Results tagged “torture”

As if watching NFL football wasn't torture enough, a Bronx man claims he was literally tortured by his guests at his Super Bowl party last year. Michael Terry, 40, says he invited his drug-dealing neighbors over to watch the big game, but after the Giants defeated the Patriots, his guests overstayed their welcome, and used his apartment to sell drugs to other buyers. When he tried to throw them out, Terry says they handcuffed him to a chair and put him through hell.

A Long Island woman is suspected of torturing and killing as many as 20 cats and dogs — some of them belonging to her neighbors — before burying them behind her home. Animal control investigators unearthed the "gruesome pet cemetery" on Saturday behind 43-year-old Sharon McDonough's Suffolk County house after discovering five malnourished dogs kept in cramped cages inside the residence. According to WPIX, "McDonough frequently involved her children in the animal killings by asking them to hold pets down as she tortured them." Neighbors whose pets have gone missing showed up at McDonough's home hoping to identify their animals. "A couple of people have lost pets," neighbor Angelo Zotto, 70, told the Daily News. "They were up here today with pictures of their pets showing them to the SPCA, wondering if theirs had been found in the backyard."

With the Justice Department's release of a report on the CIA's abuses in overseas prisons and Attorney General Eric Holder's appointment of a special prosecutor to decide whether a full criminal investigation is needed, former Vice President Dick Cheney released a statement. Cheney says having a special prosecutor look into the matter "doubts about this administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security...The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions." The AP's assessment of the released documents: "Interrogators took the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding beyond what was authorized. Mock executions were held." Specifically, "In one instance, suspect Abd al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole ship bombing, was hooded and handcuffed and threatened with an unloaded gun and a power drill. The unidentified interrogator also threatened Nashiri's mother and family, implying that they would be sexually abused in front of him, according to the report." Cheney also said, "This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of Al Qaeda members and associates since 2002," but Newsweek wonders if the information gained was useful.

Finally! Thanks to MSNBC's Morning Joe, we get to hear what former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani thinks of the debate surrounding waterboarding of terror suspects during the Bush administration. Giuliani first said, "Sometimes I think people get so preoccupied and obsessed with the rights of terrorist that they forget" about the need for getting information from the suspects.

Another day, another tough crowd for former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. Last week, Stanford students put her on the defensive on the Bush administration's stance on torture; yesterday, a 4th grader from a D.C. school asked her what she thought about the Obama administration's criticism of Bush-era methods. Rice said, "Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country. But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally.. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country," adding, "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die." Flashback to Rice's 2004 testimony to the 9/11 Commission, admitting she saw a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" in August 2001.

An elderly German architect; his 35-year-old Greek roommate; and a 6-foot-5-inch, 350-pound Dean & DeLuca security guard were indicted yesterday on charges of kidnapping and robbing the agent for a Manhattan property owner. Prosecutors say that some time last year the brawny Kakhaber Gogoladze, a Georgian national in the U.S. illegally, approached the unidentified property agent and told him to get in a car. He was driven to the apartment shared by 70-year-old Ekkehart Schwarz and Vasileios Giamagas, who were $267,000 behind on the rent for a lounge space at 68 West Third Street (pictured), where they'd failed to open a nightclub.

With the release of CIA documents showing that terror suspects were waterboarded—FireDogLake found that 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month—President Obama visited the CIA yesterday to reassure the agency that his administration wouldn't prosecute officials "for following legal advice," the NY Times reports (though some lawyers could be prosecuted for crafting the advice). Obama also addressed criticism that he was naive for releasing the memos, "What makes the United States special and what makes you special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it’s hard.” (The Daily Show took on the torture memos last night, saving Peggy Noonan's despair about the memos' release for last). The ACLU has called for the Department of Justice "to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture crimes under the Bush administration as well as a Select Committee in Congress to investigate torture and pass legislation to prevent a reoccurrence of past violations of the law."

A 70-year-old man and his 35-year-old, uh, roommate have been arrested for threatening their landlord's agent with gruesome torture. Elderly architect Ekkehart Schwarz and his younger roommate, Vassileios Giamagas, allegedly threatened "death and torture," against an unnamed man sent by the landlord to collect $265,000 in back rent. Prosecutor James Meadows says the two stopped paying rent on a restaurant space at 68 West Third Street because the landlord would not make necessary repairs. According to the Daily News, when the landlord's representative came to collect, Giamagas and another man forced him at gunpoint to sign a document stating that $50,000 had been paid, and threatened to sodomize him if he didn't comply. Later, after threatening the agent with torture via "a hammer and pliers," they allegedly forced him to sign blank checks for them, one of which they cashed for $25,000. As for Schwarz's roommate situation, a neighbor tells the News, "It was very mysterious."

