Americans should ponder the meaning of this decision, which explicitly places state interests above individual rights, even when such rights include not being sent to a country that will torture that individual. That such torture was done at the behest of the U.S. government, with written questions given to the torturers, only exacerbates the issue.

If one is looking for a smoking gun in the torture scandal, in my opinion one doesn't have to look much farther than this. The quote below is from the April 22, 2009 Senate Intelligence Committee narrative of the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions on the CIA's interrogation program.

Professor Shane O’Mara at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin has written an article which has caught the attention of the mainstream media. Pamela Hess at Associated Press described Prof. O'Mara's article, Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques’ (PDF), as showing that "the severe interrogation techniques appear based on 'folk psychology' -- a layman's idea of how the brain

Maxwell-Gunther Dispatch.com, the web news site for personnel and interested partisans of Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reported on September 17 that Col. (Dr.) James W. Walter has been awarded the Air Medal "for his meritorious service on delicate assignments providing medical care to enemy detainees." From January 2007 to 2009 as the senior detainee movement flight surgeon, he provided 106 combat hours of support to the 14 Joint Task

An article in today's Washington Post by Karen de Young (H/T Spencer Ackerman) highlights the determination to race to catastrophe by the Obama administration. In an ever-ending reconsideration and analysis of Afghanistan party, the Obama administration is said to be internally assessing the progress of the Afghan-Pakistan War over the next few weeks.

An extraordinary article by a Harvard lecturer and former Chief of Neuropsychiatry at Guantanamo Bay made the shocking claim that "hard-core zealots" had "brains that are structurally and functionally different from us." Furthermore, the article stated, 100,000 "zealots" within the Muslim body politic would have to be eliminated, the way "malignant [cancer] cells" are removed from a healthy body.

When Was the Evaluation Written? The report was almost certainly written in July, not long before it was passed to OLC. It likely was part of a packet of material used to present the "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," including waterboarding, as potentially "safe" to use. There are plenty of indications in the report that Zubaydah had been under observation and interrogated prior to the drafting of the report (emphasis added).

It is clear the evaluation was written specifically to get permission for waterboarding, and not to undertake a serious psychological evaluation of the prisoner. The report lacks details related to relevant past history that any psychologist would find important in a psychological evaluation, e.g., the quality of his family relationships, the existence of prior traumas, his actual work and school history, etc. Hell, the report never even mentions the "subject's" age. [Correction: it does; it reports he's 31 years old. - JK]