CIA's "Torture Express" aircraft in Europe

[Marksix]

As a European based great lover of NYC I wanted to get your perspective on this. I and most of the people I know work in the airline industry. We all know the operators who fly "discrete" charters for unusual clients, mostly "freight" from Eastern Europe to African states using unmarked aircraft; it's an every day part of the business. Recently it has become common currency that the CIA or US government agencies operate what has become known as "Torture Express" aircraft (we know the aircraft and their reg. numbers) to ferry "suspects" around Europe and the rest of the world.

The appleation "Torture Express" is being applied because these flights have been observed loading "passengers" sometimes dressed in the requisite orange boiler suits with flight plans to Eastern Europe and North African states which it is acknowledged have somewhat dubious interrogation practices which would not be countenanced in the US or Western Europe.

The UK government, when questioned if it countenanced torture replied NO but when asked if evidenced obtained under torture would be acceptable, obfuscated.

The accusation is that the US government is taking people from the streets of Europe without any legal process to "friendly" states where they can be held indeffinitly and subjected to any level of torture without recourse. I guess it is being justified (if acknowledged at all) by reffering us to 9/11.

Please do not take this is an anti-American rant; I speak as a person whose girlfriend could have been on the bus blown up by Islamic extremists in London on 7/7. For what it is worth, we in the airline business whilst realists (for obvious reasons) take the view that we now have more than terrorists to fear and revile; now it is the governments too. I wanted to get your views as more than most, if done at all it is being done in your name.....

As a post script to this, here in the UK today we celebrate the prevention of a terrorist plot by religous extremeists to blow up the houses of parliament, the monarchy and the entire English establishment in order to establish a relgious state. The plot (402 years ago today) was uncovered by the torturing of one Guido Fawkes by the government in the Tower of London. His effigy will be burnt on bonfires througut the country tonight as it has been these past 400 years. Plus Ca Change as the French would say...

[Edward]

There was a good article in New Yorker about that, follow the link below to read it

OUTSOURCING TORTURE
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
by JANE MAYER
Issue of 2005-02-14

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6

[lofter1]

The events you describe -- along with the ill-conceived treatment of other prisoners and the seemingly sanctioned-from-the-top use of torture and other means that are at odds with the Geneva Convention -- are both troubling and embarassing to me as an American.

I believe that the majority of American people are beginning to wake up to the travesty of some of the Bush Administration's policies. People "in the know" are beginning to speak up:

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, November 4, 2005

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html


Another shocking accusation by former administration insider Lawrence Wilkerson appears to be going under the media radar today.

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.

Here's the audio (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4987598) of Wilkerson's interview with Steve Inskeep. The transcript is not publicly available, but here are the relevant excerpts:


"INSKEEP: While in the government, he says he was assigned to gather documents. He traced just how Americans came to be accused of abusing prisoners. In 2002, a presidential memo had ordered that detainees be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions that forbid torture. Wilkerson says the vice president's office pushed for a more expansive policy.

"Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen.

"INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they've investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president's office, which is where you're placing it?

"Mr. WILKERSON: I'm privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms -- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it.

And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

"You just -- if you're a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn't matter whether it's actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you've just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur."

Addington, incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter Libby. (For more on Addington, read my columns from Tuesday (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/11/01/BL2005110100876.html) and Wednesday (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110201607_pf.html) .)
The only news service I have found that covered Wilkerson's comments on NPR was Agence France Presse (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/pl_afp/uspoliticsjusticeiraq_051103182259) .

But if past is prologue, it will get picked up by more people soon.

In my October 20 column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/10/20/BL2005102001131_pf.html) , I expressed surprise that Wilkerson's last thunderbolt hadn't made the front pages.

The previous day, he had given a speech in which he declared that a secret cabal led by the vice president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies.

But it's gotten a lot more attention since.

[TLOZ Link5]

I'm absolutely not surprised. I posted a related article in the "Bush Police State" thread.

[Marksix]

Thanks for the replies - you have restored my faith in the innate good sense of Americans and New Yorkers in particular. FYI the popular media here presents Americans as right wing trigger happy zealots intent on world domination, mostly in an effort to instill anti-americanism and not without some success so it is good to get the word straight from the horses mouth as it were.

Here in the UK we have also to put our own house in order and that is already happenning;Blair is finished and the anti civil liberties laws his government is trying to introduce under the pretext of "protecting" us from the bad guys are meeting stiff resistance.

Keep up the good fight.

[lofter1]

^ Just remember that NYC is almost an entirely different place in every way, shape, form and pattern of thought than 99% of the USA.

[Marksix]

^ Just remember that NYC is almost an entirely different place in every way, shape, form and pattern of thought than 99% of the USA.


...which is why we love it so.

[TLOZ Link5]

...which is why we love it so.

Thanks, Mark, we love you too :D

[lofter1]

Intersting that the GOP seems more worried about our questionable tactics than the ill-trust that such tactics might lead to ...

GOP LEADERS TO LAUNCH NEW 'LEAK' PROBE; INFO TO WASH POST 'DAMAGED NATIONAL SECURITY'

Tue Nov 08 2005 11:36:31 ET

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash2l.htm

Sources tell Drudge that early this afternoon House Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Frist will announce a bicameral investigation into the leak of classified information to the WASHINGTON POST regarding the “black sites” where high value al Qaeda terrorists are being held and interrogated.

MORE

Said one Hill source: “Talk about a leak that damaged national security! How will we ever get our allies to cooperate if they fear that their people will be targeted by al Qaeda.”

According to sources, the WASHINGTON POST story by Dana Priest (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html) (Wednesday November 2), revealed highly classified information that has already done significant damage to US efforts in the War on Terror.

Developing...


And here's the article in question \/ \/ \/

[lofter1]

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11


By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html


The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement
.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.

The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past two years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency's prisons.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.
About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category -- in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay -- were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier -- which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees -- is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction.
Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Department human rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.

Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.

Origins of the Black Sites

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried.

"The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed," said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means."

On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.

The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one.
But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.

The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.

It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article is that he did not have to.

Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Deals With 2 Countries

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?

Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.

A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.

"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."

Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base.

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites -- which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.

"It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.


Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

[Ninjahedge]

I wonder if there is any way to upgrade from coach to first class......

[lofter1]

Senator tells CNN he believes Republican leaked info on CIA jails
RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)

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Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post, RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/) can report.

Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report -- which stated that the U.S. was holding terrorist suspects in secret CIA jails overseas -- was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.

The revelation appears to torpedo the political gambit of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) who called on the Senate and House intelligence committees to investigate who leaked the information to the Post.

The Post story cited as sources "U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."

More via Eschaton (http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_11_06_atrios_archive.html#113148475467778198) .

CNN's Ed Henry: "Trent Lott stunned reporters by declaring that this subject was actualy discussed at a Senate Republican luncheon, Republican senators only, last tuesday the day before the story ran in the Washington Post. Lott noted that Vice President Cheney was also in the room for that discussion and Lott said point blank "a lot of it came out of that room last tuesday, pointing to the room where the lunch was held in the capitol." He added of senators "we can't keep our mouths shut." He added about the vice president, "He was up here last wek and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper." He said he believes when all is said and done it may wind up as an ethics investigation of a Republican senator, maybe a Republican staffer as well. Senator Frist's office not commenting on this development. The Washington Post not commenting either."

DEVELOPING HARD...

[lofter1]

Poor Scotty, so much to explain ...

White House Briefing:
McClellan Deflects Questions on Torture Exemption A Couple Dozen Times

By E&P Staff

Published: November 08, 2005
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001436211




NEW YORK At today's White House press briefing, Scott McClellan was hit with a number of questions about the "ethics classes" the president's staffers are now attending. But much of the briefing featured efforts by Helen Thomas, at the start, and then other reporters to get McClellan to explain the apparent contradiction between his claims that the U.S. does not torture anyone and Vice President Cheney's request for an exemption in this matter.

Here are the exchanges from the transcript:

****

Q I'd like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don't do torture, but Cheney --

MR. McCLELLAN: That's about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he's asked for an exemption on torture? No, that's --

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that is inaccurate.

Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you're mischaracterizing things. And I'm not going to get into discussions we have --

Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never --

Q I'm asking about exemptions.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged --

Q That's not the answer I'm asking for --

MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer -- because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th --

Q He didn't ask for an exemption --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we are going to --

Q -- answer that one question. I'm asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do --

Q You're not answering -- yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I'm going to tell them the facts.

Q -- the American people every day. I'm asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You've had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I'm going to respond to it.

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Q Did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.

Q Is that the answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.

Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we're asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.

Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple -- this is a very simple question.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.

Q What are we asking for?
Q Would you characterize what we're asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: We're asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that's what we --

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?

MR. McCLELLAN: David, let's talk about people that you're talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You're talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.

Q I'm asking you --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you're talking about.

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only --

Q What does that mean --

MR. McCLELLAN: What I'm telling you right now -- not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place. And, you bet, when we capture terrorist leaders, we are going to seek to find out information that will protect -- that prevent attacks from happening in the first place. But we have an obligation to do so. Our military knows this; all people within the United States government know this. We have an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and values.

Now, the people that you are bringing up -- you're talking about in the context, and I think it's important for the American people to know, are people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh -- these are -- these are dangerous killers.

Q So they're all killers --
Q Did you ask for an exemption on torture? That's a simple question, yes or no.

MR. McCLELLAN: No. And we have not. That's what I told you at the beginning.

Q You want to reserve the ability to use tougher tactics with those individuals who you mentioned.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, obviously, you have a different view from the American people. I think the American people understand the importance of doing everything within our power and within our laws to protect the American people.

Q Scott, are you saying that Cheney did not ask --
Q What is it that you want the -- what is it that you want the CIA to be able to do that the U.S. Armed Forces are not allowed to do?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to get into talking about national security matters, Bill. I don't do that, because this involves --

Q This would be the exemption, in other words.

MR. McCLELLAN: This involves information that relates to doing all we can to protect the American people. And if you have a different view -- obviously, some of you on this room -- in this room have a different view, some of you on the front row have a different view.

Q We simply are asking a question.
Q What is the Vice President -- what is the Vice President asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's spelled out in our statement of administration policy in terms of what our views are. That's very public information. In terms of our discussions with members of Congress --

Q -- no, it's not --

MR. McCLELLAN: In terms of our members -- like I said, there are already laws on the books that we have to adhere to and abide by, and we do. And we believe that those laws and those obligations address these issues.

Q So then why is the Vice President continuing to lobby on this issue? If you're very happy with the laws on the books, what needs change?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, you asked me -- you want to ask questions of the Vice President's office, feel free to do that. We've made our position very clear, and it's spelled out on our website for everybody to see.

Q We don't need a website, we need you from the podium.

MR. McCLELLAN: And what I just told you is what our view is.

Q But Scott, do you see the contradiction --

MR. McCLELLAN: Jessica, go ahead.

[Ninjahedge]

It is like a ping pong match.

They did not ask for a verbatim "exemption", but they did ask to be given rights and privileges not granted to the military in regards to CIA interrogations of terrorist suspects.

IOW, they asked for an exemption.

There are some classic lines in there too:


Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I'm going to answer it, just like the President -- I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q -- yes or no --

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

yep, just like the President. You avoid the question and continue to prattle on about the global Dr. Evil that threatens us all and our Good Faithful Upstanding citizens and Government doing all they can in their Holy Power to save the Poor Innocent Women and Children from this Hateful Menace.

PRAISE THE LORD!!! :p

[Marksix]

FYI the UK Government lost a vote in the House of Commons today whereby they were asking - at the behest of the police, for internment for up to 90 days any person the police deemed to be a terrorist suspect. No evidence, no trial, no charge need be applied therefore no lawyer neccessary.

What in fact would have happened is that the police, true to form would have locked up hundreds of mostly Asians causing the same kind of racial tensions we saw in France this last week or even worse, radicalising previously moderate muslims.

PM Blair staked his leadership on this and also his credibility. He got his answer! The politics of fear is no longer working here as it seems it is starting (not) to over in the US too.

[lofter1]

The politics of fear is no longer working here as it seems it is starting (not) to over in the US too.
Hopefully that tide is turning ...

[lofter1]

Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us

By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
New York Times
Op-Ed Contributors
November 14, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html


Washington — How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees.

General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem.

Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.

SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we know if you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.

Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.

By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse.
On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.


M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.



Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[TLOZ Link5]

Apparently, the only way that Bush will veto a spending bill is if there's an anti-torture proclamation hidden in it somewhere. An old, but still viable, article:

Bush will veto anti-torture law after Senate revolt
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 07/10/2005)

The Bush administration pledged yesterday to veto legislation banning the torture of prisoners by US troops after an overwhelming and almost unprecedented revolt by loyalist congressmen.

The mutiny was the latest setback for an administration facing an increasingly independent and bloody-minded legislature. But it also marked a key moment in Congress's campaign to curtail the huge powers it has granted the White House since 2001 in its war against terrorism.

The late-night Senate vote saw the measure forbidding torture passed by 90 to nine, with most Republicans backing the measure. Most senators said the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and similar allegations at the Guantanamo Bay prison rendered the result a foregone conclusion.

The administration's extraordinary isolation was underlined when the Senate Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, supported the amendment.

The man behind the legislation, Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam, said the move was backed by American soldiers. His amendment would prohibit the "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment of prisoners in the custody of America's defence department.

The vote was one of the largest and best supported congressional revolts during President George W Bush's five years in office and shocked the White House.

"We have put out a Statement of Administration Policy saying that his advisers would recommend that he vetoes it if it contains such language," White House spokesman Scott McClellan warned yesterday.

