No Prosecutions, No Accountability: Another Day in Torture USA

Sometimes I am truly overwhelmed with both gratitude and awe at the amount of important work being done on the ongoing torture scandal by journalists, bloggers, attorneys, psychologists, doctors, and just plain decent people.

I wanted to highlight a few that seem specially extraordinary, or of current interest. At the close, we'll look more closely at where the fight for prosecutions stands today. In this posting, we'll look at a number of articles, including one that highlights the role of psychologists in planning torture, and one that compares the role of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons with the practice at Guanatanamo.

Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse is a Daily Kos regular blogger, who just finished a second installment of the DK Sunday Torture News Roundup (first installment is here). PDNC highlighted the ongoing case of Aafia Siddiqui. Siddiqui was likely a U.S. "ghost prisoner" of the CIA, and is now being held in a Texas prison, where her sanity and competency to stand trial is being determined. You must read the entire piece, for its cumulative impact, which is powerful.
Psychologists and the Use of Torture

Psychologist and activist Stephen Soldz has been on fire of late. He has published a book chapter, Closing Eyes to Atrocities: U.S. Psychologists, Detainee Interrogations, and the Response of the American Psychological Association, which is part of a new book published by Harvard University Press: Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics (Harvard Law School Human Rights Program Practice Series) edited by Ryan Goodman and Mindy Jane Roseman.

Soldz has also covered the recent revelations in the Washington Post regarding the torture interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. From Stephen's article:

Though the Post doesn’t say this, similar claims were reported in July 2007 by Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban in her account of the role psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played in designing, conducting, and training for the CIA’s torture program. Eban added the detail that the pre-torture information was obtained primarily by FBI [rather than CIA] agents....

It appears that these psychologists based their torture program on the "learned helplessness" theories of former American Psychological Association President Martin Seligman. Seligman lectured to a 2002 CIA-organized meeting at which Mitchell and Jessen were present. [See Valtin on this conference] While Seligman claims to be ignorant of any connection between the meeting and CIA torture policy, afterwards Mitchell and Jessen were citing Seligman's ideas as inspiration for their work. Mayer has pointed out that Seligman must have known Mitchell and Jessen as he has recently admitted that they were in the audience for this talk.

We might also add, as the Defense Department Inspector General and the Senate Armed Services Committee reported, that it was largely psychologists that designed the abusive interrogation techniques for the military that were implemented at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the Zubaida fiasco, the CIA turned to help from the American Psychological Association [APA]. As I recently reported, they organized in July 2003 a joint APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, to which CIA torture psychologists Mitchell and Jessen were invited. At this conference they discussed, among other things:

What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?.... What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?

The APA leadership has never come clean regarding their participation in this conference and why the CIA’s top torture consultants were invited. They have never revealed what these torture planners told the conference or what information they were provided by the assembled psychologists. Rather, the APA, when asked about these torture psychologists, simply repeats, as if a mantra, that they are not APA members and are not subject to APA ethics sanctions, as if that clears the APA. Until the APA makes all records of the conference publicly and speaks in depth of what went on there, we can only continue to suspect that they have much to hide.

I should note that the American Psychological Association passed a resolution, initiated by a member referendum, to ban psychologist participation at national security sites that practice torture. However, as impressive as that sounds, the APA's new policy is advisory only, and it's unclear how exactly it will be determined what sites don't fit APA's policy. Meanwhile, so far as we know, psychologists still staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and various undisclosed Special Forces sites.

The APA is also still studying, five years after it was asked to do so, a possible revision of its Ethics Code, which still allows any psychologist the "right" to disregard their own ethical code and follow orders of the organization to which they belong (Standard 1.02). The code, revised in 2002, after 9/11, has been criticized by a number of professionals and other ethicists, who liken it to the Nazi plea that one was "only following orders."

If psychologists' ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take steps to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.

When public comment was solicited, military psychologists were quick to jump to the defense of 1.02. One psychologist, known to be a former member of a BSCT team, wrote:

Thanks for the opportunity to comment on Standard 1.02 and to review the abundant materials accompanying the request for comment.... I am not in favor of changing the current standard. I base my opinion on a careful review of these materials, my own experience as a practicing psychologist for almost 30 years (in private, public, and military settings), and my service on a state psychological association ethics committee. I see no evidence that the current situation meets the substantive criteria established by the Ethics Committee (1995, 1997) to warrant change to the Ethics Code outside the standard revision process.... the proposed change would create an impermissibly vague ethical standard that would require psychologists in certain circumstances to violate law, and that an ambiguous standard would have negative consequences for individual psychologists, the association, and the general public.

