The usual thinking about torture is that ‘pain will make the guilty confess.’ A whole new study coming out of Harvard University refutes that all the way around. These researchers are now saying that, contrary to popular belief, ‘the pain of torture can make even the innocent seem guilty.’ The research appears in the Journal [...]

The social investigation was conducted by Freedom House. The organization’s Freedom in the World report entitled Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2009 enumerates the bottom 21 countries and territories with regards to repression of human freedom. Here are some of the worst of hell on earth:
North Korea is the nadir of [...]

There are at least two mass graves that were discovered in Swat. Pakistani army says that ‘retreating militants killed their own injured co-fighters, to prevent them passing any information to the authorities.’ About ‘300 to 400 corpses of suspected Taliban have turned up in Swat, dumped on street corners, bridges or outside homes. Last month [...]

Based on testimonies and reports, at least 200 protesters have so far been killed in Iran, while 56 other people have disappeared during the protests in Tehran. Torture of political prisoners has also been rampant. One such case is 24-year old student Javadifar Amir who suffered fatal beatings. He was earlier ‘arrested in Tehran for [...]

An official report recommends for the U.S. military to review the conditions of detention in the U.S. prison at Bagram in Afghanistan so as to prevent abuses. Bagram prison, located in the air base of the same name, north of Kabul, houses some 600 detainees suspected of terrorism. Regarded as enemy combatants by the US, [...]

For more than 50 years, North Korea has been operating prison camps that are actually forced labor concentration camps. Government and political oppositionists are incarcerated and forced to do slave labor in these camps which hold an estimated 200,000 prisoners. Forced labor has been regarded as ‘an opportunity for redemption.’
North Korea’s government has been denying [...]

For starters, Bush insisted that torture was legal. He bought into the official legal reviews on it, hook, line, and sinker. If his administration’s legal counsels said that no international or domestic law can bind him to legal culpability in times of war, then the advice must have been sound. Everybody dealing with the top [...]

There is now such a thing as the Bush administration’s Torture 13. They belong to the nefarious circle by virtue of authorizing torture to be systematically employed in the name of information gathering post-9/11 for the sake of intelligence. They carried out the strategy, as well as legally justified it. All these point to the [...]

The country of Mexico began its court trial before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) for alleged impunity, lack of investigation, and insufficient action on the murders of women committed in Ciudad Juárez over the last decade.
The trial took place in Santiago de Chile at the end of April. The prosecution focuses on the [...]

Bagram’s ‘King of Torture’ says, “I opened up Abu Ghraib.” He was also sometimes called ‘Monster.’ Damien Corsetti, in charge of interrogation operations, gives a first-person testimony of torture. In simple parlance, his job was to torture some detainees in those CIA secret prisons.
Bagram is a US military base in Afghanistan that is long suspected [...]