Most people don’t even realize it, but an alleged al Qaeda terrorist – deemed among the most dangerous terrorists in US custody by US counterterrorism officials – has been quietly appearing in a U.S. federal court in downtown Manhattan for pretrial hearings for weeks now.

Today’s report that the CIA possesses videotapes of interrogations of alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh in a secret prison in Morocco is renewing attention to the government’s abusive interrogations practiced in secret prisons around the world as part of its “war on terror.” But U.S. officials are already saying that the tapes, which have not been publicly released, don’t actually show any abuse.

Andy Worthington is posting portions of the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued last February. The UN report was hardly reported by either the U.S. press or the blogosphere, and deserves wide dissemination.

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 It was not superceded by MK-ULTRA in the 1950s, as often supposed.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.

Perhaps the most famous torture scene in world literature takes place at the end of Act III of King Lear. This post examines that scene and draws lessons for today’s society, which faces the continuation of some of the Bush Administration’s torture policies, and a failure to make accountable those involved in the torture practiced by the previous administration.

A new UN report notes secret detentions “might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity.” Obama’s OLC braintrusts the Detention Task Force’s recommendation of indefinite detention of some Guantanamo prisoners. These actions make sense in the light of a 55 year old report on CIA covert actions.

Why was Mark Danner able to get hold of a classified report detailing torture of “high value” detainees and publish an article about it in The New York Review of Books before leading newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post?

Mark Danner has gotten a copy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on the treatment of the 14 “high-value” detainees that were taken to CIA interrogation centers.