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In October 2001, Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was seized off a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of America agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, and he was diapered and “wrapped up like a spring roll.”

In Egypt, Habib was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water, had his fingers broken, and hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that the interrogator's blindfold was dislodged, revealing his identity: Egypt's spy chief and now Mubarak's Vice-President, Omar Suleiman. Frustrated that Habib was not confessing, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a shackled prisoner in front of Habib, which the guard did with a vicious karate kick.

Alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst, is confined in a 6-by-12-foot cell with a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet for about 23 hours a day. On a "typical day," he is awakened at 5 a.m. and is not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.; if he tries to sleep during those hours, guards will make him sit up or stand. He eats all his meals in his cell. He is allowed one hour of "exercise" daily outside his cell, consisting of walking in figure eights in an empty room. When he goes to sleep, he is required to strip down to his boxer shorts and give his clothing to the guards. He is not allowed to have any personal items in his cell.

Former President George Bush’s confirmation that he authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against detainees held in secret US custody serves to highlight the absence of accountability for the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance committed by the US during the "war on terror."

In his memoirs and in an interview on NBC News broadcast on 8 November 2010, the former President confirmed his personal involvement in the interrogation techniques used in the CIA program when he said that he had authorized the use of “waterboarding” and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” against so-called “high-value detainees”.

Waterboarding, in which the perception of drowning is induced in the detainee, is torture – as both the current President and the US Attorney General have acknowledged. Torture is a crime under international law. Under international law, anyone involved in torture must be brought to justice. This obligation does not end with a change in government.

Under international law, the former President’s admission to having authorized acts that amount to torture are enough to trigger US obligations to investigate his admissions and if substantiated, to prosecute him. Failure to investigate and prosecute in circumstances where the requisite criteria are met is itself a violation of international law.

As you probably already assumed, I am not doing very well. This death camp is one of the most vile places on Earth. These places are ran by people devoid of empathy and compassion. Where death row prisoners are being housed used to be called the Hole. The prisoners who previously occupied these cells threw feces, urine, and vomit into the air vents. These airducts have yet to be cleaned. This place is never properly cleaned. There is thick black grime lining the bottom edge of every wall. Disease is running rampant.

To save money on heating and cooling, the air in this building is overly recirculated. This means more carbon dioxide and less oxygen. Worst of all, they will turn the air flow down so much that we often cannot feel any air coming out of our vents for months at a time. Because of all this, we are suffering hypoxia. All prisoners are lethargic and could not exercise even if we had the space to do so. We all have short term memory loss and trouble concentrating. It is probable that we are all suffering at least mild brain damage.

Malnourishment and oxygen deprivation is causing our bodies to grow old very rapidly. Our drinking water is a fairly thick yellow-brown color. We never get enough protein. Prisoners not even thirty years old are going gray and losing hair. We have bone joint and muscle problems. We have lines in our faces that young people should not have. My body is so broken down, especially my mind. For recreation we get to go into separate cages for about an hour, five times a week. I have not been able to run for several years.

The doctors here seem to have an adversity to treating people's illnesses. The dentists here have performed oral surgeries without using anesthetics. A dentist accidentally stitched one prisoner's cheek to his gum and ripped out half of another prisoner's tooth. Guards will shock people with electricity, strap naked prisoners to a chair and hose them down with ice cold water, spray CS gas and pepper spray into the faces of chained prisoners, deprive people of sleep, and deny medicine that treats painful illnesses.

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