“Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”

Obama promised to close Guantánamo. Instead, he’s made it worse

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Published March 8, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer

In his letters, Guantánamo Bay prisoner Shaker Aamer appeals in desperation to his captors and the outside world:

“Please … torture me in the old way. Here they destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks.”

The 44-year-old British resident and father of four has spent over 11 years incarcerated at Guantánamo despite being cleared for release as early as 2007. To this day never charged with a crime, Aamer is just one of hundreds of detainees who remain imprisoned in Guantánamo. Despite running on an explicit campaign promise to shut down the island prison which has become a symbol of the abuses of the “war on terror”, President Obama has continued to preside over its operation. And by recent accounts, under his tenure, the conditions for prisoners there – from both a physical and legal standpoint – have become markedly worse.

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Britain and US asked to release secret torture reports

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Published March 5, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", C.I.A., Guantanamo, MI5, MI6, Torture

A UN human rights advocate has called on Britain and the US to release confidential reports into the countries’ involvement in the kidnapping andtorture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of “years of official denials, sophistry and prevarication” to cover up the truth.

In a speech to the UN human rights council in Geneva introducing a report on the issue, Ben Emmerson, a British barrister who is the UN’s special rapporteur on protecting human rights within efforts to combat terrorism, demanded that Britain publish the interim findings of a report by a retired judge, Sir Peter Gibson, into the involvement of MI5 and MI6 in the removal and mistreatment of terrorist suspects.

In a response delivered at the council, British officials said the government was “looking carefully at the contents of the report by the Gibson inquiry on its preparatory work, with a view to publishing as much of it as possible”. There was no word on when this might happen.

Emmerson also asked the US to release a similar report by the Senate’s select committee on intelligence into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation programme.

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The Hidden History of Water Torture

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Published February 25, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", C.I.A., Torture, USA

Try to remain calm — even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race.  Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation.  Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately.  You’re helpless.  You’re in agony. 

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.”  Or the “water rag.”  Or the “water treatment.” Or “tormenta de toca.”  Or any of the othernicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.” 

The practice only became widely known in the United States after it was disclosed that the CIA had been subjecting suspected terrorists to it in the wake of 9/11.  More recently, cinematic depictions of waterboarding in the award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty and questions about it at the Senate confirmation hearing for incoming CIA chief John Brennan have sparked debate.  Water torture, however, has a surprisingly long history, dating back to at least the fourteenth century.  It has been a U.S. military staple since the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was employed by Americans fighting an independence movement in the Philippines.  American troops would continue to use the brutal tactic in the decades to come — and during the country’s repeated wars in Asia, they would be victims of it, too. 

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CBK Govt. Accused of Helping US in Torture Programme

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Published February 10, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Black Sites, CIA Black Sites, Extraordinary Rendition, Torture

The 2003 Government led by former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, has been accused of helping the United States in its torture programme.
A New York-based human rights organization said in a new report, that Sri Lanka was among 54 countries that have either hosted secret prisons or helped in the transport or torture of terrorist suspects as part of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rendition and black site torture programme.

The Open Society Justice Initiative said the Sri Lankan Government in 2003 permitted the use of its airspace and airports for flights associated with CIA extraordinary rendition operations.

“Court documents indicate that at least one flight operated by Richmor Aviation (a company that operated flights for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme) landed in Sri Lanka in 2003.

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Guantánamo judge unplugs hidden censors from 9/11 trial

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Published February 1, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", 9/11 Trials, Detainee, Guantanamo, KSM, Torture

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba – The military judge presiding at the Sept. 11 trial Thursday ordered the government to unplug any outside censors who can reach into his courtroom and silence the war crimes tribunal.

Only a court security officer sitting in court, at the judge’s elbow, has the authority to hit a mute button on the proceedings if there’s a suspicion that national security information could be spilled, Judge James L. Pohl announced.

At issue was a mysterious episode Monday when the sound to spectators was suddenly replaced by white noise in court after 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s attorney David Nevin said the word “secret.”

Nobody inside court did it. The judge erupted in anger, and appeared surprised that “some external body” had the power to prevent the public from listening to the proceedings — which are broadcast in the spectator’s gallery on a 40-second delay.

“This is the last time that will happen,” the judge said Thursday. “No third party can unilaterally cut off the broadcast.”

