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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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Our journey is not complete,” says President Obama, “until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law” (Obama puts gay equality centre stage, 22 January). In similarly stirring terms, Obama mentioned several uncompleted journeys in his inaugural speech, but overlooked the “journey” toward closing Guantánamo. This is especially strange as Obama made this a key priority immediately after taking office in 2009. It now seems the president has abandoned this journey. Which is bad news for its 166 detainees – including the former UK resident Shaker Aamer, who remains uncharged, untried and apparently forgotten. 
Tim Hancock 
Campaigns director, Amnesty International UK

 

• Gary Younge (A date to echo King’s dream, 21 January) omits an important name, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The election and re-election of an African-American president could never have occurred without the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to that legislation black voters in southern states faced formidable obstacles preventing them from even registering to vote. In 1962, for instance, less than 30% of black voters in the south were registered to vote, whereas that figure leapt to 67% by 1970 as a direct result of the 1965 Act. Credit for that massively important legislation is, of course, partly due to the bravery of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who organised sit-ins, marches and other forms of peaceful protest, thereby provoking often violent responses from local officials.

But these efforts would have counted for little without Johnson’s masterly leadership from the White House. It was his drive and legislative skill that made the act possible. And on this occasion at least LBJ was not content to simply pass a bill. He took a keen interest in its implementation, checking on the appointment of registrars, encouraging civil rights groups to put forward black candidates and monitoring the improvement in black registration figures.

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Sweden’s foreign minister Carl Bildt has stated that Sweden received no information with regards to two Swedes, suspected of terror crime in Somalia, who were extradited to the US. In an interview with Sveriges Radio on Saturday, Bildt was asked whether Sweden received any information before the Swedes were taken to the US.

 ”If they’d be transported when it happened? No,” he said.

The two Swedish nationals, aged 27 and 29-years-old and with Somali backgrounds, were arrested in Djibouti in August 2012.

The Swedish foreign ministry launched negotiations with authorities in Djibouti for the men to travel back to Sweden.

But before negotiations were concluded, the two men were taken to the United States to face charges of participating in weapons and explosives training with al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.

The Swedes joined al-Shabaab in 2008 and are accused of participating in weapons training with the group over a four year period.

A brother to one of the men has however previously claimed that the men regretted joining up with al-Shabaab and were on the run when they were arrested in August.

When the men were arrested the Swedish Security Service approached the prosecutor to assess whether they could be charged with any terror crime in Sweden.

It was assessed that there was no legal grounds to open a criminal investigation.

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 By Maher Arar To torture or not to torture, why is this question being asked in America? The answer you will receive is different depending on who you speak to. 

Proponents of torture, such as Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz, argued in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that there is a need in “exceptional circumstances” to resort to “legal torture”.

Citing the ticking bomb scenario, Dershowitz argues that a “torture warrant” can be issued by a judge after being presented with “compelling evidence” that a suspect holds vital information that, if not disclosed to policing agencies on time, could lead to catastrophic consequences.

Pro-torture arguments, made by Dershowitz and others since 9/11, shaped the thinking of many US administration officials for years, and may be for decades, to come. The infamous Torture  Memos that were prepared for former US President George Bush by John Yoo, then Deputy Assistant Attorney General, didn’t exist in vacuum; they were simply the end result of a few years of misleading, and often poisoned, intellectual and academic debate on the subject.

Torture proponents believe that unless intelligence agencies are granted extended powers, they will not be able to fight terrorism effectively. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” – marketing name for torture – like waterboarding and sleep deprivation became must-have tools in the arsenal of intelligence agents.

Fantasised utility of torture

Hollywood recently endorsed this notion by producing films that glorify the use of torture. For instance, Zero Dark Thirty, a recently released movie, focuses on the fantasised utility of torture; in this case, on information derived by torturing Ammar, a terrorism detainee. This intelligence, we are told, eventually led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. 

f it were not for the fact that properly obtained intelligence led to the discovery of the precise location of al-Qaeda leader, torture proponents would have scored a point. Time and again, those advocating the use of torture in the legal, academic, government and entertainment industries go to great lengths to convince us that torture works and ends up saving lives (as if we have already forgotten that the invasion of Iraq was mainly based on false intelligence that was derived through torture).

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WASHINGTON, D.C. November 13, 2012 — Leon Trotsky once said: “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Unfortunately, that is true for the innocent men, women and children in the Middle East who have witnessed their loved ones blown into pieces by drone strikes.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be winding down but the drone war lives on, with no end in sight. Drone strikes are one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy arsenals for fighting the War on Terror.

Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, writes that in Pakistan alone, President Obama has authorized over 283 drone strikes, six times more than President George W. Bush in his eight years in office.

Forget waterboarding, a drone strike is mass torture.

