"One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra spoke to two Texas television stations Wednesday night regarding his investigation of injustice within the prison systems which led to the indictment by a Texas grand jury of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, along with other officials.

Nearly sixty years have passed since the historic Nuremberg Trials concluded and we are faced yet again with the task of what to do with a set of individuals that have committed blatant war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The GEO group, the prison corporation at the center of the indictments has a long history filled with allegations of prisoner abuse. The abuse has sometimes even turned deadly.

A former corrections officer who did not want to be identified says she was on-duty at the Willacy State Jail in 2001 when Gregorio De La Rosa, Jr. was beaten to death by fellow inmates. She says he was bloody and not very responsive after the incident.

A hearing was set to determine whether or not to disqualify the judge presiding over the cases filed by a South Texas prosecutor against Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others.

The state Supreme Court's chief justice appointed District Judge Michael Peden of San Antonio to preside over a hearing Monday on a motion to recuse and disqualify Judge J. Manuel Banales.

Once considered a dangerous terrorist by the Bush administration, Mr. Hamdan was convicted only on lesser charges in August and given what amounted to a four-month sentence by a military jury. At that time, a military judge gave Mr. Hamdan credit for at least the 61 months he was held after being charged, reducing his sentence to a matter of months. The verdict was a sharp setback for Pentagon officials, who had contended they could detain him indefinitely.

A county prosecutor who brought indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others pounded his fist and shouted at the judge Friday about special treatment for high-profile defendants as a routine motions hearing descended into chaos.

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra, who is accusing the public officials of culpability in the alleged abuse of prisoners in a federal detention center, asked Presiding Judge Manuel Banales to recuse himself. Guerra has complained about Banales' handling of the case.

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration.

Virtually alone in the press corps, veteran Helen Thomas asks the
tough questions. Other reporters cower for fear they will lose access to government officials.

A US military judge in Guantanamo Bay has thrown out the US government's evidence against an Afghan detainee because it was obtained under coercion, a rights group said Friday.

A US judge ruled yesterday that five Algerian prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay must be set free, in a decision with far-reaching implications for the remaining detainees at the base in Cuba.

A Guantanamo Bay detainee who was tortured by military interrogators is again being charged with war crimes by Pentagon prosecutors, six months after those charges were dropped because of the coercive techniques used to obtain information were likely to be revealed at his trial.

A Texas grand jury has indicted outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County federal detention facilities, CNN reported.

Cheney's stake in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies that run the detention centers, was cited in the indictment. Cheney is accused of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees through his ownership interest.

Even as President-elect Obama vowed "to regain America's moral stature in the world" during Sunday's 60 Minutes appearance, two of his senior advisers confessed there is no intent to pursue those in the Bush administration who engaged in torture.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press, the advisers said that the plan is to put a stop to current interrogation methods and to "look forward" as opposed to focusing on prior transgressions.

The Obama transition team did not offer a response before the report was published.

The U.S. military judge in the case of the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks has decided to retire rather than continue to oversee the complex proceedings, defense officials said on Monday.

A former CIA officer familiar with the backstage lobbying for pardons, said: "These are the people President Bush asked to fight the war on terror for him. He gave them the green light to fight tough. The view of many in the intelligence community is that he should not leave them vulnerable to legal censure when he leaves.

"An effort is under way to get pre-emptive pardons. The White House has indicated that the matter is under consideration."

It's a grotesque commentary on the moral health of the nation when advocacy of torture is considered "centrist." One shudders to imagine what it means to be right-of-center.

The report, "Guantanamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Detainees," based on a two-year study, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of Bush Administration policies on the lives of 62 released detainees. Many of the prisoners were sold into captivity and subjected to brutal treatment in U.S. prison camps in Afghanistan. Once in Guantanamo, prisoners were denied access to civilian courts to challenge the legality of their detention.

