TV News LIES

“The ICRC goes places, to places of conflict that no one else can go to. We visit and speak to people that no else can speak to,” said attorney Matthew MacLean, arguing that release of Red Cross records would jeopardize its ability to have confidential dialogues with governments worldwide.

Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge, heard the arguments on the second day of pretrial hearings in the case of five men accused of funding, training and directing the hijackings that killed 2,976 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. The men chose to skip the hearing, a prerogative the judge granted them, until their actual death-penalty trial begins.

Expect only seven more captives to be charged at the war court, the chief Pentagon prosecutor said Sunday, offering a much reduced vision of the scope of the special court after a federal court setback.

Six prisoners await death-penalty trials — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 48, and four other alleged plotters accused of killing 2,976 people in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks plus a Saudi man accused of engineering al-Qaida’s USS Cole bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Seven others have already been convicted of al-Qaida foot-soldier crimes.

A group of senior American doctors has called on military physicians at Guantánamo Bay to refuse to work in a mass force-feeding programme that is being used to keep hunger-striking detainees alive.

Writing in the prestigious and influential New England Journal of Medicine, the three doctors called Guantánamo "a medical ethics free zone" and said that medical staff had a moral duty to allow the prisoners to go on hunger strike without coercing them into treatment. They also called on doctors to refuse to take part in force-feeding.

It has been an extraordinary three weeks in the history of the American penal system, perhaps one of the darkest on record. In four states, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, has been investigated, chronicled and disclosed in grim detail to the world by lawyers, government investigators and one federal judge.

The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.

A former Oregon businessman is suing the U.S. government and two FBI agents he says had him tortured in the Middle East after he refused to become an informant.

Yonas Fikre, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Eritrean descent, says the agents were present when he was imprisoned and tortured in the Gulf nation for 106 days, The Oregonian reported Thursday.

A long-running hunger strike by detainees at Guantánamo has worsened since Barack Obama promised action to close the controversial prison camp in a landmark speech last Thursday.

On the eve of Obama's address, there were 103 prisoners on hunger strike, with 31 being force-fed by military authorities and one in hospital. Since then, not a single prisoner has stopped their strike, and now 36 of the detainees are being force-fed to keep them alive, with five of them being hospitalised.