The court was just beginning to tackle a defense request that the judge issue a protective order on whatever remnants exist of the CIA’s secret overseas prison network. President Barack Obama ordered those facilities closed on taking office.

Defense lawyers say the five men now charged as the alleged plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings were tortured at those places. The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, says no evidence obtained other than voluntarily will be used at their death-penalty trial.

 

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Torture accusations against UK troops in Iraq echo the scandal of Abu Ghraib

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Published January 19, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Detainee, Torture

Allegations of a policy of systemic torture by the British in Iraq uncomfortably echo the infamous scandal at Abu Ghraib, the American facility at a prison in Baghdad, from which appalling pictures emerged in 2004.

US soldiers at Abu Ghraib were shown to have part in acts of sexual depravity, other deliberate humiliations and illegal interrogations. In all, 17 soldiers and officers were suspended from duty in the wake of the scandal, and 11 were charged with maltreatment and other offences, court-martialled, sentenced to military prison, and dishonourably discharged. Two soldiers who appeared in the photos, Lynndie England and Charles Graner, were sentenced to three and 10 years respectively.

In the main, senior ranks were untouched: the highest-ranking soldier to be charged, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, was acquitted on all charges, while full colonel Thomas Pappas received a “non-judicial” fine of $8,000. Brigadier-general Janis Karpinski, who was in command of detention facilities, was reprimanded for dereliction of duty and demoted to the rank of colonel. In 2006, she told a Spanish newspaper she had seen a letter from then secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld authorising the use of sensory deprivation and other illegal methods, but there were no ramifications.

The US Supreme Court declined to hear claims of abuse by 250 Iraqis at various facilities. The following year, insistence by the US government that the abuses were isolated instances was tested by similar pictures from Afghanistan.

For her part, England became something of a heroine on American patriotic websites; she emerged from prison and proceeded to give an interview to theNew York Daily News last year saying of the prisoners: “Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal. They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologise to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.

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Zero Dark Thirty aimed at excusing torture, ex-Guantanamo Bay inmates say

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Published January 11, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", CIA Black Sites, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Guantanamo, Osama bin Laden, Torture

LONDON – Two former Guantanamo detainees on Thursday condemned “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden whose brutal interrogation scenes have sparked a discussion over the use of extreme methods in the U.S. campaign against terror. 

Speaking at an event in London on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison camp in eastern Cuba, the pair said the film was an attempt to rehabilitate those guilty of human rights abuses. 

“These people are getting away not only with committing the torture … they’re justifying it,” said one of the ex-detainees, Libyan-born Omar Deghayes, who was left partially blind after what he said was an American guard’s attempt to gouge out his eyes. 

The other ex-detainee, Iraqi-born Bisher al-Rawi, said Hollywood films he used to watch portrayed torturers as the bad guys. 

Casting heroes as torturers “will justify a very, very different mindset,” he said at the event organized by human rights group CagePrisoners. “I think that’s very dangerous.” 

More than 900 people have been imprisoned at Guantanamo, most of them held for years without charge. Deghayes and al-Rawi were released in 2007, part of a group of British residents who were returned to the U.K. following a lobbying campaign by family members and British human rights organizations. 

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Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)

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Published January 10, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Extraordinary Rendition, Obama Admin Crimes, Obama Lies

FD Editor’s Note:  Well, just in case you were not completely convinced of the fact that Obama speaks only lies, give this a read.  I am livid after reading this, but I am not surprised.  The article states that he never said he was going to stop extraordinary rendition.  But he did, but in the small print he did say that he was keeping “rendition” however it was to be under certain conditions only, and it was not to be used to outsource torture.  But that is exactly what it is still being used to do.  Now I cannot read this, and go on doing nothing and I hope that you’ll all join me in doing whatever you think is the best course of action.  I am going to start by writing letters, and I will follow them up with phone calls.  I may go and speak to whoever will listen.  We cannot sit back and let this go on.. we just can’t.  If we do, we are complicit.

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prison cell with light through window Remember rendition? Many people believe the practice of having terrorism suspects interrogated overseas was supposed to end when George W. Bush left office. But President Barack Obama said he’d end torture, not renditions—and last week, the Washington Post reported that they’re still happening. That’s true in some sense, but as Mother Jones and others have reported, the Obama administration’s use of foreign regimes to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects has avoided Bush-style renditions in favor of a different practice known as proxy detention.