The administration said Congress was attempting to tie its hands in the war against terrorism.

The veto would be Mr Bush's first use of his most extreme legislative option. But senators pointed out that a presidential veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority in both houses.

For now the amendment's fate depends on negotiations between the Senate and the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, which is more loyal to the administration.

But senators said they were confident that most of the language would survive and that the issue could pose an extremely awkward dilemma for the president.

The amendment was attached to the $440 billion (£247 billion) defence spending bill and if Mr Bush vetoes the amendment, he would have to veto the entire bill.

That would leave America's armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan short of cash as early as the middle of next month.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.

[ablarc]

^ What happened with this? Where's the rest of the story?

[lofter1]

Andrew Sullivan has been giving great coverage to the Torture issue: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/

Another recent post ...
The US and Torture

Sebastian Holsclaw
November 15, 2005
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/


It has become increasingly clear that the current administration has taken a disturbingly permissive attitude toward torture. (See here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/11/but_wait_theres.html) or here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/10/cheney_the_cia_.html) for further exploration of the topic).

Though it is crass to quote yourself, I'm going to reprint most of my open letter to my party, the Republican Party, from here (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/02/exhortation.html) anyway. Then I'm going to discuss more recent developments:

There has been a drip, drip, drip that we have mostly ignored. It does us no credit to continue. There are many sources for this information, but the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6) has an excellent overview. The Bush administration has engaged in a very troubling pattern of legitimizing torture by dramatically expanding the practice of "extraordinary rendition". This practice essentially amounts to sending people to other countries to be tortured. An excellent blog source for information on this practice is available on a section of ObsidianWings (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/maher_arar/index.html). It has gotten to the point where it is obvious that this is more than a bad agent or two and it has expanded to far beyond just a few of the most hardened and obvious Al Qaeda operatives.

I wish I could just mention the program and assume that I didn't have to argue against it. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure that is true. So before I get to what Republicans should do to stop it, I'm going to briefly outline why we should act to stop it:

Torture is wrong. The practice of extraordinary rendition began as a classic Clintonian hairsplitting exercise in the mid 1990s to avoid the clear letter of the laws which prohibit America from using torture. This is the kind of avoidance of the law and ridiculous semantics that we decried when employed by the Clinton administration. It has gotten no more attractive just because Bush has decided to continue the program.

We are torturing non-terrorists. Perhaps some people would be willing to torture Al Qaeda members. I'm not one of them, but perhaps some are. The problem with that mindset is that we aren't just torturing Al Qaeda members. It is becoming completely obvious that some of the people being tortured are innocent. See especially the ObsidianWings link above. That is crazy. There isn't any information we are getting that could possibly justify the torture of innocent people.

Torture is ineffective. Torture isn't ineffective at getting information per se. It is ineffective at getting useful information. That is because the victim either snaps completely, or starts trying to mold his story to fit what the torturer wants to hear. There is evidence that we have relied on information obtained through torture, only to find that it was very wrong.

Torture also opens us up to the legitimate criticism that we are acting out the very barbarism that we want to fight. I think as Republicans we have heard that charge so many times employed against practices where the analogy was completely inappropriate, that we have become inured to the charge when properly employed. This is a case where the charge has force. Go watch the Nick Berg Beheading Video (http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/decapitation_video.htm) and then imagine the blood pouring from his neck being just like the blood oozing from the fingers of an innocent torture victim sent to his fate by the CIA. That is the barbarism we are fighting, and that is the barbarism we must not become a part of. I know we have heard the charge that we are acting "just like them" thrown at us over trivial concerns like suggesting that we pay a bit more attention to visa-holders from other countries. This is NOT THAT CASE. This is the case of saying we are acting just like them because we are torturing people--acting just like them.

Therefore extraordinary rendition is a moral sinkhole, which is being employed on people we are not sure are guilty, and which doesn't even get good information. It cannot be continued.

The Republican Party has spent so many years in the minority that sometimes I think we have not adjusted to the fact that we are in power. We are in power now. We control both Houses of Congress and we have our people throughout the administration. We don't need to wait for the Democrats to raise this issue. We can't hide behind the worry that exploring our practices is going to get a President elected who is going to retreat from Iraq. We are the party which leads the most powerful country in the world. And lead it we must. President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards. The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do. We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation. We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue. This practice is foolish in the proverbial sense of the word--it perverts our moral core and gains us nothing but the illusion of doing something important.
Since I wrote this, we have more proof that torture isn't effective at getting good intelligence, and can in fact obtain dramatically misleading misinformation.

This is especially true because we have been copying the torture techniques of Communist countries (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/opinion/14blochemarks.html):


Continue reading "The US and Torture" » (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/11/the_us_and_tort.html#more)

[Marksix]

...seen at a few airports around Europe and also said to have been seen in Afghanistan . You can easily trace its' frame number and also the owners, listed as Path Corporation.


am unable to load the photo but follow this link to see the actual aircraft: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/848894/M/

[lofter1]

here it is:

http://c4.maxserving.com/iserver/site=5498/area=side_ros/aamfmt=normal/aamsz=sideunit/PageID=1234567 (http://c4.maxserving.com/adclick/site=5498/area=side_ros/aamfmt=normal/aamsz=sideunit/PageID=1234567)http://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TL.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TTL.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_T.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TTR.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TR.gifhttp://www.airliners.net/graphics/photo_shadow_TLL.gifhttp://images.airliners.net/photos/middle/4/9/8/848894.jpg (http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=848894&size=L&width=1024&height=782&sok=&photo_nr=)

[TLOZ Link5]

Frightening how something so innocuous can conceal such a dark secret.

[lofter1]

European Probe to Check Suspect Planes


Tuesday November 22, 2005
By JAN SLIVA
Associated Press Writer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5432814,00.html


PARIS (AP) - The head of an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe said Tuesday he was checking 31 suspect planes that landed in Europe in recent years and was trying to acquire past satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.

If the European probe uncovers evidence of covert facilities, the potential impact ranges from major embarrassment for the United States to political turmoil in countries that might have participated, even unwittingly. Countries found housing secret detention centers also could be suspended or expelled from the 46-member Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog organization.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Swiss senator Dick Marty said the Council of Europe, on whose behalf he was investigating, had a "moral obligation'' to look into claims the CIA set up secret prisons on the continent to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

He said that despite lack of proof, there were "many hints, such as suspicious moving patterns of aircraft, that have to be investigated.''

But given the limited powers of the Strasbourg-based council, Marty's chances of uncovering explosive state secrets seemed unclear. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such facilities.

Allegations the CIA hid and interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported in The Washington Post on Nov. 2. The paper did not name the countries involved.

A day later, Human Rights Watch said it had evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania. The New York-based group identified the Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania and Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport as possible sites for secret detention centers, saying it based its conclusion on flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004 that it had obtained.

In a report presented in Paris on Tuesday to the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, Marty said other airports that might have been used by CIA aircraft in some capacity are Palma de Mallorca in Spain, Larnaca in Cyprus and Shannon in Ireland.

Marty's report - a copy of which was obtained by the AP - contends the aircraft are "alleged to belong to entities with direct or indirect links to the CIA. It is claimed these were used by the CIA to transport prisoners.''

He said he asked the Brussels, Belgium-based Eurocontrol air safety organization to provide details of 31 suspect planes that flew through Europe, in accordance with a list given to him by Human Rights Watch.
Member states send Eurocontrol - also known as the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation - flight logs of both civilian and military flights, but these are not published.

Marty also said he asked the European Union's Satellite Center in Spain to look up and hand over satellite images of suspect sites in Romania and Poland.

"When we talk about 'prisons,' they don't necessarily have to be for many people, they could be cells for a very small group of people, one or two,'' he said.

Marty said he was planning to ask authorities in the Council of Europe's member states whether they have been contacted in order to ``authorize secret detention in one form or another.''

He also said he intended to ask Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, to share any information the Senate may get from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the possible existence of secret detention facilities outside the United States.

Earlier this month, the Senate voted to require National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to provide the Senate and House intelligence committees with details of any clandestine facilities where the United States holds or has held terrorism suspects.

On Tuesday, several EU countries - including Britain, the Netherlands and Finland - agreed to write the United States on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of the reports of secret prisons.

Marty said the probe was not meant to spark anti-American feelings or question the U.S. fight against terrorism.

"This is absolutely not a crusade against America. I think all Europeans agree with Americans that we must fight terrorism,'' he said. "We do not want to weaken the fight against terrorism ... but this fight has to be fought by legal means. Wrongdoing only gives ammunition to both the terrorists and their sympathizers.''

The Council of Europe is the guardian of the European Convention on Human Rights, a legally binding human rights treaty signed by all 46 council members. The council itself has no direct jurisdiction over any country but can exercise political pressure.

Membership in the organization is considered prestigious for European countries as it attests to their attachment to Europe's human rights principles.

[lofter1]

The U.S. Policy of allowing "Torture" will haunt this country for years to come:

Torture claims 'forced US to cut terror charges'

· Dirty bomb evidence came from al-Qaida leaders
· CIA worried case would expose prison network

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1650418,00.html?gusrc=rss

The Bush administration decided not to charge Jose Padilla with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city because the evidence against him was extracted using torture on members of al-Qaida, it was claimed yesterday.

Mr Padilla, a US citizen who had been held for more than three years as an "enemy combatant" in a military prison in North Carolina, was indicted on Tuesday on the lesser charges of supporting terrorism abroad. After his arrest in 2002 the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert was also accused by the administration of planning to blow up apartment blocks in New York using natural gas.

The administration had used his case as evidence of the continued threat posed by al-Qaida inside America.

Yesterday's New York Times, quoting unnamed current and former government officials, said the main evidence of Mr Padilla's involvement in the plots against US cities had come from two captured al-Qaida leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a leading al-Qaida recruiter. But the officials told the newspaper Mr Padilla could not be charged with the bomb plots because neither of the al-Qaida leaders could be used as witnesses as they had been subjected to harsh questioning and could open up charges from defence lawyers that their earlier statements resulted from torture. Officials also feared that their testimony could expose classified information about the CIA prison system in which the men were thought to be held.

The CIA has never publicly acknowledged it is detaining Mr Mohammed and Mr Zubaydah. It is not known where they are being held. But it was reported last month the CIA was using secret detention centres in eastern Europe, possibly in Poland and Romania, for interrogations, thus beyond the reach of US law.

Internal reviews by the CIA have raised questions about the treatment and credibility of the two men. The New York Times said one review, completed in spring last year by the CIA inspector general, found that in the first months after his capture Mr Mohammed had suffered excessive use of "waterboarding", a technique involving near drowning which entails the detainee being strapped to a board and then submerged.

Announcing the charges against Mr Padilla on Tuesday, the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, repeatedly refused to answer questions on why none of the allegations involving attacks on the US had been included. "I am not going to talk about previous accusations and allegations that are outside the indictment," he said. However, the New York Times said the officials had emphasised that the government was not backing off its initial assertions about the seriousness of Mr Padilla's actions.

Mr Padilla was arrested at O'Hare airport in Chicago in 2002 after returning from Pakistan. President George Bush declared him an enemy combatant, and the administration resisted calls to charge and try him in civilian courts. His case became a cause célèbre, with human rights groups claiming it was an extreme example of how civil liberties had been brushed aside in pursuit of the war on terror.

Mr Padilla was handed over last week to the justice department for civilian proceedings, avoiding a potentially embarrassing supreme court showdown over how long the US government could hold one of its citizens in military custody without charges.

Torture has become an emotive issue around the world since prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq was uncovered. A new law sponsored by Senator John McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate and a war hero who was tortured in Vietnam, would ban inhumane treatment and oblige all US agencies to abide by international law on torture. The draft law was approved by 90 votes to nine in the Senate earlier this month, but the House of Representatives has yet to give its support and Dick Cheney has launched an aggressive effort to modify the legislation to allow the CIA to be exempted - causing the Washington Post to label him "Vice President for Torture" in an editorial.

[lofter1]

http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/3/cheneythanksgiving.gif

[lofter1]

This article shows how clueless the Torture-Mongers are.

McCain's clear statement that "the information was of no real use to the Vietnamese" contradicts what these folk so desperately want to prove ...


That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

John McCain: Torture Worked on Me

Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/29/100012.shtml


Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!

In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain describes how he was severely injured when his plane was shot down over Hanoi - and how his North Vietnamese interrogators used his injuries to extract information.
"Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate," he wrote.

"I thought they were bluffing and refused to provide any information beyond my name, rank and serial number, and date of birth. They knocked me around a little to force my cooperation."

The punishment finally worked, McCain said. "Eventually, I gave them my ship's name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant."

Recalling how he gave up military information to his interrogators, McCain said: "I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our names, rank and serial number."

The episode wasn't the only instance when McCain broke under physical pressure.
Just after his release in May 1973, he detailed his experience as a P.O.W. in a lengthy account in U.S. News & World Report.

He described the day Hanoi Hilton guards beat him "from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes."

"For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards . . . Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope."

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."
That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

[Ninjahedge]

What a stupid article.

Interrogation tecniques do not work to get the information you want, not just to break a prisoner.

What a stupid STUPID statement this article is making.

It is like saying "Smashing things DOES make things change!!!"

But it obviously does not create anything (the change that we would be looking for).

I hate it when people play with somantics, especially when they know what the person meant in the first place.

[lofter1]

Just yesterday Bush unequivocally stated (yet again) that the war should be run by the military commanders and NOT the politicians in Washington.

Seemingly Rumsfeld didn't get that message ...

