Torture

After a devout 63-year-old north Texas woman was abducted and sexually assaulted by a former neighbor, she said she survived by praying and reading the Bible. A jury convicted Jeffrey Allan Maxwell, 59, of Corsicana this week of aggravated kidnapping and two counts of aggravated sexual assault. On Wednesday, a judge sentenced him to three life terms. Maxwell must serve two of his three sentences consecutively, meaning he will not be eligible for parole for 60 years. “I'm proud that it's all over,” Lois Pearson told the Weatherford Democrat after the verdict.

On a Saturday night in May last year, Jay S. Bybee hosted dinner for 35 at a Las Vegas restaurant. The young people seated around him had all served as his law clerks in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the post Bybee assumed after two turbulent years at the Justice Department, where as head of the Office of Legal Counsel he signed the legal justifications that have become known as the "torture memos."

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.

An Iraqi man has filed a lawsuit against two U.S. military contractors, alleging he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for more than 10 months. Emad al-Janabi alleges in his lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles federal court Monday, that he was abused beginning in September 2003 by employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., which was formerly Titan Corp. Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as "Big Steve."

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.

MEXICO CITY - On the eve of Mexico's Day of the Dead this year, authorities in Veracruz declared triumphantly that they had solved one of the decade's most notorious slayings of a journalist in Mexico. They trotted before reporters a sad-sack figure, one Jorge Antonio Hernandez Silva. They proclaimed him guilty of the April slaying of Regina Martinez, a highly respected reporter for the national Proceso magazine. He had confessed, the Veracruz government said, and the motive was robbery.

In 1983, when Nelson Mandela was in prison and his great friend and legal partner, Oliver Tambo, was leading the African National Congress in exile, I was summoned to the ANC headquarters in Zambia. On my arrival, Tambo told me they had a problem and he hoped that I, as a lawyer in the movement, could help find a solution. The ANC, he said, had captured a number of people sent by Pretoria to infiltrate and destroy the organization, and now the ANC needed regulations on how such captives should be dealt with.

A member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family was found not guilty Sunday of the torture and rape of an Afghan in a case that has embarrassed the Gulf emirate and raised questions over human rights. The judge reading the verdict at a court in the United Arab Emirates did not give a reason why Sheik Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan was exonerated of responsibility for abuse shown in a video first made public by ABC television last year. ABC identified one of the abuse participants as Issa.

In some of his most expansive comments since his movie touched off a Washington firestorm, the screenwriter of "Zero Dark Thirty" defended his film as depicting torture accurately and said that a pending Senate investigation brought him "a chill. " "We've been accused of defending torture because there are disagreements in some quarters as to exactly which detainee undergoing exactly which form of interrogation first produced the lead that led to [Osama] Bin Laden and thus ... we shouldn't have included it," Mark Boal said.