Torture, Here and Abroad

Meanwhile, over at FDL, bmaz as a great discussion going about Cheney Lies, Obstruction Of Justice & Torture Tape Destruction, taking off on the same Washington Post article that Stephen Soldz was commenting on above:

It has been my belief from the outset that the reason the "torture tapes" were destroyed was not simply because they depicted the brutal torture of detainee subjects but, just as importantly, if not more so, they demonstrated there was no credible/usable information produced as a result of that torture. Warrick and Finn confirm this. Even worse, they confirm what little good information the Bushies did extract from abu-Zubaydah was obtained through traditional interrogation prior to the onset of the torture program....

The Bushies made the conscious and criminal decision to go full tilt torture having direct reason to know both that abu-Zubaydah was cooperating through traditional interrogation and he was of very marginal use as an information source to start with.

I'd also like to point out a very interesting article in the recent New Yorker. Enitled "Hellhole" and written by Atul Gawande, the article discusses the decades long controversy over the use of solitary confinement in U.S. supermax prisons. It describes the terrible psychological consequences of being placed in isolation, without contact with other human beings, for months or even years on end.

EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury....

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy.

Gawande discussed some of the early research on the effects of isolation by former American Psychological Association president Harry Harlow.

[Harlow] happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

An associate had brought the Gawande article to my attention, and thought it deserved a letter to the editor by myself, and I agreed. What follows is the text of my letter to the New Yorker. I can't know if it will be published. I hope it will be.

Dear Editor,

As someone who only two years ago presented a paper on sensory deprivation to the yearly convention of the American Psychological Association, I was both interested in and touched by Atul Gawande's article (March 30, 2009) on the effects of isolation and solitary confinement on adult human beings. While in many ways a splendid article, Mr. Gawande's sources are incorrect in finding Harry Harlow's monkey isolation experiments to have been the serendipitous result of unintended consequences.

In fact, Harlow's research was connected to earlier work done by Rene Spitz, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingame, and John Bowlby, on the effects of separation and isolation upon children. He was also doing government research on the effects of isolation, as it related to "brainwashing". With his colleagues, psychologist I.E. Farber, and psychiatrist Louis J. West, Harlow published "Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread)" in the December 1957 issue of Sociometry. The article was singled out in the CIA's KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual in the early 1960s as providing a blueprint for a modern type of coercive interrogation, i.e., torture.

The use of isolation at Guantanamo, as pointed out by Mr. Gawande, is an integral part of the detention process there. Its existence is in part derivative from the widespread (and immoral) use of isolation at U.S. Supermax prisons. But it is also connected to the DDD/KUBARK model of intensive interrogation. The Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures called for initial isolation of prisoners for 30 days or more. The same instruction found its way into the 2006 (and latest) version of the Army Field Manual for interrogations, which has an appendix that also allows for use of sleep deprivation, and modified forms of sensory deprivation. The AFM also calls for manipulation of old fears, and creation of "new" ones, as well as allowing for use of drugs in interrogations. Most recently, Susan Crawford, President Bush's choice for Convening Authority at Guantanamo, told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that the use of these techniques, and some others, on the prisoner Mohammad Al-Qahtani amounted to "torture." Following this revelation, the Center for Constitutional Rights called for President Obama to reject the offending portions of the Army Field Manual.

Harry Harlow's work on isolation and sensory deprivation (the two are closely related) is a key instance of the uneasy alliance between the military and intelligence agencies with the academic world of the behavioral and medical sciences. As Mary Shelley foresaw two hundred years ago, the scientific understanding of human nature could lead to both great benefits and horrific evils. Harlow's association with work on torture interrogations was, sadly, one of the bleakest chapters in American psychology.

Another of my colleagues reminds me that the Gottfried bill, now in the New York State legislature targets isolation abuse and domestic prison abuses as well as prohibiting all NY State health care professionals from involvement in interrogations, domestic or military. See also this article on the bill by Stephen Soldz.

Whither Prosecutions?

