The Judge Rotenberg Center for children with disabilities can continue to use electric shocks on its students as US Food and Drug Administration ban is overturned

Amnesty International is calling on senators to to halt the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over his “possible involvement” in human rights violations after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. By Emily Birnbaum.

We are said to be the most dangerous prisoners in the world. Yet in the years since this prison was opened, there have been no murders here, no escape attempts, no drugs. The only deaths have been those of the nine men who succumbed to health problems or took their own lives. By Ahmed Rabbani. (July 27, 2018)

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it. By Christopher Hitchens. (Aug. 2008)

The man who did 30 months in prison for exposing waterboarding program speaks out on Trump's CIA pick. By John Kiriakou.

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on Trump’s New CIA Pick Gina Haspel.

Tom Cotton, Trump’s reported choice for CIA, mocked the idea that Russia backed Trump—and backed waterboarding. That could make for a tense reception at Langley. By Spencer Ackerman.

A civil lawsuit brought by three victims of the CIA’s torture program against the two psychologists who created it will go to court on 5 September in Washington state, after a judge ruled that more than a year of discovery had yielded sufficient evidence to support the plaintiffs’ claims.

A Syrian man is laying on the ground, surrounded by apparent Russian troops. Then they start beating him with a sledge hammer. In a leaked video from Syria, Russian soldiers can be seen torturing a Syrian man by beating him with a sledge hammer. At several points in the video they refer to the man as a member of ISIS, and they continually beat him. They have him surrounded on all sides, and at several points they outstretch his hands and feet and pummel them with a sledge hammer.

Gina Haspel, the new No. 2 at the CIA, played a leading role in the torture of terror suspects following 9/11. Now German lawyers are seeking criminal action against her. By Christian Fuchs.

A UN committee has condemned the “widespread practice of torture” in Pakistan by police, the military and intelligence agencies in a report published on Friday, and called on Islamabad to implement urgent reforms to the law. “The police engage in the widespread practice of torture throughout the territory ... with a view to obtaining confessions from persons in custody,” the UN Committee against Torture wrote in its first report on the situation in the country, made public after months of investigation.

The city will serve as a bellwether for how – or if – the Justice Department will fight police abuse under the new attorney general. By Ryan J. Reilly, Kim Bellware.

Kathy and Robert Dyer received the phone call out of every parent’s nightmares at 3 a.m... By Eric Dexheimer.

It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul. It is outrageously expensive. It doesn’t work. And this is what solitary confinement feels like, from 35 prisoners who have lived through it. By Nathaniel Penn.

If torture is wrong, it’s wrong whether or not it works. It’s wrong because it’s torture. In conversation with ABC News in his first televised interview since taking office, President Donald Trump spoke in strikingly frank terms about the possible use of torture as a tool for interrogation. “I have spoken as recently as twenty-four hours ago with people at the highest level of intelligence,” Trump said. “And I asked them the question, ‘Does it work? Does torture work?’ And the answer was, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”

The Pat Finucane Centre in Derry has produced papers from 1972 which document four cases of the alleged “waterboarding” of people in Northern Ireland by the British army and RUC. One of the papers is the “secret” minutes of a meeting in November 1972, where the then Fianna Fáil taoiseach Jack Lynch raised concerns with British prime minister Edward Heath about an epileptic who was allegedly “waterboarded” by British soldiers - although the term was not in use at the time.

Torture is terrible. Yet a draft of a new executive order suggests Trump might bring it back anyway. By Zack Beauchamp and Jennifer Williams.

The material sheds additional light on the torture program as the future of the Senate’s classified full report on it hangs in the balance with the Obama presidency ending. By Sheri Fink, James Risen and Charlie Savage.

Claims that rendition and torture of Abdel Hakim Belhaj breached Magna Carta rights must go before judges, supreme court rules. By Owen Bowcott and Ian Cobain.

As one of the Angola 3, he was in isolation longer than any other American. Then he came home to face his future. By Rachel Aviv.