Chem-bio conference proceedings, 2000

From the DTIC archives comes this 635-page “Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Point Detection for Chemical and Biological Defense (1st) Held in Williamsburg, Virginia on October 23-27, 2000.” (Click on the link “Handle / proxy Url” to download the whole PDF doc.)

Chinese torture techniques used at Gitmo: chart

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From the New York Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. …

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

The chart from the 1957 article on communist torture:

Full article “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War” [PDF @ NYT]

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National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, December 2006

The Pentagon recently posted this to a subpage of their FOIA area:

The National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, December 2006

FBI destroying irreplaceable historical records

Those of us who file FOIA requests with the FBI on a regular basis have run into this inexcusable situation. It’s great to see an article in Slate shine a spotlight on it.

The Department of Forgetting

How an obscure FBI rule is ensuring the destruction of irreplaceable historical records.

By Alex Heard

… At the time, I was new to the weird science of FOIA requesting, so I didn’t know the FBI was allowed to destroy files routinely. Dismayed, I looked into how the Records Retention Plan works, with help from several generous FOIA experts. What they described sounded more like a Records Destruction Plan, since it allows the FBI to discard roughly 80 percent of its files at any given time.

15,000 more Iraq detainees by year-end (in addition to the 60,000 so far)

According to the Army, the US is planning to imprison 15,000 more “detainees” in Iraq over the next six months. (60,000 people have been detained so far.)

These little-known figures were revealed in a military contract that was flagged by Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s Danger Room blog. (However, they aren’t the focus of the post, which is titled “Strangest Iraq Contract Yet: Store Detainee Property.”) So far the media have completely ignored these revelations.

Future directions for non-lethal weapons

In early June, the military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate posted a presolicitation for contractors that lays out the exact directions that nonlethal weapons research will be taking. (Also available here.)

General applied research focus areas in their relative priority of interest to the JNLWD include:

A. Non-lethal vessel stopping at extended range

B. Clear a space without entry

C. Non-lethally divert an aircraft in the air or stop and/or disable an aircraft on the ground

D. Individual and crowd behavior in environments where less than lethal force is an option

E. Human effects/effectiveness and safety thresholds of selected NL stimuli

F. Stimulating academic institutions, both civilian and DoD Academies, in the research and development of NLW concepts. This includes supporting short-term academic challenges and competitions related to NLW development.

G. Advanced materials and NL payloads

(more…)

Read More >>

Back online and feeling fine

{UPDATE July 3, 2008: This post refers to the original structure of the relaunched site, but it’s now been consolidated so that everything new shows up on the front page. So please just ignore this post.}

The Memory Hole is back in a new incarnation. You’ll find two parts - the blog (which you’re reading now) and the main site, an archive of documents pried loose from officialdom.

To find out more about The Memory Hole 2.0, check out this article from the main site.

The Memory Hole 2.0 Is Here

After an extended hiatus, The Memory Hole is back and ready to post more documents, usually of a sensitive, governmental type nature.

To jog your memory - it has been a while - the site is best known for obtaining and releasing 288 photos of flag-covered coffins containing the remains of troops from Iraq, digitally uncensoring a Justice Dept report, and obtaining and posting the uncut 5-minute footage of George W. Bush doing nothing as the 9/11 attacks raged (this video had already been downloaded well over 200,000 times by the time Michael Moore used it in Farenheit 9/11 exactly one year later).

There’s been a lot of other nifty material here: all 21 CDs of the FDNY’s dispatch tapes from 9/11, the ultra-rare Kerry hearings into narco-corruption, a massive guide to unseen NSA publications, the National Archives’ investigation into the missing papers of Chief Justice John Roberts, US Army Chemical Corps reports, the previously unreleased reports from the Future of Iraq Project, photos of the Iranian hostage crisis that had never been seen outside of Iran (which were then prominently used, with credit, by Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden in Guests of the Ayatollah), 19 politically inconvenient reports that were yanked from the Civil Rights Commisssion’s website … well, there’s a whole lot more. To take a gander, head over to the old site at http://www.thememoryhole.org/index2.htm

At the very beginning of the relaunch, the site had two sections - the main site and a blog - but to (hopefully) simplify things, all the new posts, articles, etc. will now appear on the main page:

www.thememoryhole.org

Documents posted to The Memory Hole come from two main sources: Freedom of Information Act requests filed by me (and some contributors and colleagues), and documents posted to government websites, especially if they’ve been pulled offline or are likely candidates for an info-cleanse. Occasionally, helpful souls will donate rare and forgotten documents retrieved from the bowels of libraries, purchased from the Government Printing Office before quickly becoming unavailable, etc.

Simultaneously, I’ll also be taking a more bloggy approach by pointing you to other important documents being posted online (and there are lots of them going up all the time). Plus, I’ll be linking to news about such documents, as well as databases, interesting gov/mil pages, and sundry related things.

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Expect changes to the look and workings of the site, especially as my webmaster and I get things tweaked and ironed over the coming weeks. If something doesn’t seem to be working properly, or if you have any other kind of feedback, please get in touch.

So please bookmark this site and/or subscribe to The Memory Hole’s RSS feed to keep up on the latest, and get ready for some unredacted fun…….

–Russ

{NOTE: This post was updated July 3, 5:18 PM Arizona time to reflect the new structure of the site.}

Chem-bio conference proceedings, 2000

Chinese torture techniques used at Gitmo: chart

National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, December 2006

FBI destroying irreplaceable historical records

15,000 more Iraq detainees by year-end (in addition to the 60,000 so far)