Finally, to end on a somber note (if being more somber is even possible at this point), journalist Jason Leopold is reporting today that Congressional calls for prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture are basically dead on arrival (emphases added):

Last June, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 55 other congressional Democrats signed a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey demanding a special prosecutor to investigate the growing body of evidence that Bush administration officials had sanctioned torture, which had been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Not unexpectedly, Mukasey – a staunch defender of Bush’s theories about expansive presidential powers – ignored the letter. Now, however, despite even more evidence of torture and a Democratic administration in place, the calls for a special prosecutor have grown muted.

Aides to several Democratic lawmakers who signed the June 2008 letter told me that the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush administration’s past actions could become a distraction to that focus.

They added that the most that now can be expected is either a “blue ribbon” investigative panel such as Conyers proposed earlier this year or a similar “truth and reconciliation commission” as advocated by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. Not a single signer of last year’s letter has stepped forward to renew the demand for a special prosecutor to the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder.

When one sees the tremendous bulk of evidence surrounding the use of torture by the United States, and the fantastic amount of ongoing work on the issue by so many outstanding individuals and groups, it's hard to believe that even months after the departure of the unlamented Bush and Cheney, the issue remains alive and yet under the radar for most Americans. Meanwhile, a Spanish judge "has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials…over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay." The potential defendants include Bush-Cheney attorneys John Yoo and David Addington, and former Department of Defense General Counsel, William Haynes.

But there are no charges in Spain as yet. Meanwhile, despite assertions to the contrary, torture remains SOP in Obama's America, whether it be in Supermax prisons, or practiced by "legal" means abroad, courtesy of the Army's own official field manual, or hidden still by the ongoing existence of the extraordinary rendition program that the Obama administration was reluctant to terminate, or hidden effectively by lack of recourse to review by hundreds, if not thousands of U.S. prisoners from Iraq to Afghanistan.

So one continues to educate, cajole, and stimulate the populace to take action against these crimes against humanity, another frustrating day in Torture USA. One can still sign a petition to Holder and Obama calling for prosecutions, just click here.

SASC Full Declassified Report Due Out, Levin to Call for DOJ Referral

Jason Leopold reported today that the Senate Armed Services Committee is very close to releasing -- "possibly as early as next week" —- its 200 page, 2000 footnote

... voluminous report on the treatment of detainees held in U.S. custody and the interrogations methods they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources, who described the report as the most detailed account to date of how the Bush administration and Defense Department implemented interrogation methods widely regarded as torture.

Levin and the SASC's investigation is a gold mine of information about how the Bush administration implemented its torture program. Both the documents produced by the investigation, and the declassified 19-page summary released by Sen. Levin last year contained important new information, such the details surrounding John Yoo's drafting of the torture memos.

Last year, in response to questions by Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Condoleezza Rice, who was National Security Adviser when interrogation methods were discussed, said that beginning as early as the summer of 2002 Yoo provided legal advice at “several” meetings that she attended and that the Department of Justice’s advice on the interrogation program “was being coordinated by Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales.”

According to a declassified summary of the Armed Services Committee report, Yoo met with Gonzales and David Addington, counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, to discuss the subjects he intended to address in the August 2002 torture memos.

According to Mr. Leopold:

Levin’s investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete. The declassified version of his report will include a full account of the roles military psychologists played in helping the Bush administration implement a policy where harsh interrogations was used against detainees.

The release of the full declassified version of the Armed Service's Committee report will also put additional pressure on the Obama administration to immediately launch a full-scale investigation into the Bush administration’s interrogation program....

The declassified report will include a full accounting of how the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, which was meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime, was reverse engineered and used against detainees during interrogations. SERE training techniques include stress positions, forced nudity, use of fear, sleep deprivation and, until recently, the Navy SERE school used the waterboard.

Already, the committee has revealed that discussion surrounding the use of SERE techniques on detainees began in the spring of 2002, before the issuance of a legal opinion authorizing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

Of course, as I wrote last June, we'll see that the timeline around the initiation of SERE's involvement will go back at least as far as December 2001.

But the one document produced from the December 2001 contact -- a fax cover sheet from the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), sent from "Lt. Col. Dan Baumgartner" to "Mr. Richard Shiffrin," who worked for Haynes's in Rumsfeld's DoD General Council office -- introduces a theme of aggressive courting by JPRA/SERE personnel to take on the interrogations/exploitation task:

Mr. Shiffrin --
Here's our spin on exploitation. If you need experts to facilitate this process, we stand ready to assist. There are not many in DoD outside of JPRA that have the level of expertise we do in exploitation and how to resist it.

