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The Church of Scientology faces the prospect of a police investigation in Australia after being accused of torture and embezzlement and of forcing employees to have abortions. Nick Xenophon, an independent senator, presented letters to the Australian Parliament from seven former Scientologists which he said showed that the secretive church was a front for physical violence, intimidation and blackmail. “I am deeply concerned about this organisation and the devastating impact it can have on its followers,” he told the Australian Senate in Canberra. He called for a Senate inquiry. The State Crime Command of New South Wales police yesterday confirmed...

SIERRA VISTA — Since 2004, one Sunday in November has been the time when a group of people gather outside Fort Huachuca’s Main Gate to protest what they say are torture procedures being taught on the post. And every year, the anti-post group is countered by supporters of the fort. This year, the sixth year of the event, will begin at noon Sunday with a “No to Torture Rally” followed by a procession from Len Roberts Park where protesters are expected to hold “A Vigil of Presence” across from the post’s main gate. Because of the annual protest, fort officials...

Davidson found guilty Murder One all counts.

Some of those musicians -- Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine -- say their music has been played at ear-splitting level to torment terror suspects and coerce confessions at the detention facility. Other petitioners want to know whether their works have been used in such capacity, including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne and Billy Bragg. "The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me," said Tom Morello, former lead guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, an industrial rock band whose song "March of the Pigs" has been linked to torture tactics at...

And the winner for most torturous sounds to a jihadi's ears is..... Was the theme to "Sesame Street" really played to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo and other detention camps? What about Don McLean's "American Pie"? Or the Meow Mix jingle? Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."? A high-profile coalition of artists -- including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots -- demanded Thursday that the government release the names of all the songs that were blasted since 2002 at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment....

Billy Lynch left Dorchester 72 years ago, and they’re pretty sure they’ve finally found him, a long way from home, deep in the ground in China. Staff Sergeant Billy Lynch was a Marine. He grew up on Victory Road, and if you go to the corner of Victory and Neponset Avenue, you’ll see the black street sign with the gold star that commemorates William Joseph Lynch Square. It is a place of honor for a Marine who disappeared 67 years ago. He left Neponset for the Marines in 1937, right out of high school, and never came back. He was...

It was all a lie. Megan Williams, the Charleston woman who claimed she was kidnapped, sexually abused and beaten by "the Logan Six" now says it never happened. The Charleston Gazette reports Williams plans to hold a press conference in Columbus, Ohio later today to recant her story. Williams' attorney Byron Potts told the newspaper his client is tired of living a lie and wants to come clean. Back in September of 2007 Williams was found by police in an outbuilding at the home of Bobby Brewster. She told investigators Brewster and five others held her hostage for nearly a...

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified. Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated — and with the publication of photographs showing the militants triumphantly sporting their victims’ flak jackets and weapons. The French had been in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, for only a month, taking over from the Italians; it was one of the biggest single losses of life by Nato forces in Afghanistan. What the grieving...

WEST PALM BEACH - Citing the depravity of the gang rape and torture of a mother and her son, 12, in the Dunbar Village Apartments, Circuit Judge Krista Marx on Tuesday sentenced three of the four men involved to life in prison. It was the only appropriate disposition, the judge said. The standing-room-only crowd gasped in disbelief. As deputies led the men from the courtroom, a scuffle ensued between defendant Tommy Poindexter and an officer. A woman in the crowd began screaming, setting off more yelling.

Unidentified assailants kidnapped and killed the top official of the border town of Palomas, across from New Mexico, on Thursday. Town Mayor Estanislao Garcia Santelis had long complained about the drug traffickers and migrant smugglers active around Palomas. Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in northern Chihuahua state, said Garcia Santelis' bullet-riddled body was found near a burned-out pickup truck and bore signs of torture. Palomas made headlines in 2008 when its police chief sought asylum in the U.S. after his deputies abandoned him and he received death threats. The Mexican army subsequently took over law enforcement in...

