Ireland in the 1970s) were not being used. It has now emerged that such techniques were being used by some troops deployed abroad. The BBC reported that "Labour MP Andrew Dismore, chairman of the committee, said he hoped the public inquiry [into the death of Baha Mousa] would give some indications as to why they were given 'wrong evidence'. Earlier this month, the MoD agreed to pay almost £3m in compensation to Mr Mousa's family and nine Iraqi men after admitting breaching human rights". United States While the United States is a party to international conventions against torture, a proponent of human rights treaties and a critic of torture by other countries, torture has taken place within its borders and on its government's behalf outside of its borders. On 13 December 1999, NYPD officer Justin Volpe was sentenced to thirty years in prison for sodomizing detainee Abner Louima with the handle of a bathroom plunger. The Chicago Police Department's Area 2 unit under Commander Jon Burge repeatedly used electroshock, near-suffocation by plastic bags and excessive beating on suspects in the 1970s and 1980s. The City of Chicago's Office of Professional Standards (OPS) concluded that the physical abuse was systematic and, "The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture." The Supermax facility at the Maine State Prison has been the scene of video-taped forcible extractions that Lance Tapley in the Portland Phoenix wrote "look[ed] like torture." In 2003 and 2004 there was substantial controversy over the "stress and duress" methods that were used in the U.S. War on Terrorism that had been sanctioned by the U.S. Executive branch of government at Cabinet level. Amnesty International and numerous commentators have accused the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of approving a system that uses torture, destroying the mechanisms for judicial review created by the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and creating a parallel legal system below international standards. In an interview with the Washington Post, the convening authority of the Guantanamo military commissions, Susan J. Crawford, a retired judge, who was responsible for reviewing practices at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, said of one Guantanamo Bay detainee, "his treatment met the legal definition of torture, and that is why I did not refer the case" for prosecution. The U.S. Government denies that torture is being