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...news that the U.S. waterboarded one al-Qaeda prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, at least 83 times, and another, the confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 183 times, has given new energy to the debate over whether U.S. interrogation methods amounted to torture. Defenders of waterboarding say that the procedure, while awful for the prisoner, is relatively safe and has few long-term effects. But doctors and psychologists who work with torture victims disagree strongly. They say that victims of American waterboarding-like the Chileans submitted to the submarino under Pinochet-are likely to be psychologically damaged for life...
...Mohammed-meaning we may never know the final wages of what CIA agents did in dark rooms under our name. But there should be no doubt now that we tortured. "That we would still be having a discussion about whether or not waterboarding is torture is so disingenuous," says Keller. "They should come out and say what...
...sounds like a scene from an action movie, but in the Gulf of Aden it is legal business practice. That's because the pirates are regarded as criminals, rather than terrorists, under U.S. or international law, which bans money going to individuals or organizations listed as terrorists. Unlike in, say, Iraq, Somali pirates appear to have little interest in killing hostages who are seized along with vessels, and the crews are usually released with the ships when the ransoms are paid. "Paying ransoms is not illegal," says Guillaume Bonnissent, a special risks underwriter for Hiscox Insurance Co. Ltd. in London...
...negotiations which can drag on for weeks, the sum is agreed - usually more than $2 million for a container ship or oil tanker. Then the cash is air-dropped by private security companies that specialize in delivering ransoms to Somali pirates; insurance brokers say that's only about three companies. "The money is concealed in large floating plastic containers, and flown by air and dropped," says Mike Regester, an insurance broker for the London company Cooper Gay, which covers oil and shipping companies for kidnap and ransom. "Then the pirates go out and pick it up," he says...
...insurance brokers say that ships are protecting themselves as best they can: many vessels are encased in barbed wire and crews often use high-powered water hoses to try to ward off oncoming pirates. Kidnap experts say the pirates are increasingly skilled at seizures; they say they were astonished last November when the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star was seized, since its side had been regarded as too high for pirates to scale. The pirates finally released the ship and its crew two months later, after a security company dropped $3 million in cash over the Indian Ocean. "Even with...