Families of firefighters killed in the 9/11 attacks are looking to obtain a meeting with President Obama to discuss his decision to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Obama announced on Thursday that Gitmo would be closed for 120 days while officials review the prison known for its harsh interrogation methods. Civil Rights lawyer Norman Siegel says that the families are looking for "open and fair, but speedy trials for the prisoners who are being held there." Obama may be in store for an an earful if family members share the sentiments of Michael Burke, whose brother was a fire captain who died in the attacks and writes an op-ed for today's Daily News. He argues that it is impossible to fight terrorism under the Constitution, which would could become a "means to our destruction." He also says that Obama "is convincing these mass murderers that we are too narcissistic, too foolish and too weak to protect and defend ourselves."

Explosive accusations are being leveled against two NYPD cops, one active and one retired, who allegedly participated in at least 100 robberies of drug dealers, netting more than 100 kilos of coke. The duo are part of a crew that's been named in federal indictments in Brooklyn. The Daily News reports that the cops would change the collar brass on their uniforms to disguise their precincts when they kidnapped drug dealers and took them to "remote areas," where they'd torture them to find out where they were hiding their cash and drugs, which the crew would later resell. Two defendants who worked with the unidentified officers "applied a pair of pliers to one victim's testicles, threatening to squeeze the pliers if the victim did not talk." U.S. Attorney Andrea Goldbarg last month promised additional charges and the arrest of the two cops, who, apparently, have not yet been taken into custody.

Today, a judge sentenced Robert Williams to life in prison for the brutal rape and torture of a Columbia graduate student. Williams was convicted last month, with a jury finding him guilty of 44 counts, including attempted murder, kidnapping, arson, burglary, robbery, assault, rape and sodomy. The attack occurred in April 2007, after Williams had gained access to the victim's Hamilton Heights apartment building, followed her to her floor and forced his way into her apartment.

Yesterday, a jury of eight men and four women found Robert Williams guilty of 44 counts, including, per the Post, "attempted murder, kidnapping, arson, burglary, robbery, 10 assault charges, five separate rapes and 11 incidents of sodomy," related to his 19-hour rape and torture of a Columbia University graduate student in her Hamilton Heights apartment a year ago.

A 24-year-old woman took the stand and began to relive a terrifying ordeal as she described how she was raped, tortured, and held captive in her own Hamilton Heights apartment in April 2007.

In April 2007, a Columbia graduate student was raped and tortured for 19 hours in her Hamilton Terrace apartment. More than a year later, her suspected rapist is now in court, facing 71 criminal charges including attempted murder, arson, rape and sodomy.

Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris was on hand last night for a Tribeca Film Festival screening of his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, a nuanced exploration of the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those familiar with Morris’s innovative oeuvre won’t be surprised to hear that, far from a tendentious indictment of the perpetrators, his film is a circumspect consideration of some of the factors that contributed to those infamous photographs of humiliation. [Today, the NY Times' movie critic Manohla Dargis calls it a "blockbuster of a documentary."]

Maybe you've received a flier to see a show at Radio City Music Hall called Chinese New Year Splendor, which is promoted as a holiday celebration of China’s diverse cultural riches. But mixed within the traditional Mongolian dancing, orchestral music and Buddhist parables are dramatizations of the Chinese government’s oppression of Falun Gong, a qigong-based spiritual practice that is banned in China. And the show’s political content is prompting audiences to walk out by the hundreds.

The defense lawyer for Robert Williams used a sartorial defense in court yesterday. Williams, accused of raping and torturing a Columbia graduate student last April, appeared wearing his "jeans and polo shirt inside out," prompting his lawyer to say, "This is symptomatic of mental illness...The best I can do right now, given my relationship with my client, is that I’d like the court to observe my client’s shirt and jeans are both inside out." However, the judge said, "Maybe they were dirty on the other side."

The great-grandson of one of an early owner of Macy's is being accused by a 52-year-old jewelry designer of imprisoning the woman and torturing her with, of all things, a lobster trap. Bette Marchek claims that William Straus kept her captive on his Westchester estate, starved her, beat her, and eventually attacked her with a lobster trap while the pair were on City Island in the Bronx. That was the figurative straw that broke the...