Torturers Don't Go Unnoticed

++All the major human rights groups and the ACLU have called on the administration to prosecute those involved in our torture program.

++The European Center for Constitutional Law and Human Rights based in Germany is going to seek indictments in that country against the Bush administration officials involved with the program. They also are focusing on the lawyers for their role in justifying it.

++The European Center centers its case on German citizen Khalid el-Masri who was kidnapped and renditioned to the Salt Pit in Afghanistan and tortured. el-Masri was wrongfully identified by the CIA's Queen of Torture whom Jane Mayer identified in the New Yorker. The interrogators kept cabling back to Langley that el-Masri was not the Al Qaeda person the agency wanted. The Agency insisted. Once the mistake was finally recognized, the American ambassador former Senator Coats called for a special meeting with the German Foreign Minister and told him there had been a mistake--all this taken down because it was a formal meeting. El-Masri was then whisked away and dumped by the agency on the road leading to his rural home. He found that his wife had left him and taken his children to Lebanon.

++The UN Committee on Torture this week called on the United States to sanction the lawyers who justified torture. The UN said that by sanctioning the lawyers the United States would no longer have a legal excuse to resume torturing detainees.

++Legal aid groups are again focusing on the crime of "Scientific experimentation with Humans", a crime against humanity. This charge is aimed at the CIA psychologists who have admitted their interrogation project was an experiment in "learned helplessness". 

++By the way,"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" quaintly called "EIT" is a direct translation from the Gestapo Handbook for their torture regime.

++By never mind, the New York Times tells us that the CIA's mandate has been renewed and that the agents who bugged the Senate computers were let off without a slap on the hands. Maybe because John Brennen ordered them to bug the Senate.

++The ACLU has organized a petition urging Mark Udall to release the full torture report before a new Congress begins and Udall walks out the door.