[Peace-discuss] Torture under Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/08-5>.]

...Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects 
and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had 
them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing that 
this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced 
that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to 
allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely 
on diplomatic assurances of good treatment." Showing the quality of such 
treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who 
famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with 
chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had 
committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell...