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.

The death of former CIA “ghost prisoner” Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, aka Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, is beginning to make some serious waves in the press. The story was initially broken in the U.S. on May 10 by Andy Worthington. Now Newsweek is reporting (H/T, again, the redoubtable Mr. Worthington) that al-Libi was “healthy and had no apparent physical ailments” when Human Rights Watch (HRW) visitors met him on April 27, only days