Rights Groups Pressure US

Prisoner finally freed without charge was hung upside down, beaten

(NEWSER) - A Yemeni man was held by the US in secret prisons for nearly three years and subjected to torture after his capture in Iraq, a human rights group has charged in a condemnation of America's "cruel" defiance of international law. The man, Khaled al-Maqtari, was held in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, secret jails in Afghanistan, and a CIA prison in an unknown location, where he was hung upside down by a chain, beaten and drenched with icy water, Reuters reports. More»

Agency chief moves to 'call off the dogs' with investigation into secret prisons findings

(NEWSER) - In an unprecedented move, the director of the CIA is challenging the agency's own inspector general by ordering an internal investigation of his investigation, reports the Los Angeles Times. CIA Inspector General John Helgerson has issued a series of scathing reports about the agency; now director Michael Hayden has ordered a probe into whether Helgerson was impartial in his findings. More»

Agency believed to have teamed up with Pentagon

(NEWSER) - The CIA apparently colluded with the US military to develop torture techniques for interrogating terrorist suspects, Salon reports. The program was based on methods originally designed to teach American special forces how to withstand abuse if captured. While the military's role in this "reverse engineering" had been previously exposed, the CIA link is a revelation. More»

(NEWSER) - The U.S. prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is as bad as Guantanamo, reports Eliza Griswold in the New Republic. Prisoners are kept in barbed-wire cages, beaten, tortured, raped, and held without promise of trial. But unlike Gitmo, Bagram has no visiting congressional delegations. More»

Testimony undercuts Bush claims about CIA secret facilities for terror suspects

(NEWSER) - Details about "black sites"--the network of secret internment facilities for terror suspects the CIA ran until last summer—are emerging as former prisoners tell their stories. The Washington Post interviews Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster who spent 28 months in two facilities—where he was drugged, burned, beaten and abused, he claims. More»