Five people have been charged with 196 counts in the so-called Philadelphia dungeon case, in which a woman allegedly lured children and disabled people into her home, then tortured and imprisoned them for years to steal their welfare checks, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Prosecutors say the crimes fall under federal hate crime law, marking the first time that hate crime charges have been applied to people with disabilities. 

The indictment says that between 2001 and 2011, Linda Ann Weston, 52, of Philadelphia, fed her victims one bowl a day -- if that -- of ramen noodles and drugged them so they wouldn't act up or attempt an escape. Prosecutors say she forced two of her victims into prostitution.

Images of the dungeon where six people were rescued in October 2011 show decrepit conditions: a narrow corridor of a windowless room with bare mattresses, soiled sheets and rotten boards. At the center of the tiny room is the boiler to which she allegedly chained her victims – and also her children and niece.

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Two women died in her care, prosecutors say. They are identified in the indictment only by their initials: M.L., who died of starvation after being coerced to live with Weston for five years, and D.S., who died after a month of captivity in 2005.

This is not Weston’s first brush with the law. She was convicted of third-degree murder in 1983 for hammering her sister’s boyfriend’s head, hiding him in a closet and starving him to death.

That conviction was brought up in a lawsuit filed in September by Weston’s niece, one of the people rescued in October 2011. The niece, who was 10 when she was transferred into her aunt’s care, is suing her aunt, currently incarcerated, the City of Philadelphia and the caseworker who had her removed from her mother’s house.

The niece, now 20, alleges that Weston forced her into prostitution, starved her, denied her education and beat her regularly. She says her body bears witness to nearly a decade of abuse.

The niece’s complaint also alleges that the City of Philadelphia received numerous complaints that Weston was holding children captive in her basement.

At a press conference announcing the charges on Wednesday night, U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger, described Linda Weston and her accomplices as an organized crime family. Weston could face the death penalty, Memeger said.

Her accomplices – boyfriend, Gregory Thomas, Sr., 49, Eddie Wright, 52, daughter, Jean McIntosh, 33, and Nicklaus Woodard, 26 – face a maximum of life in prison, Memeger said.

Memeger said that during the decade the Westons tortured disabled and mentally ill adults, they stole more than $200,000 of their Social Security benefits.

“Through cunning, trickery force and coercion she took the benefits that were supposed to help them,” he said.

He said the “victims were tied up and confined like zoo animals and treated like property akin to slaves.”

Weston and her accomplices kept their victims on the move, Memeger said, shuttling them from Virginia, Texas and Florida and locking them in attics and basements.

After Weston was arrested in October 2011, her son, Joseph McIntosh, told the Philadelphia Daily News that his mother abused her own children as well. He said that after she was released after four years from prison for third-degree murder, she successfully petitioned to get her children back.

"We didn't know about her background," Joseph told the Philadelphia Daily News in October 2011, after his mother had been arrested. "(Department of Health Services) knew about her history. They knew who she was, but they still released us into her custody - all of us at a young age."

He said his mother locked him in the basement for a year to prevent him from running away -- which he said would have reduced her welfare check payments. She fed him noodles and Kool-Aid doctored with drugs, he said. He said he finally escaped in 1998 when he was sent upstairs to wash but instead walked outside into the yard and hopped the fence.

McIntosh said that Weston even chained up his sister Jean, who prosecutors accuse of being one of the torturers.

The victims were freed on Oct. 15, 2011, when Philadelphia Police Department officers rescued them from a dungeon-like space in an apartment in the city’s Tacony section.

A West Virginia man was arrested Thursday for allegedly making his wife his slave, abusing her and holding her hostage for almost a decade.  

Authorities in Jackson County, W.Va., charged Peter Lizon of Leroy, W.Va., with malicious wounding after a woman staying at a domestic-violence shelter filed a criminal complaint, alleging a woman she met was brutally beaten by her husband.

In an interview with investigators, the woman said she met Lizon’s wife, Stephanie, 43, while staying at the Family Crisis Intervention Center in Parkersburg, W.Va., and described her as “gaunt and filthy.”

According to the criminal complaint, Stephanie told the woman that she recently escaped from her husband, who had kept her chained up with metal padlocks for about 10 years, which tore into the skin on her hands and ankles, leaving noticeable scar tissue. Her feet were also “mutilated and swollen” after her husband allegedly smashed her foot with a scoop attachment from a farm tractor.

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“This is a case that is tenfold of what our average domestic is and maybe more than that,” Jackson County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Tony Boggs told NBC affiliate WSAZ. “It comes down to what appears to be slavery and torture.”

Lizon reportedly called his wife his "slave," and whenever he entered the room, he made her kneel down before him.

