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Archive for the '"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"' Category

01
Aug

Guantanamo judge allows disputed interrogation

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Kangaroo Kourt and travesty of justice

By MIKE MELIA

In this file photograph of a sketch by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin, reviewed by the U.S. Military, defendant Salim Hamdan watches as FBI agent Craig Donnachie testifies about his interrogations of Hamdan, while a picture of disguised U.S. agents is displayed on a screen, during Hamdan\'s trial inside the war crimes courthouse at Camp Justice, the legal complex of the U.S. Military Commissions, at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, in Cuba, Thursday, July 24, 2008. Hamdan, the former driver for Osama bin Laden, is the first prisoner to face a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin, Pool, File)

In this file photograph of a sketch by

courtroom artist Janet Hamlin, reviewed

by the U.S. Military, defendant Salim

Hamdan watches as FBI agent Craig

Donnachie testifies about his

interrogations of Hamdan, while a

picture of disguised U.S. agents is

displayed on a screen, during

Hamdan’s trial inside the war crimes

courthouse at Camp Justice, the legal

complex of the U.S. Military Commissions,

at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, in

Cuba, Thursday, July 24, 2008. Hamdan,

the former driver for Osama bin Laden, is

the first prisoner to face a U.S. war-crimes

trial since World War II.

(AP Photo/Janet Hamlin, Pool, File)

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — A U.S. military judge allowed prosecutors to use a disputed interrogation as evidence at the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, ruling Thursday the defendant was not coerced into saying he swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

In a heavily redacted ruling, Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, rejected defense claims that Salim Hamdan made the May 2003 statement under the influence of sleep deprivation or other coercive programs at the detention center on this U.S. Navy base.

The ruling cleared the way for Robert McFadden, an agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to describe the interrogation to jurors as the final prosecution witness.

Hamdan, a Yemeni, faces up to life in prison if convicted of conspiracy and aiding terrorism.

McFadden, one of nearly a dozen interrogators to testify at the trial, said Hamdan swore an Islamic oath, or “bayat,” to bin Laden.

Although Hamdan supported the killing of Jews and Christians on the Arabian peninsula, he told bin Laden he would withdraw from the oath if “the jihad became Muslim on Muslim or political violence,” McFadden said.

“Mr. Hamdan said he was convinced by the need for seeking jihad,” he said.

In the nine-hour interrogation, McFadden said Hamdan also provided extensive details about bin Laden’s security convoys in Afghanistan.

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27
Jul

Obama’s Foreign Policy: Steering U.S. Imperialism Through Dangerous Waters

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", US Troops and War

by Larry Everest / Revolution ( revolution.sfbureau [at] gmail.com )

On July 14 The New York Times published a major editorial by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama titled, “My Plan for Iraq,” in which Obama called for “redeploying” U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months. The next day Obama gave a major foreign policy address outlining his “new overarching” global strategy. It laid out how he sees the “challenges of a new and dangerous world,” his criticisms of the Iraq war, his concerns about Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, and a list of other contradictions the U.S. is facing, including global climate change, nuclear proliferation, and rising energy costs.

Obama’s article and speech come on the eve of his overseas trip, which is designed to demonstrate his credentials as a “credible commander-in-chief,” as one backer put it. And it comes when many who oppose the Iraq war are hoping that Obama represents a real change from Bush and his unending war for greater empire, and that there’s a basis for the people to “hold” Obama “to his good positions,” as columnist Norman Solomon put it.

16
Jul

Jonathan Kay: Free Omar Khadr

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Detainee Abuse and Omar Khadr

Jonathan Kay

This is a bad day for Canada. As I write this at 1pm Tuesday, piteous video images from Omar Khadr’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay are not only the #1 news item on the National Post web site, but also the lead item on BBC News and USA Today. Millions of Web surfers are now wondering why Canada’s government has acquiesced — and as the video shows, even participated — in the unconscionable treatment of a blubbering boy-soldier.

As someone who otherwise considers himself one of the War on Terror’s noisiest Canadian cheerleaders, I submit that the bleeding hearts are right on this one: Omar Khadr needs to come home.

