A Pentagon review of conditions at the Guantanamo Bay military prison has concluded that the treatment of detainees meets the requirements of the Geneva Conventions but that prisoners in the highest-security camps should be allowed more religious and social interaction, according to a government official who has read the 85-page document.

April 22, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

force detainees at Guantánamo Bay to stand for hours on end, in order to soften them up and make them talk to U.S. interrogators, he made a joke about it. "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," the then-defense secretary wrote on Dec. 2, 2002, at the bottom of a memo authorizing military officials to use extreme techniques against prisoners. "Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

NEW YORK, Apr 7 (IPS) - Human rights advocates are expressing alarm about recent disclosures that medical professionals assisted the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in harsh interrogations at secret prisons overseas and at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. It has also been brought to light that judges have ignored the mental health problems of government witnesses in terror-related trials.

In his quest to obtain key documents proving that his client was tortured at the hands of the Bush administration, Smith is now involved in a truly bizarre though revealing controversy, first reported last Thursday by The Guardian. In February, Smith wrote a letter to President Obama urging Obama to authorize the release of evidence relevant to Mohamed's torture so that Obama does not become complicit in covering-up crimes of torture (which is itself a crime). Smith attached to his letter to Obama a 2-page memo detailing the facts proving his client's torture. But under the rigid rules of Guantanamo, all lawyers for detainees are barred (under threat of criminal penalties) from disclosing any information they learn from their clients -- even if the subject of the communication is the torture to which their clients were subjected -- without first obtaining the approval from something called the "Privilege Review Team," a secret tribunal of Pentagon officials who monitor and ...

Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners.