The four captives are walked off to the side of the road. The younger woman is blindfolded. The other woman, seated on the ground, bows her head. “Yes, come here, little girl,” one of the men says to the child, pulling her shirt up and wrapping it around her face so she cannot see. The baby on the woman’s back is still looking around. And then the soldiers open fire with their assault rifles.

It is all filmed with remarkable calm, even the repeated shots to the head of the woman with the infant, and the infant as well, and then what appears to be a coup de grace for the little girl.

Ahed’s story drew rare attention to the plight of Palestinian children held in Israeli military prisons — an overwhelming majority of them over stone-throwing incidents or for participation in protests — and the sham court proceedings, abuse and threat-filled interrogations, and extracted confessions to which they are subject. In the weeks before Ahed’s release, The Intercept spoke with more than a dozen formerly imprisoned children, parents of children currently in prison, attorneys and advocates, as well as several members of the Tamimi family. They shared similar stories of predawn raids during which soldiers separated children from their families, physically and verbally assaulted them, blindfolded and handcuffed them, and drove them to interrogation centers where — almost always without an attorney or parent present — they were subjected to further abuse and forced to confess, before being summarily sentenced to months in prison.

I am officially a prisoner of war, though the only battle I ever fought back home, as a taxi driver in Karachi, was the rush hour traffic. I was mistaken for an extremist, captured by Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s government and sold to the CIA for a bounty in 2002. I’ve now been detained at Guantánamo, without trial, for nearly 14 years.

President Trump’s lawyers argued in court this month that I and other Guantánamo prisoners who have filed habeas corpus petitions could be held by the U.S. government for a hundred years, if that is how long the “conflict” lasts.

Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria, but coverage in the United States has been sporadic at best. PBS News Hour did a thorough three-part series, but MSNBC, for instance, has barely mentioned the crisis in a year, during a period when it has done 455 segments on Stormy Daniels (this according to media reporter Adam Johnson).

The reason for inattention is obvious: The United States bears real responsibility for the crisis. A quote from a Yemeni doctor found in PBS reporter Jane Ferguson’s piece sums it up:

“The missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks … American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.”

Much of the grim and murky circumstances of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the late 1940s have gradually been exposed over time. One aspect – rarely researched or deeply discussed – is the internment of thousands of Palestinian civilians within at least 22 Zionist-run concentration and labor camps that existed from 1948 to 1955. Now more is known about the contours of this historical crime, due to the comprehensive research by renowned Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta and founding member of the Palestinian resource center BADIL Terry Rempel.

The facts are these.

In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as “Al Qaeda.” There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, writes Nafeez Ahmed. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself. Since then, the country's water infrastructure - and the suffering of its people - has only deteriorated further.

Geopolitical expert Adam Garrie says that the Israeli regime’s possession of nuclear weapons and the American veto power at the UN Security Council have provided the regime with a feeling of impunity for their daily violations of international laws.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with FNA, Adam Garrie said that the US exercises its veto power “like a weapon of mass obstruction” to shield the Zionist regime at the UN Security Council.

Mr. Garrie believes that the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, acts more like the Ambassador of the Zionist regime than that of the United States. He likened the UN Security Council to “a shopping center where Zionist propaganda is for sale” and the US envoy to “a shop keeper lying to her customers” while trying to insult the intelligence of the whole world.

On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia announced that it is issuing a royal pardon for any and all Saudi troops engaged in the war in Yemen, covering all crimes related to violating military rules and discipline. They said this is to show appreciation for the “heroics” of the invading forces.

The Saudi invasion of Yemen has been widely controversial internationally. Saudi airstrikes have killed massive numbers of Yemeni civilians, and the war has also caused a famine, and the largest cholera epidemic in human history.

Faced with UN criticism, Saudi officials heavily resisted allegations of wrongdoing, and ultimately got the UN to agree that Saudi Arabia would be allowed to investigate its own forces, and police themselves. This pardon shows none of that is going to matter.

Israeli forces shot 22-year-old Muhammad Abu Halima in the chest, killing him, during protests east of Gaza City on Friday.

