Rawstory | MIT professor Noam Chomsky on Monday decried the use of drones against suspected terrorists, saying that it was murder and violated due process. “If Bush, the Bush Administration, didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers,” he said on Democracy Now. “If the Obama Administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them, so you don’t have to have torture chambers all over.”

Global Research | The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal yesterday found former US president George W Bush and seven of his associates guilty of the charge of ‘Crime of Torture and War Crimes’. The associates were former US vice-president Dick Cheney; former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld; Bush’s former counsel Alberto Gonzales; Cheney’s then-general counsel David Addington; Rumsfeld’s then-general counsel William Haynes; then-assistant attorney-general Jay Bybee; and former deputy assistant attorney-general John Yoo.

New York Daily News | “Help! Help! Help me!” yells the Brooklyn teenager, strapped face down on a gurney. Then, as the electrical current is switched on, he lets out a blood-curdling scream. That wrenching scene was captured on videotape played in a Boston-area courtroom, where the mother of Andre McCollins is suing the clinic that was supposed to be treating her autistic son. McCollins, then 18, survived the shock treatment. But The Judge Rotenberg Center fought tooth-and-nail for eight years to prevent that video from being shown.

Guardian | In 2004, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, were detained en route to the UK, and rendered to Libya. This is the story of their imprisonment, and the trail of evidence that reveals the involvement of the British government. Fatima Bouchar, the wife of Abdul Hakim Belhaj. Both were detained in 2004 in Bangkok with the help of MI6 and rendered to Libya. Photograph: Irina Kalashnikova for the Guardian

Wired | A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.” What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”

Alantic | A couple of Goldblog readers alerted me to a Max Blumenthal story in which Karen Greenberg,  the director of the Fordham School of Law's Center on National Security, is quoted accusing Israel of teaching American interrogators the dark art of torture:

AlterNet.org | Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been stripped of legal immunity for stripped of legal immunity for acts of torture against US citizens authorized while he was in office.   The 7th Circuit made the ruling in the case of two American contractors who were tortured by the US military in Iraq after uncovering a smuggling ring within an Iraqi security company.  The company was under contract to the Department of Defense.   The company was assisting Iraqi insurgent groups in the "mass acquisition" of American weapons.  The ruling comes as Rumsfeld begins his book tour with a visit to Boston on Wednesday, September 21, and as new, uncensored photos of Abu Ghraib spark fresh outrage across Internet.  Awareness is growing that Bush-era crimes went far beyond mere waterboarding.  

Guardian | 'I had my knee in his back. To control him': theatre tackles the Baha Mousa inquiry. British soldiers inflicted "violent and cowardly" assaults on Iraqi civilians, subjecting them to "gratuitous" kickings and beatings, an inquiry into the death of the detainee Baha Mousa has found. In a devastating indictment of military culture, the retired appeal court judge Sir William Gage ruled that there was widespread ignorance of what was permitted in handling prisoners of war.

Guardian | The scale of the CIA's rendition programme has been laid bare in court documents that illustrate in minute detail how the US contracted out the secret transportation of suspects to a network of private American companies.

AP | A lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of personal responsibility for U.S. forces allegedly torturing two American whistleblowers who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm will be allowed to move forward, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

Washington's Blog | Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo were all instrumental in implementing the U.S. torture program. So it is no surprise that they are now pretending that torture helped get Bin Laden. 

Telegraph | AIN January 2004, Spec. Joseph M. Darby, a 24-year-old Army reservist in Iraq, discovered a set of photographs showing other members of his company torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery anguished him, and he struggled over how to respond. “I had the choice between what I knew was morally right, and my loyalty to other soldiers,” he recalled later. “I couldn’t have it both ways.”

IndiaTimes.com | Former US President George W Bush has reportedly cancelled a visit to Switzerland amid concerns that he could be arrested for allegedly authorising the torture of prisoners. The former American president was due to speak at a charity gala, making the keynote speech at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner in the city of Geneva on February 12.

RawStory.com | The Obama administration went to the mat to defend its predecessors from a torture prosecution in Spain last year, a leaked State Department cable shows. The cable, released by WikiLeaks this week, shows that senior US diplomats teamed with Republican lawmakers -- including a former Republican Party chairman -- to put pressure on Spanish officials to drop a criminal investigation into the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques."