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.

Jason Leopold has posted an incredible interview with David Hicks, formerly Detainee 002 at Guantanamo. In April 2007, Hicks, an Australian, was released from Guantanamo and sent back to serve nine months in jail in Australia, having been forced to plead guilty to “providing material support to terrorism.” This is his first interview, and Truthout has posted it along with an article by Leopold with more background on Hicks, which includes interviews with some of the guards who watched him.

A National Research Council (NRC) 2008 report on a conference on Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies examined briefly what it characterized as a “contemporary problem,” the possibility of doing research on “war on terror” detainees, removed by the U.S. government from Geneva protections against experiments done on prisoners of war.

Despite famously, spectacularly and cravenly throwing his long-time pastor under the bus during the 2008 Democratic primary, Barack Obama has failed to steer our country back to its founding principle of the strict separation between church and state. Because George W. Bush relied heavily on radical Christian fundamentalists to be elected, it was not surprising when he followed through on a campaign promise and established an office of faith-based initiatives. Obama, however, has continued the office, with only minor changes to the window dressing. Furthermore, despite public attention on The Family and its nefarious activities, Obama defied calls to stay away and still spoke last year to the National Prayer Breakfast, which is organized by the same group. Although the US is not yet to the point that politicians will be killed because they are viewed as likely to weaken a blasphemy law or there are mass killings based on religious differences, how far away are those days now that the military sees the need for extra “counseling” for soldiers who are atheists, when a House Committee Chair plans hearings on the “radicalization” of a faith he differs with, and some cadets at the Air Force Academy replied in a survey that they “felt in fear” since they were not Christian fundamentalists? Integration of radical Christian fundamentalist (or any other religion’s) views into the US government and military is a huge danger to our country and to the world, and yet Obama seems just as fearful of attacking this problem as he is in the other political battles in which he has capitulated.

An “experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative” called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is drawing criticism from civil rights groups and rank-and-file soldiers by testing military personnel for “spiritual fitness.” What’s next? Will atheism be pronounced a new form of “material support to terrorism”?

A new article at Truthout describes how Paul Wolfowitz issued a military directive in March 2002 that loosened rules against human experimentation and protections for subjects of such research that had been in place since the early 1970s. According to sources within the Department of Defense, the Wolfowitz Directive, “Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research”, was used to support a top-secret Special Access Program at Guantanamo funded through the Defense Department’s black budget involving “deception detection”, interrogation, and other research upon detainees.

You see, from the start this war was designed to be our longest war. Because all those Commander-in-Chief powers both Republicans and Democrats have grown to love so much depend on it continuing.

Jason Leopold at Truthout writes that a number of intelligence sources have described a hitherto unreported second taping system that was used on Zubaydah at the black site CIA prison in Thailand where the interrogations took place in 2002-2003. The new finding corroborates reports of experiments done on prisoners held in the CIA’s black site program.