One limitation imposed upon the SASC report was that it did not investigate the CIA, who refused to cooperate with the committee. But some tidbits from the investigation appear to be emerging. As Jason Leopold reports it:

Rice told Levin in written responses to his committee’s queries last September that the CIA’s interrogation program was reviewed by National Security Council principals and that Rumsfeld participated in that review.

Rice said that when the CIA sought approval of the interrogation program she asked Tenet to brief the principals and asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to “personally advise NSC Principals whether the program was lawful.”

John Bellinger, Rice’s Legal Advisor, told Levin that he asked CIA lawyers to seek legal advice not only from the OLC, but also from the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, headed at the time by Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff reportedly advised the CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that the August 1, 2002, legal opinion protected CIA interrogators from prosecution if they used waterboarding or other harsh tactics.

Hopefully, we may know about the OLC "advice" when the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) at the Department of Justice produces the results of its four year investigation of the OLC memos written largely by John Yoo and David Addington.

What will these bombshells produce? What if the missing and supposedly seriously shocking Abu Ghraib photos are released, as now appears possible, per ACLU press release last week (ignored by the press, and blogosphere in general -- though not this intrepid blogger, who has been pushing almost daily for prosecution of the Bush torture criminals).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the government's request to have the full appeals court rehear a decision from last September ordering the release of the photos as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking information on the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas.

Will these and other revelations be enough to unfreeze the large scale societal intertia on ending torture and prosecuting U.S. government and military-intelligence officials who plotted and conducted such crimes against humanity? Leopold reports that Levin has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special individual, such as "a retired federal judge", to review the report and make a recommendation to Holder about what to do next. No one too high up wants to say the "P"-word out loud.

I have been quite pessimistic of late about the ability of this scandal to move beyond the purview of a handful of civil liberties groups, progressive bloggers and activist websites. While there is the promise of some movement towards social and political change or reform -- the release of some of the OLC memos, which revealed a near totalitarian plan to make the Executive Branch of the U.S. government free of other governmental checks, and the strengthening of FOIA access to the public of government documents -- the primary actions of both the Executive and Legislative branches has been to circle the wagons to protect the government elite now out of office, and preach the gospel of "moving on", with a nod towards token recognition of the problems (through a "Truth Commission" sans prosecutorial weight) and sage wagging of the head about the lessons of the past.

Even the most liberal witness at Sen. Leahy's hearings earlier this month regarding the feasibility of such a "Truth Commission" was clear that the results wouldn't provide anything as politically explosive as the Pike Committee did during the heyday of the investigatory 1970s.

Governmental rhetoric about openness and truth about torture rings more than a little hollow, given the administration's position on backing the old Bush/Cheney line on making judicial revelations about torture anathema by invoking bogus "state secrets" and national security suppression of evidence, even of the right to go to trial itself. All this comes as the new Obama administration has yet to answer for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, proposing a South Korea-sized U.S. contingent for Iraq to serve an indefinite period, and making the torture-riddled Army Field Manual of today the law of the land when it comes to interrogations.

I don't see how the drive for prosecutions can withstand the inaction of much of civil society on this issue, and that includes the silence or inactivity of the churches, the unions, the bulk of academia and the declassed (or scruffy) intelligentsia and student population. But politics often takes strange turns, and there is no complete accounting for large-scale social-psychological phenomena.

If the torture revelations come at the right way, at the right time, and with the correct visceral punch, the population may yet rise up and demand justice be done, even if it means an unprecedented indictment of a series of the former highest officials in the land. If this happened, it would be as if a lighting bolt had descended upon the body politic, and social struggle would heat up to an indefinite but large degree.

We must state our appreciation for the work of Sen. Carl Levin and the Senate Armed Services Committee for the fine job they have done, even knowing, as they must, that a full airing of the issues would be like throwing a keg of dynamite on the tinder of a society reeling from eight years of near-dictatorial rule. But the work is not done yet, and I will reserve full congratulations until the report itself is out and I've had a chance to review it. I look forward to writing my review, and reading the analyses of the many other fine commentators on the net who are sure to pounce on this juicy nugget and squeeze it for all it is worth... at least I hope that's what happens.

