In an an arrogant riposte to an earlier posting of mine, Lawfare blogger and member of the Hoover Institute Task Force on National Security and the Law, Benjamin Wittes, proclaimed he is “Happy to be a government proxy.”

Wittes’ tongue may seem somewhat in cheek, but he really means it. “Government proxy” how? In my earlier article criticizing both Wittes and Adweek columnist Alex Koppelman for their poorly resourced and vituperative articles attacking Scott Horton’s investigation of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, published by Harper’s Magazine in January 2010. Department of Defense investigations had labeled all three deaths suicides.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed an appeal for the families of two of the three men who died in mysterious circumstances in June 2006. The U.S. government called it “asymmetrical warfare” by the detainees, who are said to have killed themselves in some belief that would hurt the U.S. government. As bizarre as that theory is, Defense Department investigations found the men committed suicide in a multiple, timed series of three planned suicides.

A lot of people were apparently very upset when Scott Horton won the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. None less so than Adweek’s Alex Koppelman, who wrote a hit piece on Horton’s work that made its way around the Net. But Koppelman’s analysis is wrong in many aspects, and not least in his misrepresentation of an independent autopsy of one of the deceased detainees, which said concluded something very different than what he reported.

As if we already didn’t know the media is full of lies and stupidity, two new examples have surfaced in recent days, with former administration officials and their media mouthpieces vying for who can pronounce the most incredible lies about the torture policies of the U.S. government.

In my last update on the Raymond Davis case, I suggested that it appeared that Davis would possibly be convicted for the killing of two Pakistanis on January 27 in Lahore before his March 14 hearing scheduled on the issue of diplomatic immunity. Tuesday, however, proceedings in the murder case were adjourned until March 16, two days after the immunity hearing. Other related developments include the granting of bail for Aaron DeHaven and discussions in multiple venues (see Scott Horton’s discussion in the video and this NPR story) of the increasing tensions between the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI that this case has exposed.

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.

I’ve interviewed guards at Guantanamo and heard their frustrations, to the point where I was kind of shocked there weren’t more severe beatings at the hands of 19 year olds who have cocktails of excrement thrown at them. Obviously I’m not excusing any such beatings; I’m just saying that when someone is given responsibility over other people in an environment of legal impunity, standards of acceptable behavior can slip very fast. That’s just human nature.

On Monday, Scott Horton blew a hole straight through the government’s lies when Harpers Magazine published the results of his investigation into the supposed suicides of three Guantanamo prisoners in June 2006. It’s clear now that the men were murdered — possibly tortured to death — at a secret heretofore undisclosed black site at Guantanamo, and then made to look as if they killed themselves, while other evidence to the contrary was ignored or suppressed or destroyed.

But this is not the first time that murders have been cooked up to look like suicide.