Nearly 400 people were injured along Gaza’s eastern boundary on the 15th consecutive week of the Great March of Return demonstrations. Nearly 60 were wounded with live ammunition, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

On Wednesday the health ministry announced that Mahmoud Majid al-Gharableh, 16, had succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the head on 14 May, which saw the highest number of fatalities in a single day since the launch of the protests in late March.

Al-Gharableh is the 20th child among the nearly 150 Palestinians reported killed by Israeli forces in Gaza during that period, the vast majority of them during protests. More than 4,000 others have been wounded by live fire.

Crude propaganda
Israel has resorted to crude propaganda to deflect blame for the deaths of Palestinian boys and girls hit by bullets fired by its soldiers.

Horrific atrocities including mass rape and cannibalism are taking place in a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a UN report.

Testimony from the country's Kasai region included boys being forced to rape their mothers, little girls being told witchcraft would allow them to catch bullets, and women forced to choose gang-rape or death.

Both rebels and government troops have committed atrocities during the conflict including dismemberment of civilians, according to accounts published by a team of U.N. human rights experts who said the world must pay heed.

The team investigating a conflict in the region told the U.N. Human Rights Council last week that they suspected all sides were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Leaked documents show that Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of the notorious Cambridge Analytica, carried out a surveillance operation embedded among local Yemeni populations in 2009. The research and psychological tactics of deception were likely later used against populations around the world including Libya, Syria, and Iran where SCL Group carried out various operations to influence social climates on behalf of their clients.

SLC Group has a dubious history of stirring up trouble with “psychological warfare” in places like Nigeria, Ukraine, Latvia and many Western countries.

The leaked documents, obtained by the Grayzone Project, detail a program called “Project Titania” carried out in Yemen which SCL Group appears to have used for honing their psychological manipulation skills. Grayzone spoke with a media professional who SCL attempted to recruit for an operation in Iran in 2009.

In 2004, investigative reporter Sy Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq that shocked the world. Shocking photos of US military personnel humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib sparked global outcry, as well as national hearings, investigations and finger pointing. We speak with Sy Hersh about his investigation, nearly 15 years later.

Imagine a county sheriff that took a suspected drug-law violator into custody more than 10 years ago. Since then, the man has been held in jail without being accorded a trial. The district attorney and the sheriff promise to give the man a trial sometime in the future but they’re just not sure when. Meanwhile the man sits in jail indefinitely just waiting for his trial to begin.

Difficult to imagine, right? That’s because most everyone would assume that a judge would never permit such a thing to happen.

The Oise-Aisne cemetery, dedicated to the fallen Americans in the First World War, has a small plot impossible to visit in which rest the remains of 94 soldiers executed for committing all kinds of atrocities against the civilian population.

The work of the soldier is always dark and anonymous. It consists, as General George Patton said at the time, in a basic rule: “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.” As if that were not enough, the story always reminds the high officials, but never the soldiers that shed their blood in Salerno or the fine sand of Normandy. That is why monuments and military cemeteries are so important for the nations like the United States because the names of the combatants allow to honor the memory of soldiers and not to forget them. Resting places such as the cemetery of Coleville, Omaha, are an example of this, hosting more than 10,000 American heroes.

Craig Murray, the only British civil servant to express written concerns over UK complicity in torture and rendition, has told RT that former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw should face the International Criminal Court.
Murray was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan when he noted that MI6 operatives were receiving intelligence from the "torture chambers of the Uzbek regime," later expressing written concerns back to the Foreign Office and "to Jack Straw personally," only to be told that "in the War on Terror, the decision was that we would accept intelligence from torture."

"I subsequently became aware that in fact the Americans were also shipping people into Uzbekistan specifically in order for them to be tortured under the extraordinary rendition system," said Murray.

A US federal judge has ruled that a family can proceed with their lawsuit against a police officer who tasered their teenage son in the groin on the night that he died in police custody after being arrested while high on LSD.
The Texas teenager, Graham Dyer, was arrested on the night of August 13, 2013 during a trip on the hallucinogenic LSD drug. In the back of the police cruiser, the teen repeatedly banged his head against the metal supports in the vehicle.

