Friday, Oct 24th
Last update07:50:22 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
Lawyers for the government have admitted that a senior MI5 officer gave false evidence to the high court in the case of former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed.
Less than a month after an expert panel accused the defense establishment of "grave ethical failures" in testing an experimental anthrax vaccine on hundreds of soldiers, Israel Radio revealed Sunday that soldiers from the Duhifat Battalion were forced to participate in another experiment 15 years ago.
Israel Railways changed its story Sunday over the dismissal of at least 40 Arab employees, telling a court that mistakes made by the employees prompted it to introduce new employment conditions.
Attorney Tawfiq Tibi, who represents about 20 of the employees who petitioned the court, said the dismissals were a case of double discrimination.
"They discriminated against them firstly by firing them, and the second time by preventing those who did not serve in the army from applying for the job," Tibi said.
More Than 20 Types Of War Crimes Against Children Ascribed To /Ex-President Bush In Iraq And Afghanistan
Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.
Senior members of the Bush administration today defended the physical abuse of prisoners by CIA operatives at Guantánamo and elsewhere round the world set out in graphic detail in secret memos released by president Barack Obama.
General Michael Hayden, head of the CIA under president George Bush, and Michael Mukasey, who was attorney-general, criticised Obama for releasing the memos.
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