Top U.S. military officer contradicts his civilian boss

11/30/2005
http://www.abc15.com/news/morenews/index.asp?did=23049 (http://www.abc15.com/news/morenews/index.asp?did=23049)


WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's top military man, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said American troops in Iraq have a duty to intercede and stop abuse of prisoners by Iraqi security personnel.

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld contradicted Pace, the general stood firm.

Rumsfeld told the general he believed Pace meant to say the U.S. soldiers had to report the abuse, not stop it.

Pace stuck to his original statement.

The unusual exchange occurred during a discussion at a news conference about the relationship between U.S. forces in Iraq and an Iraqi government considered sovereign by the United States.

A questioner asked whether the United States and its allies might be deemed responsible for preventing mistreatment of people under arrest in Iraq, given that the U.S. and its allies train Iraqi forces.

"There are a lot of people involved in this, dozens of countries trying to help train these Iraqi forces. Any instance of inhumane behavior is obviously worrisome and harmful to them when that occurs," Rumsfeld said. "Iraq knows, of certain knowledge, that they need the support of the international community. And a good way to lose it is to make a practice of something that is inconsistent with the values of the international community."

He added: "Now, you know, I can't go any further in talking about it.

Obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility when a sovereign country engages in something that they disapprove of."

Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked what orders the troops have to handle such incidents. He responded: "It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it."

He said soldiers who hear of but don't see an incident should deal with it through superiors of the offending Iraqis.

That's when Rumsfeld stepped to the microphone and said, "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

Pace then repeated to Rumsfeld that intervening when witnessing abuse is the order the troops must follow, not just reporting it.


On the Net:
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press.

[TLOZ Link5]

I don't know who to side with here. If the military wants to intercede on the behalf of the inmate being tortured, then I can see where Pace is coming from. But at the same time, defying Rumsfeld is a disturbing concept in and of itself because it implies an undermining of civilian control of the military.

[lofter1]

Hmm, hard choice:

Defying Rumsfeld ... or defying the accepted International Rules of War?

[Marksix]

Quite apart from the barbarity of torture, the consequences of information obtained under torture are far reaching, especially when they are used by governments to shape or justify policy and laws. As an example, here in the UK the government wants to impose compulsory ID cards containing biometric data on the holder linked to multiple government, medical and law enforcement data bases.

There are many profound implications for this; it changes the relationship between citizen and government (actually we are subjects) meaning we have to justify ourselves to government and their agencies for the first time in our history. You will be required to produce the card on demand, to purchase a rail or air ticket even petrol and anything else the government deems. Databases will be used to categorise people by ethnicity, location - current past and future, political tendencies, union membership and many, many other infringements on privacy.

When first announced the government stated they were needed to protect us against terrorism. Police chiefs were rolled out to back up their position stating they had seen unspecified intelligence leaving them in no doubt that the threat was real, imminent and catastrophic justifying any infringement on civil liberties that i.d. cards would bring.

It has since transpired that the "intelligence" they were shown referred to so called "dirty bombs" planned to be detonated in UK cities. This "intelligence" has since been shown to obtained from a radical Muslim after many months of torture, since proven to be totally spurious.

The government has since admitted that i.d. cards would not have prevented ANY of the terrorist attacks in the UK or indeed in the US and are now justifying the £8 billion i.d. card bill on the prevention of identity theft....

It is just one indication of how cynical politicians will, if allowed, use even the degradation of common held values to make policy, law and even war and it can all be traced back to one person having a cattle prod shoved up his arse.


BTW - the last government to attempt a nation i.d. scheme backed up by databases was the German Nazi Part in the 1930's. It was invented by IBM expressly for Adolf Hitler to provide him with the first of many solutions to Germany's perceived problems that led to the Holocaust. Indeed, there was no solution IBM was unwilling to provide Hitler with.

Until the 12-year strategic alliance between IBM and the Nazi regime, people could be counted manually, but not individually identified. At the end of the 19th Century, IBM invented data processing with its Hollerith punch card system - that is, a simple process of storing information on individuals, places, objects and processes by mechanically punching select holes in designated columns and rows. In 1933, as Hitler wanted to identify the Jews and other 'enemies of the state' so he could target them for persecution, IBM energetically stepped forward, offering to create an automated system for Hitler's first national census. The company designed a census that not only counted heads but also recorded the characteristics of those heads by name and background. Throughout the 12-year Reich, IBM's technology helped the Nazis in all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, social exclusion, confiscation, ghettoisation, deportation and even extermination.

There was an IBM customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in almost every concentration camp, from Auschwitz (IBM coded 001) to Dachau (IBM coded 003). It all began with national identification in 1933.

The system was used to target any designated enemy: for example, homosexuals (coded 2), Jehovah's Witnesses (3), Communists (6), Gypsies (2) and, of course, Jews (8).

As ever, US companies are at the forefront in bidding for contracts to supply the technology for the UK's i.d. cards and databases.

IBM’s punch cards were simply a piece of paper with holes in it. In practice, the technology was deadly.

I.D. cards are simple credit card like smart cards and as our government says - "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"......

http://www.no2id.net/

[Ninjahedge]

Except fear itself.


Total indexing of the US population is a scary prospect.

-Citizen No: 4567-9851-7899-4

[TLOZ Link5]

Hmm, hard choice:

Defying Rumsfeld ... or defying the accepted International Rules of War?

It may be Rumsfeld, but it's still civilian control over the military. Who knows what repercussions that might have in future administrations?

[lofter1]

EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

10 Out of 11 High-Value Terror Leaders Subjected to 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques'

By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1375123


Dec. 5, 2005 — Two CIA secret prisons were operating in Eastern Europe until last month when they were shut down following Human Rights Watch reports of their existence in Poland and Romania.

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

CIA officials asked ABC News not the name the specific countries where the prisons were located, citing security concerns.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA's secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today avoided directly answering the question of secret prisons in remarks made on her departure for Europe, where the issue of secret prisons and secret flights has caused a furor.

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists.

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

The CIA has used a small fleet of private jets to move top al Qaeda suspects from Afghanistan and the Middle East to Eastern Europe, where Human Rights Watch has identified Poland and Romania as the countries that housed secret sites.

But Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told ABC Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross today: "My president has said there is no truth in these reports."

Ross asked: "Do you know otherwise, sir, are you aware of these sites being shut down in the last few weeks, operating on a base under your direct control?"

Sikorski answered, "I think this is as much as I can tell you about this."

In Romania, where the secret prison was possibly at a military base visited last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the new Romanian prime minister said today there is no evidence of a CIA site but that he will investigate.

Sources tell ABC that the CIA's secret prisons have existed since March 2002 when one was established in Thailand to house the first important al Qaeda target captured. Sources tell ABC that the approval for another secret prison was granted last year by a North African nation.

Sources tell ABC News that the CIA has a related system of secretly returning other prisoners to their home country when they have outlived their usefulness to the United States.

These same sources also tell ABC News that U.S. intelligence also ships some "unlawful combatants" to countries that use interrogation techniques harsher than any authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. They say that Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Egypt were among the nations used in order to extract confessions quickly using techniques harsher than those authorized for use by U.S. intelligence officers. These prisoners were not necessarily citizens of those nations.

According to sources directly involved in setting up the CIA secret prison system, it began with the capture of Abu Zabayda in Pakistan. After treatment there for gunshot wounds, he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small disused warehouse on an active airbase.

There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor especially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after .31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

While in the secret facilities in Eastern Europe, Abu Zubaydah and his fellow captives were fed breakfasts that included yogurt and fruit, lunches that included steamed vegetables and beans, and dinners that included meat or chicken and more vegetables and rice, sources say. In exchange for cooperation, prisoners were sometimes given hard candies, deserts and chocolates. Abu Zubaydah was partial to Kit Kats, the same treat Saddam Hussein fancied in his captivity.

"One of the difficult issues in this new kind of conflict is what to do with captured individuals who we know or believe to be terrorists," Rice said. "The individuals come from many countries and are often captured far from their original homes. Among them are those who are effectively stateless, owing allegiance only to the extremist cause of transnational terrorism. Many are extremely dangerous. And some have information that may save lives, perhaps even thousands of lives."

Sources tell ABC News that Jordanians, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Saudis, Pakistanis, Uzbekistanis and Chinese citizens have been returned to their nations' intelligence services after initial debriefing by U.S. intelligence officers. Rice said renditions such as these are vital to the war on terror. "Rendition is a vital tool in combating transnational terrorism," she said.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

[Ninjahedge]

"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

So we have to REGRESS in our interrogation techniques?

GJ Condi!

[lofter1]

America can't take it anymore

The Bush administration has embraced torture as a key part of the "war on terror."
Finally, members of Congress, the military and the CIA are speaking out against the abuse.

By Mark Follman
Dec. 5, 2005

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/05/torture_backlash/index.html


Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability.

Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects -- conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House -- have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators.

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html) top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.

"There is no instance in American history where we've been exposed as being so deeply involved in actually conducting torture on a routine and regular basis," says Thomas Powers, an expert on national security and the author of two books on the CIA.

In recent months, a fierce backlash against the abuses has not only been rising in Washington, but well beyond. Many Americans on the front lines of national security are demoralized and angered by the fact that only a few foot soldiers have been punished -- such as Pvt. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib infamy -- while commanders in the field and policymakers have remained untouched. A growing number of military and CIA personnel, according to officers from both realms, admit that the Bush policies, hatched in the fearful weeks and months after 9/11, have deeply corrupted military and intelligence operations over four years of war.

In October, the Senate passed the McCain amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. It would impose uniform standards for interrogation on both the military and CIA, adhering to the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture and other "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners. As the amendment makes its way to the House, the Bush administration is fighting it every step of the way. Cheney is wielding his influence on both Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, seeking to water down language in the McCain amendment and exempt the CIA from new guidelines.

Following the revelation of the black sites, President Bush stated: "We do not do torture." Much evidence proves otherwise, but what else could the president of the United States say? Torturing prisoners is both illegal and morally reprehensible. Committed by Americans, it has undermined the mission to bring democratic reform to Afghanistan, Iraq and the greater Middle East.

It has done profound damage to America's image at home and worldwide. And most intelligence experts, (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson11nov11,0,7794527.story) including CIA director Porter Goss, (http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20051121/1a_lede21.art.htm) agree that when it comes to gathering useful information, torture simply doesn't work.

By now, the public may be desensitized to all the personal testimonials of torture brought to light in the media. In some cases, skepticism is warranted: Captured al-Qaida training manuals revealed instructions for prisoners to lie about being tortured to undermine the enemy. Military investigators have said they've found instances of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay making false allegations.

But evidence of widespread use of torture by the United States under the Bush administration is indisputable, including the policy of rendition, (http://dir.salon.com/topics/rendition/) or the handing over of prisoners to foreign allies like Jordan and Egypt who are known to torture. European leaders have been in an uproar (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,387185,00.html) as further evidence emerges that the CIA has secretly used European airports to transport prisoners for interrogation.

The numbers alone tell a chilling story. According to recent reports by the Associated Press, the United States has held more than 83,000 prisoners since the war on terror began, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, more than 14,000 remain in U.S. custody, mostly in Iraq, where U.S. military officials have acknowledged in the past that many prisoners were of little or no intelligence value. Military officials have said the same of the majority of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay; yet from Guantánamo to the war zones, more than 4,000 prisoners have been held for a year or longer, with several hundred held for multiple years.

As of March this year, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody. Of those, 22 died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, while others reportedly died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been deemed criminal homicides.

Particularly troubling, says Powers, is that the Bush White House has taken no responsibility for the long trail of illegal abuses committed in the name of fighting terror: "Has anybody high up been held accountable for those 26 homicides? Not that I know of. And I'd be very surprised if we ever learn the full extent of all this. My guess is that if we could see the whole picture, it'd be extremely dark and unpleasant."

Army Capt. Ray Kimball is among the growing number who say that interrogation by torture is anti-American, ineffective and categorically wrong.

In an interview with Salon, he said it also causes severe harm to U.S. soldiers themselves.

"Torture not only degrades the victim, it also ultimately degrades the torturer," said Kimball, who served in Iraq and now teaches history at West Point. "We already have enough soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after legitimate combat experiences. But now you're talking about adding the burden of willfully inflicting wanton pain on another human being.

You tell a soldier to go out there and 'waterboard' someone" -- strap a prisoner to a board, bind his face in cloth, and pour water over his face until he fears death by drowning -- "or mock-execute someone, but nobody is thinking about what that's going to do to that soldier months or years later, when it comes to dealing with the rationalizations and internal consequences. We're talking about serious psychic trauma."

A few courageous soldiers, including Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, have spoken out (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527.html) against policies they say have cultivated torture on the battlefield. For 17 months, Fishback sought clarification within the military for the proper treatment of prisoners, and could find none. "I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder," Fishback wrote in an open letter to Sen. John McCain in September. "I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq."

Coercion used on detainees, Fishback wrote, "is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable ... If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession."

More soldiers are starting to come forward with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, (http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=torture) which conducts leading research on torture in the war on terror. Although unwilling to talk on the record for fear of retribution by the military, a number of active-duty soldiers who've spoken with Human Rights Watch are increasingly angry about the torture scandals, according to researcher John Sifton. While some soldiers are wary that media and human rights groups are out to make the military look bad, Sifton says most of them realize that they are taking the sole blame for the abuses.

"A number of soldiers we've talked to have told us they were ordered by military intelligence to torture," Sifton told Salon. "And not just at Abu Ghraib but at forward operating bases across Iraq." According to Sifton, several soldiers who tried to report misconduct say their superiors told them to take a hike.