Video footage — which the police refused to turn over to the family until years after the incident — showed one officer reaching into the back seat and repeatedly shocking Dyer while another officer held him down by his hair. The teenager was later found unresponsive in his cell and was taken to hospital where he died. The medical examiner concluded that he died due to the self-inflicted head injuries.

Two police officers who strapped an 18-year-old in a restraint chair and tortured him with a taser were arrested and charged with multiple crimes this week. The horrifying video was so damning that the normal process of sweeping it under the rug was not an option.

The British government’s involvement in torture and rendition is “beyond doubt” the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said today. The parliamentary committee, which oversee the work of the intelligence machinery of the UK, revealed the true scale of the UK government’s involvement in torture and rendition since the war on terror was launched by US President George Bush in 2001.

It is one of the most damning indictments ever of UK intelligence. Torture and rendition, according to the ISC, were much more widespread than previously reported. The ISC rejected the intelligence agencies’ defence and said that the cases were not just “isolated incidents”.

A litany of cases of concern was highlighted in two reports by the USC. One report deals with the mistreatment and rendition of detainees between 2001 and 2010, while the other considers current issues.

Israel, one of the most technologically advanced military superpowers, is making a colossal fool of itself on the global stage by crying Wolf – ‘We have the right to defend ourselves from – from ?- hold onto your hats, folks, from – Kites, Balloons, Stones, Cameras, a Slap, a Poem.

Seriously? Damn Right. These aren’t just any kites, balloons, stones, cameras, slap, poem. These are terror toys of Palestinian mass defiance and of monster maquisards, mainly teenagers and youth, that strike fear and panic in the mighty Israeli armed forces.

With Israel’s back to the wall, Israeli leaders predictably huddle behind the ‘Terrorist’ Card and the Victim Card that hide Israel’s cowardice and cruelty and justify its atrocities against Palestinian resistance.

Quote from NRC’s Hodeidah Office Coordinator, Saleem Al-Shamiri, in Sana’a:

“Many people fled their homes in Hodeidah already. Sana’a and other cities are receiving many displaced. Water supplies have been cut off in some areas. Even families who refused to leave their house behind, have now been forced to flee because the fighting is closing in. Some of my friends arrived yesterday and today early morning. They are concerned for their future and worried they have lost their homes and income. How will they manage to rebuild their lives again?”

“I have friends who can’t leave their homes because they don’t have the means to travel. They are scared for their safety. They might be left in the crossfire without any water, food or way to escape. I am hoping the warring parties will allow safe routes out of the city as the fighting gets closer. People must be given a chance to save their own lives.”

Quote from NRC’s Hodeidah Office Coordinator, Saleem Al-Shamiri, in Sana’a:

“Many people fled their homes in Hodeidah already. Sana’a and other cities are receiving many displaced. Water supplies have been cut off in some areas. Even families who refused to leave their house behind, have now been forced to flee because the fighting is closing in. Some of my friends arrived yesterday and today early morning. They are concerned for their future and worried they have lost their homes and income. How will they manage to rebuild their lives again?”

“I have friends who can’t leave their homes because they don’t have the means to travel. They are scared for their safety. They might be left in the crossfire without any water, food or way to escape. I am hoping the warring parties will allow safe routes out of the city as the fighting gets closer. People must be given a chance to save their own lives.”

The so-called “liberators” in Yemen are sexually and physically torturing detainees at secret prisons. Survivors recall disturbing stories laden with gruesome interrogation tactics for extracting false confessions. Meanwhile, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen attempts to portray themselves as the bearers of freedom and reason.

As an ally of the United States’ “counter-terrorism” operation in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates established 18 prisons throughout territory under their control. An ongoing investigation from the Associated Press has so far identified instances of deranged sexual torture at five of these facilities. The Emirati headquarters in Yemen houses one of such facilities where witnesses have seen American soldiers.