U.S. Militiary and CIA Interventions Since WWII: A Listing

If you haven't caught it yet, William Blum's Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, is a remarkable, if brief, compendium of U.S. criminal actions in the past 60 years. The table of contents, reproduced below, with links to sample chapters, represents a list of military and covert interventions around the world that in their totality mark the United States as a rogue nation, a terrorist state.

Most Americans would feel the above statement was extremely harsh or even nonsensical. They have been taught that the U.S. is the beacon of the world's people, even the last, best hope for mankind. The truth is often too awful to imagine, to stare in the face. But just as a house dweller cannot ignore forever the termites eating away at the foundations of his house, the American people must come to terms with what the leaders of their country have done in the recent historical period. If the trillions-dollar economic doesn't wake them up that something is seriously wrong with this country and how it is run, then nothing may awaken them.

From the website, killinghope.org (each linked chapter is footnoted with source material):

Introduction
1. China - 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy - 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style
3. Greece - 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state
4. The Philippines - 1940s and 1950s: America's oldest colony
5. Korea - 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania - 1949-1953: The proper English spy
7. Eastern Europe - 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor
8. Germany - 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism
9. Iran - 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings
10. Guatemala - 1953-1954: While the world watched
11. Costa Rica - Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally - Part 1
12. Syria - 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government
13. Middle East - 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America
14. Indonesia - 1957-1958: War and pornography
15. Western Europe - 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts
16. British Guiana - 1953-1964: The CIA's international labor mafia
17. Soviet Union - Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing
18. Italy - 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal's orphans and techno-fascism
19. Vietnam - 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus
20. Cambodia - 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism
21. Laos - 1957-1973: L'Armée Clandestine
22. Haiti - 1959-1963: The Marines land, again
23. Guatemala - 1960: One good coup deserves another
24. France/Algeria - 1960s: L'état, c'est la CIA
25. Ecuador - 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks
26. The Congo - 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba
27. Brazil - 1961-1964: Introducing the marvelous new world of death squads
28. Peru - 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle
29. Dominican Republic - 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy
30. Cuba - 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution
31. Indonesia - 1965: Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others
East Timor - 1975: And 200,000 more
32. Ghana - 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line
33. Uruguay - 1964-1970: Torture -- as American as apple pie
34. Chile - 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead
35. Greece - 1964-1974: "Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution," said
the President of the United States
36. Bolivia - 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d'etat
37. Guatemala - 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized "final solution"
38. Costa Rica - 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally -- Part 2
39. Iraq - 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work
40. Australia - 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust
41. Angola - 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game
42. Zaire - 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven
43. Jamaica - 1976-1980: Kissinger's ultimatum
44. Seychelles - 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance
45. Grenada - 1979-1984: Lying -- one of the few growth industries in Washington
46. Morocco - 1983: A video nasty
47. Suriname - 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman
48. Libya - 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match
49. Nicaragua - 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion
50. Panama - 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about
52. Iraq - 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
53. Afghanistan - 1979-1992: America's Jihad
54. El Salvador - 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style
55. Haiti - 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire - 1992 to present

Notes
Appendix I: This is How the Money Goes Round
Appendix II: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945
Appendix III: U. S. Government Assassination Plots
Index

Blood Pacts Are Seldom Broken

While the ACLU, CCR, EFF and other civil liberties groups are fighting valiantly to protect Americans against governmental eavesdropping, the fight may be losing for technological-political reasons, and not simply legally.

The vast web that is electronic snooping is world-wide and includes reciprocal agreements between countries to share information. The actual wiretappers, in many instances, are "private" companies contracted out by the NSA or other governmental agencies. In both such cases, Fourth Amendment protections are ineffective, and FISA courts inapplicable.

Take the 2006 agreement the U.S. government made with Mexico to build a huge telecom/Internet eavesdropping center. They don’t need to concentrate solely on communications originating or terminating in the United States… they are contracting it out!

What follows is from the State Department document used to procure vendors for the project with AFI (Mexico’s version of the NSA) noted above (.doc link and Google cache link):

This procurement action is undertaken to establish a lawful interception solution that will provide the Government of Mexico, Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico (PGR), Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI) with the capability to intercept, analyze, and use intercepted information from all types of communications systems operating in Mexico…. Equipment supplied must be manufactured in the United States….

