Last March, Kurnaz told the German press about the forcible use of drugs on detainees at Guantanamo, including the administration of anti-malarial medications. One article at DW World cited investigatory stories by Jason Leopold and myself on the use of the controversial drug mefloquine on all the Guantanamo detainees.

In the RT video, Kurnaz talks about his stay in Kandahar, imprisoned by the U.S. military before he was shipped to Guantanamo. He was age 19.

The entire 9/11 field of inquiry has been vilified, poisoned over the years by ridicule, sometimes fantastic conspiracy mongering, and fearfulness by journalists of approaching the material, lest they be branded as irresponsible or some kind of conspiracy freak. As a result, little work has been done to investigate, except by a small group of people, some of whom have raised some real questions, others who were intoxicated by the possibility of some giant conspiracy.

If anything, this story is about an intelligence and oversight scandal.

Sec. Gates–who does have his future to think about, after all–wants to make sure his successors (or at least his future employers) understand. No more defense contractors need get tossed into the terrible winepress of budget austerity–there are plenty of fighting folks, ready for trampling.

Our government has apparently conceded it can’t keep its networks secret from China.

The commissions’ main purpose is to produce government propaganda, not justice. These are meant to be show trials, part of an overarching plan of “exploitation” of prisoners, which includes, besides a misguided attempt by some to gain intelligence data, the inducement of false confessions and the recruitment of informants via torture. The aim behind all this is political: to mobilize the U.S. population for imperialist war adventures abroad, and political repression and economic austerity at home.

One entity that has thus far avoided all responsibility for the leak are the folks in charge of the Defense Department’s IT. As I have pointed out, DOD’s network security was embarrassingly bad–worse than your average mid-sized corporation. But to make their negligent security even worse, they had already suffered a damaging compromise of their systems when, in 2008, malware was introduced into their system via removable media, the same means by which Manning is alleged to have downloaded the WikiLeaks cables.

It seems to me we’re never going to see that report until after the eight-year statute of limitations on torture expire for everything described in the report that clearly exceeded John Yoo’s expansive interpretation of what constitutes torture.

As part of a new investigative story, Truthout has published two documents written by the former psychologist for SERE, and later CIA contract interrogator for the Bush torture program, Bruce Jessen. Jessen’s notes describe an “exploitation” survival course that was “reverse-engineered” to provide a blueprint for the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration, which emphasized not just the ways to coercively interrogate an individual for intelligence purposes, but to “exploit” the detainee for a number of uses, including production of false confessions, recruitment of prisoners as U.S. spies, putting on show trials, and medical experimentation.

So, for those who have gotten confused by DOD’s pushback: they are still taking away Manning’s very dangerous boxers at night (though they allow him to wear such dangerous items during the day). And then, in a bid to pretend they’re not trying to drive Manning crazy, they basically make him sleep in an uncomfortable duffel bag-like garment.

The London Times is reporting (behind the greed wall) that General David Patreus’s days as leader of coalition forces in Afghanistan are numbered.