More than 200 unarmed Palestinian protesters have been wounded by Israeli troops in the besieged Gaza Strip along the border separating the impoverished enclave and the occupied territories.

According to a report by the Gaza Ministry of Health, 206 demonstrators, including at least eight minors, sustained injuries as a result of inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers in the blockaded sliver on Friday.

Reports said that Israeli forces fired large quantities of tear gas canisters and live bullets east of Gaza City to disperse some 7,000 protesters who were rallying for what had been officially designated as “Friday of the Wounded”, paying tribute to those who have been wounded since the beginning of the Great March of Return demonstrations.

Last night in Connecticut, Sarah Walsh of AIPAC told a Conservative synagogue audience that the lobby group is striving to ensure that support for Israel remains bipartisan, but there are more signs that progressive Democrats feel they are able to criticize Israeli policies.

First, Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace says there’s been a reluctance even in the Democratic establishment to defend Israel during the Gaza slaughter. In an interview with the Real News, Vilkomerson said Trump’s embrace of Netanyahu has opened the door for formerly-silent Democrats to be critical of Israel. “There’s a willingness to look at Israel’s actions that maybe wasn’t possible when Obama was president.”

“Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” Bergman writes. In many cases, these so-called targeted killings over the last two decades also involved the deaths of nearly a thousand bystanders, according to Bergman’s calculations – those numbers, however, fail to include the tens of thousands killed in overt acts of war and collective punishment that mostly go unmentioned in this book.

That Israeli officials were willing to be quoted and identify others by name implies a certainty of never being held accountable in a court of law. Consider, for example, the instruction given by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Avi Dichter, at that time Shin Bet’s director, in reference to Hamas. Sharon, in an open admission of intent to commit genocide, stated: “Go for it. Kill them all.”

“These are historic days,” the 28-year-old Gaza resident said. “We are telling the whole world that we have never forgotten our legitimate right of return to our stolen villages and towns.”

Stone-throwing is a simple act of resistance for Palestinians. It is a symbolic way of confronting one of the most militarized nations on earth.

It has been a tactic used by some participants in the Great March of Return – protests demanding that Palestinians be allowed home to villages and towns from which Zionist forces expelled them in 1948.

As the dust settles over Gaza, an already wobbling Egyptian-mediated ceasefire may bring some calm for the two million Palestinians trapped there without, yet again, any resolution to Gaza’s underlying problems.

The most pressing problem for Palestinians in Gaza remains a tottering infrastructure that threatens a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe at any moment. Water and electricity are scarce, sewage flows directly into the sea and the economy is in ruins.

The health sector has been the focus over the past few weeks since the Great March of Return protests put the spotlight back on Gaza.

The number of injuries resulting from Israeli attacks against unarmed protesters on the eastern boundary of the Gaza Strip nearly broke the back of an overstretched and under-resourced sector, exacerbating the pressure on health professionals and straining provision.

As Ahmed was too shy to approach the woman, Khader and I went and talked to her. After introducing ourselves, we asked for her address, so that Ahmed could visit her family with a marriage proposal.

It was my only contact with Ahmed.

On 14 May this year, I came home, feeling weary after covering the latest massacre committed by Israel. When I opened my laptop, I saw pictures of Ahmed on the Internet. He was one of around 60 demonstrators killed on that day. He was 27 years old.

Learning that Ahmed was among them saddened me, even though I had just met him once. I began to weep.

The next morning I phoned Khader to console him. Later, we both went to Ahmed’s funeral. The sense of shock among the mourners was almost palpable.

Ahmed did actually marry the woman he was too shy to approach. Her name is Hanan.

She is 24 and graduated with a teaching degree from the Islamic University of Gaza, where Ahmed was studying business administration.

The margin between what is a human right as an inalienable possession, and how it is seen in political terms is razor fine. In some cases, the distinctions are near impossible to make. To understand the crime of genocide is to also understand the political machinations that limited its purview. No political or cultural groups, for instance, were permitted coverage by the defintion in the UN Convention responsible for criminalising it.