The proposed system must comply with the following AFI stated requirements for interception of target calls and sessions from (1) TELMEX PSTN network, through analog lines, (2) TELCEL TDMA and GSM network, (3) NEXTEL iDEIM/GSM network, (4) TELEFONICA network, (5) UNEFON network, (6) IUSACELL CDMA network and TDMA network, (7) Existing CISCO VoIP network at customer’s premises, (8) packet data from the Mexico PRODIGY ISP network. Additionally the client desires the establishment of a central monitoring center with the capabilities of (1) real-time and off-line playback, (2) fax decoding, (3) packet data decoding, (4) storage of all calls for at least 25,000 hours, (5) storage of all session related information, (6) 30 monitoring stations and 30 printers, (7) cellular location and tracking. Capabilities must include TDMA, GSM, CDMA, iDEN, AMPS, PCS, landline, FAX, Email, chat, internet, SMS and VoIP….

1. The successful solution will fulfill the following:

a. Help deter, prevent, and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism.
b. Strengthen the USG’s and Mexico’s protective posture to disseminate timely and accurate, actionable information to each country’s respective federal, state, local, private, and international partners.

As James Bamford noted in this book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, p. 228:

Since the U.S. certainly qualifies as an “international partner,” it means Mexico is obligated to disseminate its data to a U.S. agency. But what is perhaps even more troublesome is the requirement to share its data with “private” partners — in other words private surveillance companies within the U.S.

This type of arrangement with Mexico and other countries may in fact be among the most secret parts of the Bush administration’s entire warrantless eavesdropping program. That is because it completely bypasses the requirement for probable cause that one of the parties is connected to al-Qaeda. The intercepted data is gathered by Mexicans in Mexico… and passed in bulk to the U.S., possibly to the NSA or FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration.

Astute commenter, William Ockham, pointed out the following at an interesting post at Emptywheel/FDL yesterday:

... if you read (between the lines of) the documents filed in the Nacchio case, you can see that the NSA was paying the telcos to tap into all the fiber optic cable laid overseas so that the NSA could pull all that traffic into the Narus systems any time they wanted.

As a famous quote from an Oliver Stone movie says, “We are through the looking glass here, people.”

U.S. democracy is proving to be a giant failure, and in its place we are seeing the worst sort of nightmare any dystopian author could imagine.

Echelon II

Bamford calls the system of setting up taps on all fiber-optics cables, in conjunction with the use of private companies like Verint or Narus or NICE Systems, Echelon II. (For more introduction to Project Echelon, a massive signals intelligence global interception and relay system run by the U.S. and its closest allies, see this article.)

Bush attorney Stephen Bradley testified before the House Judiciary Committee (Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security), during hearings to discuss updating FISA (9/6/06), as reported at In These Times:

As a Justice Department attorney [Bradbury] told the House Judiciary Committee after the wiretapping program was revealed, “I think the president has made it clear that there is no other program that involves domestic electronic surveillance of domestic communications,” leaving open the possibility that foreign electronic surveillance of both foreign and domestic communications is still ongoing.

The NSA and other government agencies are throwing smoke and mirrors, and the ACLU and other groups are already lagging behind events. The government has been routing its eavesdropping work around U.S. prying eyes for some time. Bush’s real crime, from the standpoint of the spooks and FBI types is that he pushed hard to do in the U.S. what the government has promoted in dictatorships and authoritarian countries for some time, including reciprocal agreements, secret backdoors, etc. to such up the info. By pushing hard in the U.S., he was bound to stir up a hornets nest of civil libertarians, etc., or whistleblowers like Mark Klein, a San Francisco AT&T tech who demonstrated how the government was sucking all U.S. Internet traffic into servers at Room 641A at AT&T's Folsom Street building.

It’s not that Comey or the FBI were upset about all the wiretapping when they went to Ashcroft's hospital bed to get him to reject Bush/Gonzales's surveillance request. These cops got their dream come true when CALEA passed in 1994. They’ve spent much the subsequent years finding ways to expand access to the Internet, and one way they did that to get close to Verint, the private company that secretly taps most U.S. communications.