When he eagerly joined the mass street protests that followed Iran’s tainted June 12 presidential elections, Ibrahim Sharifi, 24, hoped only to add his voice to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators demanding that the government nullify the results. He never imagined that he would eventually have a far greater impact, as the only person willing to speak publicly about the brutal treatment he was subjected to in prison, including rape and torture. Mr. Sharifi, who recounted his ordeal to the opposition leader and former presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, and then released a video account last month on opposition Web...

In late 2001, when the Pentagon decided to put detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of setting up a camp and establishing its rules went to Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert. Lehnert planned to rely on what he learned while running a camp at Guantanamo in the mid-1990s for nearly 19,000 Cubans and Haitians trying to flee to the United States. And he was determined to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Convention, providing decent food, banning extreme interrogation and allowing religious services. He brought in a Muslim chaplain and...

It is not true that the Islamic Republic of Iran lacks compassion. It is not true that the Islamic Republic hangs people without a hint of mercy. Here is the proof. Recently, I met Mrs. M at a gathering of Iranian ex-pats in a park. I would also like you to meet this elderly widow who is suffering from a variety of brain, neurological, and vision disorders. She is a lone woman without a country, moving from one shelter to the next on her way to the final resting place to which we all are destined. One dreadful day, Mrs....

An Iraqi journalist who gained worldwide fame after hurling his shoes at George W. Bush today claimed he had been tortured while in prison. Muntadhar al-Zeidi was freed to a hero's welcome after spending nine months behind bars for his extraordinary attack on the former US president. Hundreds of people congregated to meet him, a phalanx of gun-toting men fired volleys into the air while women cried out and broke into traditional Iraqi dances. Supporters around the world have offered him everything from a harem to a four-bedroom house while one Saudi man reportedly offered to pay $10 million for...

War On Terror: Charges against the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole are dismissed. He will be retried, but not by a military commission that would have given him the death penalty he deserves.Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell announced on Thursday that Susan Crawford, the convening authority for military tribunals at Guantanamo, has made the decision to withdraw charges against Abd al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri. This is the Saudi man believed to be the architect of the bombing of the guided missile destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors, as it sat in the Yemeni port of Aden. The...

MI6 is being investigated by the police over allegations of torture for the first time. It follows a similar investigation already launched into MI5.The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has referred an unidentified case involving alleged complicity in torture to the Attorney General who has in turn referred it on to the Metropolitan Police, the Daily Telegraph can disclose. The police are already investigating MI5, the Security Service, over allegations that they colluded in the torture of the former Guantanamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed. It is the first time that the foreign intelligence service and domestic security service have been the...

Is torture un-American? Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson lays it on the line: “The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not” [sic]. ... Americans have made their feelings on the issue quite clear, but Jackson just can’t handle the truth. He insists that “as Cheney continues to defend the dark side - even without conclusive proof that waterboarding coughed up critical intelligence - he is daring Americans to come out of the shadows to demand...

If a dead tree edition of the Washington Post falls on the front porch, and the rest of the media ignores its top investigative story, has it really made a sound? After former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, the MSNBC bloviators were all atwitter and aghast. Among the canards they shouted back at Cheney’s calmly delivered stiletto jabs of facts was “Torture doesn’t work! It doesn’t, it just doesn’t because we say it doesn’t!” As we will see, Matthews, Olbermann, Maddow and Co., will drag any ambiguous quote by a Republican—or someone who...

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a non-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood. PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret "torture programme". The American Medical Association,...

GEORGE BUSH’S “war on terror” left America with a scarred reputation and many disturbing questions. Barack Obama has said that he wants to move forward, rather than look back. That is understandable. The new president has an ambitious agenda. Prising open the lid on previous mistakes might unleash a political hornet-swarm. But this week, with Mr Obama bunkered on Martha’s Vineyard, an ugly past roared into the present. On August 24th the Department of Justice released a report on the CIA’s interrogation of detainees abroad, written by the agency’s internal watchdog in 2004. More important, Eric Holder, the attorney-general, directed...

Link only, per FR copyright and excerpt rules

I had a chance to watch the Dick Cheney interview on yesterday's Fox News Sunday broadcast with host Chris Wallace, who was excellent as always. All I have to say is that I'm certainly glad I'm not on the bad side of Cheney, for he's what we in the military used to call "born again hard." … And this is why I really admire the guy and think that he's far more a figurative Prince Valiant than any sort of Prince of Darkness. Unless you happen to be an Al Qaeda baddie captured by American military or CIA-type forces, that...

Eleno Oviedo can tell you a thing or two about torture. Oviedo spent 26 years as a political prisoner in Cuba’s hellish prisons. As Oviedo recalled in an interview with this columnist, he and other Cuban prisoners of conscience suffered beatings, extreme temperatures and isolation with very little food or medical care. They received threats of violence. And the Cuban authorities constitute a credible threat. Beatings were routine, and Oviedo said he heard “more than 300 times prisoners being executed” by firing squad. Many of the prisoners cried “Viva Cristo Rey,” as a final act of defiance and profession of...

Aug. 31: Lal Mohammad, a 40-year-old farmer, whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban on the Afghan presidential and provincial council election day, is seen in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Republican Senator John McCain has denounced the use of torture on terrorism suspects during the administration of former president George W. Bush. "I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan," said McCain. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, the Arizona senator said that the enhanced interrogation techniques also helped al Qaeda recruit additional members. "I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq,” said McCain, who added that he...

On a Saturday morning in late August, while country was away on summer vacation and those who closely watch politics were watching Ted Kennedy's funeral, the Washington Post quietly hung up the mainstream media's white flag on the CIA's harsh interrogation tactics. It turns out, they work — who knew? Fortunately, Steve Hayes has stayed on the case and, at the Standard's blog, he's got the story about the story — along with excerpts from the essential report by FDD's Tom Joscelyn (also in the Standard, here) relating the effectiveness of the CIA program and an important op-ed by FDD's...

There are several questions that continue to surround the latest revelations in the CIA's EIT program. First, are waterboarding and other EIT techniques in fact torture? Whether these techniques worked or not, was it worth it? Could we have gotten any information from some detainees without using them? Finally, did we get valuable intelligence following the use of these techniques? Most of these questions are tangential. In that, there is no objective way to look at it and so your answer likely depends on your political ideology. Most will continue to be debated long after the release of the lateste...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator John McCain, a torture survivor from his days as a captive during the Vietnam War, says his private comments about harsh interrogation methods were misrepresented by the Bush Administration in a recently released legal document intended to justify a six-day-long course of sleep deprivation for one CIA detainee in November of 2007. The newly declassified memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel mentions a secret briefing McCain and other members of Congress received sometime before October 17, 2006. The memo says the lawmakers were told about six CIA interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation....

Says Abuse of Detainees Helped al Qaeda Recruit Terrorists, But Opposes Investigation into "Enhanced" Interrogations. BY MICHELLE LEVI Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he thinks it is a "serious mistake" for the administration to focus on the past when investigating the interrogation techniques of the CIA under President Bush on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "For us now to go back, I think, would be a serious mistake. "I believe that the president was right when he said we ought to go forward and not back. I worry about the morale and effectiveness of the CIA. I worry about this thing...

"Please Pray for Justice for my baby girl and our angel, Channon" http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=10952439561&ref=nf

Torture-slayings trial, Day 9: Victim's families: Jury 'let us down' with Letalvis Cobbins verdict KNOXVILLE - The families of a young Knox County couple tortured and killed in January 2007 tonight sharply criticized a jury's decision to spare defendant Letalvis Cobbins the death penalty. "I think the jury has let us down," said Mary Newsom, mother of murder victim Chris Newsom. "I think they've let Channon and Chris down. We were hoping for the death penalty." After deliberating a little more than two hours, the jury delivered its verdict about 6:50 p.m. in Judge Richard Baumgartner's courtroom. The judge polled...