Law professor and national security expert Steve Vladeck explained the difference between the Bush and Obama renditions on the Lawfare blog last week. The two most famous cases of Bush-era extraordinary rendition are those of Maher Arar and Khaled El-Masri, two men whom, as Vladeck noted, “were illegally sent by the United States to third-party countries where they could be interrogated (and tortured) in a manner that would have been unlawful if conducted by U.S. officials.” The case in the Post story is different, in that it involves arrests by local authorites who later transferred the detainees to the United States, and that there’s no torture alleged. This case indeed involves prisoner transfers from one country to another, but the details are completely different. The Post story, Vladeck argued, “is equating apples to oranges in a context in which nuance matters.”

Here’s the meat of the Post‘s story:

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial….

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones, I reported on several cases of suspected proxy detention of American citizens, and confirmed, via multiple FBI sources, that the bureau does in fact share information with foreign security services that leads to the arrests and detentions of both foreigners and Americans abroad—and that US officials interrogate American and foreign-born terrorism suspects in foreign custody.

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US defence contractor pays $5M to Iraqis who alleged torture at Abu Ghraib

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Published January 9, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Detainee Abuse, Iraq, Iraqi Refugees, Torture

WASHINGTON – A defence contractor whose subsidiary was accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to torture detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has paid $5.28 million to 71 former inmates held there and at other U.S.-run detention sites between 2003 and 2007.

The settlement in the case involving Engility Holdings Inc. of Chantilly, Virginia, marks the first successful effort by lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other detention centres to collect money from a U.S. defence contractor in lawsuits alleging torture. Another contractor, CACI, is expected to go to trial over similar allegations this summer.

The payments were disclosed in a document that Engility filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission two months ago but which has gone essentially unnoticed.

The defendant in the lawsuit, L-3 Services Inc., now an Engility subsidiary, provided translators to the U.S. military in Iraq. In 2006, L-3 Services had more than 6,000 translators in Iraq under a $450 million-a-year contract, an L-3 executive told an investors conference at the time.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for the ex-detainees, Baher Azmy, said that each of the 71 Iraqis received a portion of the settlement. Azmy declined to say how the money was distributed among them. He said there was an agreement to keep details of the settlement confidential.

“Private military contractors played a serious but often under-reported role in the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib,” said Azmy, the legal director at the Center for constitutional Rights. “We are pleased that this settlement provides some accountability for one of those contractors and offers some measure of justice for the victims.”

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Excusing Torture, Again

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Published January 7, 2013, in "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Torture

The neocon Washington Post let ex-CIA official Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw waterboarding and other torture and then destroyed the videotaped evidence, make his case that there was no torture, just effective interrogation that helped get Osama bin Laden. But ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern disagrees.

By Ray McGovern

Jose Rodriguez, former director of operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Jose Rodriguez, former director of operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Would-be tough guys like former CIA torturer-in-chief José A. Rodriguez Jr. brag that “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists – or doing what the rest of us would call “torturing” – has made Americans safer by eliciting tidbits of information that advanced the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Rodriguez makes this case again in the Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section in the context of the new “hunt-for-bin-Laden” movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” though Rodriguez still disdains the word “torture.” He’s back playing the George W. Bush-era word game that waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other calculated pain inflicted on detainees in the CIA’s custody weren’t really “torture.”

Entitled “Sorry, Hollywood. What we did wasn’t torture,” Rodriguez’s article amounts to a convoluted apologia – no, not an apology; an apologia – for torture, partly by trivializing what was done. For instance, Rodriguez explains that in the CIA’s waterboarding, “small plastic water bottles were used,” not “a large bucket,” and the detainees were strapped to “medical gurneys,” as if the size of the water-delivery system and the use of a medical device somehow make torture not torture.

Yet, while quibbling with some details of the movie and its gory depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rodriguez largely agrees with the film’s suggestion that the harsh tactics played a key role in getting the CIA on the trail of bin Laden’s courier who eventually led Seal Team 6 to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Rodriguez writes, “I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program … our program worked – but it was not torture … and enhanced interrogation techniques played a role in getting bin Laden.”

But others familiar with the chronology of events dispute that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were responsible for any significant breaks in the case. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Service Committee respectively, have asserted that “The original lead information had no connection to CIA detainees” and a detainee in CIA custody who did provide information on bin Laden’s courier “did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

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