A number of influential congressional Democrats oppose keeping Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden in their posts because both have publicly supported controversial Bush administration policies on interrogation and telephone surveillance. One Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee said there is a "consensus" view on the matter.

In the early years of George W. Bush's presidency, Cheney and his allies won most of the internal contests over the Guantanamo Bay prison, the CIA's interrogation program, domestic spying, military commissions and other contentious issues.

US President-elect Obama has promised to shutter Guantanamo, although how he’ll do so remains unclear. Human rights groups are holding him to his word and asking European nations for their support once the prison closes.

As the clock runs down on the Bush administration, moderates within the government are mounting what may be one last drive to roll back many of the harsh detention and interrogation policies pushed through by Vice President Dick Cheney.

In June, a judicial review was triggered after the Treasury solicitors turned down a request from Mohamed's lawyers to release documents in the British government's possession regarding his illegal detention in Pakistan and his subsequent disappearance.

Saying he questioned the government’s claim that a Guantánamo Bay detainee had planned a radioactive-bomb attack in the United States, a federal district judge ordered the Justice Department on Thursday to give the detainee’s lawyers documents on his treatment.

President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

I've previously argued that - now that Obama has been elected - there is no excuse not to try Bush, Cheney and the gang for war crimes committed in Iraq, war crimes committed with torture, and crimes involving spying on Americans and 9/11.

The use of a form of torture known as waterboarding to gain information is a "no-brainer", the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, told a radio interviewer, it was reported today.

Mr Cheney implied that the technique - a form of simulated drowning - was used on the alleged September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is being held at Guantánamo Bay.

The 109th Congress, led by Republican Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham and with the acquiescence of many Democrats, is poised to legalize torture, trials with secret evidence, and annulment of the right of habeas corpus. The measure also protects administration officials from prosecution for war crimes. If this measure becomes law, its name will live in infamy.

At the American Bar Association’s conference on national security yesterday, CIA senior deputy general counsel John Rizzo recommended that President-elect Barack Obama “address immediately detainee issues at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s interrogation program.”

"Sometime later the detainee site was taken over and rebuilt by men called OGAs, which stood for Other Governmental Agency. That's a pretty vague term. They built high walls around the detainee center. I figured, "Well, yeah, they're terrorists. You don't want them seeing out. You want to contain them, deny them any information that they could use to escape."

At the American Bar Association’s conference on national security yesterday, CIA senior deputy general counsel John Rizzo recommended that President-elect Barack Obama “address immediately detainee issues at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s interrogation program.” Rizzo said that the agency’s interrogation and detainee program needs “urgent” attention:

The Bush administration is doing everything it can to delay compliance with a court's order that the Pentagon turn over pictures of prisoners abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new court filing.

A three-judge appeals court panel in September ordered the administration to turn over 87 photographs depicting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other sites. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the photos in 2005.

For the past year, a 28-year-old Muslim American student, Sayed Fahad Hashmi—the first person extradited to the United States from Britain to face charges of terrorism—has been held at the Manhattan Correctional Center under conditions of confinement that are the very definition of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment."

TONY Blair could face the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.

The court's chief prosecutor said at the weekend that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the British Prime Minister and US President George Bush could one day face charges at The Hague.

International Criminal Court prosecutor announced on Sunday that US President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair could face war crimes charges at the Hague, after it emerged that up to one million Iraqis have been killed since the illegal invasion.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word "torture" to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah's interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Now that a Democrat has been elected president, the Democrats in Congress have no excuse. They can no longer pretend that they have to “hold back” to win the election.

They have no excuse to delay war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and company for Iraq.

They have no excuse to delay war crimes charges for torture.

They have no excuse to delay criminal charges for spying on Americans.

They have no excuse to delay criminal charges for 9/11.

This document stated revealingly: “ ‘Waterboarding’ is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.”

As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘waterboarding’ process; however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death”.