Here’s why:

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16
Jul

Interrogation video: teenage detainee pleaded for help

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Minor and Torture

By Mark Seibel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON _ Amnesty International on Tuesday called for the immediate release of a Canadian citizen being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after his lawyers released copies of a video in which the then-teenage captive sobs and repeatedly cries, “Help me.”

Omar Khadr was 16 when the video was taken as he was being questioned by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003. A Canadian court ordered Canadian intelligence to surrender the video to Khadr’s attorneys, who are fighting American charges that Khadr killed an American soldier with a grenade during fighting in Afghanistan in 2002. Khadr, then 15, was taken from the battlefield badly wounded and near death.

The lawyers released 10 minutes from the video, which totals more than 7 hours. The video was created by U.S. government agents at the prison in Cuba and originally marked as secret.

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14
Jul

Khadr interrogation footage puts spotlight on CSIS

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Guantanamo and Omar Khadr

COLIN FREEZE

From Monday’s Globe and Mail

When a Canadian spymaster was asked three years ago whether his agency had kept any tapes of its talks with teenage prisoner Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay, his reply was that nothing could be said.

The alleged existence of any such tapes was classified.

“To answer that question would disclose national security privileged information,” said Jack Hooper, a CSIS deputy director compelled to testify by lawyers acting for Mr. Khadr, the Canadian citizen being detained in the U.S. prison camp in Cuba.

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13
Jul

British soldiers accused of sickening sex assault on 14 year old Iraqi boy

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee Abuse, Iraq, Islamophobia, Minor and war crimes

Just days after the MoD has to pay out millions to the father of a man UK soldiers beat to death, fresh claims of abuse emerge

By Andrew Johnson

The IoS has pixellated this image of the boy making the complaint because he is consumed by shame, and lives in fear of retribution from former friends

The IoS has pixellated this image of the boy making the complaint because he is consumed by shame, and lives in fear of retribution from former friends

British soldiers forced a boy of 14 to carry out an act of oral sex on a fellow male prisoner in Iraq, according to shocking new allegations made about the behaviour of British troops.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed yesterday that the Royal Military Police (RMP) have launched an investigation. If the allegations are proved, it would mark a sordid low in the behaviour of British troops in Iraq, and damage further the reputation of Britain in the Middle East.

The victim, now 19, whom The Independent on Sunday has agreed to identify only as Hassan, says he was rounded up with a friend while trying to steal milk cartons from a food distribution centre. He was whipped, beaten and forced to strip naked.

“They made us sit on each other’s laps,” he said. “They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us, I wished I was dead at this moment. Then they made me sit with Tariq… where I was forced to put Tariq’s penis in my mouth. The other two were made to do the same.”

Court action is ongoing over a series of allegations surrounding the British base Camp Breadbasket and incidents that took place there in May 2003. There have been allegations of simulated sexual abuse of Iraqis by British troops, but this, if true, would be the first example of actual sexual abuse.

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12
Jul

Sex Crimes in the White House

By Dazeylin 2 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse and Sexual Abuse

Naomi Wolf

NEW YORK - Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators of these crimes, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw the photos that emerged in 2004 from Abu Ghraib prison. Even as the Bush administration was spinning the notion that the torture of prisoners was the work of “a few bad apples” low in the military hierarchy, I knew that we were seeing evidence of a systemic policy set at the top. It’s not that I am a genius. It’s simply that, having worked at a rape crisis center and been trained in the basics of sex crime, I have learned that all sex predators go about things in certain recognizable ways.

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12
Jul

Book Cites Secret Red Cross Report of C.I.A. Torture of Qaeda Captives

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Afghanistan, Bagram, Black Site, C.I.A., Camp X-Ray, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, ICRC, Lies and War Crimes of the US Government, Lies of the U.S. Administration and human rights
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

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05
Jul

US Private Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee Abuse and Torture
Posted by Kristin Bricker

Mayor says torture training will continue and public officials will not be punished.
[videos below]
Exactly one day after George Bush signed the first year of the $1.6 billion Plan Mexico into law–giving Mexican military and police US training, armament, and resources–videos surfaced showing Mexican police undergoing torture training in León, Guanajuato. The torture training is directed by a British man from an unidentified US private security company.

