Jon Queally at CommonDreams writes
Modeling CIA Torture, ISIS Waterboarded Those It Captured: Report:
| The Washington Post reports on Thursday that at least four individuals taken captive by the Islamic State were tortured and that the group—also known as ISIS—appeared to be modeling the CIA's use of torture as it employed waterboarding as one of the painful techniques they used.
Worldwide condemnation followed revelations that in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration approved the CIA to torture suspected terrorists during interrogations conducted at secret 'Black Sites' – or clandestine holding facilities.
Among those subjected to the brutal treatment by ISIS, according to sources quoted in the Post's reporting, was American journalist James Foley who was subsequently executed by the group.
From the Post:
| “They knew exactly how it was done,” said a person with direct knowledge of what happened to the hostages. The person, who would only discuss the hostages’ experience on condition of anonymity, said the captives, including Foley, were held in Raqqah, a city in the north-central region of Syria. […]
A second person familiar with Foley’s time in captivity confirmed Foley was tortured, including by waterboarding.
“Yes, that is part of the information that bubbled up and Jim was subject to it,” the person said. “I believe he suffered a lot of physical abuse.” […]
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As the Huffington Post's Jack Mirkinson points out:
| Waterboarding became perhaps the most notorious method of torture practiced by American interrogators in the years after September 11th.
Interestingly, while the Post has, like most mainstream outlets, typically been reluctant to call methods such as waterboarding "torture" when it was practiced by Americans, the paper had no apparent problem calling what ISIS did to Foley "torture."
"A second person familiar with Foley’s time in captivity confirmed Foley was tortured, including by waterboarding," the Post wrote.
Still, the paper has not followed the New York Times in vowing to use the word "torture" more firmly in its articles.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Wall Street's moral hazard:
| It's the financial sector's world now. The rest of us? We just live here.
That's the only conclusion logic can dictate concerning the pressure that is being put on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to get on board with a deal that would require certain large banks that made ill-gotten gains out of misrepresented mortgage-backed securities and improper foreclosure procedures to be indemnified from future prosecution for an amount that at its highest represents only pennies on the dollar of the total amount of fraud perpetrated on individual homeowners and institutional investors.
Economic theory has a concept called moral hazard. The idea behind the concept is that parties who do not have to worry about the risk associated with their actions will behave differently from those who do. It's not hard to imagine a world where, for instance, criminal behavior carried no risk of prison or fines: there would certainly be much more of it, and the world would be a scarier place. For financial crimes that are designed to make money, however, the calculus is completely different: a criminal justice system or regulatory agency can impose fines or force settlements, but unless those settlements or fines approximate the profit that was made from the criminal enterprise in question, those fines become nothing more than a cost of doing business.
And there is no question that in the case of the deal being pushed by the Obama administration and other state attorneys general, massive white collar crime is at issue, as Matt Taibbi concisely explains […]
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Tweet of the Day
Whether it's birth control or carbon pollution, Republicans just don't believe men should have to pay for their emissions.
— @LOLGOP
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, everybody's talking about the 9-year-old with the Uzi. And you can thank GunFAIL for that.
Greg Dworkin's top story is a narrative-buster: Medicare's not exploding. McDonnell's "crazy wife" defense. Jindal flip-flops & sues over Common Core. "How fish can learn to walk." Congressional candidate's gun stolen, used in deadly robbery. Here comes the pro-militarization lobbying. McDonnell's oddball living arrangements. Shocking cop cam video from a February story captured outrageous brutality, which cops nonetheless denied. Struggling to keep up with views on drug-detecting nail polish, and Ferguson as a "suburban ghetto."
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