One of them was Army Spc. Tony Lagouranis, who worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison and in a special intelligence unit that operated across Iraq in 2004. After multiple attempts to report wrongdoing, he became frustrated by stonewalling inside the military and took his knowledge of abuses to the media.

"It's all over Iraq," Lagouranis, now retired, told (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/lagouranis.html) the PBS show "Frontline" in late September. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ... burns.

They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs." At the root of the abuses, he said, was a lot of "frustration that we weren't getting good intel," and murky directives regarding the treatment of prisoners. Inevitably, Lagouranis said, those conditions gave rise to instances of "pure sadism," like the ones at Abu Ghraib.

There are other accounts of stonewalling and coverup by the military: One Army whistleblower who tried to report abuses in Iraq in 2003 was suddenly declared psychologically ill and forcibly shipped out of the country. "They were determined to protect their own asses no matter who they had to take down," said Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, in a Salon report (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/coverup/index.html) last year.

In a joint effort with Human Rights First and NYU's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch has been amassing a database of "literally hundreds and hundreds of cases of torture" at the hands of the U.S. military and CIA that have gone uninvestigated or unresolved. "There are only two cases I know of in which an officer or senior NCO has been accused of criminal conduct because of actions of those under their command," Sifton said. While some lower-level troops who committed abuse have been rightfully punished, he said, "it's simply shocking that nobody higher up has been held criminally liable."

"The message that's going out to guys is, as long as you're a senior military member or administration staffer, you're golden," says one active-duty Army officer, a veteran of combat in Iraq. "Just make sure either you've got a fall guy, or you're high enough up in the hierarchy, and you'll be fine."

Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm) a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.

The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/sjres23_eb.htm) the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture -- a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult -- and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing -- at least until the Bush administration began calling for "the gloves to come off" in the war on terror.

According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory. "There are plenty of us who think that the legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests. The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's views, and that we're just beginning to pay them."

It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S. intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the Middle East well before the war even began.

"Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign country that had an OGA site operating on it," says the Army officer. (OGA, or "other government agency," is parlance for a nonmilitary agency, typically the CIA.)

"The airfield was prepped for any number of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we didn't like that, that was too damn bad."

Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the "black sites," which, according to the Washington Post, were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

A recent report (http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051114fa_fact) by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S hands at Abu Ghraib in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison. The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head, bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken ribs, suffocated to death.

Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity -- a practice known as "ghosting." To date, only one agency employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor -- but not an officer -- charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit to using torture. "They've also said they don't commit assassinations," Powers says wryly. "They don't, except when they do."

Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar intelligence meltdown -- Powers says analysts were made to "hop on one leg and whistle" while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD -- the CIA has become an "operational arm" of the Bush White House.

The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability even dimmer.
As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and file will be held accountable. "Over the last 50 years the agency has been asked many times to do extreme things," Powers says. "But almost always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the White House takes a hit."

Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful information from prisoners, especially insurgents. "I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse," Baer says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak out (http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=32861&dcn=todaysnews) against torture on moral grounds.

"It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to recruit," Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. "This is a 180-degree turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further."

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire -- one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual -- it's complete madness."

Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged (http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2005/06/17/durbin_gitmo/index.html?sid=1356001) by the White House for pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully -- but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on the front lines, and an "incredible contradiction" from the White House on torture.

For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last January, the revelation of the CIA "black sites" has raised new, troubling questions. "To my knowledge, it was never discussed -- whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going on inside," Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol Hill. "I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to step in."

That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney, he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib.

According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

"I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp issue," Durbin says. "It's further illustration that when a nation is in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history."


Copyright ©2005 Salon Media Group, Inc.

[lofter1]

Rumsfeld questions policy on preventing Iraqi abuse of detainees

December 7, 2005

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051207/pl_afp/usiraqdetainees&printer=1 (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051207/pl_afp/usiraqdetainees&printer=1;_ylt=Au78VLNFdBTz22A0uyU48qmtOrgF;_ylu=X 3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE)


Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has questioned a policy that requires US military personnel who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody to take "all reasonable actions" to prevent it, a spokesman said.

Rumsfeld seemed taken aback last month when General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, told him at a news conference that all US military personnel had the responsibility to try to stop abuse that they witness.

( link: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=74938&postcount=29 )

Since then, Rumsfeld has raised questions about the policy, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

He indicated that a key question is what happens when a permanent, sovereign government is formed in Iraq following elections December 15.

"Our forces are in a sovereign nation and the law enforcement of that nation is the responsibility of that country," Whitman said.

At the same time, he said, "This is a new democracy. We know that this is tough stuff, and it's a change, a dramatic change from the way things were done in the past."

The problem came to the fore last month when US and Iraqi troops raided an Iraqi Interior Ministry jail in Baghdad and found about 170 detainees who had been abused and in some cases tortured.

A top commander in Iraq told reporters last week that US military intelligence is drawing up a list of other suspected Interior Ministry jails for inspection by US-Iraqi teams.

Whitman said US service members would be expected to try to persuade Iraqis abusing prisoners that their behavior is "inappropriate" and to report it up their chain of command.

But General George Casey, the commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), issued a policy directive earlier this year setting a higher standard of responsibility for US troops who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody.

"It is the responsibility of all MNF-I units and personnel to take all reasonable actions in accordance with the rules of engagement to stop or prevent any observed or suspected instances of physical or mental abuse that could lead to serious injury or death of a detained person in Iraqi custody," it said.

The directive added that soldiers should "promptly report the details through the chain of command so that those acts can be appropriately addressed with Iraqi government officials."

Asked whether Rumsfeld was questioning what was meant by "all reasonable actions," Whitman said: "That would certainly be part of it."

"The secretary, in the way that he typically does, asks questions to try and understand and ensure that the policies and procedures for our service members are well understood in a way that doesn't conflict," Whitman said.

Whitman noted that in other countries, US troops are typically governed by a status of forces agreement with the host country. But US forces have no such agreement with Iraq.

"So you have to make sure your policies and procedures are consistent with the laws of the land that we are in, and are well understood by the miitary personnel that are there," he said.

Rumsfeld alluded to his misgivings Monday during a question-and-answer session with students and faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.


He said "reporting something that looks amiss is good; orally trying to stop something that looks amiss to me sounds very reasonable.

"Then the next question is: what level of force should they use to try to stop it if they see it happening in a country where they dont know the laws, they dont know the culture."
He said the response "could vary depending on whether ... the abusive act or the seemingly inhumane act or possibly illegal act ... is being performed by an official of that government -- a policeman or a soldier -- or just by someone else."






Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/afp/SIG=122dhv7qk/**http%3A%2F%2Fwww.afp.com%2Fenglish%2Flinks%2F%3F pid%3Dcopyright)

[Marksix]

"....If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession." - perfectly, eruditely put!

The Law Lords (similar to your supreme court judges)here in the UK today ruled that evidence obtained under torture to be inadmissable in court.

The country's highest court ruled on Thursday that evidence obtained under torture cannot be used in legal hearings, backing the case of eight terrorism suspects and civil rights campaigners.

A panel of seven Law Lords overthrew a decision by the Appeal Court in 2004 that secret tribunals hearing cases relating to the terrorism suspects could consider evidence that would not be acceptable in a criminal court trial.

That meant authorities could consider information that might have been extracted using torture in another country, provided British agents were not directly involved.

"I have to conclude that the duty not to countenance the use of torture by admission of evidence in judicial proceedings must be regarded as paramount and to allow its admission would shock the conscience, abuse or degrade the proceedings and involve the state in moral defilement," Lord Carswell said.

The tide is turning, things are changing.

[lofter1]

He Says Yes to Legalized Torture

ANNE E. KORNBLUT (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ANNE E. KORNBLUT&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ANNE E. KORNBLUT&inline=nyt-per)
New York Times
Sunday Dec. 11, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11kornblut.html


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11kornblut.jpg
Katie Falkenberg for The New York Times

In the Fray Charles Krauthammer, conservative conundrum.


WASHINGTON -- AS the debate over torture intensified earlier this month, Charles Krauthammer hit a nerve.

In a Dec. 5 cover essay in The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, Mr. Krauthammer argued that torture is not only defensible in certain very limited circumstances, but in fact morally necessary - if, for instance, it would save thousands of civilians by squeezing information about an imminent attack from a captured terrorist.

He was not the first to say so, but in his 4,000-word polemic, Mr. Krauthammer crystallized the case for keeping torture legal in a way that the Bush administration had not, ridiculing the "moral preening" of his critics and taking apart an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_mccain/index.html?inline=nyt-per), point by point, while assailing the administration at the same time.

"Once you have gone public with a blanket ban on all forms of coercion, it is going to be very difficult to publicly carve out exceptions," Mr. Krauthammer wrote. "The Bush administration is to be faulted for having attempted such a codification with the kind of secrecy, lack of coherence, and lack of strict enforcement that led us to the McCain reaction."

In this debate as in so many others, Mr. Krauthammer found himself at the nexus of debate among conservatives; he has, after decades as a public intellectual, weighed in on almost every important issue at some point along the way, including stem cell research, the Iraq war and the debate over creationism and intelligent design.

In some instances, as in the torture debate, he has arguably articulated the administration's stance better than President Bush or his cabinet secretaries. And after years of opposing neoconservatives in their quest to spread democracy abroad, Mr. Krauthammer is now among the firmest supporters of the war in Iraq, so much so that he is occasionally a lightning rod for the war's critics.

But Mr. Krauthammer's views over the years have shifted, prompting many conservatives to wonder just what camp he belongs to.

"He doesn't waffle, and he certainly doesn't have, I think, certain sacrosanct positions," said Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute.

"That in and of itself can set you apart."

Gary Rosen, the managing editor of Commentary magazine, agreed. "He doesn't like wild-eye idealism," he said. "He's always wanted to be this shrewd, practical commentator, and I think he takes some pride in cutting through what he sees as the rhetoric on both sides."

Mr. Krauthammer has never fit any typical Washington profile: Trained in psychiatry, he has spent most of his adult life in a wheelchair after a diving accident left him paraplegic in his first year of medical school. He spent seven years practicing medicine before moving into politics, first as a policy planner for President Jimmy Carter (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/jimmy_carter/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and then, in the 1980 campaign, as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale.

He began writing for The New Republic in 1981, soon developing a rotation of columns - in The Washington Post, on the back page of Time magazine - that put him in touch with an outside-the-Beltway audience.

From the start he has viewed himself as an outside voice, arguing against what he calls the "nuclear freeze hysteria" in his first editorial in The New Republic. The editor at the time announced that the editorial - published at the height of the movement to halt nuclear proliferation - "caused more subscription cancellations than any other in the magazine's history," Mr. Krauthammer said.

Now, firmly part of The Weekly Standard orbit and a regular commentator on Fox News, he claimed the neoconservative mantle in an unconventional manner, shunning it at critical times - such as during the intervention in Bosnia.

Most neoconservatives would say they believe in the use of American military force to spread democracy around the globe. But Mr. Krauthammer says there must also be a compelling strategic interest for the United States to warrant intervention, a position more often associated with the so-called "realists," like Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser under the first President Bush.

Mr. Scowcroft recently criticized the Bush administration for arguing that the chief mission in Iraq is spreading democracy.

For his part, Mr. Krauthammer in his newspaper column also criticized Mr. Scowcroft's stance on the Iraq war.

As if such distinctions were not complicated enough, Mr. Krauthammer has developed his own ideological categories, identifying himself as a "democratic realist" - which he says is someone who believes the United States "will support democracy everywhere," but only commit "blood and treasure" - that is, troops - in places that present an overwhelming threat to the existence of the United States. For him, that meant Iraq in 1991 and 2003, but not Bosnia.

To most casual readers, such distinctions may come across as a muddle, but in intellectual circles, discerning Mr. Krauthammer's leanings is a parlor sport. Is he a neoconservative? A realist? Some mixture of the two? Or something else?

"The one curious thing - I don't know quite where he stands right now is - he really was not a neoconservative in a way, and in fact I think he's tried to deny he was a neoconservative, if you go back to all the debates of the 1990's," said Francis Fukuyama, who has been in a public rift with Mr. Krauthammer since last year, when Mr. Fukuyama assailed a speech his former friend gave defending Iraq.

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said Mr. Krauthammer, whom he has known for many years, has moved from the realist school toward the neoconservative position since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, - a shift that Mr. Krauthammer himself disputes.

And so it was that he defended the nine senators who voted against Mr. McCain's anti-torture amendment. That essay in The Weekly Standard set off a round of debate from all sides, including one from the Standard's more liberal counterpart, The New Republic. In the latest issue, Andrew Sullivan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/andrew_sullivan/index.html?inline=nyt-per), its senior editor, answered Mr. Krauthammer point by point. And the cover was a parody of The Weekly Standard's.

But perhaps the latest measure of his influence came earlier this year from the White House, following the uproar over the Harriet Miers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/harriet_e_miers/index.html?inline=nyt-per) nomination. Mr. Krauthammer, who fiercely objected to Ms. Miers as unqualified for the job, mapped out an exit strategy for her in one of his columns - suggesting that if Republicans demanded documents about her White House service and Mr. Bush refused to provide them, the resulting stalemate would give Ms. Miers a graceful way to withdraw.

That was exactly what happened. Mr. Krauthammer said he had no prior inkling from the administration that they were taking that route; he has subsequently gotten credit for giving them a plan. And therein, he says, is a unifying theme of his recent writings. Referring to Ms. Miers, he said with a twinkle: "I didn't want to see her tortured."


Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

Case Study:
Terrorist Hides Bomb.
Terrorist Is Captured, but Won't Speak.
Is Torture O.K.?