The videos show the English-speaking contractor directing and participating in the torture of members of the Special Tactical Group (GET in its Spanish initials) of the León municipal police force during a 160-hour training over twelve days in April 2006. Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, the Secretary of Public Security in León, says the participants volunteered to be tortured as part of the training.

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03
Jul

Jazeera ex-detainee to put focus on rights

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee Abuse, Released, Sami al-Haj and human rights

AL JAZEERA television said yesterday it had appointed a cameraman held for six years without charge at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay as producer at its new freedoms and human rights programmes department.
“I will do my utmost to reveal to the world the violations committed against humans,” Sudanese-born Sami al-Haj, who was handed to Sudanese authorities in May, said in an Al Jazeera statement announcing the appointment.
“I hope Jazeera, through creating this department would be able to help those who suffer quietly due to such violations.”

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01
Jul

Bush’s top general quashed torture dissent

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee Abuse and Torture

New evidence shows that despite warnings from across the military, former Gen. Richard Myers shut down legal scrutiny of brutal interrogation tactics.

By Mark Benjamin

U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers listens to questions during a news conference March 16, 2005, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers listens to questions during a news conference March 16, 2005, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON — The former Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, helped quash dissent from across the U.S. military as the Bush administration first set up a brutal interrogation regime for terrorism suspects, according to newly public documents and testimony from an ongoing Senate probe.

In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Those military officials called for further legal scrutiny of the tactics. The chief of the Army’s international law division, for example, said in a memo that some of the tactics, such as stress positions and sensory deprivation, “cross the line of ‘humane treatment’” and “may violate the torture statute.”

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30
Jun

Israelis Assault Award Winning IPS Journalist

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Israel and Journalist

By Mel Frykberg

GAZA CITY (IPS) - Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza.

Omer, a resident of Rafah in the south of Gaza, and previous recipient of the New America Media’s Best Youth Voice award several years ago, was returning from London where he had just collected his Gellhorn Prize, and from several European capitals where he had speaking engagements, including a meeting with Greek parliamentarians.

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25
Jun

Khadr aches for `chance in life’

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Afghanistan, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Minor, Omar Khadr, Torture and human rights
Prisoner reaches out in letter to media

Noor Javed

Staff Reporter

Omar\'s letter to the CBCNB: Omar Khadr was born in Toronto and is a Canadian citizen, he is not a naturalized citizen as stated in this article.

Longing for a normal life and a chance to return to the country where his “soul” is “connected,” a letter by Omar Khadr to Canadian media offers a rare glimpse into the mind of the 21-year-old suspected terrorist who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past six years.

The handwritten letter was in response to six questions submitted by the CBC, asking the naturalized citizen about his memories of Canada, his aspirations, what he wants to tell Canadians, and what he would do to distance himself from his past.

The CBC avoided asking about his legal case because of the reluctance of the U.S military to allow details of the investigation outside of court.

All questions had to be pre-approved by U.S. military censors beforehand and Khadr’s answers were also scrutinized by the military before being sent to the CBC.

The American military has allowed the young detainee to send letters to his friends and family in the past, but this appears to be the first time he has directly reached out to the Canadian public.

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25
Jun

Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Abuse, Afghanistan, Black Site, Bush Lies, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo and Iraq
By Tom Lasseter / McClatchy Newspapers  | http://www.bostonherald.com

WASHINGTON - The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn’t the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

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24
Jun

Abu Ghraib? Doesn’t Ring a Bell.

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Bush Lies, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, DoD and Torture

By Dana Milbank

If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday’s Senate appearance by the Pentagon’s former top lawyer.

bill-ii

William “Jim” Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee.

Did he ask a subordinate to get information about harsh questioning techniques?

“My memory is not perfect.”

Did he see a memo about the effects of these techniques?