The same goes for the policing bodies who might use human rights in calculating fashion, less to advance an agenda of the human kind than that of the political. This can take the form of scolding, and the United States, by way of illustration, has received beratings over the years in various fields. (Think an onerous, vicious prison system, the stubborn continuation of the death penalty, and levels of striking impoverishment for an advanced industrial society.)

Hundreds of prisoners in southern Yemen swept up on suspicion of belonging to al-Qaida or ISIS are being systematically raped, tortured and humiliated in at least five out of 18 UAE-controlled "hidden prisons," according to seven witnesses who spoke to AP, which also obtained letters and drawings smuggled out of one prison in Aden.

Emiratis have swept up hundreds of Yemeni men into a network of at least 18 hidden prisons on suspicion of being al-Qaida or Islamic State militants. The prisoners are held without charges or trials.

Witnesses said Yemeni guards working under the direction of Emirati officers have used various methods of sexual torture and humiliation. They raped detainees while other guards filmed the assaults. They electrocuted prisoners’ genitals or hung rocks from their testicles. They sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the US administration for leaving the UN Human Right Council, saying its step was “courageous” in criticizing the council of bias.

Netanyahu thanked, in a statement on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump, Minister Pompeo and Ambassador Nikki Haley for their decision against what he called the “hypocrisy and lies” of the so-called UN Human Rights Council.

He added, according to Al Ray, that the Human Rights Council proves its chronic bias against Israel, claiming that it has betrayed its mission of protecting human rights.

The United States announced, on Tuesday, its leaving the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, which Ambassador Nikki Haley called “an organization that is not worthy of its name.”

Although thousands of women have reported rape and other sexual atrocities in South Sudan's war, human rights groups say the figure is likely to be much higher.

United Arab Emirates officers tortured detainees in 18 secret prisons in Yemen, an AP news agency investigation finds.

Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan upped his government’s efforts to link the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign with “terrorism”, in a presentation to pro-Israel activists on Tuesday night, reported The Jerusalem Post.

Erdan unveiled what he described in a post on Twitter as a “map of the Delegitimization Network – aka, the Hate Net”, which the minister claimed “mapped out the 42 leading #BDS orgs, their hub in Ramallah & the connections between them”.

The minister told an audience of Israel advocates that “a coordinated and financed network of [boycott] organizations is led from Ramallah and Gaza, a quarter of which have links to terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]”.

Some 75 members of the Jewish community have sent an open letter to the Board of Deputies of British Jews condemning its support for Israel’s violence against Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border.

“We are appalled that the Board of Deputies (BoD) which claims to be ‘the voice of British Jews,’ has once again attempted to justify the massacre of unarmed Palestinian people by the Israeli military,” the statement read.

Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation is expected to approve a draft bill on Sunday that aims to ban the documentation of Israeli soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians by human rights groups.

The legislation would prohibit the “documentation and distribution of any report about confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians with the intent either to harm national security or to ‘break the spirit of Israeli soldiers and inhabitants’”, reported Haaretz.

The law, proposed by MK Robert Ilatov of Yisrael Beitenu, enjoys support from faction head Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the Kulanu party, headed by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon.

Early on June 13, the embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington, DC tweeted a photo of a fax from MSF’s administrator of communication and liaison in Djibouti. This document is dated June 11, and the Saudi embassy claimed it showed MSF “clearly admit that the unfortunate facility incident was due to their failure to update their coordinates per standard procedures.”

MSF told me this claim is false. The organization clarified that it gave the Saudi coalition the GPS coordinates for its cholera treatment center at least 12 times in writing, and the coalition “acknowledged receipt of these coordinates in writing at least nine times.”

Throughout the past seven decades, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly recognized that Palestinian refugees are entitled to go home. The Great Return March has asserted that right, while drawing attention to how Israel violates it.

Ahmed was the son of Mahmoud al-Rantisi, an information technology teacher at the Islamic University of Gaza and a leading member of Hamas.