New York Times
Sunday Dec. 11, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/weekinreview/11torture.html

To torture or not? In the Dec. 5 issue of the conservative Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer argued for the legalization of torture under strictly limited conditions, and criticized Senator John McCain's (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_mccain/index.html?inline=nyt-per) proposal to ban all "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of detainees by American soldiers and intelligence operatives.

Cue the firestorm - fanned in part by Andrew Sullivan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/andrew_sullivan/index.html?inline=nyt-per), also a conservative, who replied in the most recent issue of The New Republic, where he is senior editor.

Here, excerpts from the debate:


KRAUTHAMMER Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty. ... And even if the example I gave were entirely hypothetical, the conclusion - yes, in this case even torture is permissible - is telling because it establishes the principle: Torture is not always impermissible.

However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when - i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb.

SULLIVAN This is too easy and too glib a formulation. It is possible to concede that, in an extremely rare circumstance, torture may be used without conceding that it should be legalized.

One imperfect but instructive analogy is civil disobedience. In that case, laws are indeed broken, but that does not establish that the laws should be broken. In fact, civil disobedience implies precisely that laws should not be broken, and protesters who engage in it present themselves promptly for imprisonment and legal sanction on exactly those grounds. They do so for demonstrative reasons. ... They are saying that laws do matter, that they should be enforced, but that their conscience in this instance demands that they disobey them.

In extremis, a rough parallel can be drawn for a president faced with the kind of horrendous decision on which Krauthammer rests his entire case. What should a president do?

The answer is simple: He may have to break the law. In the Krauthammer scenario, a president might well decide that, if the survival of the nation is at stake, he must make an exception. At the same time, he must subject himself ... to the consequences of an illegal act. Those guilty of torturing another human being must be punished - or pardoned ex post facto.

KRAUTHAMMER In 1994, 19-year-old Israeli corporal Nahshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car used in the kidnapping and tortured him in order to find where Waxman was being held. ...

Faced with a similar choice, an American president would have a similar obligation. To do otherwise - to give up the chance to find your soldier lest you sully yourself by authorizing torture of the person who possesses potentially lifesaving information - is a deeply immoral betrayal of a soldier and countryman ... a case of moral abdication - of a kind rather parallel to that of the principled pacifist. There is much to admire in those who refuse on principle ever to take up arms under any conditions. ... One should be grateful for the saintly among us. And one should be vigilant that they not get to make the decisions upon which the lives of others depend.

SULLIVAN What minuscule intelligence we might have plausibly gained from torturing and abusing detainees is vastly outweighed by the intelligence we have forfeited by alienating many otherwise sympathetic Iraqis and Afghans, by deepening the divide between the democracies, and by sullying the West's reputation in the Middle East. ...

Ask yourself: Why does Al Qaeda tell its detainees to claim torture regardless of what happens to them in U.S. custody? Because Al Qaeda knows that one of America's greatest weapons in this war is its reputation as a repository of freedom and decency. Our policy of permissible torture has handed Al Qaeda this weapon against us. It is not just a moral tragedy. It is a pragmatic disaster.



Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

"...flown in and out of north Africa on two private jets, reportedly operated by the CIA ... stripped naked, photographed, given an enema and put on a plane with shackles, earphones and a blindfold ... interrogated for 18 months in a Moroccan prison ... his genitals cut with a scalpel ..."

London suspect in CIA torture claim

Dipesh Gadher and Stephen Grey
The Sunday Times
December 11, 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1920255,00.html


http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gifA FORMER London student accused of terrorism claims he was tortured under the CIA’s policy of flying prisoners to countries that use extreme interrogation techniques.

The Pentagon alleges that Binyam Mohammed plotted to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in America and received instructions from Al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, including the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

The 27-year-old, from Notting Hill, west London, faces a trial before a military court at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He could be jailed for life.

Mohammed’s lawyers, however, say he is the first British resident to become a victim of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme which came under scrutiny last week as Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, toured Europe.

The lawyers claim the allegations against Mohammed are based on a confession extracted through torture in a Moroccan jail — and accuse the British authorities of being complicit in his ordeal.

In a diary written by Mohammed and seen by The Sunday Times, he claims two British officials knew in advance of his transfer to Morocco and says his interrogators told him they were being assisted by MI5.

Mohammed is thought to have been flown in and out of north Africa on two private jets, reportedly operated by the CIA, which have landed at UK airports more than 150 times, according to official records.

The indictment against Mohammed accuses him of attending terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in 2001, including one alongside Richard Reid, the failed airline shoe-bomber.

The Pentagon claims he was introduced to Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda’s chief recruiter, with whom Mohammed discussed making an “improvised dirty bomb”. It is alleged that the Londoner, who claimed asylum in Britain in 1994 after fleeing Ethiopia, later met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, in Karachi, Pakistan.

The Al-Qaeda chief allegedly briefed him on a “mission” to blow up New York apartment blocks but he was arrested at Karachi airport in April 2002 as he attempted to fly to London.

Although his claims cannot be verified — and Al-Qaeda terrorists are coached to make false allegations of torture if captured — Mohammed’s diary tells a different story. He admits going to Afghanistan but denies meeting any Al-Qaeda leaders.

While he was held in Pakistan, Mohammed claims he was met by two Britons, who he believes to be MI6 officers.

“They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it,” he writes. “I initially took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you’re going you need a lot of sugar.’ . . . One of them did tell me that I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”

A few weeks later, Mohammed claims he was handed to a team of Americans “dressed in black, with masks, wearing what looked like Timberland boots”. He was stripped naked, photographed, given an enema and put on a plane with shackles, earphones and a blindfold. A report in The Washington Post last week attributed a virtually identical procedure to the CIA’s “Rendition Group”.

On July 22, 2002 — the day that Mohammed claims he was moved to Morocco — flight logs show a Gulfstream V private jet, registration number N379P, was at Rabat airport.

This plane was reportedly owned by a CIA front company called Premier Executive Transport Services of Massachusetts. Although it has since been re-registered twice, the jet has landed at UK airports 127 times since the 9/11 attacks. It has stopped at Glasgow, Prestwick, Luton and RAF airbases at Northolt and Brize Norton.

Mohammed claims he was interrogated for 18 months in a Moroccan prison, where he was accused of being “the big man in Al-Qaeda” and had his genitals cut with a scalpel.

His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who helped to compile Mohammed’s diary after interviewing him in Cuba this year, believes the British were liaising with the Moroccans.

Mohammed writes: “They asked me about a (Muslim) heritage centre . . . where I worked . . . They showed me pictures and asked about people who had been there.

“The interrogator told me, ‘We have been working with the British, and we have photos of people given to us by MI5’.”

On January 22, 2004, Mohammed was flown from Morocco to Afghanistan.

Flight plans show another CIA-operated plane, a Boeing 737, registration N313P, flew from Rabat to Kabul that day.

This plane, which has also been reregistered, has landed in the UK 39 times. Aircraft thought to be used by the CIA have stopped off in Britain on more than 200 occasions. It is not known whether any prisoners were on board.

Last week Tony Blair told MPs that torture could not be justified “in any set of circumstances”. He said he accepted Rice’s assurances that America had acted in accordance with international conventions.

Mohammed was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004. A date for his trial has yet to be set. “There is no doubt that Binyam was rendered and tortured in a most savage and barbaric way,” said Stafford Smith.

“There should be a full-scale inquiry into the British role.”

Poland’s prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz yesterday ordered an inquiry into allegations that the CIA held terrorist suspects at secret prisons in the country.


Copyright 2005 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,549,00.html)Times Newspapers Ltd.

[lofter1]

Crushing the testicles of innocent children might be OK???

If so then where would the line be drawn ... or does anything go ?

Torture Victims Confront Torture Advocate

Revolution #026
December 12, 2005
posted at revcom.us (http://revcom.us/)


John Yoo (law professor at Berkeley, is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Bush Justice Department official: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/war_counsel?mode=PF ), author of the infamous legal memo justifying Presidential powers to torture US captives around the world, couldn't escape torture victims (World Can't Wait activists) when he appeared in Chicago on Dec. 1. in a debate with Doug Cassel, long time human rights legal scholar and professor at Notre Dame.

Audio here (http://rwor.org/downloads/file_info/download1.php?file=yoo_on_torture.mp3) of the following exchange:


Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Additonal John Yoo Post: John Yoo poster (http://rwor.org/a/020/conservative-ass-john-yoo.htm)

[Ninjahedge]

"Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."

Um, nice sidestep.

What he means to say is "No, there is no law, on the books, saying he can't do whatever he wants to so long as he says it is necessary."

I think that needs to be changed a bit. There are some things he cannot do, legally, to US citizens (which is gradually being eroded in the name of protection from "THEM"). But I do not know what limits the President, or any military official has in regards to 'vehement' procurement of information.....

[lofter1]

Limits? According to Yoo, not a damn thing limits the President.

[lofter1]

House Supports Ban on Torture

Measure Would Limit Interrogation Tactics

By Josh White and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 15, 2005

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402045.html


The House gave strong support yesterday to a measure that would ban torture and limit interrogation tactics in U.S. detention facilities, agreeing with senators that Congress needs to set uniform guidelines for the treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.

On a 308 to 122 vote, members of the House supported specific language proposed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would prohibit "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in the custody of the U.S. government. Though lopsided, the vote was largely symbolic and does not put the language into law.

The vote specifically instructed House negotiators to include McCain's language, word for word, in the fiscal 2006 defense appropriations bill, a decision that is not binding but carries significant political weight.

The House also supported a McCain provision that would require officials in any Defense Department detention facility to follow the interrogation standards in the Army's field manual on interrogations. That manual is currently being revised.

The vote sends a clear signal to the Bush administration that both chambers of Congress support the anti-torture legislation and want the government to adopt guidelines that aim to prevent damage to the U.S. image abroad. The White House has been aggressively pushing to create exceptions for CIA operatives and to water down McCain's language to keep it from limiting interrogators' options. But it appears that the administration and House Republican leaders lost some leverage yesterday.

With the Senate's 90 to 9 vote in support of McCain's language earlier this year, both houses have presented veto-proof tallies to a White House that has vowed to strike down any bill that would limit the president's authority to wage the war on terrorism.

"We cannot torture and still retain the moral high ground," said Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who called for the vote yesterday. "No torture and no exceptions."

In all, 200 Democrats, 107 Republicans and one independent voted for Murtha's motion to instruct House negotiators. Voting against it were 121 Republicans and one Democrat, Rep. Jim Marshall (Ga.). All eight House members from Maryland voted for the motion, as did eight of Virginia's 11 members. The three who voted against it were Republican Reps. Eric I. Cantor, Thelma D. Drake and Virgil H. Goode Jr.

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr. (N.C.) was among the many conservative Republicans who voted for Murtha's motion. He said in an interview that experts have told lawmakers that harsh interrogation methods often produce misleading or false information because the detainee "will tell you what he thinks you want to hear" to end the pain.

Jones said he believes that extreme interrogation tactics resulted in some of the bad intelligence that led the administration to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

McCain's language is also stalling the defense authorization bill, a policy-setting measure, as the White House continues to negotiate for exceptions and legal protection for interrogators who might unwittingly cross the proposed new lines.

"Unfortunately, we're in a situation now, post-Abu Ghraib, where restoring our image abroad is just as important as winning victories on the battlefield," said a congressional aide who is close to the discussions. "Our reputation has suffered so much that Republicans are willing to take steps that tie our hands in certain situations."

McCain and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley met yesterday morning on Capitol Hill as part of the negotiations on McCain's anti-torture legislation.

Congressional aides and U.S. officials said yesterday that McCain has flatly refused Bush administration requests to modify the language he has proposed or to water down the impact of the torture ban.

Despite McCain's unwavering stance, the White House continues to push for some exceptions for officials working in the U.S. intelligence services -- specifically the CIA. Sources familiar with the negotiations said yesterday that McCain and Hadley's one-on-one meetings over the past month have centered on the White House's request for some level of legal protection from liability for CIA operatives should they be found in violation of the standards.

Such an exception would allow interrogators to use a defense that a "reasonable person" would not have thought their actions were illegal, similar to what is available under military laws on following orders.

Defense Department officials have been debating the impact McCain's language would have on intelligence operations, and officials largely agree that the provisions are consistent with existing policy. They would put into law Army doctrine, eliminating a commander's flexibility to change the rules -- something members of Congress have been seeking after numerous reported instances of abuse.

McCain's language grew out of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and the confusion that became apparent about the government's policies on the treatment of detainees. McCain -- who was tortured as a Vietnam prisoner of war -- has been seeking to provide congressional clarity to the armed forces and to other officials who interrogate prisoners.

A McCain spokeswoman said yesterday that negotiations are continuing and that he is opposed to any language that would undermine the intent of his provisions.

The impasse on the authorization bill is caused in part by Republican leaders being stuck having to make a difficult choice: Either go against the president and limit the use of some interrogation tactics or risk not having a National Defense Authorization Act for the first time in 45 years and in the middle of a war.

"I'm deeply disappointed that the Republican leadership has dragged their feet for weeks, unwilling to consider Senator McCain's language, which gained wide bipartisan support in the Senate," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

"When America's servicemen and women are deployed in war zones, exposed to danger and possible capture, it is irresponsible to not make sure fundamental standards exist for the treatment of detainees," Tauscher said.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

[lofter1]

President Backs McCain Measure on Inmate Abuse

By ERIC SCHMITT (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ERIC SCHMITT&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ERIC SCHMITT&inline=nyt-per)
New York Times
Dec. 16, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16detain.html


WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Under intense bipartisan Congressional pressure, President Bush reversed course on Thursday and reluctantly backed Senator John McCain's call for a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.

