The Practive of Torture Is Still Permitted In Iraq

Ali Methboub protects his identity as he poses for a photo. Mr. Methboub was detained for more than two years in an Iraqi prison where he was tortured into making blatantly false confessions. Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Iraqi Torture Victim's Tale Reveals Nation's Darker Side -- Christian Science Monitor

Ali, a member of the Methboub family that the Monitor has followed since 2002 in Iraq, continues to struggle with the abuse he suffered after being unjustly imprisoned for 2-1/2 years.

Ali was always the least troublesome Methboub son, a dutiful member of the Iraqi family whose saga the Monitor has chronicled since 2002. So his arrest and imprisonment shocked matriarch Karima Selman Methboub and her children, beginning one of the darkest periods for a Baghdad household that has resiliently survived every other aspect of Iraq's long war.

Read more ....

My Comment: The legacy (and everyday use) of torture will be with Iraq for a very long time .... long after the U.S. has departed.

On ‘Torture,’ Holder Undoes Holder -- A Commentary

Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama

From National Review:

The attorney general reveals his legal ignorance — or, his willful inconsistency.

There was a little noticed bombshell in Washington’s waterboarding melodrama last week. And it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi’s implosion in a Capitol Hill press room, where she yet again tried to explain her inexplicable failure to protest the CIA’s “torturing” of detainees. No, this one detonated in the hearing room of the House Judiciary Committee. There, Attorney General Eric Holder inadvertently destroyed the warped basis for his claim that waterboarding, as administered by the CIA, amounted to torture.

Read more ....

Critics Still Haven't Read the 'Torture' Memos -- A Commentary

From The Wall Street Journal:

The CIA proposed the methods. The Justice Department gave its advice.

Sen. Patrick Leahy wants an independent commission to investigate them. Rep. John Conyers wants the Obama Justice Department to prosecute them. Liberal lawyers want to disbar them, and the media maligns them.

What did the Justice Department attorneys at George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- do to garner such scorn? They analyzed a 1994 criminal statute prohibiting torture when the CIA asked for legal guidance on interrogation techniques for a high-level al Qaeda detainee (Abu Zubaydah).

Read more ....