Torture

Britain should no longer rely on U.S. assurances that it does not torture terrorism suspects, an influential House of Commons committee said. London had taken those assurances at face value but after the CIA acknowledged "waterboarding" three detainees, Britain should change its stance, the Foreign Affairs Committee said in its annual report on human rights. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said in April that he thought the technique, which simulates drowning, amounted to torture.

Last week, my colleagues and I did something defense attorneys rarely do: We asked the government to file charges against our client. And because it seems unlikely the case will ever make it to an American courtroom, we have asked that it be heard in the nation's flawed military commission system. Abu Zubaydah, our client, was an early poster child for the Bush administration's torture regime. He was the first prisoner held in a secret "black site" and the first to be tortured using "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

Canada's Foreign Ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured, and it classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document that is part of a course for diplomats. Both listed nations deny they allow torture in their jails. The document mentions the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where one Canadian man, Omar Khadr, is among the inmates. Under "definition of torture," the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding.

False equivalency Re "Student loans, abuse against women spur fights in Congress," April 26 The article says, "The looming confrontations on both issues show how hard it is for Republicans - or Democrats, for that matter - to compromise in this highly contentious environment. " Democrats, often to my dismay, are usually too willing to compromise. Republicans, at least since President Obama was elected, never do unless the public outcry is so great and they're forced to. And to imply that there is an equivalency between taking funds from public health versus a tax increase on the rich that is "off-limits" because almost all Republicans have signed a pledge not to raise taxes is laughable.

Singer Rick James, the Grammy-winning King of Funk of the 1980s, was arrested with his 21-year-old girlfriend Friday for allegedly imprisoning and torturing a 24-year-old woman with a hot cocaine pipe over three days at James' Hollywood Hills home, police said.

An undercover TV journalist reporting on crime and drugs in Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns was tortured and put to death with a sword by a drug lord who runs his territory like a medieval fiefdom, police said. Tim Lopes of Globo television was captured June 2 as he tried to infiltrate a dance party in northern Rio de Janeiro, where gangs sell drugs and stage illicit sex shows.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is again in the news. The two Americans released this month by Iran have reported that when they complained about conditions in their Tehran prison, the jailers would "immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. " Such is the power of symbols. Symbols are important, and we ignore them at our peril. But even in these hyperpartisan times, when symbols are baseball bats used by thugs in the public square to beat reason senseless, I like to pretend that the truth is worth pursuing.

Slain federal drug agent Enrique Camarena told his killers that agents knew the whereabouts of two of Mexico's most powerful drug lords but did not pursue them because they feared for their own lives, according to a tape-recording of Camarena's torture made public Monday. In a chilling transcript of Camarena's ordeal, filed in Los Angeles federal court, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent is heard complaining to his captors that U.S.

A Spanish judge opened an inquiry on the Bush administration's alleged torture of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pressing ahead Wednesday with a drive that Spain's attorney general has said should be waged in the United States, if at all. Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain's most prominent investigative magistrate, said he was acting under this country's observance of the principle of universal justice, which allows crimes allegedly committed in other countries to be prosecuted in Spain.

If Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. believes that crimes may have been committed in the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" against suspected terrorists, he has no choice but to ask a respected prosecutor to weigh the evidence and, if appropriate, bring charges. But the appointment of such a figure, which The Times has reported is imminent, won't provide critics of the CIA with the legal equivalent of a wide-ranging "truth commission" they have been seeking. Nor is it likely to illuminate the conduct of White House lawyers or policymakers.

Human rights activists are pressing for the public release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's post-Sept. 11 detention and "enhanced interrogation" practices, hoping that it will answer the question once and for all of whether torture played a role in locating Osama bin Laden. Whatever the document might say about that question, releasing it would add to public knowledge about what President Obama rightly has called a "dark and painful chapter in our history. " Next week, almost a year to the day after the killing of Bin Laden, Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, will publish a book titled "Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

WASHINGTON - Foreign political organizations like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and multinational corporations cannot be sued for the torture or murder of persons abroad, including Americans, under the terms of a 1991 U.S. anti-torture law, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday. Only individual perpetrators of such crimes can be held liable, the court said. The decision is a setback for human rights activists who have sought to extend American law to target inhumane conduct aboard.

'Bad Ass' MPAA rating: R for violence, some torture, pervasive language, and some sexual content/nudity Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Playing: At Chino Hills 18

Five men were charged with murder Saturday in the abduction, torture and killing of two Michigan women. The victims -- 18-year-old Abreeya Brown and 22-year-old Ashley Conaway -- were taken Feb. 28 from their home in Hamtramck at gunpoint and were stuffed in the trunk of a car, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement Saturday. The young women were found March 25 in a shallow grave in a wooded area of northwest Detroit, both bound and shot in the head. The five charged with their murder, all from Detroit, are Brandon Cain, 26, Miguel Rodriguez, 24, Reginald Brown, 24, Jeremy Brown, 19, and Brian Lee, 25. Neither of the suspects named Brown are related to victim Abreeya Brown.

It is torture to write about Tim Tebow. It's hard to know what to think, much less what to type. It was torture to listen to his news conference Monday. You alternately wanted to scream at him and hug him for being so naive. The marriage of Tebow to the New York cuss-and-fight-and-mope Jets is not made in heaven. It pushes the limits of the bizarre and nonsensical. They are the "Hard Knocks" Jets, the NFL team that showed a U.S. TV audience that blocking and tackling are best done while uttering F-bombs.

Human rights activists rallied in downtown L.A. on Tuesday to call for intervention by the United Nations to stop the torture of prisoners by an amoral regime. But they weren't talking about Syria, Cuba or some African dictatorship; the rogue state in question is the state of California. The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, along with a handful of prison-advocacy groups, submitted a petition to the U.N. requesting an on-site investigation of conditions in California's Security Housing Units, the segregated cells where prisoners suspected of gang involvement are placed.

Now that "Avatar" has been named the best motion picture drama by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., making it a front-runner in the Oscar sweepstakes, does it mean the terrorists have won? Judging from the anger the movie has generated in some conservative circles, one might think so. Filmmaker James Cameron's science-fiction epic, which is on track to be the highest-grossing movie ever, has been widely derided as anti-American,liberal propaganda. That's funny, we thought it was just formulaic -- if incredibly artful -- escapist fantasy.

In a strikingly defensive explanation of his stance on Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics, President Obama on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that the harsh interrogation techniques he has banned might have yielded useful information, but that he was nonetheless willing to rule them out on moral grounds.

Calling solitary confinement "torture," California prisoners and advocates are asking the United Nations to investigate the segregated housing of gang members at prisons throughout the state. "We have California treating several thousand prisoners in much the same way the U.S. government treats enemy combatants held in Guantanamo," said Peter Schey, an attorney representing hundreds of inmates. Schey, who announced the petition at a news conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday alongside prisoners' relatives, said solitary confinement was devastating to the physical and mental health of prisoners and was likely to increase their risk of committing more crimes upon release.

Syria'sarmed rebels have committed "serious human rights abuses," including kidnappings and torture, and reportedly executions, of security personnel and civilians, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. The group painted a dark picture that is in stark contrast to the "freedom fighter" image that the rebels and their political allies outside Syria have sought to project to the world. In an open letter to the opposition, Human Rights Watch depicts a decentralized, disparate guerrilla structure in which armed groups seem to operate with complete autonomy, sometimes acting on sectarian motives to kidnap and kill security force members and civilians considered pro-government.