larson, who chairs the House Democratic caucus, also said that he's spoke...

Rich Lowry: ... For Pelosi's account to be accurate, the CIA must have engaged in one of the most baroque and ineffectual conspiracies in the history of Washington. Remember: Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her in a September 2002 classified briefing and told her that it hadn't waterboarded high-level al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah. To support her version, Pelosi needs to stack implausibility on top of implausibility in a precarious Jenga tower of self-justification. The CIA must have convinced Porter Goss, the Republican congressman (and subsequent CIA director) who was present at the 2002 briefing, to lie and pronounce himself "slack-jawed" at Pelosi's account. It must have forged the "contemporaneous records" CIA director Leon Panetta, an Obama nominee, has cited that show Pelosi was told of the waterboarding. It must have either pulled the wool over Panetta's eyes or enlisted his active engagement in a monstrous machinery of deception. Even O...

Mark Steyn: Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi's performance at her press conference re: waterboarding has raised, according to The Washington Post, "troubling new questions about the Speaker's credibility." The dreaded T-word: "troubling." I doubt it will "trouble" the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi Speakership to a sudden end – and needless to say I'm all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of Congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America's tortured "torture" debate: Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding? He's in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he's in favor of it now. He doesn't think it's torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his i...

Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion: ... In May 2002, the government announced a terror alert based in part on information Zubaydah had revealed about attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge and other landmarks, although Zubaydah was being evasive as to whether there was an active plan. Pelosi was quoted as being aware of the details of the interrogation (italics in quotation mine): CNN.com , May 22, 2002: Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force--a round-the-clock operation at the New York field office of the FBI--got a call from FBI headquarters. Abu Zubaydah, the highest al-Qaeda official to be captured by the U.S., had told interrogators that he had heard other Osama bin Laden loyalists discussing attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and other U.S. landmarks. But, a federal law-enforcement official told TIME, Abu Zubaydah had said the conversations took place a while back and claimed he knew of no particular plan. Since his capture in March, Abu Zubaydah has shared som...

Jerry Holbert takes on a trip through the Pelosi mind of 2002.

Washington Post: Senior intelligence officials yesterday acknowledged that two al-Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had been questioned about alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq when the two men underwent CIA interrogation in 2002 and 2003. But the officials denied that the questioning on Iraq had included waterboarding. "The two top priorities driving so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were information on the locations of al-Qaeda leadership and plots against the United States," one intelligence official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly. "Questions were asked about Iraq, but the notion that waterboarding was used to extract from either an admission that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a relationship is false, period," he added. Recent media accounts have reported allegations that the waterboardings of Mohammed and Abu Zubaida, the nom de guerre of Zayn...

Peter Brooks: ... Fact is, we'll probably never really know what happened in those CIA briefings to Capitol Hill, because the records of the meetings are likely based on notes scribbled by the staff in attendance. But the reality is that this brouhaha is more about politics than about our national security -- and that's a shame. The effort by those on the Left to reach back and possibly punish those who were involved in keeping this country safe in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks is just downright wrongheaded -- and will only hurt our national security. For instance, the last thing Panetta needs is to be distracted by a battle royal with the speaker of the House. He has a real job to do in advising the president daily on the threats this country faces. We need the CIA focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, catching Osama bin Laden and monitoring Iranian and North Korean nuclear and missile programs, to name just a few extremely pressing problems, not wasting...