The woman also alleged that Stephanie said her husband caused her to have a miscarriage after her husband hit her in the stomach. She said she buried the corpse of a fully developed infant on their farm. She also said she gave birth to another baby while bound by chains, but neither she nor her now-one-year-old child had received any medical attention.  

During the investigation, police obtained 45 photos of Stephanie from the shelter, showing injuries ranging from severe burns to her breasts and back to broken fingers and bruises all over her body.

“It’s amazing what one human being can do to another,” Boggs said, “and that should not ever happen or be allowed to happen. And hopefully this will stop and curtail that, at least in this instance.”

Lizon’s attorney, Shawn Bayliss, told WSAZ the allegations against Lizon are false, saying the woman who told police everything has a “feeble mind.”

Lizon is being held in the South Central Regional Jail in lieu of $300,000 bail.  

Chief Boggs told msnbc.com malicious wounding is likely to net Lizon between two to 10 years in prison. 

According to the criminal complaint, Stephanie escaped from Lizon on June 18 while he was returning farm equipment to a rental store in Parkersburg. He left her and their child in the family's vehicle. While Lizon was inside, she walked away, leaving her child in the car, and hid in a Zumba dance facility. People there gave her money for a taxi ride to the shelter where checked in under the name "Serena Sokol." Staff at the shelter later determined her true identity. She was treated for her injuries in an emergency room on June 20. 

Chief Boggs told msnbc.com he would not discuss the current whereabouts of Lizon’s one-year-old child, but said child protective services have been made aware of the situation.

A spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services told msnbc.com that state law forbids child protective services from disclosing the details of specific cases.

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What is torture? In the post-9/11 era, that question has loomed over the country’s efforts to track down and interrogate those planning terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

The former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service renewed the debate this week with the publication of his book, “Hard Measures,” and an explosive interview on 60 Minutes in which he defended the “enhanced interrogation” program he helped oversee.

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On Thursday, Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that what his officers did was legal, noting torture involves the “breaking of bones” and “blood on the walls.” He said CIA officers knew tactics resulting in great bodily harm wouldn’t elicit good intelligence, so they used other ones, like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, on their subjects.

President Obama, who has said waterboarding is “torture,” ended the practice shortly after taking office.

Rodriguez defended the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” program on “Morning Joe,” claiming it added momentum to the “war on terror” as the agency began capturing al-Qaida’s “high command.”

He said the first detainee to provide the big picture on al-Qaida was Abu Zubaydah, who was near death after being wounded by the Pakistanis. He was nursed back to health because the service knew how valuable his information would be, Rodriguez said.
Zubaydah, who had been the third most senior al-Qaida figure, was subjected to waterboarding along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2002.

“The program is not about using brute force because we recognize that brute force doesn’t work. So, we’re totally in agreement that torture does not work,” he added.

But critics charge that waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” are torture, similar to what was practiced by the Japanese or the Nazis.

“This is not that,” he said. “Our waterboarding program is based on the U.S. military training program … tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen were waterboarded pursuant to this program to prepare them for the possibility of being captured someday so that they would know what it felt like.”

The last waterboarding was in 2003. He said there was a lot of confusion among the public over how many times someone was waterboarded versus how many pourings of water there was, noting that “183 pourings of water became 183 times, which is just not the case.”

Of the interrogation techniques, “waterboarding is the most harsh; sleep deprivation is tough, too,” he said. But he noted that when he described the tactics to a U.S. senator who had been a marine, the response was, “’What?’ He said, ‘That’s it?’”

When asked what torture was, Rodriguez said: “Brute force. It’s breaking of bones. It’s people passing out from pain. It’s blood on the walls. This is the way that some of our heroes who’ve actually been tortured tell us what torture is.”

Despite his defense of the technique, Rodriguez doesn’t think waterboarding would work today, since the enemy would be prepared for it. Nonetheless, he said, the controversial interrogation program’s value was “incredible,” providing “thousands and thousands of reports” about al-Qaida.

“The more we captured, the more we learned and eventually it destroyed the organization that attacked us on 9/11 and allowed us to get bin Laden,” he said.

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WASHINGTON - A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

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The backers of such techniques, which include "water-boarding," sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al-Qaida leaders.

One official said investigators found "no evidence" such enhanced interrogations played "any significant role" in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.

'Tortured' Gitmo prisoner seeks release of secret videos

The debate over the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations, which human rights advocates condemn as torture, is resurfacing in part because of a new book by a former top CIA official.

In the book, "Hard Measures," due to be published on Monday, the former chief of CIA clandestine operations Jose Rodriguez defends the use of interrogation practices including water-boarding, which involves pouring water on a subject's face, which is covered with a cloth, to simulate drowning.

"We made some al-Qaida terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days," Rodriguez says in an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes" that will air on Sunday. "I am very secure in what we did and am very confident that what we did saved American lives."