Now that a Democrat has been elected president, the Democrats in Congress have no excuse. They can no longer pretend that they have to "hold back" to win the election.

They have no excuse to delay war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and company for Iraq.

They have no excuse to delay war crimes charges for torture.

They have no excuse to delay criminal charges for spying on Americans.

They have no excuse to delay criminal charges for 9/11.

The Bush administration has committed war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in its practice of torturing prisoners, according to the conclusions of a medical examination conducted by the organization Physicians for Human Rights.

One of the key issues facing the next US president will be the detention policies of the US military that form part of its so-called war on terror.

We all know about Guantanamo Bay, but since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been arrested and detained. At present, there are some seventeen thousand in US custody. They are what the military call "security detainees" held for an undetermined amount of time, and not charged with any crime. However, the authority cited by the military for the way the US holds prisoners is about to expire.

CIA Director, Michael Hayden, said that all of their interrogations were done within the legal limits of the law. He added that these and other interrogation techniques have been helpful in disclosure of information relevant to terrorist operations and was always conducted under supervision. Excuses for the destruction of these tapes according to the CIA were because they did not want to disclose the identities of the agents doing the interrogations of these suspects. Last month the CIA failed to hand over other tapes from interrogations as requested by the U.S. District Court.

Lagouranis saw people crippled through prolonged use of the stress positions he forced them to adopt, and driven to the verge of insanity through weeks of sleep deprivation and psychological disorientation. But maybe it was worth it if it produced valuable intelligence in the fight against the insurgency? No, he says. As a method of getting intelligence it was useless. And besides, the aim of interrogations shifted subtly. "A lot of what we ended up doing was trying to gather confessions, not intelligence."

The CIA can hide statements from imprisoned suspected terrorists that the agency tortured them in its set of secret prisons, a federal judge ruled Wednesday,

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court declined to review the government's assertions that the allegations of torture from men held in the CIA's black site prisons -- whether truthful or not -- would put the nation at risk of grave danger if allowed to be made public.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court declined to review torture allegations from men held in the CIA's prisons-because it could put the nation at risk of grave danger if allowed to be made public.

A U.S. military judge barred the Pentagon Tuesday from using a Guantanamo prisoner's confession to Afghan authorities as trial evidence, saying it was obtained through torture.

Army Col. Stephen Henley said Mohammed Jawad's statements "were obtained by physical intimidation and threats of death which, under the circumstances, constitute torture."

Jawad's defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, told The Associated Press that the ruling removes "the lynchpin of the government's case."

The BBC are preparing to screen scenes of an actor being subjected to a controversial form of torture - waterboarding.

The scenes, starring actor Richard Armitage, will be shown during the new series of popular show Spooks, which starts tonight.

A method that has been condemned around the world, waterboarding was pioneered in the Dutch East Indies in the 16th century.

While the world remains transfixed by the economy and the US election, today's events at the US government's flagship "war on Terror" prison at Guantánamo indicate that the role of the military commissions – the novel system of terror trials created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – are unravelling at a furious pace, and that what remains of the government's tattered credibility is collapsing alongside them.

A former high-ranking police official was arrested Tuesday on charges that he lied when he denied that he and detectives under his command tortured murder suspects decades ago, allegations that led Chicago to pay former inmates millions and helped spark Illinois' death-penalty moratorium.

The U.S. military is keeping five terror suspects detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison after dropping charges against them pending the filing of new charges next month.

As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation - including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA - which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.

The Pentagon said Tuesday it has dropped war-crimes charges against five Guantanamo Bay detainees after the former prosecutor in their cases complained that the military was withholding evidence helpful to the defense.

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

See this up close video of the interrogator putting a cable around
a man's neck and at the end, telling him that he has 3 minutes to
live. Videos of US soldiers sodomizing children at Abu Ghraib have
successfully been kept off the Internet

E-mail: 'I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing'

The Bush administration explicitly endorsed the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods against al Qaeda suspects in a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.