“I don’t specifically remember when I saw this.”

Did he remember doing something with the information he got?

“I don’t remember doing something with this information.”

When did he discuss these methods with other Bush administration officials?

“I don’t know precisely when, and I cannot discuss it further without getting into classified information.”

Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) had had enough. “You say you don’t remember it any more clearly than what you’ve said,” he pointed out. “Therefore, going into classified session isn’t going to give us any more information than what you’ve said, which is you had conversations but your memory is bad.”

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22
Jun

Release ‘Detainees’: Charge and Imprison Bush for Capital Crimes

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Extended Solitary Confinement, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo, Torture and human rights

Len Hart

The Bush administration is trying once again to rewrite history and the law, specifically ‘the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees’. Typically the legal eagles in the Bush regime have it backward. Bushco should not be given a second chance to fabricate a case when it had none to begin with. Detainees have already been in detention for years in violation of US Codes and our international treaties. Bush has had years to make a case and has failed to do so. To make ‘detainees’ –illegally detained to begin with –wait still longer for justice is, in itself, another crime to be charged to George W. Bush.

A capital crimes case against Bush is better than the ‘case’ Bush has against the ‘detainees’. This is a regime that commits war crimes and tries to make them legal after the fact –a recipe for dictatorship and tyranny.

A Federal judge will review the so-called evidence against detainees in the wake of the recent high court decision. Typically, Bushies want more time to fabricate another ‘case’. What was wrong with the case they had was this: they didn’t have one!

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21
Jun

Guantanamo prisoner opens new era of court challenges

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Boumediene v. Bush Decision, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Taguba, Torture, habeas corpus and human rights
By Michael Doyle and Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Taliban tortured Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al Ginco. They thought he was a U.S. spy. Then, U.S. soldiers called the Syrian native an enemy and shipped him to Guantanamo.

Now, Ginco will be turning a spotlight back on the Bush administration itself. Newly empowered by the Supreme Court, Ginco has become the first Guantanamo detainee to demand in a U.S. federal court that the military show the hard evidence that justifies his detention. Scores of others are expected to do likewise, attorneys predict.

The war on terror may never be the same.

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17
Jun

Military lawyers objected to harsh interrogation techniques

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Detainee, Detainee Abuse and Torture

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Top senators are demanding at a Tuesday hearing to know who approved harsh interrogations of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sen. Carl Levin says officials damaged intelligence gathering by approving harsh interrogation techniques.

Sen. Carl Levin says officials damaged intelligence gathering by approving harsh interrogation techniques.

“How did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep and blasted music at them?” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, asked in his opening statement at the hearing of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

“Senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees,” said Levin, the committee chairman. “In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives.”

Levin was especially critical of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who he said pushed for harsh interrogations in the face of objections from top military lawyers. Rumsfeld was not present at the hearing.

“When Secretary Rumsfeld approved the use of abusive techniques against detainees, he unleashed a virus which ultimately infected interrogation operations conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Levin said.

A former Pentagon official told the panel that Rumsfeld wanted the military to conduct interrogations because he envied other agencies.

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16
Jun

U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Afghanistan, Bagram, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Detainee Treatment Act and Dilawar

By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL, Afghanistan — American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

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15
Jun

America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, C.I.A., Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Torture and habeas corpus
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as “the worst of the worst.”

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

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14
Jun

Yoo Gave Interrogators Legal Cover to Kill Guantanamo Detainees

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Abuse, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Ghost, Guantanamo, John Yoo, Torture, Yoo Memo and human rights

By Jason Leopold
The Public Record

On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon’s top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism,” the directives said.

Among the issues to be addressed were “policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured U.S. military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of U.S. armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Defense Department] interrogators.”

The Defense Department turned over an 81-page document to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that provides further insight into the extraordinary Executive Branch powers granted to President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks.

John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. It essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners.

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13
Jun

U.K. rights group: U.S. has photographic evidence of torture

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" and Abuse

LONDON (AP) — The U.S. government has photographic evidence that a Guantanamo Bay inmate was tortured with a knife after being taken to Morocco by U.S. forces, a British human rights group said Tuesday.