During the 1990s, most of us thought we were living in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We even spent the "peace dividend" - cutting resources for intelligence and the military. The Cold War was over. We had no enemies worth worrying about. That was the conventional wisdom, the accepted narrative of that giddy era. The fact that Americans were being attacked with regularity by Islamist terrorists - for example in New York City in 1993, at Khobar Towers in 1996, at two of our embassies in Africa in 1998, off the coast of Yemen in 2000 - did...

After vowing not to become involved in recriminations over the Bush anti-terror policies, President Obama has allowed his Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to dig up all the dirt he can find on the CIA and the anti-terror investigators whose aggressive questioning saved us from countless attacks. Why the switch? Because Obama needs to do something to appease the left that elected him. After refusing to pull out of Iraq and deciding to follow the Bush timetable for withdrawing and staying in Afghanistan and likely having to beef up our presence there, liberals might be wondering...

A Thought Experiment: You walk into your home to find an armed intruder threatening to shoot your spouse and children, trapped with nowhere to run. Fortunately, you have a gun. You try to negotiate, but the intruder is in no mood to talk. His intention is murder. You have seconds to decide. What do you do? For many, the answer is clear. You fight to save your family. And most of us would call that self defense. Most Christians would agree that any action would be not only morally permissible, but also morally required. Now imagine another scenario: You are...

Human rights group Amnesty International has argued that Sweden is taking part in torture after the country handed over its first prisoner in Afghanistan to local authorities, according to a report by Sveriges Radio news programme Ekot. "There is an absolute ban on torture and thus also a ban on handing over prisoners to countries in which there is a risk of torture," Lisa Bergh, Amnesty Sweden's Secretary-General, told Ekot. "It is patently clear that prisoners risk torture if they are handed over to the authorities in Afghanistan," Bergh explained. The prisoner was captured by Swedish forces in July after...

The Justice Department prosecutor appointed this week to examine the CIA's interrogation program will revisit long dormant-cases of abuse by the agency's civilian contractors, bringing new attention to a little- known but controversial element of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Civilian contractors used by the CIA at secret overseas facilities were said to be involved in a series of cases of detainee abuses and deaths in the years following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but only one was ever prosecuted. The contractors also played a key but secret role in the CIA's brutal interrogations of suspected top...

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week's coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we've had a chance to read the reports, it's clear the real story isn't the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda. In other words, it worked—at least until politics got in the way. That's the essential judgment offered by former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in...

Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the 9-11 commission report, was the mastermind of the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nashiri was also the target of an "unauthorized" CIA interrogation technique (that had not been legally vetted by the Justice Department) that is described in a May 7, 2004, CIA inspector general's report that was partially declassified by the Obama administration this week. CIA officers blew smoke in Nashiri's face, according to the report, and they used cigars. The IG's office described this smoke-blowing as one of several "unauthorized or undocumented techniques"...

Bangladesh: Pastor Tortured by Police On June 7, police raided an evangelism meeting, arrested and tortured a pastor and two others in Boalia, Bangladesh, according to The Voice of the Martyrs contacts. Pastor Habibur Rahman, of Boalia Spiritual Church was leading the meeting when suddenly the police came in and took them to the police station. That night the police blindfolded them with cloths for few hours and beat them up. During the beatings police asked who was supporting them financially, and how long they had been evangelizing and how many people they had converted. At some point during the...

SNIPPET: "From the days of Prophet Muhammad, sexual terror has been an integral part of Islamic Jihad. The siege of the Beslan School by Islamic Jihadis in 2004 was no exception as reveals Dr. Schurman-Kauflin. -- Editor, MA Khan Excerpt from Chapter 1, “Disturbed: Terrorist Behavioral Profiles” (2008) On September 1, 2004, terrorists stormed a school in Beslan, Russia, and perpetrated one of the most heinous terror attacks in history. Though many people may have heard of this attack, it is very likely that most do not know what really happened there. The reality is so dark that few dare...