A day after the House overwhelmingly endorsed Mr. McCain's measure, the White House took a deal that the senator had been offering for weeks as way to end the legislative impasse, essentially giving intelligence operatives the same legal defense afforded military interrogators who are accused of violating the regulations.

For Mr. Bush, it was a stinging defeat, considering that his party controls both houses of Congress and both chambers had defied his threatened veto to support Mr. McCain's measure resoundingly. It was a particularly significant setback for Vice President Dick Cheney, who since July has led the administration's fight to defeat the amendment or at least exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from its provisions.

Mr. McCain's measure would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of prisoners and ban the kind of abusive treatment of prisoners that was revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

"We've sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists," Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, said as he sat next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people no matter how evil or bad they are."

Mr. Bush sought to make the best of an awkward political situation by inviting Mr. McCain, his longtime political rival and the nation's most famous former prisoner of war, to the White House to thank him for a measure that the president had opposed for months as Congressional meddling.

On Thursday Mr. Bush said it was important legislation "to achieve a common objective: that is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture."

Soon after Mr. McCain left the White House, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, who has negotiated with the senator for weeks, said that as a result of the negotiations the law would apply "equally to men and women in uniform and for civilians who are involved in dealing with detainees and interrogations."

The agreement will also extend to intelligence officers a protection now afforded to military personnel, who if accused of violating interrogation rules can defend themselves if a "reasonable" person could have concluded they were following a lawful order. But Mr. Hadley conceded that the administration was unable to get a grant of immunity for C.I.A. interrogators, which he said "was a legitimate thing to consider in this context."

The effect of the deal, Mr. Hadley said, would be to cement in law what he insisted had been administration policy: that the United States would "not use cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment at home or abroad."

The immediate effect of the measure, if passed, is hard to predict. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was at the heart of last year's uproar over whether the administration had allowed torture in the fight against terror, said on CNN that Mr. McCain's amendment "provides additional clarification, in terms of what are the limits of interrogating dangerous terrorists."

"Obviously, we'll study the law carefully," Mr. Gonzales said. "And to the extent that we have to conform our conduct in any way, we will do so. People need to understand what the limits are. And if people don't meet those limits, they're going to be investigated and they're going to be held accountable."

The White House announcement was not the end of what has become a long-running drama on Capitol Hill.

Less than an hour after Mr. McCain and Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, stood with the president, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, announced he would block the deal as part of a military budget bill unless the White House provided a letter containing specific assurances that the measure would not diminish intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Asked if the intelligence authorities had told him that Mr. McCain's measure would harm their ability to do their work, he said: "The answer to that is yes."

On the other side of the Capitol, Mr. Hunter's counterpart, Mr. Warner, was scrambling to patch the rift by working with the White House to release the letter Mr. Hunter had requested. By Thursday evening, Mr. Hunter was reassured in writing by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, that American intelligence-gathering operations would not suffer under Mr. McCain's measure, and he consented to the deal, said Josh Holly, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Warner said he was optimistic that his bill would pass. But just in case, he was exploring another option: attaching the newly drafted McCain language to a $453 billion military spending bill, also pending before the Senate. The bill already includes the original McCain provisions, and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said he would accept the language negotiated by the White House.

The McCain measure has veto-proof majorities in both houses. The Senate has backed it 90 to 9, and the House voted Wednesday, 308 to 122, to support it.

At the C.I.A., whose use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists was at the core of the debate, the official response was circumspect. "The C.I.A. understands its legal obligations and of course complies with U.S. policy," said Jennifer Dyck, the agency's chief spokeswoman.

But A. John Radsan, who served as assistant general counsel of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004, said he believed that "the C.I.A. is the loser in this."

While agency officers may benefit from greater clarity about the rules of interrogation, Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, had joined Mr. Cheney in arguing that the agency needed the flexibility to use harsh tactics in some cases.

The McCain amendment removes the "gray zone" of tactics less severe than torture but harsher than those allowed by the Army Field Manual, said Mr. Radsan, now at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as C.I.A. general counsel from 1995 to 1996, said he believed there was a gap between Mr. Goss and other top managers, who sided with Mr. Cheney, and many lower-level officers who felt uncomfortable with any perception that they had been allowed to use techniques bordering on torture.

"I think the overall reaction of the rank-and-file officers will be relief that this issue is behind them and the rules are clear," Mr. Smith said.


Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Scott Shane and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[ZippyTheChimp]

Cheney, Rumsfeld Could Be Called To Testify

BY CONSTANT BRAND - Associated Press
January 27, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/26622

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A European Parliament investigation into alleged CIA secret prisons could ask Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to testify, although it has no legal power to subpoena them, a member of the panel said yesterday.

"Very senior people" would be asked to answer the allegations of human rights violations on E.U. territory, a vice president of an investigation into the alleged prisons being conducted by the parliament, Sarah Ludford, said.

"I don't see why we should not invite Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney," Ms. Ludford said. "I'm sure they would be very welcome and they would be heard with great interest, or Condoleezza Rice perhaps, why not?"

Ms. Ludford, a British Liberal Democrat party member, acknowledged that the parliament had no legal power to subpoena them.

"I would not be over optimistic, but I don't think it's completely off the planet to think that they might come to see us," she said.

The parliament committee held its first meeting yesterday, electing a Portuguese conservative, Carlos Coelho, as its president.

"I hope that we will be inviting very senior people from governments, from non-governmental organizations and people who have knowledge of the intelligence community," Ms. Ludford said. "If they are seen not to cooperate then I think we can draw conclusions."

The 732-member E.U. legislature agreed two weeks ago to launch its own investigation.

Allegations the CIA hid and interrogated key Al Qaeda suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported November 2 in the Washington Post.

Human Rights Watch has said it has circumstantial evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania. Both countries have denied any involvement.

Secret prisons on European territory and extraordinary rendition - the practice of transporting criminals or terror suspects to countries where harsh interrogation methods are permitted - would breach human rights treaties which all E.U. countries signed up to.

The work of the 46-member committee is the first inquiry conducted by the European Union. Several E.U. countries have launched their own investigations, as has the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog.

The E.U. parliament committee was given a mandate to find out whether the CIA or other American agencies or other countries carried out abductions, extraordinary rendition, detention at secret sites, and torture of prisoners in E.U. countries or have used E.U. countries to transfer prisoners.

"It's high time we start the investigation," a German Socialist, Wolfgang Kriessl-Doerfler, said. "I assume that all governments have an interest to cooperate with us, to clear up the questions"

[MrSpice]

Why shouldn't CIA interrogate suspected Al-Queda operatives using non-standard methods? European apeasement methods don't seem to work well for them.

[BrooklynRider]

"Non-standard methods"? You want to cut the crap on the euphemsims and say whay you mean?

If you mean "torture", for one thing, it is against the law. Congress specifically prohibits the executive branch and government from using torture. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of torture. And finally, we are engaged in a war. To use torture is to invite torture of our own soldiers.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Why shouldn't CIA interrogate suspected Al-Queda operatives using non-standard methods? European apeasement methods don't seem to work well for them.
Wasn't this modus operandi for the KGB?

[lofter1]

CIA chief sacked for opposing torture

Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith, Washington
The Sunday Times

February 12, 2006


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2036182,00.htmlhttp://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gif

The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.

Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004 with a mission to “clean house”, has been angered by a series of leaks from CIA insiders, including revelations about “black sites” in Europe where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held.

In last Friday’s New York Times, Goss wrote that leakers within the CIA were damaging the agency’s ability to fight terrorism and causing foreign intelligence organisations to lose confidence. “Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, ‘You Americans can’t keep a secret’.”

Goss is believed to have blamed Grenier for allowing leaks to occur on his watch.

Since the appointment of Goss, the CIA has lost almost all its high-level directors amid considerable turmoil.

AB “Buzzy” Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who resigned shortly after Goss’s arrival, said the leaks were unlikely to stop soon, despite proposals to subject officers to more lie detector tests. Krongard said it was up to President George Bush to stop the rot. “The agency has only one client: the president of the United States,” he said. “The reorganisation is the way this president wanted it. If he is unwilling to reform it, the agency will go on as it is.” “History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place.”

[lofter1]

Revealed: the terror prison US is helping build in Morocco

Tom Walker Rabat and Sarah Baxter
The Sunday Times
February 12, 2006

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2036185,00.html

http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gifTHE United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.

The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat’s diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.

The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America’s principal partners in the secret “rendition” programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups critical of the policy have compiled dossiers detailing the detention and apparent torture of radical Islamists at the DST’s current headquarters, at Temara, near Rabat.

A recent inquiry into rendition by the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, the Swiss MP, highlighted a pattern of flights between Washington, Guantanamo Bay and Rabat’s military airport at Sale.

French intelligence and diplomatic sources said the most recent such flight was in the first week in December, when four suspects were seen being led blindfolded and handcuffed from a Boeing 737 at Sale and transferred into a fleet of American vehicles.

Morocco’s membership of a so-called “coalition of the willing” has led to tension within the kingdom, where Mohammed VI, 42, is trying to suppress a wave of Islamic fundamentalism, most powerfully expressed in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003, in which 12 suicide bombers — all of them Moroccan — killed more than 40 people.

More than 3,000 suspected radical Islamists have been arrested since, but some of the country’s higher-profile Al-Qaeda sympathisers have been released, including Abdallah Tabarak, a former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden.

While much of the media is said to have been infiltrated by the DST, a few publications that dare to question official policy have accused the government of allowing Morocco to become “the CIA’s dustbin”.

Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary — who described Morocco and Tunisia yesterday as “long-standing friends and constructive partners” in the fight against terrorism — is due to visit today. Among the topics expected to be discussed with officials is the opening of a new FBI office in Morocco.

Last Friday the country witnessed its first protests against the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. They were highly organised and controlled but created a sense of apprehension in the capital before Rumsfeld’s talks.

Morocco has an estimated 30,000 policemen for a population of 30m and many people seem scared of speaking to strangers. A Sunday Times reporter was photographed by men with mobile phone cameras at least three times last week but was never directly challenged.

“It’s like a web — they let you spin away and like that they believe they get more information,” said the French intelligence source. The presence of minders made asking questions around Ain Aouda almost impossible, but at a restaurant adjoining a newly built mosque nearby, elderly men supping mint tea while they watched the African Nations Cup were clearly angry about the project. “We’ve seen nothing but Americans for five months,” complained one wizened figure before being told by his friends to be quiet.

There are no public access roads leading to the site, which can be seen at the moment only from a bend above the Korifla Gorge. The secluded forest setting is similar to that of Temara, 10 miles to the north.

Moroccan officials refused to make any comment about Ain Aouda. A spokeswoman for the American embassy said she had no information about the new building.

Temara itself already has a fearsome reputation among former inmates. Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born Briton later sent to Guantanamo Bay, told Amnesty International that interrogators there cut his chest and penis when he refused to answer questions.

Mohammed said he was held at Temara for 18 months before being flown to another “black prison” in Afghanistan in January 2004, and then on to Guantanamo Bay.

It is not clear how many suspects are being questioned in Morocco. The French intelligence source said the four brought to the country in December were all believed to be “high profile” but gave no further details.

Copyright 2006 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,549,00.html)Times Newspapers Ltd.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Temara

http://www.wordtravels.com/Attractions/Countries/Morocco/Attractions/Temara/

The seaside town of Temara, about eight miles (13km) from Rabat, is a favourite weekend picnic spot and campsite for city dwellers. The beach has several stretches of sand, some good hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. Temara also sports a zoo and several other leisure facilities

Map: http://www.maplandia.com/morocco/nord-ouest/skhirate-temara/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Torture reintroduced by Morocco's terrorism fight

afrol News (http://www.afrol.com/)
21 October 2005

http://www.afrol.com/articles/14609 (http://www.afrol.com/articles/14609)

Human rights groups today accuse Moroccan authorities of is undermining its recent human rights progress in the crackdown on suspected Islamist militants. The more than 2,000 jailed alleged militants cannot expect fair trials and many have been subjected to torture in order to extract confessions.

After suicide bombers attacked Casablanca on 16 May last year, Moroccan authorities adopted sweeping counter-terror legislation and arrested more than 2,000 suspected militants, subjecting many to threats and abuse. Suspects were held in prolonged incommunicado detention, and faced other violations of their right to due process and a fair trial, according to a report released today by the US group Human Rights Watch.

Detainees are on a fast-track to conviction because prosecutors and judges show little interest in how the police obtained their statements, commented Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. "Their treatment shows that the human rights advances in Morocco have largely bypassed the courts."

The 70-page report features interviews with the lawyers and family members of Moroccan prisoners who said that their interrogators had subjected them to physical and mental abuse, in some cases amounting to torture, in order to extract confessions or to induce them to sign a statement they had not made. Many were held incommunicado by police beyond the legal time limit and did not have prompt access to defence counsel.

Human Rights Watch also goes far in confirming the existence of a secret detention centre at Temara, a compound just south of Rabat on the road to Casablanca. At least four detainees had told the group of a stay in the centre, run by the DST; a domestic intelligence gathering agency that by the law is not authorised to arrest, detain, and interrogate persons suspected of criminal offences. Moroccan authorities have denied the existence of a detention facility run by the DST.

Abdelghani Ben Taous, a 45-years-old teacher in Islamic studies, who was arrested on 10 June 2003 and taken to Temara, according to information given to Human Rights Watch by his sister and lawyer. During the trial, Mr Ben Taous said that he had signed a confession under torture and duress and further testified that he had been sexually abused during his interrogation.