Expert: War on terror at 'critical' point as al-Qaida looks to regroup in Africa

For nearly three years, the Senate intelligence committee's majority Democrats have been conducting what is described as the first systematic investigation of the effectiveness of such extreme interrogation techniques.

The CIA gave the committee access to millions of pages of written records charting daily operations of the interrogation program, including graphic descriptions of how and when controversial techniques were employed.

Sources agreed to discuss the matter on condition of anonymity because the report has not been finalized.

The committee members' objective is to conduct a methodical assessment of whether enhanced interrogation techniques led to genuine intelligence breakthroughs or whether they produced more false leads than good ones.

Report: Bin Laden told followers to kill Obama, Petraeus

U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged that while the harshest elements of the interrogation program, including water-boarding and other tactics which cause severe physical stress, were in use, the CIA never carried out a scientific assessment of the program's effectiveness.

The Bush Administration only used water-boarding on three captured suspects. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Other coercive techniques included sleep deprivation, making people crouch or stretch in stressful positions and slamming detainees against a flexible wall.

The CIA started backing away from such techniques in 2004. Obama banned them shortly after taking office.

One source cautioned there could still be lengthy delays before any information or conclusions from the Senate committee's report are made public.

Hidden in plain sight: Inside a secret CIA prison

One reason the inquiry has taken so long is that in 2009, committee Republicans withdrew their participation, saying the panel would be unable to interview witnesses to ensure documentary material was reported in appropriate context due to ongoing criminal investigations.

Current and former U.S. officials have said one key source for information about the existence of the al-Qaida "courier" who ultimately led U.S. intelligence to bin Laden was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

KSM, as he was known to U.S. officials, was subjected to water-boarding 183 times, the U.S. government has acknowledged.

Officials said, however, that it was not until some time after he was water-boarded that KSM told interrogators about the courier's existence. Therefore a direct link between the physically coercive techniques and critical information is unproven, Bush administration critics say.

Supporters of the CIA program, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have portrayed it as a necessary, if distasteful, step that may have stopped extremist plots and saved lives. 

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Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

A serial killer who set up a torture chamber in his truck and kidnapped mostly female hitchhikers across the United States has admitted murdering a newlywed couple in Texas, according to reports.

Robert Ben Rhoades -- already serving a life sentence for the death of a 14-year-old girl in Illinois -- this week pleaded guilty in West Texas to killing Patricia Candace Walsh and her husband Scott Zyskowski, both in their 20s, the Deseret News reported.

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Prosecutors had agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for the pleas and Rhoades, 65, was given two life sentences, the News said.

The paper said Rhoades, a long-haul truck driver, was the subject of the book "Roadside Prey" by Alva Busch.

In his cab was "a type of dungeon with handcuffs on the ceiling," the News reported. In 1996, the Tucson Weekly, citing officials, said it was believed that Rhoades had been killing an average of three women a month by the early 1990s.

The Associated Press reported the couple, from Seattle, were hitchhiking to Georgia to preach the Christian gospel, when they took a ride from Rhoades near El Paso, Texas in early 1990.

FBI spokeswoman Shauna Dunlap said investigations concerning Rhoades were continuing.

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Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s 11 months in solitary confinement was “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” the UN chief on torture said Monday, though he stopped short of calling it torture.

Manning, 25, faces 22 counts, including aiding the enemy after he allegedly released classified documents to WikiLeaks. He was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day following his arrest in May 2010 in Iraq, and continuing through his transfer to the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Va.

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The confinement, lasting about 11 months, ended upon his transfer to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., on April 20, 2011.

 

When Juan Mendez, special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, asked Department of Defense officials why Manning was held in such a condition, he was told it was due to the gravity of the crime and for “prevention of harm” – though they did not specify what that meant, citing privacy concerns.

Manning defense's focus on gender identity disorder alarms some

“He hasn't been convicted of any crime yet so … subjecting him to a very long period of solitary confinement on the basis that he might be found guilty of a crime seems to me to be both a violation of his presumption of innocence but also a violation of his right not to be treated cruelly or inhumanely,” Mendez told msnbc.com.

As for the “harm” issue, it would be difficult to assess though it seemed “excessive to protect him from some harm that is kind of indeterminate and ... even fanciful,” particularly since Manning has no history of violence, he added.

The explanations for Manning’s solitary confinement were “insufficient,” according to Mendez. “That's why I reached the conclusion that the United States government was responsible for having inflicted on him cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” he said.

“Those are the words of the convention against torture that the United States has signed and ratified,” he said. “It's one degree less than torture and I'm not in a position to say that anything that happened to Manning amounted to torture, but it seems to me that solitary confinement by itself raises some flags and if it's prolonged, as in this case, it does cross a line.”

Mendez included the conclusions of his investigation of Manning’s case in a Feb. 29 addendum of his report on “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." The Guardian reported Mendez's findings in the case on Monday.