Here is video from this morning of Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe saying he believes it is a disaster for President Obama to have announced that a special team has been set up to do interrogations of terror suspects that will operate under White House and not CIA control. Scarborough mocked the fact this team will reportedly not use "sleep deprivation" any longer in interrogations. Scarborough said that would play well in "San Francisco" and other elitist neighborhoods, but to average Americans they are thinking, "My God, the do that (sleep deprivation) in fraternities." Scarborough says he believes most...

CIA agents threatened to kill the children of a terror suspect in an attempt to make him talk, a report into prisoner abuse has revealed. The document, compiled by the agency's inspector general in 2004, could lead to criminal charges against interrogators, with the US attorney general reportedly having already lined up a senior prosecutor to investigate claims of mistreatment. The disclosure came as President Barack Obama gave his approval to a new interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House, marking a move away from the Bush-era policy of giving the CIA the lead when it comes to...

As approval ratings for President Obama and the Democrats' Congress continue to fall-with both independents and the Democratic Party base leaving the support column, the Obama Admin has turned to its old tactic of distraction by torture. That is to say, they've leaked to the press some new sort of report about allegations of torture conducted during the early years of the Bush Administration. In the past, President Obama chose not to allow pictures of "torture" to be published because his military commanders said it would endanger the lives of troops in the field by emboldening the enemy. However, his...

Jonathan Adler called it two days ago: Let's see now. Deficit projections are once again on the rise as Obama's approval rating falls. Health-care reform is faltering, climate-change legislation is stalled, and David Axlerod is under fire for his conflicts of interest. Seems like a good time to change the subject. Contents of the CIA inspector general's report on harsh interrogation methods have already leaked, so it won't do the trick. If I were a betting man, I'd expect something else to drop Monday or Tuesday. Turns out to be Monday: The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the...

Media Blackout "Equal and exact justice to all men..." --Thomas Jefferson Editor's Note: PG suggested -- this essay contains graphic descriptions of a brutal crime. In 1775, John Adams wrote, "There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue ... if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice..." Adams understood that a shared penchant for justice and virtue is essential to liberty, and depends upon the ability of people to discern between right...

Your editorial claims that Congress was complicit in Bush administration human rights abuses. Here are the facts: Until Sept. 6, 2006, only a handful of members of Congress were aware of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to prohibit the CIA's use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" -- the same standard as the Geneva Convention. After learning of the CIA program, Congress took action. I introduced an amendment to the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill to limit the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual....

WILKES-BARRE TWP. – Township police have arrested three people and area looking for two more in the alleged torture of a man and woman earlier this month. It was unclear what the motive was, but one of the defendants being sought told police that she took $200 from one of the victims for payback for taking her money and leaving her stranded during a trip in New Jersey. Michael J. Sisko, 24, of Wilkes-Barre Township, Jason Farrell, 19, of Wilkes-Barre, and Lindsey N. Stephens, 18, of Wilkes-Barre, were arraigned Tuesday on 16 counts of robbery and multiple counts of simple...

Five years after the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos came to light, Lynndie England says the government's "softening up tactics" are acceptable ways to get information from prisoners. In an interview with the BBC, England defends herself and fellow soldiers who posed Iraqi prisoners in degrading positions for photographs in 2004. "Compared to what they do to us, that's like nothing," England says in the BBC video, referring to instances where Americans were decapitated, burned, dragged through the streets or hung from a bridge by insurgents. She likens the physical degradation that appears in the Abu Ghraib photos to the...

LONDON (AFP) – The head of Britain's foreign intelligence service said Monday his agents were not involved in torture, amid allegations of British links to mistreatment of terror suspects held overseas. The head of MI6, John Scarlett, said his officers were committed to human rights and democracy as they protected Britain against terrorism threats. "Our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else," Sir John told BBC's Radio 4 in comments posted on its website Monday. "They also have the responsibility of protecting the country against terrorism and these issues...

FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- Like many young boys, Khidir loves playing with toy cars and wants to be a policeman like his father when he grows up. But it was his father's very job that caused the tiny child to suffer the unimaginable.