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A mechanic died violently in police custody in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, shortly after he refused to continue paying bribes. The police reportedly started extorting money from the victim after they seized the auto-rickshaw that he operated and the two men he hired to drive it. The man was delivered dead to a hospital shortly after police picked him up, bearing signs of torture. The hospital has refused to release his medical records. The case shows how Bangladeshi police are able to trade on justice, to arrest persons at will, and to kill with impunity. The wife and nephew of the dead man have been threatened repeatedly by the officers involved in the case.

Vermont author and activist Charlotte Dennett is part of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, which is pushing the notion that some former Bush administration officials should be tried for war crimes. The so-called "accountability movement" is named in honor of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the top US prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Dennett documents the accountability movement in her new book The People v. Bush, published last month by Vermont-based Chelsea Green.

http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2010/02/leahy-to-hold-hearing-on-bushera-torture-memos.html

Late in the evening on 9 June 2006, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen.

According to the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service's report, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat.

According to the report, each prisoner, even as they were choking on the rags, would have climbed up on their washbasin, slipped their head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until they asphyxiated. The report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in US immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

Behind the scenes, the deaths generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos showing officials stymieing outside inquiry.

The documents concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The documents show how officials covered up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It’s not torture if you don’t mean it to be. It’s not torture if you don’t nearly kill the victim. It’s not torture if the president says it’s not torture.

In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting people in its custody to terrible mistreatment. It has deprived victims of a remedy and Americans of government accountability, while further damaging the country’s standing in the world.

Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims’ appeal because the illegality of torture was not “clearly established” was the Obama Justice Department.

http://s.nyt.com/u/A8U

Some in the United States and abroad say the legitimization of torture, the trampling of civil liberties, the violation of international law, and a dubious declaration of war that claimed more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi lives are not just miscalculations but crimes. War crimes, in fact. "The administration did more than commit crimes," argues Scott Horton, an expert on international law and contributing editor of Harper's magazine. "It waged war against the law itself."

Can a country that has allowed the rule of law to be flouted continue as a credible democracy, setting an example to ordinary citizens and claiming the moral high ground in the international community? Says British international lawyer Philippe Sands: "At some point the dam will break, the wall of impunity will be breached, and someone will be investigated. Whether it's the lawyers or the ultimate decision-makers I don't know. But history teaches that these things don't go away."

The permanent danger of torture through human history is that it can be used by the torturers to manufacture or "create" evidence through confession. In fact, this has always been the prime function of torture: not to discover something that the torturers did not know beforehand, but to force a victim to tell the torturers what they were already convinced was true.

When neoconservatives, at the peak of their hubris, bragged that they could create reality, they weren't kidding. Torture is the most effective means of creating reality because of this dynamic. What better evidence is there that someone was an al Qaeda member than that he confessed to it? And torture can get victims to confess to anything if they are tormented enough.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/posts-of-the-year-they-tortured-a-man-they-knew-to-be-innocent-october-1-2009.html

The US interrogator told Fouad al-Rabiah: "There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent."

This was not a statement from the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, nor archival evidence from one of Stalin's gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than seven years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible. But even worse -- far worse -- is the fact that the Obama administration would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.

To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/email-of-the-year-october-2-2009.html