Sure, bad guys get killed in the process. But so do innocent women and children. In Pakistan for example, BBC’s Jane Corbin reports the story of a young girl named Nabeela Ur Rehman. She was tending to her cow in the family compound when she witnessed the slaughtering of her grandmother by a drone, right in front of her eyes. The trauma she must have experienced, and the fear that she continues to live with is unfathomable.

Investigators from Stanford and NYU Law Schools released a study (“Living under Drones”) about the effect of drones on the civilian population in Pakistan. Some of those effects include severe anxiety and psychological disorder.

Have drone strikes killed top Al-Qaeda targets? Are they more efficient than ground troops? Yes and yes.

The American approach to fighting the War on Terror has slowly shifted from a counter-insurgency strategy into a counter-terrorism approach. Counterinsurgency–like in Iraq and Afghanistan–requires protecting the population, winning them over, training the country’s army, and gathering human intelligence. The amount of money and military personnel it takes to successfully deploy such a strategy is unsustainable in the long run. Not to mention the inevitability of mass casualties.

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WASHINGTON — The controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be closed and the 166 detainees being held there could be absorbed safely by U.S. prisons, a government report says.

Many of the detainees are accused of plotting terrorist acts against the United States.

“This report demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman who released the Government Accountability Office study Wednesday.

The GAO study shows that U.S. prisons already hold 373 prisoners convicted of terrorism in 98 facilities across the country.

“As far as I know, there hasn’t been a single security problem reported in any of these cases,” Feinstein said. “This fact outweighs not only the high cost of maintaining Guantanamo – which costs more than $114 million a year – but also provides the same degree of security without the criticism of operating a military prison in an isolated location.”

The study said there are six Defense Department prisons and 98 Justice Department prisons that could take the detainees, but it does say that existing facilities likely would need to be modified and current inmates may need to be relocated to make room for the new arrivals.

President Barack Obama ordered the closing of the Guantanamo’s detention facility when he took office in 2009, but that was blocked by a Republican-led bill that cut off funding to move the detainees to the U.S. The lawmakers cited security concerns, saying the presence of the detainees would encourage terror attacks in the states or cities where they were being held.

Feinstein commissioned the study in 2008 to find out where the detainees could be held, if the White House was able to move ahead with Guantanamo’s closure.

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Islamabad—Two hundred and ten Pakistanis including 6 females are languishing in US jails on various charges ranging from immigration, espionage, larceny, fraud, possession of weapons to robbery incidents, according to the list provided to the parliament by the Foreign office

According to the list , two females Parveen Bhatti and Hina Hafeez are serving sentence since June 2008 in fraud case, Hira Ashraf and Sher bano Mosa from November 2009 for overstaying on visa, Huma Javed since Sept 2008 for over staying and Dr Aafia Siddiqui since August 2008 for espionage.

According to the list, Abu Rehman Abdul Rabi Rahim and Mohammad Ahmed Ghulam who were arrested along with Saifullah Paracha in Sept 2004 have been shown as Pakistani citizens. Similarly Balochi Ammar Lavar Khan Majeed is in US custody for past seven years but is not yet been indicted.

The majority of the arrested Pakistanis have been arrested on violation of immigration charges. 2008 was cited as the year in which most Pakistanis were jailed in US.A.  Pakistani named Sohail Qazi is rotting in US jail since 1972 for violating immigration law. Similarly Mukhtar Faisal is also serving jail sentence since 1979 and no charges have been shown against him.

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From Prime Ministers to pop stars, terror suspects to teenage tearaways, Scotland Yard has questioned them all. But the request by the British Attorney General that the London police launch an investigation into MI5, the U.K.’s domestic security service, is unprecedented. At issue are claims by Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantánamo detainee, who alleges that British intelligence agents knew he was being held and tortured in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, and even supplied questions to his interrogators.

Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says that to evaluate his client’s claims — which could expand the investigation to include similar allegations by fellow Gitmo alumni — police will need access to records and personnel from the British intelligence community as well as from ministries with oversight of the security services and perhaps even to the pinnacles of decision-making in Westminster — and Washington. “It would be very surprising if the decision [on Mohamed] was not taken at a high level. The question is how high,” says Stafford Smith, who is also the director of the legal charity Reprieve. During a live broadcast of Britain’s nightly Channel 4 News on March 26, the attorney was more explicit. “The British investigation cannot just stop at the British people because the real torturers … were the Americans and the Pakistanis and the Moroccans,” he said.

 

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder says some Chinese Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being considered for release in the United States.

During an interview Wednesday, Holder was asked whether members of a group of Uighurs (WEE’-gurz) at the U.S. military detention facility in Cuba could be released on American soil. He said it was a possibility.

The United States has cleared 17 of the Uighurs for release from Guantanamo, but insists it will not hand them over to China because the Uighurs fear they will be tortured.

 

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