Interrogators

PM orders code on questioning abroad

Richard Norton-Taylor

The government yesterday bowed to growing pressure over allegations of Britain’s complicity in torture by promising to draw up and publish new guidelines for the security and intelligence agencies when they are involved in interrogating detainees abroad.

Announcing the unexpected move to MPs, Gordon Brown said he condemned torture “absolutely” but had asked the intelligence and security committee (ISC) to help draw up new guidelines “in order to have systems that are robust”.

In a separate move, the prime minister told MPs that compliance with the new guidelines would be monitored by intelligence services commissioner Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge, who will report annually.

Brown’s announcement, which follows a succession of revelations in the Guardian about the ill-treatment and torture of UK nationals and residents abroad, appeared to be a tacit admission that existing guidelines were open to abuse. It was also seen as an attempt to resist calls for an independent inquiry into growing evidence of British complicity in the interrogation of suspects held in Pakistan and Morocco.

 

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ImageSahar Yasiri says ?Iraq is the number one country having the largest number of prisons in the world where there are more than 400 thousand Iraqi detainees including 6500 children and 10 thousand women.? This is the first part of long interview translated by AMSI English Web Team.

The representative of the Federation of prisoners and political prisoners, Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri clarified that the number of camps and prisons in all governorates of Iraq reaches to 36 except the Abu Ghraib prison, which turns as the best among the other prisons despite the terrible conditions. He said in an interview in a conference organized by the World Commission against unarmed cooperation with the Free University of Brussels entitled “war terrorism of American on terrorism “that the number of Iraqi prisoners up to 400 thousand prisoners whom 6500 event and 10 thousand women 95% of whom were raped.

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waterboarding_nrAbu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, has been held without charge or trial as a “high-value detainee” for over six years, first in secret CIA custody, and then in Guantánamo, while battles have raged within the administration over his supposed significance. Drawing, in particular, on the story of former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, makes the case that Zubaydah’s importance has been wildly exaggerated.

A recent article in the Washington Post, Out of Guantánamo and Bitter Toward Bin Laden, which was based on an interview with former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi (released in 2006), was noteworthy as much for what it did not reveal as for what it did.

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Hell, USANEW YORK (Reuters) – Recent letters from the Justice Department to Congress state that U.S. intelligence agents working to prevent terror attacks can legally use interrogation techniques banned by international law, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

President George W. Bush issued an executive order last summer in which he said the CIA would observe international regulations regarding detainee treatment. The letters indicate the Bush administration now contends these boundaries may be stretched in some interrogations.

A March 5 letter from the Justice Dept. to Congress makes clear the Bush administration has not defined which interrogation methods might violate the Geneva Convention’s bans on “outrages upon personal dignity,” the Times said.

The letters were provided by the staff of Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel received classified briefings on the matter and Wyden requested further information, which yielded the letters, the Times said.

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18-year-old Muhibullah of rural Afghanistan allegedly heard intruders trying to break into his family’s compound in the village of Uruzgan. Having assumed the role of head of household after his father, Haji Yar Mohammed, had lost a leg and eye fighting against the Soviets in the late `70s during a U. S. backed effort, Muhibullah grabbed an AK-47 assault rifle, left the compound perimeter and fired warning shots in the air to ward off intruders.

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Forced Medication in Interrogation Can Constitute Crimes and Violate Nuremberg Code, Says PHR; Medical, Human Rights Group Calls for Congressional and DOJ Investigations

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) urgently called on Congress and the Department of Justice, with the involvement of the FBI, to each immediately investigate allegations by detainees that they were forcibly drugged while in US custody. These claims, reported today by the Washington Post, also raise new and deeply troubling questions about what role health professionals may have played in violating detainees’ human rights, domestic and international law, and codes of medical ethics established since World War II. The report claims that forced medication may have been used for a number of purposes including as a chemical restraint, as a facilitator of interrogation, and possibly for therapeutic purposes in the absence of informed consent. Any use in interrogation of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to profoundly disrupt the senses or personality is criminal under US law, including the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Statute.

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It was the young officials at Guantánamo who dreamed up a list of new aggressive interrogation techniques, inspired by Jack Bauer from the TV series, 24. But it was the politicians and lawyers in Washington who set the ball rolling. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail right to the top

By Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands QC uncovers details of interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay
On Tuesday, December 2 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed a piece of paper that changed the course of history. That same day, President Bush signed a bill to put the Pentagon in funds for the next year. The US faced unprecedented challenges, Bush told a large and enthusiastic audience, and terror was one of them. The US would respond to these challenges, and it would do so in the “finest traditions of valour”. And then he signed a large increase in the defence budget.

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kurnaz250_250

He spent over four years in Guantánamo Bay, the infamous US detention camp. The tale of Murat Kurnaz, as told by himself, will hit US bookstores this week. In his first interview since his release from Guantánamo Bay in 2006, Kurnaz tells Germany’s “Stern”-magazine all about torture, solitary confinement, being humiliated, and his life in fear.

Why do you have this enormous beard?
The sole reason is the Sunna.

The Sunna – that is the Muslim tradition based on the life of Mohammed.  Muslims should try to do everything that our prophet did. Many of the prophets had beards, including the prophet Jesus. Doesn’t the Pope have a beard as well?

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Tribune Editorial

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I resisted watching ”Taxi to the Dark Side,” the documentary on America’s treatment of terror suspects that won this year’s Academy Award as best documentary feature. The review DVD I was sent was sitting on top of my television set for a week, reminding me – no exhorting me – to look at it, but I kept avoiding it. I literally had to steel myself to finally sit down and watch, knowing how sickened I’d be by the subject matter.
The featured story was of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver, who was dead five days after he was taken into American custody at the Bagram Air Base in 2002. He was an innocent man, as it turned out, and not someone who had participated in a rocket attack on American forces, as was claimed by the Afghan militiamen who turned Dilawar over. Still, the dark-haired husband and father spent his last days in an American military prison with his arms shackled to the ceiling, forced to remain standing, hooded and not allowed to sleep.
He was beaten so badly about the lower body that the coroner said his legs had been pulpified. His death was ruled a homicide.  We killed him – slowly.
The documentary offers a stark description of this monstrous crime, including pictures of the prisoner isolation cages with the chains hanging from the ceiling and chilling admissions by those who joined in Dilawar’s suffering.

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In 2003, when he was a deputy assistant U. S. attorney general, John Yoo wrote a long legal memorandum arguing that the president has the inherent constitutional authority to torture people.

Furthermore, Yoo claimed, the president’s power to torture can’t be limited by Congress, the courts, or international treaties. As long as the torture is being carried out because the president believes it’s necessary, Yoo argued, it’s legal and cannot be made illegal.

Yoo’s arguments bothered some people quite a bit. His memo, after all, was not merely some academic exercise. Yoo provided the U. S. government with a handy legal justification for committing acts normally considered war crimes, and our government duly proceeded to torture hundreds of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at Guantanamo Bay (several of the victims died as a result).

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