October 23, 2007

  • Where Are We? The Torture Edition

    You’re an Egyptian guy who happens to be in a Manhattan hotel room on 9/11. The hotel is evacuated, and someone finds an airplane radio in your closet.

    The FBI takes you and questions you. You don’t know where the radio came from… It’s not yours. The FBI forces a confession out of you by threatening to send your family to Egypt to be tortured. You confess to being involved in 9/11 in order to spare your family.

    Then the airline pilot shows up at the hotel and asks where his radio is.

    You sue the FBI. There’s a ruling in your favor. The court publishes an opinion about it. But a little while later, some ‘blogger writes about it. Suddenly, the opinion disappears from the court’s web site, and is later replaced with the information about the coerced interrogation redacted.

    This is a true story. Follow the link for both versions of the opinion.

    Take away: The FBI can coerce a confession out of you and then cause the records of this wrongdoing to be removed from the public record, because apparently illegal activity on the part of the FBI is top secret.

Comments (8)

  • Oh man…

    If you didn’t do it… NEVER say you did… EVER>… There have been so many times that people have sat in an interrogation room for hours andhours and hours without being allowed to go to the bathroom or have something to drink… etc… so they say ok… and then end up in jail only to be proven innocent later… I don’t get it. I guess you would have to be in the situation to understand, but I can’t imagine that not being able to go to the bathroom would ever make me say I did something I didn’t.

    It has been proven that torture doesn’t work either so… what should they do? We need very clear rules on what is allowed and what isn’t.

  • so do you think that any pres. will ever stop this, or is this kind of shit a done deal forever?

    chuck is more idealistic that i am, and thinks the right person in office will fix everything.  i don’t think so — i think the bastards will just take as much power as they can.

  • Gee, what a surprise.

  • Like I said in my stump speech a while back, the President doesn’t change these things. The President *uses* these things. The Congress changes them. There is no right person for the office who will change these things for good; they’ll persist as precedents unless the laws are changed.

  • of course what it makes me wonder is, what else do we “not know about” … gulp

    :(

  • And it never occurs to the FBI that someone who is in on 9/11 wouldn’t likely stay in a hotel so close to the WTCs that it would have to be evacuated.

    Thanks for spreading the word on shit like this.  Transparancy is the only hope for civilization.

  • Hooray for…um…justice?  Justice.  Justice!  Yes that’s it.

  • OMG! Come and check out the Detroit (Dearborn, Michigan) scene! (You know, the area of the greatest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States)……………..Ouch!!!!

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