Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations
"The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world."

View the Report and the Republican Party's Rebuttal 

‘I Confess!’ Why Do People Admit to Things They Haven’t Done?

SEVERAL months after Antonio Ramirez was shot seven times in Oakland, Calif., the police picked up a frightened 16-year-old named Felix, isolated him in an interrogation room late at night without a lawyer, rejected his pleas to see his mother, and harangued him until he began to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.

They wanted a diagram of the crime scene, he later told his court-appointed lawyer, Richard Foxall, but whatever he drew was so inaccurate that the police never produced it. When he described escaping in one direction after the killing, they corrected him, because they knew from witnesses that the shooter had gone the opposite way. When he didn’t mention an alley nearby, they told him about it, and he incorporated it into his statement. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said one officer, as Felix recalled to his lawyer.

So, they demanded, where was the gun? Felix denied having a gun. “That’s when they really got out of control and started yelling at him,” Mr. Foxall said. “He started to feel personally threatened.” Slyly, he made up something demonstrably untrue: that he had left the gun with his grandfather. “I thought this was brilliant,” his lawyer said, because it discredited the tale he was concocting. “He doesn’t have a grandfather. Both grandfathers are dead.”

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From the NY Times op-ed pages. Tom

Famed detective Jim Smyth’s interrogation techniques derail murder case

Jim Smyth, the star Ontario Provincial Police interrogator who famously pried a confession from sex killer Russell Williams, has a reputation that demands a screenplay.

As a top Canadian practitioner of the modern art of police interrogation, it is his job to bring forensic psychology to life, using conviviality and guile to convince murderers to skip trial and go straight to jail.

Major successes include his work on the interrogation of Michael Briere, who confessed to killing 10-year-old Holly Jones in Toronto in 2003, and his profiling in the case of Tori Stafford, 9, which led him to discover the girl’s remains by following a hunch to a rural field.

But now Detective-Sergeant Smyth’s sly charm and relentless pursuit of confessions have derailed a major prosecution, leading a judge to rule a suspected murderer’s admission of guilt was involuntary and possibly false, and therefore inadmissible. With no other evidence against him, Cory Armishaw, 26, was cleared of second-degree murder over the 2006 shaking death of three-month-old Jaydin Lindeman in Guelph, Ont.

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