Mr Ben Taous' lawyer told Human Rights Watch that in the police log the date of his client's arrest was recorded as 23 June – and not the actual date of 10 June – "so as to cover up the illegally long period he was held in garde à vue detention in Temara." At Temara "he endured beatings with a stick, electric shocks, slaps on the face, shackling, verbal intimidation and humiliation, and sleep deprivation."

It was mainly the legal changes passed quickly in the wake of the Casablanca bombings that had made the human rights violations against Mr Ben Taous and other possible, according to the US human rights. Morocco's current counter-terror legislation "erodes rights protections." For example, the legislation extends to 12 days the time police can hold a terror suspect before he is brought before a judge, and to 10 days the time he can be held before consulting a lawyer.

The legislation further introduces a sweeping definition of 'terrorism' offences, for which stiffer penalties are applicable, Human Rights Watch said.

However, the human rights problems in Morocco were running "deeper than any one piece of legislation," added Ms Whitson. "Even the recent reforms to the criminal justice system have not alleviated the systemic failures to protect rights."

The group recommended that Moroccan courts should fulfil their role as a bulwark against abuse by rejecting evidence that is tainted by torture, improper coercion, or other serious violations of due process, and by holding the perpetrators of such abuse accountable.

The report also examines one of the positive human rights developments in Morocco, the establishment of a commission to document and provide compensation for grave abuses that the state perpetrated against dissidents and others under the rule of the King's father, Hassan II.

In this respect, the report describes the Equity and Reconciliation Commission as "the Arab world's most serious effort yet to acknowledge and address past abuses," but expresses concern about limitations on the commission's mandate and powers. The US group offers recommendations to help the commission address past abuses in a fashion that contributes more effectively to ending impunity.

Human Rights Watch in a statement today urged the United States and the European Union to integrate respect for human rights in their growing security cooperation with Morocco. The report also urges the US and European countries "not to extradite or otherwise forcibly return to Morocco persons suspected of terrorist offences unless the government provides verifiable guarantees that such persons will not be subject to torture or other ill-treatment."

The suicide bombings of May 2003 were despicable attacks on innocent civilians, said Ms Whitson. "But unless authorities fight extremist violence in a way that is consistent with their public commitment to human rights, the rights of all Moroccans are at risk."


© afrol News

[lofter1]

Italian spy director arrested over CIA kidnap

RAW STORY / MY_WAY / REUTERS (http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Freuters.myway.com %2Farticle%2F20060705%2F2006-07-05T093858Z_01_L05822254_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-SECURITY-ITALY-USA-DC.html)
By Massimiliano Di Giorgio and Phil Stewart
July 5, 2006

ROME (Reuters) - Police have arrested a director at Italy's military intelligence agency on suspicion of helping the CIA in the alleged kidnapping of a terrorism suspect in Milan, officials said on Wednesday.

It is the first time an Italian official has been linked to the 2003 abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Nasr says he was flown to Egypt and tortured.

The arrest of Marco Mancini, a director of a division of the Sismi military intelligence agency, was first leaked by judicial sources and later confirmed in a statement by former Italian President Francesco Cossiga.

An Italian court has issued European arrest warrants for 22 suspected U.S. agents over the abduction, but no Italians had been sought until now.

If an Italian role is confirmed, it would lend evidence to allegations that European countries colluded with the United States in the secret "renditions" of terrorism suspects.

Italian investigators had been wiretapping Nasr before his abduction and accuse him of having ties to al Qaeda and recruiting combatants for Iraq, according to court documents. They say the kidnapping broke Italian law and ruined a promising investigation.

Mancini was accused of collaborating in the kidnap, the sources said, adding that an official statement would be made later on Wednesday by the prosecutor's office.

Cossiga, who is also a former interior minister with close contacts with the secret services, said in a statement that other Sismi officials were also being arrested.

An investigative source said the operation was still in progress.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Armando Spataro, declined comment.

The European Union's Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said he respected Spataro's decision to arrest Mancini.

"The prosecutor is investigating, he is accusing this officer of the Italian secret service, we'll see whether he is responsible or not," Fratini said in Brussels.

The Abu Omar case is one of the best known examples of alleged CIA secret operations in its war on terror, including the practice of "extraordinary renditions."

Human rights groups condemn the practice, saying suspects have frequently been sent by the United States to countries that practice torture.

Washington acknowledges making secret "rendition" transfers of terrorism suspects between countries, but denies either using torture itself against terrorist suspects or handing them over to countries that do so.

(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander in Brussels)

Copyright 2006 Reuters

[lofter1]

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/letter_of_the_d.html

http://time.blogs.com/./photos/uncategorized/powellletter_1.jpg

[lofter1]

Botero Restores the Dignity of Prisoners at Abu Ghraib

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/15/arts/15chan.450.jpghttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif

Gary Hershorn/Reuters
Fernando Botero with one of his “Abu Ghraib” paintings.
Their first United States show, at the Marlborough Gallery,
ends on Saturday.


nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/arts/design/15chan.html)
By ROBERTA SMITH
November 15, 2006


Last Chance


A selection of Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” paintings, which were shown in Europe last year, can now be seen through Saturday at the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan. They may not be masterpieces, but that may not matter. They are among Mr. Botero’s best work, and in an art world where responses to the Iraq war have been scarce — literal or obscure — they stand out.


That it is moving to encounter these large, unnerving images and austere compositions on American soil is reflected in the gallery’s sign-in book: in place of the usual signatures, there are effusively grateful comments in several languages.


Naked, bound, blindfolded, bleeding, alone or in groups, the prisoners in Mr. Botero’s paintings are enduring torment and humiliation. These now familiar scenes are based on the images and written accounts that emerged when pictures of abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light in 2004. The notorious naked human pyramid is here, as are prisoners in women’s underwear, forced into sexual postures, threatened by guard dogs or tied to bars. Sometimes the boot or fist of a tormentor juts in.


These paintings do something that the harrowing photographs taken at Abu Ghraib do not. They restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their situation. Mr. Botero does this, as painters always have, through manipulations of scale, color and form. He has also made surprisingly astute adjustments to his own daffy style.


The Abu Ghraib prisoners are not his usual pneumatic inflatables. They are immense, but monumental; muscular and solid. It is as if Mr. Botero has turned for inspiration from Henri Rousseau and peasant art to the figures of the Laocoön and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. His prisoners are shown in a kind of majestic isolation in precise volumes of space. Defined by planes of gray, green and terra cotta, and by cagelike iron grids, these spaces evoke the Spanish Inquisition, images of Christian martyrs and the calm geometry of early Renaissance paintings.


Themes of power and excess are not entirely new to Mr. Botero’s seemingly sunny art. He has previously evoked military dictators and the violence of the Colombian drug wars. His evocations of obesity itself imply a sinister cluelessness.


In the show’s catalog the critic David Ebony suggests that these works are in the tradition of Picasso’s “Guernica,” Philip Guston’s images of Richard M. Nixon, and Leon Golub’s towering “Mercenaries” series. Like them, the new Boteros hold art and politics in balance, creating the needed buffer to help us face the unbearable and maintain some hope. They may also convey the gratuitous cruelty of these events to future generations. That is good enough.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Botero
Pinta el horror de Abu Ghraib

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/noticia.php3?nt=24663

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/BOTERO45.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/BOTERO39.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/BOTEROs4.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/botero44C.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/BOTERO11.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/DSC00209_1.jpg

http://www.revistadiners.com.co/media/BOTEROtrict%201.jpg

Copyright © 2000 Ediciones Gamma.

[Luca]

I can't see how torture can ever be officially condoned. Whether there should be a branch of government (i.e. foreign itnel gathering) which operates extra-legally in some cases, I think is a separate issue.

I do think that it is wrong to conflate some 'stress techniques' with outright torture which causes physical damage/extreme pain. I don't think tough questioning while sleep deprived constitutes torture by a long shot, though obviously it would not produce evidence admissible in a court of law.

I'm not so sure about water-boarding. Having some familiarity with it in very mild form in a controlled, training situation I can tell you it's absolutely fuc#ing horrible -- I can't begin to imagine how much it would scare you if you didn't know it was a controlled situation. If anyone can resist it, my hat's off to them. No way I could. Low-voltage shock is no fun either, but perhaps less long-term nightmare inducing.

[lofter1]

Cartoon Violence

The true power of Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings

http://www.slate.com/id/2153674/
By Mia Fineman
Nov. 15, 2006

art: The big picture

Click here (http://javascript%3cb%3e%3c/b%3E:void(window.open('http://www.slate.com/id/2153674/slideshow/2153797/','_blank','width=940,%20height=675,%20left=,%20to p=,%20resizable=no,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,'));) to see a slide show about Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings.


http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123118/2135763/2153197/2153673/Slideshow_LaunchModule.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:void(window.open('http://www.slate.com/id/2153674/slideshow/2153797/','_blank','width=940, height=675, left=, top=, resizable=no,status=yes,fullscreen=no,location=no, menubars=no,scrollbars=yes,titlebar=no,toolbar=no, '));)

[ablarc]

Botero is powerful stuff. Would like to see an exhibit of his here: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7756&page=4

[Ninjahedge]

I can see what he is gettig at, but something seems a bit odd about his depictions here. I guess he is utilizing a classical flavor to his drawings, but something about the way he depicts these bloated individuals reminds me of almost a childish daemonic sense.

Why would he chose to draw the man in womens underwear, or show blood coming from various orifices? His other paintings seem to get the message across without the additional, barely hidden messages and glimpses into his own perspective...

Something about it just does not click right.


(BTW, i am not saying he is wrong, so don't think I am somehow condoning Abu or anything..... There is just something out of sync)

[lofter1]

Senator Patrick Leahy rips Attorney General Gonzalez a new one this past week during Senate Hearings regarding US Policy on torture ...

Listen: http://www.vivek.ca/arar.mp3 (http://www.vivek.ca/arar.mp3)

[Marksix]

Some people reading my posts might (understandably) imagine I'm some sort of paranoid living in a tin foil wallpapered room but I think this issue shows just how thin the veneer of government respect for civilisation can be.

[ZippyTheChimp]

February 17, 2007

Italy Indicts C.I.A. Operatives in ’03 Abduction

By IAN FISHER

ROME, Feb. 16 —An Italian judge indicted 26 Americans on Friday, most of them C.I.A. officers, in what will become the first trial of the American program of secretly whisking away terror suspects. Italy’s former top spy was also indicted.

Despite the indictment, issued by a judge in Milan, it is unlikely that any of the Americans, one of whom is an Air Force colonel, will ever face trial here. The trial is expected to take place in June.

The indictments came in connection with the case of a radical Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, disappeared near his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, and said he was kidnapped.

He was freed this week from jail in Egypt, where he says he was taken and tortured.

The indictment marked a turning point in Europe, where anger is high at the American program of “extraordinary renditions,” an aggressive policy of seizing suspected terrorists on foreign soil and interrogating them at secret locations in a third country.

Though the Italian indictment is the first in which such a case was ordered to trial, this week the Swiss government approved an investigation into the flight that was said to have carried Mr. Nasr from Italy to Germany, through Swiss airspace. The flight reportedly then went from an American air base in Germany to Egypt.

Late last month, a German court issued an arrest warrant for 13 people suspected of involvement in the kidnapping in Macedonia of a German citizen of Lebanese descent. There are also investigations into extraordinary renditions in Portugal and Spain.

In the meantime this week, a European Union parliamentary committee issued a detailed report into what it said were “at least” 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights in Europe, some of them involving extraordinary renditions. The report, which awaits approval by Parliament, is particularly sensitive because it suggested forcefully that a number of governments knew of the flights.

“We believe there has been either active collusion by several E.U. governments or turning a blind eye,” one member of the European Parliament, Baroness Sarah Ludford of Britain, said this week.

All the operatives, who included the top two C.I.A. officials in Italy at the time, have left the country. A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment on the indictment, and an American government official said that no extradition requests had been received from Italy for those charged. If Italy did seek extradition, there seems little chance the Bush administration would agree.

Here in Italy, the possible complicity of the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister at the time, is one of the most difficult issues in the case. Among the Italians indicted Friday were Nicolo Pollari, who until earlier this year was Italy’s chief of military intelligence, and his former deputy, Marco Mancini.

Mr. Pollari has denied responsibility, saying he cannot defend himself because he would need to use evidence classified as state secrets. The suggestion is that officials outranking Mr. Pollari gave approval for the kidnapping. “We are very disappointed by the decision of the judge, being convinced that the lack of proof and the acquisition of documents covered by secrets of state demonstrates Pollari’s innocence,” Mr. Pollari’s lawyer, Tittal Madia, said, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

The case has snarled Italian politics with several complications. This week, the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi asked the Constitutional Court to review whether the prosecutor in Mr. Nasr’s case, Armando Spataro, overstepped his bounds by wiretapping the phones of Italian agents.

On Friday, Mr. Spataro said in a statement that he “astonished” by the government’s move, saying he had followed all the laws in gathering evidence.

Meanwhile, a member of Mr. Prodi’s government, Antonio Di Pietro, minister of infrastructure and a former corruption prosecutor, criticized the government for not having requested the extradition of the officers.

Mr. Prodi’s government has not said whether it will make such requests. But the issue looms as one more source of conflict between Italy and the United States.

While both American and Italian officials say the relationship remains solid, it has been tested in recent months on several fronts. A big demonstration is being planned on Saturday in Vicenza, in northern Italy, where the Americans have asked to enlarge an existing air base, and Italian officials have recently criticized American actions in Iraq, Lebanon and Somalia.

