Human Rights Glance
Matthew Zirbel’s home in Great Falls, Virginia is filled with oriental carpets, perhaps collected from his time spent working in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The million dollar home has “LOTS of “WOW!” You will “Oooh & Ahhh”, says this recent description on Zillow.
This isn’t the first time Zirbel’s surroundings have wowed someone. Over a decade ago, Zirbel, then a junior CIA officer, was in charge of the Salt Pit, a “black site” in Afghanistan referred to in the recent Senate torture report as “Cobalt,” where detainees were routinely brutalized and which one visitor described as a “dungeon.” A delegation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons was “WOW’ed” by the Salt Pit’s sensory deprivation techniques, and a CIA interrogator said that prisoners there “literally looked like [dogs] that had been kenneled,” according to the report.
The Charmed Life of a CIA Torturer
The Detainee Abuse Photos Obama Didn’t Want You To See
If you thought the Senate’s ‘torture report’ was shocking, imagine the prospect of the Obama administration releasing hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs depicting detainee abuse.
The Obama administration is withholding hundreds, perhaps even thousands of photographs showing the U.S. government’s brutal treatment of detainees, meaning that revelations about detainee abuse could well continue, possibly compounding the outrage generated by the Senate “torture report” now in the public eye.
Farmworker children uprooted by California rules
A lifetime of moving has taught Claudia Morales to start packing early, because like many 13-year-olds, her room "is always a mess."
The hoodies go in her suitcase, but as usual, all her partially completed schoolwork ends up in the trash. Just a week later, Claudia has new notebooks, along with new textbooks, and three bulging suitcases to start unpacking 200 miles away.
She does this every year. Twice.
In protest of inaction, ICC prosecutor stops investigating Darfur genocide
The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) told the U.N. Security Council on Friday that she is ceasing her investigations in Sudan's chaotic Darfur region because no one has been brought to justice in a decade and the council has done little or nothing to help.
Darfur's situation is deteriorating and the brutality of crimes is increasing, but there have been no discussions with the council for "concrete solutions," Fatou Bensouda said. She demanded a new approach.
Brazil Released Its Own Torture Report This Week, And The U.S. Is Implicated
As Americans learned about the deeply disturbing tactics of the CIA's post-9/11 torture program this week, the government in Brazil released a report filled with its own history of systemic abuses. The nearly-2,000-page report by Brazil's National Truth Commission detailed a pattern of killings and torture during a period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
The report not only shed light on the brutal methods of Brazilian interrogators, but also showed that the United States and the United Kingdom had trained some of the perpetrators in torture techniques.
Untrained CIA Agents Were Just Making Up Torture Methods As They Went Along
On Tuesday morning, the Senate intelligence committee released an executive summary of its five-year investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention program. (Read the executive summary here.)
Among the report's most striking revelations is that CIA interrogators were often untrained and in some instances made up torturous techniques as they went along.
The CIA was "unprepared" to begin the enhanced interrogation program, the Senate report concluded. The agency sent untrained, inexperienced people into the field to interrogate Abu Zubaydah, the first important Al Qaeda suspect the US captured.
Freezing cells and sleep deprivation: the brutal conditions migrants still face after capture
Josefina Peralta made the gruelling journey from her home in Honduras to Texas in May, venturing a perilous crossing of the Rio Grande River and passing across the US border at night in search of safety, opportunity and a new life. Within hours of making the crossing, she was picked up along with her infant daughter and four other women by officers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and taken to a temporary holding station in a rural area outside McAllen.
Peralta (not her real name) was put into a 15ft by 45ft concrete cell with about 30 other migrants from Central America who had made the similar dangerous and traumatic journey. Her clothes were still wet from crossing the river, but according to the account she gave human rights researchers, CBP officers wouldn’t let her change into the dry clothes she had ready in her backpack.
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