Some torture stories are just too horrible to contemplate, while others are too complicated to understand. But Scott Horton's devastating new expose of the possible murders of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006 is neither: It's simply too terrible to allow to be true. Which is why it has been mostly ignored this week in the mainstream American media and paid little attention by the usual crew of torture apologists on the right.

Undertaking 11 days of fasting, prayer, meditation and public action, a group of Catholic and other activists has renewed its push for the immediate closing of the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Members of Witness Against Torture, established in 2005 with the goal of closing the prison housing suspected terrorists, began their fast Jan. 11 at the White House.

Eight years ago this week the U.S. government transported its first prisoners from Afghanistan to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama stated that Guantanamo would shut down by Jan. 22, 2010. Because of legal and ethical questions relating to the status of Guantanamo detainees, however, the president later announced that this deadline would not be met.

As the White House on Tuesday detailed its proposal to move terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a prison in rural Illinois, some lawmakers made it clear that they would try to derail President Obama's plans to shutter the controversial detention center. In addition to buying the nearly empty state prison in Thomson, Ill., to house the Guantanamo detainees, the government said, it plans to set up a courtroom in the facility for defendants who will be tried before a military commission.

Iran's security forces have enjoyed a "climate of impunity" during six months of "sweeping repression" to put down mass protests, according to an Amnesty International report released Wednesday that catalogs abuses from rape, killings, torture, and show trials. The Amnesty report is the most detailed accounting of abuses -- and Iranian officials' attempts to cover them up -- so far of the six months of political crisis in Iran. Since disputed elections on June 12, Iran has been thrown into a political crisis as protesters – who at their peak numbered hundreds of thousands in the weeks after the vote -- took to the streets to challenge what they called the fraudulent reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

After two years of wrangling to head off a case that centered around the Bush administration's practice of abducting alleged terrorists abroad and sending them to friendly third states for interrogation, Italian prosecutors won a stunning victory on Wednesday, when 23 US intelligence agents were convicted in absentia by a Milan court for kidnapping. The practice of "extraordinary rendition" became common for the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, with hundreds of alleged militants abducted in Europe and Central Asia and elsewhere, and delivered to states like Algeria, Egypt, and Syria, where torture is often used against presumed enemies of the state. The US says it received assurances that torture would not be used. But the practice has been especially controversial in Europe, where roughly 100 Muslim men have been abducted.

A group of senior retired generals and admirals who support President Obama's beleaguered plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay said that they were "encouraged" by a meeting yesterday afternoon with Attorney General Eric Holder, and said they heard no reservations from Holder about the administration's determination to close the facility by its January deadline.

After the C.I.A. inspector general's report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage -- not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation. In Mr. Cheney's view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush's Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

A year after the Bush administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods, CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers. Interrogators kept the unidentified detainee awake by chaining him to the walls and floor of a cell, according to government officials and memos issued with an internal CIA report. The Obama administration released the internal report this week.

The Obama administration has secured commitments from nearly a dozen countries willing to accept detainees from Guantanamo Bay and is increasingly confident about its ability to transfer a large majority of the prisoners who have been cleared for release, according to U.S. and foreign officials. Six European Union countries -- Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain -- have accepted or publicly agreed to take detainees. Four E.U. countries have privately told the administration that they are committed to resettling detainees, and five other E.U. nations are considering taking some, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.