Lithuania is currently embroiled in a bizarre and deeply confusing political controversy which reveals what happens when a country becomes gripped by extremist ideologies. Evidence has emerged that Lithuanian intelligence agencies allowed secret CIA prisons to be maintained in their country during the Bush era. Just because such prisons would be "illegal" under the so-called "law" of Lithuania and various international conventions to which that nation is a signatory, irresponsible leaders of that country are demanding "investigations" and even possibly legal consequences if it turns out crimes were committed. What kind of a backwards, primitive country would do something like this? "Criminals"? "Prosecutions"? "Obliged to open a case"? "Violations of human rights"? Just because they maintained a few secret prisons in violation of domestic and international law? What kind of crazy, purist, Far Leftist utopians are running that place? They need a heavy dose of pragmatism so they can understand all the reasons why so-called "crimes" like this can be overlooked -- just blissfully forgotten like a bad dream.---

Richard Colvin, who was second in command at Canada's Kabul embassy in 2006 and 2007, said that Afghans swept up in security sweeps by Canadian troops during that time were routinely handed over to the Afghan intelligence services. "According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," Colvin told Canada's parliament. "For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure. SEE ALSO: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/728958--eu-diplomat-backs-claims-on-torture

President Obama’s admission in China that he will miss his self-imposed deadline for the closure of Guantánamo is disastrous for the majority of the 215 men still held in the detention facility, and for those who hoped, ten months ago, that the president would move swiftly to close this bitter icon of the Bush administration’s lawless detention and interrogation policies in the "war on terror." Despite announcing the closure of Guantánamo on his second day in office as part of a number of executive orders rolling back the Bush administration’s executive overreach, Obama then failed to follow up with a detailed plan. He missed the opportunity to bring a number of wrongly imprisoned men to the US mainland (the Uighurs, Muslims from China whose release into the US had been ordered by a district court judge), and allowing Republican fearmongers to seize the initiative, mobilizing lawmakers (including some in Obama’s own party) to pass legislation preventing any cleared prisoner from being released into the United States.

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. "The activities in that prison were illegal," said human rights researcher John Sifton. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions." Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004. Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania's efforts to join NATO.

A long-awaited Justice Department watchdog report that is said to be highly critical of the legal work on torture that three attorneys who worked at the agency's powerful Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) conducted for the Bush administration will be released at the end of the month, Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers Wednesday in testimony before a Senate committee.---As I previously noted, the report, prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), is said to have reached "damning" conclusions about numerous cases of "professional misconduct" in the legal advice former OLC attorneys John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury provided to the White House about the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." OPR completed the report last December, but then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, who commented on the findings, demanded Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury be given the opportunity to respond to OPR's conclusions, the Justice Department disclosed in a letter sent earlier this year to Whitehouse and Sen. Richard Durbin, (D-Illinois).

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has blocked the release of photographs depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking new powers just granted to him by Congress that allows him to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and keep the images under wraps on national security grounds. In a brief filed with the US Supreme Court late Friday, Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said Gates “personally exercised his certification authority” on Friday to withhold the photos and “determined that public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States." [Note: Don't you just love politicians/lawyers? "Certification Authority"?? What in the hell does that mean?]

Britain's Ministry of Defense has launched an investigation into new claims that soldiers sexually abused Iraqi detainees and subjected them to mock executions, hooding, and used dogs to incite fear--interrogation methods that were also used by US soldiers and personally approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The charges come on the heels of Britian's complete withdrawal from Iraq last summer. The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include one in which a 16-year-old Iraqi boy claims he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has likened the alleged abuse to the torture and sexual humiliation that took place in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which was run by US forces.

"Claims that British soldiers recreated the torture conditions of Abu Ghraib to commit the sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi civilians are being investigated by the Ministry of Defence. "

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country. Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program. "I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

Former Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft had a busy day in court yesterday. A federal appeals court ruled he could not be held responsible for kidnapping a Canadian citizen in New York and shipping him off to Syria where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. But, in another case, five men, who had been living in New York and were ultimately deported, won a $1.26 million settlement from the US government in a suit accusing Ashcroft and other officials of racial profiling, illegal detention and abuse of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.