Reprieve said their client, Binyam Mohamed, had his genitals slashed repeatedly with a doctor’s scalpel while in custody in Morocco after he was flown there from Pakistan by American officials in 2002. It also said his U.S. captors later took pictures of the abuse to show authorities that his wounds were healing.

 

Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and former British resident, is charged by the United States with plotting with al-Qaeda to bomb American apartment buildings.

Reprieve maintains the charge is based on information coerced from Mohamed using torture.

Reprieve quoted Mohamed as saying that an American female photographed his wounds before he boarded a plane in the Moroccan city of Rabat on the night of Jan. 21, 2004.

“When she saw the injuries I had she gasped. She said: ‘Oh, my God, look at that!’ Then all her mates looked at what she was pointing at and I could see the shock and horror in her eyes,” Mohamed was quoted as saying. “Later, when I was in Afghanistan, they took more pictures. They were treating me, and one of them explained that the photos were ‘to show Washington it’s healing.”‘

Reprieve said Mohamed’s account was confirmed by an unidentified journalist it says spoke with a U.S. intelligence agent who saw the photographs. The group has urged the United States not to destroy them.

Reprieve provides legal aid to many current and former Guantanamo inmates and is a fierce opponent of the military tribunal system set up to prosecute some of the men held there, saying it is designed to cover up U.S. use of torture to secure confessions.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

11
Jun

DOJ Official: Rumsfeld Personally Approved of Brutal Interrogations

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Bagram, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Rumsfeld, Torture, Torture Ships and Torture flights

By Jason Leopold The Public Record
Published in : Nation/World

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay despite warnings from the FBI that the methods amounted to inhumane treatment, was possibly illegal, and would not produce reliable intelligence, a Department of Justice inspector general testified Tuesday.
rummmy
“The FBI believed that these techniques were not getting actionable information, that they were unsophisticated and unproductive,” said Glenn Fine, the DOJ’s inspector general, in testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They raised their concerns with the Department of Defense, but the Department of Defense, from what we were told, dismissed those concerns and that no changes were made in the Department of Defense’s strategy.”

Rumsfeld, who resigned immediately after the 2006-midterm elections, has vehemently denied that he approved of torture. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel provided the Defense Department with legal guidelines that authorized techniques such as waterboarding, the use of military dogs, and “slaps” and concluded that as long as “organ failure” did not occur the methods could not be construed as torture.

Fine issued a 437-page report last month on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, which found that White House officials ignored FBI concerns about the treatment of detainees.

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11
Jun

New report details torture of Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Andy Worthington, Binyam Mohammed, CIA Black Sites, Detainee Abuse, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo and war crimes
Andy Worthington, author of “The Guantánamo Files,” introduces a new report, by legal action charity Reprieve, detailing the rendition and torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who faces a trial by Military Commission in Guantánamo.


Yesterday, Reprieve ( http://www.reprieve.org.uk/), the legal action charity that represents over 30 prisoners in Guantánamo, issued a detailed and devastating report, Human Cargo: Binyam Mohamed and the Rendition Frequent Flier Programme, which presents compelling evidence of the rendition and torture of one of its clients, the British resident Binyam Mohamed. The report is available as a PDF here: http://www.reprieve.org.uk/documents/2008_06_10Mohamed-HumanCargoFinalMedia.pdf.

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10
Jun

US covered up alleged torture, claims charity

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Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abuse, Binyam Mohammed, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Torture and USA

Lawyers for a London resident held in Guantanamo Bay have accused the US government of covering up his alleged torture.

According to the legal action charity Reprieve, Binyam Mohamed was abused in prisons in Morocco and Afghanistan by “proxy torturers” working on behalf of the United States before being brought to the US base in Cuba in September 2004.

Mohamed, 29, who used to work as a caretaker in Kensington, west London, denies accusations of possessing materials for terrorism and conspiring to commit terrorism.

Click here to read the rest of US covered up alleged torture, claims charity


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