Since Manning’s move, the situation has improved, with him having access to other inmates, for example, Mendez said.

As Manning heads to trial over WikiLeaks, new push for whistleblower protections

In a May 2011 letter from Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Charles Johnson to Mendez, Johnson wrote that “there was considerable misinformation in the public dialogue” about Manning’s confinement at Quantico and that it met legal and regulatory standards.

“Though Private Manning was classified as a maximum custody detainee at Quantico, he occupied the very same type of single-occupancy cell that all other pretrial detainees occupied, regardless of their custody classification,” Johnson said.

A call placed to the Army's Military District of Washington media representatives after hours seeking comment on Mendez's remarks was not immediately returned.

At a court hearing in late February at Fort Meade near Baltimore, Manning declined to enter a plea. Another court session is scheduled for March 15-16, according to The Associated Press.

The Bradley Manning Support Network argues that Manning is a whistleblower, citing online discussions in which he allegedly said he hoped to generate “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms” and wanted “people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

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A new lawsuit seeks to force the U.S. government to make public “extremely disturbing” videotapes of a Saudi national whose abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison has been called “torture” by a former Bush administration official.

The suit, filed in New York federal court on Monday, comes 10 years after the first prisoners in the United States’ global war on terror arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The prison, within a U.S. Navy base, was considered by Bush administration lawyers outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

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The controversial prison was ordered closed within a year by President Barack Obama when he took office, but stiff resistance in Congress over housing detainees in the United States and trying them in civilian courts has left most of 171 detainees in limbo as the base remains open.

Indeed, 46 of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have been designated as too dangerous to be released at all by the Obama administration and have been assigned for indefinite detention without charges or trial. Through the years, 779 detainees have been incarcerated there with Bush releasing more than 500 and Obama 67.

“Sadly, Guantanamo is becoming a fixture,” Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees, told msnbc.com. “We come to think that during wartime that there are these blips of decreased civil liberties, but eventually we restore ourselves to normalcy. That dynamic 10 years on is not happening now. …The president who so eloquently criticized it has accepted its existence.”

The Obama administration disputes that characterization. A State Department spokesman told NBC News that it has made clear that closing Guantanamo is in the interest of national security and is continuing its efforts to close the facility.

Benjamin Wittes, of the conservative-leaning Brookings Institute, has suggested that Guantanamo has changed since the Bush years.

"Alone among facilities used by the military to detain enemy forces in the war on terror," Wittes wrote, "detentions at Guantanamo are supervised by the federal courts in probing habeas corpus cases. Detainees there, unlike at any other detention facility, have access to lawyers. Their cases are followed closely by the press, and many hundreds of journalists have been to Guantanamo."

Harsh interrogation techniques
In their lawsuit filed Monday, Lawrence Lustberg and Sandra Babcock seek to shed light on the treatment of their client Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 and was whisked to Guantanamo Bay, where government investigators later identified him as a man who had planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The case of Qahtani first came to light in 2005 when Time magazine published secret log files from Guantanamo that detailed harsh interrogation techniques on the Saudi suspect.

In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder, but on May 11 of that same year those charges were dropped. The reasons at the time were not made public.

• Slideshow: Life goes on in Guantanamo

In 2009, a Bush administration official revealed the reason to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

"We tortured Qahtani," Susan J. Crawford said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Now, Qahtani's attorneys, who have been to Guantanamo, seek to shine more light on what happened nearly a decade ago.

"It’s important at this juncture for the public to have access to visual images of what happened at Guantanamo,” Babcock told msnbc.com. “I think people have become desensitized to the plight of the men that came to Guantanamo. They don’t see them as human anymore. It’s easy to distance yourself to what happened."

• From Oct. 2006: Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo

The tapes remain classified, according to Lustberg and Babcock, but the lawyers have viewed them and say the government should release them.

"I can’t tell you what’s in the tapes," Babcock told msnbc.com, citing their secrecy. "But I can tell you that they are extremely disturbing and I think they could change the tenor of the debate in this country about our nation’s interrogation and detention practices."

Lustberg points out that "the Army field manual still allows our government to engage in some of the same abuse that was visited on Qahtani. We think that when this sort of thing goes on, detainee abuse should continue to be a robust debate."

The lawsuit says Qahtani's treatment included severe sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations and isolation. It also cites threats by military dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures and religious and sexual humiliation.

A spokeswoman for government lawyers told The Associated Press that there would be no comment. 

Other cases at Guantanamo are still pending. Five prisoners accused of helping to organize the Sept. 11 case are expected to be arraigned at the base in 2012 in what would be the most high-profile U.S. war crimes tribunal since the World War II-era. The five, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are facing charges that include murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

There is no judge yet in the Sept. 11 case.

 

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