Ahmed’s connections to Hamas give Israel no excuse for killing him and other unarmed demonstrators. Under international human rights law, it is illegal for Israeli snipers – shielded by two fences – to open fire on protesters.

President Donald Trump should pardon John Kiriakou as soon as possible. He should do so to reverse former president Barack Obama’s worst injustice: putting a man in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation techniques, now widely considered to be torture and banned by Obama himself.

Kiriakou was highly decorated during his 14 years of CIA counterterrorism service. In 2007, he went public with what the CIA was doing to prisoners—which current CIA director Gina Haspel most recently disowned in a letter to Senator Mark Warner: “[T]he program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With both the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior Agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken.” Kiriakou’s objections catalyzed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which strengthened and clarified existing interrogation prohibitions.

The number of dead is outrageous; the number injured – especially gunshot victims, and particularly victims of “butterfly bullets” – is unconscionable. These young protesters will need multiple, complex surgeries (or amputation) and intensive rehabilitation, in a region where medical facilities and staff are already stretched beyond their limits. We can only hope for an authentic investigation via the UN Human Rights Council.

Israel’s forcible transfer of thousands of Palestinians has been denounced as a war crime by over 300 elected officials, legal scholars, academics, artists, faith leaders and activists from around the world.

The universal show of solidarity to the Palestinians was published in an open letter which voiced strong opposition to Israel’s plans to forcibly transfer thousands of Palestinians living in farming-shepherding communities in the occupied West Bank.

Signatories include 90 members of parliament, many of whom are from the EU and UK parliaments. Other notable signatories include ten Israel Prize laureates, film director Ken Loach, artists Ai Weiwei, author Alice Walker, academic Noam Chomsky and several musicians. Dozens of Rabbis have also signed the letter denouncing Israel for what many would describe ethnic cleansing.

This logic has been uttered by a prominent Israeli journalist: Mass shootings of Palestinians have saved their lives. Reporting from the sniper positions near the Gaza fence, Dan Margalit writes in his Hebrew-only Haaretz opinion (Saturday):

From this position, the events looked a bit different than from the Karni crossing near Nahal Oz. Now I am convinced, more than at the beginning of the fighting about 10 weeks ago, that the massive shooting at the beginning of the battles [sic] has saved many Palestinian lives, and of course, first and foremost, lives of Israelis.”

And just how does he get to the logic, that mass shooting of Palestinians is good for them (and of course, first and foremost for us, and despite the fact that no real “battles” have really occurred in these demonstrations)?

The United States has been quietly funding and equipping elite paramilitary police units in El Salvador accused of extrajudicially murdering suspected gang members, according to a forthcoming United Nations report reviewed in advance by CNN.

Beginning with George W. Bush in 2003, successive US administrations have provided tens of millions of dollars in aid for Salvadoran military and police in support of the government’s “Mano Dura” (“Firm Hand”) security program, an aggressive campaign to combat out-of-control gang violence in a country with one of the world’s highest homicide rates.

The director of a national security program at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs has registered with the U.S. Department of Justice as an agent of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 28Pages.org is first to report.

In his registration statement, retired U.S. Army Colonel Bill Smullen, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, indicated he has agreed to provide “public relations support” to the Saudi embassy for compensation initially projected at $8,000.

Smullen’s National Security Studies program at Syracuse is billed as “a premier professional development program that offers executive education courses for senior civilian and military leaders who are responsible for the national security interests of their respective organizations.”

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the country’s use of torture is far deeper and more systemic than what has been publicly acknowledged.

Revelations on the use of torture by US intelligence personnel during the George W Bush presidency have been described as one of the "darkest chapters" in US history.

Not only did it erode whatever moral authority the US claimed to have had during the first decade of the "War on Terror," but the egregious mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca also helped to give birth to the self-proclaimed Islamic State and to re-energise the global jihad movement.

You'd be mistaken, however, if you believed this nefarious chapter in US history started and ended with the Bush administration - and given that the Republican-controlled Congress has voted to probe whether US troops resorted to torture as part of their interrogation of prisoners in Yemen, you can be sure there is still much to learn.