One man's fight to expose the CIA's torture secrets Daniel Jones, the man at the center of the US Senate's landmark investigation of the CIA Bush-era torture program, has gone public for the first time about an experience that led to the CIA spying on him as part of what he calls a "failed coverup". Jones led the team that turned 6.3m pages of internal CIA documents into a scathing study which concluded that torture was ineffective and that the CIA had lied about it to two presidents, Congress and the public. In the first of three installments, Jones expands on the findings and the role of CIA officials whom, he claims, "played a significant role in this program, who are in the report, continue to play significant roles in sensitive programs at the agency." The current administration, while doing "all the right things" shutting down the torture program, lost an opportunity to open the books on the dimensions of the ugly, post 9/11 episode. "We were just never given a fair airing. No one from the White House would be briefed by us. They were briefed by the CIA," Jones says. The man who revealed the CIA's torture secrets North Korea tests nuclear 'warhead explosion' North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test overnight. The underground test, which was recorded as a 5.3-magnitude earthquake recorded near a military installation. Pyongyang confirmed it had conducted a "nuclear warhead explosion" in response to "US hostility". Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, called the test "deeply troubling and regrettable" and in "complete disregard of the repeated demands of the international community". Japan called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council and its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, described North Korea's nuclear weapons program as a "grave threat" to Japan. World affairs editor, Julian Borger, says the test indicates a greater level of ambition in Pyongyang than might not have been assumed before. North Korea accused of 'maniacal recklessness' after new nuclear test The last line of defense in a forgotten corner of rural Louisiana As the only public defender for the 20th judicial district of Louisiana, Rhonda Covington is short on time. In part three of a series reported in partnership with the Marshall Project, we look at the Louisiana public defense system spiraling into fiscal ruin – and how defenders like Covington struggle to keep it going at all. At any given moment, she could be investigating cases, calling witnesses, scouring through evidence, taking photos at crime scenes (with her own camera), meeting with her clients' families, writing motions, typing up pleadings ... And that's just the start of it. "There are days," she says, "when I feel that I could literally scream to the top of my lungs for 10 minutes." For Louisiana's defenseless poor, it's one for all 9/11, 15 years on: Hillary Clinton's day on the 'pile' It was 26 August 2003, almost two years after 9/11, and the sickening plume of smoke that hung over Ground Zero in lower Manhattan had long since dissipated. "I don't think any of us expected that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe," then- junior senator from New York Hillary Clinton told WYNC public radio. She had just learned that the Bush administration instructed officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency to reassure New Yorkers after 9/11 that the toxic pall that had hung over Ground Zero in the days after 9/11 was safe. Rarely has Clinton sounded so impassioned. "I am outraged," Clinton went on. "In the immediate aftermath, the first couple of days, nobody could know. But a week later? Two weeks later? Two months later? Six months later? Give me a break!" 9/11 tapes reveal raw and emotional Hillary Clinton Nasa to attempt 'smash-and-grab' on speeding asteroid Nasa has launched Osiris-Rex, a spacecraft destined to land on the asteroid Bennu, to scoop up samples with a robotic arm and return to Earth. The 7-year mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, into clear dusk skies. Following the explosion of a SpaceX rocket and its payload last week, engineers went through the Atlas rocket with extra care. Principal investigator Dante Lauretta said the mission fit Nasa's broader quest to answer "the big questions: where do we come from, what is our future, and really, are we alone in the universe?" Nasa launches spacecraft to 'high-five' asteroid and capture debris | |
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Former Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein on the day the CIA torture report was released, in December 2014. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP 
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