CIA agents have written books about it. Former President George W. Bush has explained why he thought it was necessary and legal. Yet the al Qaeda suspects who were subjected to so-called harsh interrogation techniques [torture], and the lawyers charged with defending them at the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, are not allowed to talk about the treatment they [correctly] consider torture. Defense attorneys say that and other Kafkaesque legal restrictions on what they can discuss with their clients and raise in the courtroom undermine their ability to mount a proper defense on charges that could lead to the death penalty. Those restrictions will be the focus of a pretrial hearing that convenes this week. Prosecutors [persecutors] say

every utterance of the alleged al Qaeda murderers, and what their lawyers in turn pass on to the court, must be strictly monitored precisely because of the defendants' intimate personal knowledge of highly classified CIA interrogation methods they endured in the agency's clandestine overseas prisons.

Defense attorneys [correctly] called that view extreme. Everything is presumptively top secret. Prosecutors have said in court filings that any revelations about the defendants' interrogations could cause "exceptionally grave damage." Civil libertarians argue that if those interrogation methods really are top secret, then the CIA had no business revealing them to al Qaeda suspects.

Obama Turns The Clock Back To The Days Of Bush’s Kangaroo Courts And Worthless Tribunals
(New Document Shows FBI Interrogation Advice Draws On CIA Torture Manuals)

US officials familiar with the situation say that the Pentagon has a contingency plan in place for "seizing" Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal should President Obama order them to do so, and that the plan involves sending small teams of special operations forces into Syria. The idea that this could be accomplished with only small teams of ground troops is dramatically far afield of what officials were saying only last week, when they claimed that the plans involved a 50,000-60,000 strong occupation force just to secure weapons, and even more for “peacekeeping.” Syria is known to have a chemical weapon arsenal, but exactly where and exactly how much is a matter of considerable speculation.

Despite being dispatched to hundreds of places across New York City where would-be terrorists might congregate, an eight-member Police Department unit that eavesdropped on countless conversations has not generated a lead or an investigation in at least six years, a police chief testified in a deposition unsealed Monday. The unit was formed in 2003, Chief Galati testified, as the police struggled to quickly learn the distinctions between the many Muslim communities in the city. When eavesdropping, Chief Galati said, members of the unit were listening for conversations that were “alarming or aggressive.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's lawyer Thursday said he had key information relating to the rape claims his client was facing which would be surprising when revealed, a report said. - Baltasar Garzón, who spent hours in a briefing with Assange on Sunday discussing his legal strategy, said

the defence had requested a prosecutor from Sweden travel to London to take a statement from the former hacker. "I think that will be a very good option," he was quoted as saying by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Garzón, best known for trying to extradite Chile's Augusto Pinochet from London to Madrid in 1998, declined to go into specifics on the rape claims but said there was "fragmented knowledge" about the matter. He reportedly said

the defence was in possession of a number of fundamental elements about the allegations that when made public would be a "big surprise". "We cannot divulge them right now but we have requested that the prosecution take a statement from Mr. Assange," he said on the sidelines of a conference in the Australian city of Brisbane.

Sydney Morning Herald: DFAT 'ignored' Assange requests: lawyer

It is possible to protect the rights of the complainants in Sweden and Assange's rights against political persecution, but a vindictive thirst for vengeance is preventing that.

Let us pause to reflect on a truly amazing and revealing fact, one that calls for formal study in several academic fields of discipline. Is it not remarkable that one of the very few individuals over the past decade to risk his welfare, liberty and even life to meaningfully challenge the secrecy regime on which the American national security state (and those of its obedient allies) depends just so happens to have become – long before he sought asylum from Ecuador – the most intensely and personally despised figure among the American and British media class and the British "liberal" intelligentsia?

In 2008 – two years before the release of the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and the diplomatic cables – the Pentagon prepared a secret report which proclaimed WikiLeaks to be an enemy of the state and plotted ways to destroy its credibility and reputation. But in a stroke of amazing luck, Pentagon operatives never needed to do any of that, because the establishment media in the US and Britain harbor at least as much intense personal loathing for the group's founder as the US government does, and eagerly took the lead in targeting him. Many people like to posit the US national security state and western media outlets as adversarial forces, but here – as is so often the case – they have so harmoniously joined in common cause.

Glenn Greenwald: Human rights critics of Russia and Ecuador parade their own hypocrisy - The media's new converts to civic freedom over the Pussy Riot and Assange asylum affairs show a jingoism blind to US abuses. Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it.

Our courts now jail at the drop of a headline – for stealing water or abuse sent on Twitter. So who are we to condemn Russia? - For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the "disproportionate" Pussy Riot terms. In America's case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism "suspects" incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial "three strikes" offenders. Last week alone a US military court declared that reporting the Guantánamo Bay trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be censored. Any mention of his torture in prison was banned as "reasonably expected to damage national security". This has no apparent connection to proportionate punishment or freedom of speech.

Brother Nathanael Kapner: Pussy Riot’s Global Showdown
Paul Craig Roberts: Pussy Riot, The Unfortunate Dupes of Amerikan Hegemony

Facebook has removed Hezbollah-related pages in what can be seen as another attempt by Washington to muzzle criticism of US policies. - A spokesman for the social networking website told Lebanon’s Daily Star that the company removed the official Facebook page for Hezbollah's al-Manar television because it ‘incited violence’. Due to Hezbollah's appearance on a list provided by the State Department that contains names of organizations that may be involved in the “promotion of violence”, they have been removed from the site, Wolen claimed. This is not the first time that Facebook and similar social networking websites use personal information of their users against them and violate their privacy under pressure from the CIA and the Zionist lobbies. In a recent case of “Facebook Terrorism,” high-profile US Marine Brandon Raub was thrown behind bars for posting his critical views of the US government on the social networking website.

International Business Times: Facebook, the CIA, DARPA, and the Tanking IPO
Susanne Posel: 1st Amendment Violated as Facebook Assists Police in Pre-Crime Investigations

Today, General Dempsey, Chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the man who flew to Tel Aviv and informed Netanyahu that America wanted no part of his scheming against Iran was the subject of an assassination attempt in Afghanistan. This wasn’t an act of terrorism or Taliban militants. It was a “mob hit” against someone who failed to kiss the feet of Netanyahu. His response was to unleash killers, not a fact for the public but a fact just the same, one the American military knows very well. Netanyahu has a problem with “hubris.” The culprits, “militants,” managed to escape undetected from the most sophisticatedly defended real estate on earth, the perimeter of Bagam Air Force Base. Lucky for them they attacked at night, a time when America’s 5th generation night vision, ground radar and other detection systems were mysteriously disabled.

Al Manar: Rocket Damages Plane of US’ Dempsey in Afghanistan