Via The Intercept:
A draft of the executive order obtained by the New York Times and Washington Post calls for senior officials to consider re-opening the CIA’s network of secret prisons, where terror suspects were disappeared and deprived of their rights.
And by rescinding President Obama’s 2009 executive order that banned torture and closed the CIA’s prisons — where many of the worst abuses of CIA’s post-9/11 torture program took place – it paves the way for illegal torture to take place in secret.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer disputed the authenticity of the draft order on Wednesday, saying that it is “not a White House document,” and that he had “no idea where it came from.” But when asked whether the administration was considering re-opening black sites, Spicer refused to answer, saying he would not comment on the document.
Via The New American:
If it was a war crime for which the United States “prosecuted and convicted a number of Japanese troops and officials” after World War II, it is still a war crime. If it was — as SERE taught American soldiers — among the “most severe of those [techniques] employed” by “brutal authoritarian enemies” when it was practiced by “the Nazis, the Japanese, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese,” simply referring to is as “an enhanced interrogation technique” does nothing to change what it really is. Just because Americans are on the giving end doesn’t make it any less wrong.
Or any more effective.
In fact, President Trump has even less excuse for his ignorance of the total lack of effectiveness of torture than Cain and Bachman had in 2011. Because — as The New American reported in April 2016 — newer information dispels any remaining myth that torture is anything other than worthless as far as intelligence gathering goes.