Earlier this month, an Italian court ordered an American soldier to stand trial for the death in Iraq of Nicola Calipari, an Italian secret service agent killed in 2005 while securing the release of a kidnapped Italian journalist. The soldier is unlikely to be extradited to Italy.

Deportation Challenge Rebuffed

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 16 (Reuters) — A South African court on Friday rejected a challenge to the deportation of a Pakistani citizen whose family says was subject to “extraordinary rendition” as part of the American effort to curb terrorism.

Khalid Rashid was arrested as an illegal alien in October 2005 and subsequently disappeared. South Africa says he was deported “under special circumstances” and flown to Pakistan, where he was handed over to Pakistani officials.

Mr. Rashid’s lawyers sought to challenge the deportation, but the Pretoria High Court on Friday rejected the move along with lawyers’ requests to introduce new information in the case, the South African Press Association said.

Mr. Rashid’s family and lawyers say he has not been heard from since his removal to Pakistan, which they believe was part of the C.I.A.’s rendition program.

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Jasonik]

Reviving this thread. Maybe the title could be changed to: Investigating U.S. Torture Programs

*****

Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime

By Evan Wallach
Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page B01 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html)

As a JAG in the Nevada National Guard, I used to lecture the soldiers of the 72nd Military Police Company every year about their legal obligations when they guarded prisoners. I'd always conclude by saying, "I know you won't remember everything I told you today, but just remember what your mom told you: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." That's a pretty good standard for life and for the law, and even though I left the unit in 1995, I like to think that some of my teaching had carried over when the 72nd refused to participate in misconduct at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Sometimes, though, the questions we face about detainees and interrogation get more specific. One such set of questions relates to "waterboarding."

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

In this case from the tribunal's records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:

A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.
The United States (like Britain, Australia and other Allies) pursued lower-ranking Japanese war criminals in trials before their own tribunals. As a general rule, the testimony was similar to Nielsen's. Consider this account from a Filipino waterboarding victim:

Q: Was it painful?

A: Not so painful, but one becomes unconscious. Like drowning in the water.

Q: Like you were drowning?

A: Drowning -- you could hardly breathe.
Here's the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese:

They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.
And from the second prisoner:

They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

We know that U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. That's a lesson worth learning. The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history. The law of war is no different. This history should be of value to those who seek to understand what the law is -- as well as what it ought to be.

Evan Wallach, a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, teaches the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

[RandySavage]

A year or two ago when this issue was at the forefront of the news, I was taking a shower and waterboarding crept into my mind. So, very stupidly, I took a wet washcloth, put it over my nose and mouth, faced the water stream, and took a breath. It was more like a half or quarter of a breath because I immediately doubled over in a coughing spasm. It was like getting a lungful of water while in the ocean or a drink down the wrong pipe x 10. Not a pleasant experience at all. I'd probably tell the interviewer anything they wanted to hear if being subjected to that for any significant period...

[Ninjahedge]

Very simply put.

Any administrator that has had no objection to this treatment and has denied it as being a form of torture should be publicly subjected to it.

I still do not agree with its use, but trying to deny its true nature is just sad. (IOW, I do not agree with torturing prisoners, but going to the public and claiming it isn't torture to try to validate its use is just cowardly. If you USE it ADMIT it.)

[lofter1]

The Surgeon and the Torture Memos

DOCTOR AND PATIENT

NY TIMES
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
April 30, 2009

Having trained medical students, I’ve come to recognize a familiar pattern of behavior when young doctors hold a scalpel for the very first time. Most people — actually anyone who has experienced even a paper cut — are hesitant to slice through flesh. Aspiring surgeons are no different. Their first efforts are tentative and almost always memorable.

“Really, me?” I asked, the first time I was handed the knife. I cupped my hand as if to accept a communion wafer but was taken aback by the scalpel’s weight, a sure sign in my mind of the instrument’s gravitas. Like doctors-in-training before and after me, I wrapped my fingers around the handle in a kind of death grip and winced as the belly of the blade touched the patient’s body. And as much as I’d like not to admit it, my hand shook, so great was my fear of pushing too hard and slicing too deep.

In the end, my first attempt at a surgical incision left barely a line on the patient’s skin. The mark was so tentative and so puny that even my cat wouldn’t have deigned to claim the scratch as her own.

These days I have to try hard to remember the surge of adrenaline and the extent of my fear that very first time. After years of training, cutting began to feel second nature to me, the scalpel merely an extension of my fingers. So when a friend earlier this week told me that she could never imagine cutting into another person and wondered how young doctors learn to do so, I had to stop and think before I could respond to her.

“Habituation,” I finally said. “You get used it.”

That response, and the idea of becoming habituated, has been haunting me ever since. Is it possible for all of us to become habituated to the horrific?

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department declassified four memos regarding the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush Administration and used by the C.I.A. with senior level Al Qaeda members. The details of these documents made my skin crawl; there are cool descriptions of dousing detainees with water at 41 degrees, forced nudity, slamming detainees into walls and waterboarding.

>> Justice Department Memos (http://documents.nytimes.com/justice-department-memos-on-interrogation-techniques#p=1)

But my mind kept wandering back to one thing: the seemingly ordinary professionals who were responsible. These were lawyers, psychologists, physicians, judges, and military and C.I.A. personnel, not just a rogue group of marginalized military grunts. In fact some of these individuals seemed hardly different from, well, me. A few were even the kind of hometown denizens I might admire.

Take, for example, Jay Bybee, former assistant attorney general and now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. In addition to his busy job, Mr. Bybee is a father to four children and has managed to serve as both a cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and an assistant coach for youth baseball and basketball. I am lucky if I can pack lunch for my two kids and get to work on time.

The reason I keep thinking about my response to my friend’s question is that I know it is possible for even sensitive souls to become habituated to a range of grisly tasks. I am someone who has learned — become habituated — to performing a whole host of unusual and, depending on your point-of-view, potentially gruesome undertakings: poking sharp objects into other people, removing organs and extremities, and switching parts between the dead and the living. And as I implied to my friend, even cutting the flesh of another human being can become just another part of your day job.

What renders a surgeon’s work different and humane, however, is not just the individual doctor’s desire to do the right thing by his or her patients (though I seriously wonder if Jay Bybee thought he was doing the right thing by his fellow Americans when he listed the 10 acceptable interrogation techniques, waterboarding among them). It is the surgeon’s commitment to and steadfast compliance with his profession’s code of ethical conduct. It is a constant awareness of the extraordinary trust that patients and the public place in their physicians, a trust that entails transparency and accountability in the patient-doctor relationship.

As I see it, the problem now with these documents is not that our trust in those accountable has been shattered. It is that the rest of us are beginning to show signs of becoming habituated to such transgressions.

Americans have been aware of brutal interrogation techniques for several years now: the first pictures from Abu Ghraib were shown five years ago this week, and the declassified documents in fact hold little new information. And while our current president speaks of moving forward, and not looking back at this chapter of our history, can we afford to turn away?

In doing so, we accept how we have become habituated. We risk seeing the brutality not as an atrocity but as part of who we are. We become the surgeon who might have shook when first taking the knife in hand but who now dares to cut with eyes closed.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

No wonder some folks want Gitmo to stay open and and thereby keep all the related info off shore ...

A new report questions "suicides" at Guantanamo

SALON (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/12/07/guantanamo/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+salon%2Fgreenwald+%28Glenn+Gr eenwald%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)
BY GLENN GREENWALD
MONDAY, DEC 7, 2009

On the night of June 10, 2006, three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/10/AR2006061000507.html). Without any autopsy or investigation, U.S. military officials proclaimed "suicide by hanging" as the cause of each death, and immediately sought to exploit the episode as proof of the evil of the detainees. Admiral Harry Harris, the camp's commander, said it showed (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11gitmo.html?_r=1) "they have no regard for life" and that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare aimed at us here at Guantanamo"; another official anonymously said that the suicides showed the victims were "committed jihadists [who] will do anything they can to advance their cause," while another sneered that "it was a good PR move to draw attention."

Questions immediately arose about how it could be possible that three detainees kept in isolation and under constant and intense monitoring could have coordinated and then carried out group suicide without detection, particularly since the military claimed their bodies were not found for over two hours after their deaths. But from the beginning, there was a clear attempt on the part of Guantanamo officials to prevent any outside investigation of this incident. To allay the questions that quickly emerged (http://law.shu.edu/publications/guantanamoReports/guantanamo_report_june_suicides_8_21_06.pdf), the military announced it would conduct a sweeping investigation and publicly release its finding, but it did not do so until more than two years later when -- in August, 2008 -- it released a heavily redacted reported purporting to confirm suicide by hanging as the cause. Two of the three dead detainees were Saudis and one was Yemeni; they had been detained for years without charges; one of them was 17 years old at the time he was detained and 22 when he died; and they had participated in several of the hunger strikes at the camp to protest the brutality, torture and abuse to which they were routinely subjected. Perversely, one of the three victims had been cleared for release earlier that month.

A major new report from Seton Hall University School of Law [pdf] (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/07/guantanamo/setonhall.pdf) released this morning raises serious doubts about both the military's version of events and the reliability of its investigation. The Report details that the three men "died under questionable circumstances"; that "the investigation into their deaths resulted in more questions than answers"; and that "without a proper investigation, it is impossible to determine the circumstances of the three detainees' deaths." The 54-page, heavily-documented Report raises numerous troubling questions ...

With revelations (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/27/AR2009112703438.html) of serious, recent abuse at an ongoing "black site" prison (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29bagram.html) in Afghanistan, serious questions have been raised about the extent to which detainee abuse has actually been curbed under Obama. But there's no question that the single greatest impediment to disclosure and accountability for past abuses is the Obama Justice Department, which has repeatedly gone far beyond the call of duty in its attempt to protect Bush war crimes and other illegal acts. This new Seton Hall Report regarding these three detainees deaths illustrates not only how perverse and unjust, but also how futile, such efforts are. War crimes never stay hidden, and the only question from the start was whether the Obama DOJ would be complicit in the attempt to shield them from disclosure. That question has now been answered rather decisively.

UPDATE: Scott Horton has an interview (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/the-most-innocent-explana_n_382263.html) with Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, the primary author of the report, in which he elaborates on why the military's claims and "investigation" are so suspect.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

***

[lofter1]

Just one of the many questions from the interview (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/the-most-innocent-explana_n_382263.html) with Law Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University School of Law:

Q: One of the prisoners, Yassar Talal Al Zahrani, had been seized as a minor and survived the prison riot that occurred at the Qali Jangi Prison near Mazar-i-Sharif. When his body was turned over for burial, an independent medical examination was arranged which found that the heart, kidneys and throat had all been removed from his corpse. The medical examiner noted that the removal of the throat in particular was highly irregular, and made an independent assessment impossible. Do you have any sense why U.S. military pathologists removed his internal organs and throat? Is this discussed in the report?

A: No.

***

From the Seton Hall report [pdf] (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/07/guantanamo/setonhall.pdf) (Death in Camp Delta) ...

This report reveals the following facts:

 The original military press releases did not report that the detainees had been dead for more than two hours when they were discovered, nor that rigor mortis had set in by the time of discovery.

 There is no explanation of how three bodies could have hung in cells for at least two hours while the cells were under constant supervision, both by video camera and by guards continually walking the corridors guarding only 28 detainees.

 There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell—a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.

 There is no indication that the medics observed anything unusual on the cell block at the time that the detainees were hanging dead in their cells.

 The initial military press releases did not report that, when the detainees‘ bodies arrived at the clinic, it was determined that each had a rag obstructing his throat.

 There is no explanation of how the supposed acts of ―asymmetrical warfare‖ could have been coordinated by the three detainees, who had been on the same cell block fewer than 72 hours with occupied and unoccupied cells between them and under constant supervision.

 There is no explanation of why the Alpha Block guards were advised that they were suspected of making false statements or failing to obey direct orders.

 There is no explanation of why the guards were ordered not to provide sworn statements about what happened that night.

 There is no explanation of why the government seemed to be unable to determine which guards were on duty that night in Alpha Block.

 There is no explanation of why the guards who brought the bodies to the medics did not tell the medics what had happened to cause the deaths and why the medics never asked how the deaths had occurred.

 There is no explanation of why no one was disciplined for acts or failures to act that night.

 There is no explanation of why the guards on duty in the cell block were not systematically interviewed about the events of the night; why the medics who visited the cell block before the hangings were not interviewed; or why the tower guards, who had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, were not interviewed.

As these many unanswered questions suggest, the investigations were themselves contrary, not only to best practices for investigations of serious matters, but also failed to conform to minimum standards in several ways.

These include:

 Failure to review relevant information, most of which was easily available including audio and video recordings which are systematically maintained; ―Pass-On‖ books prepared by each shift to describe occurrences on the block for the next shift; the Detainee Information Management System, which contains records of all activity for
that night as the events occur; and Serious Incident Reports, which are the reports used when there are suicide attempts.

 Failure to investigate an alleged conspiracy among detainees to commit suicide, despite the Naval Criminal Investigative Service‘s statement that on the night in question another detainee—who did not later commit suicide—walked through the cell block telling people, ―tonight‘s the night. There is no indication of how this could have happened given camp security rules or, if it had taken place, why security was not tighter than usual as a result.

 Failure to investigate all available material witnesses who would have had an opportunity to observe what happened that night.

[Codex]

Couple of interesting articles -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-563858/British-Government-refuses-help-torture-flight-victim.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1232665/Why-Bagram-Guantanamos-evil-twin-Britains-dirty-secret.html

http://www.medeshi.com/2009/10/gitmo-jet-named-in-torture-flight.html

http://www.secret-bases.co.uk/cia-rendition.htm