A major report on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) program was released today by the Open Society Justice Initiative. It is one of the most comprehensive examinations of the program to date.

From “credible public sources and information provided by reputable human rights organizations,” the organization was able to figure out that “as many as 54 foreign governments reportedly” hosted CIA prisons on their territories; detained, interrogated, tortured and abused individuals; assisted in the capture and transport of detainees; permitted the use of domestic airspace and airports for secret flights transporting detainees; provided intelligence leading to the secret detention and extraordinary rendition of individuals and interrogated individuals who were secretly being held in the custody of other governments.

A former government official has come forward to tell Firedoglakethat the government is prosecuting whistleblower John Kiriakou on the charge of revealing an identity of a “covert CIA officer” because the CIA was “totally ticked at Kiriakou for acknowledging the use of torture as state policy.”

According to the official, the “covert CIA officer” — referred to in the indictment as Official A — was “responsible for ensuring the execution” of the worldwide RDI program.

Just a few years ago, the national debate over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, secret renditions and other legal elements of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” happened openly in American courtrooms and in the daily newspapers. Increasingly, those debates have receded into the rearview mirror as we content ourselves with the illusion that these issues are no longer urgent, or no longer affect us. In his thoughtful new book, Habeas Corpus After 9/11, Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall University School of Law, reminds us that these and other legal innovations in the War on Terror are neither resolved, nor isolated, nor benign. We are still living in the legal universe that was constructed on the fly after 9/11. We just don’t want to admit it.

Barry Eisler’s new novel, Inside Out, is a spy thriller that takes off from the past years’ headlines about missing CIA torture tapes. But it is something even more: it is one of the most politically astute novels of our generation. No other work of fiction has pointedly posed the alternatives for those who would seek political change in the United States in the 21st century. And what are the possibilities in a system where conspiracy is impossible because “everyone is complicit”? Political nihilism, revolutionary adventurism, martyrdom, or subornation by the Establishment.

Andy Worthington is posting portions of the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued last February. The UN report was hardly reported by either the U.S. press or the blogosphere, and deserves wide dissemination.

A new article at Truthout, by H.P. Albarelli and Jeffrey Kaye, describes how the CIA’s Artichoke Project was the contemporaneous and operational side of the MK-ULTRA mind control research program. It was not superceded by MK-ULTRA in the 1950s, as often supposed. Even more, Artichoke-derived methods of using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and overload, behavioral modification techniques and other methods of mind control have resurfaced as a primary component of U.S. interrogation practice.

In the same week that Vice Admiral Harward claims that the US no longer has secret prisons in Afghanistan, the UN has published a report with extensive documentation that multiple secret prisons have been employed. Whether they still are in operation is hard to determine.