They just don’t want to get caught. If I’ve learned anything from my anti-torture work, it’s that these governmental crimes are concerned with cover-up from day one. If you think about it, it’s built into the covert mind-set and SOP. In fact, it’s one way to identify what is a covert op, i.e., there’s misdirection and cover-up from the very beginning.

We cannot be protected by FISA anymore. Nothing can protect us. That’s the shocking truth.

Orwellian Pessimism vs. Social Struggle

As if the reader cannot tell... I am very pessimistic these days. The release of the ICRC report on the CIA barely stirred a ripple, unless you frequent certain websites (as we do), but in Congress and the press as a whole, it’s business as usual, diverted by the circus that is the financial cataclysm. The latter itself is essentially a threatened strike by big finance capital to bring down the entire world financial system if it is not compensated for its amazing losses, once their attempt to totally game the system fell apart, mainly because they believed their own propaganda about the market.

The political parties are morally and practically dead. What they do doesn’t matter anymore. This is the legacy of lawless war, torture, and out-of-control spying. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans now staff this military-spy-surveillance world, both private and government, and they have a vested interest in its preservation. Moreover, the boards of the private companies move seamlessly in and out of the corporate world, including its financial, major energy and industrial sectors.

One asks, "Who’s in charge?" Is it really Dick Cheney from a safe house in Arlington? A very good question.

Do not look for a single individual. The rule is out there for anyone to see. It’s not a dictatorship of a single person. It’s rule by committees, and these committees are "democratically" open to anyone who has the money or has risen as a dedicated and talented servant of the system. It's rule by a class.

We’re about to have verified (oh, sometime this year, I believe), that the U.S. did conduct drug and behavioral experiments upon prisoners, and most likely Jose Padilla among them. (See also Padilla's attorneys' Motion to Dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct.) Will anything happen as a result? Will we even see post-Church Committee laws passed to protect us? No. The demand for consensus was drawn in the sand on 9/11 (or rather in subsequent months and years), and sealed with the deaths of 100,000s of Iraqis and an unknown number of victims who suffered death by torture (likely in the hundreds, at least).

Blood pacts are seldom broken. If you didn’t speak out before, it’s very hard to do so now.

As a result, we will have both social decay, and more tumult and oppression. This is because while the populace is passive, it is disgruntled, and the oligarchy will want to snuff out any sparks of resistance or effective opposition. Obama may be humane - god, I hope so - but he totally accepts the need for the oligarchy to rule.

I’m not sure what should be done at this point. Without some kind of social struggle, the last bastions of liberty, which were set aside by having an independent judiciary, will succumb, and there will be nothing left to protect us.

Turley on Maddow: Obama Must Appoint a Special Prosecutor on Torture

Beautiful Music for a Bleak Year

Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Opus 110
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
I. Largo; II: Allegro Molto

Sabrina Tabby & Caeli Smith, violins; Madeline Smith, viola, Genevieve Tabby, cello

Seraphina at Ethical Society Building, Philadelphia
April 22, 2007

Sunday Torture Weekly "Round-up"

Also posted at Daily Kos

The Sunday Weekly Torture "Round-up" is intended to be a new regular feature at Daily Kos, capturing stories on the ongoing torture scandal, especially those that might otherwise escape notice. At the same time, we will strive to present an overview of important new developments in the drive to hold the U.S. government responsible for its war crimes, in addition to covering stories concerning torture from other countries, as time and space permit. (Alas, the U.S. has no monopoly on this hideous practice.)

The editors for the WTR are myself, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, and Meteor Blades and we will rotate each week. Interesting or important news or tips concerning torture or civil liberties issues bearing upon it can be emailed to any of these individuals.

There were many new developments this week: the CIA announced it would withhold a list describing 1000s of documents related to the destruction of videotapes depicting torture; an ex-Bush administration official told of administration indifference to evidence of innocence for the great bulk of "enemy combatants"; a major lawsuit against Pentagon contractors accused of torture was allowed to proceed; a "released" Guantanamo hunger striker was refused more humane prison conditions, and more.

Cheney, Wilkerson, Obama and the Fake Scandal over Gitmo Prisoner Releases

Dick Cheney has been running around the country trying to spread his particular style of panic and fear in the wake of reports that released Guantanamo prisoners will swell the ranks of terrorists who will then strike at America. Andy Worthington refutes these lies in "The Stories of Six Prisoners Who Were Released from Guantanamo" and this story at Huffington Post.

As has been covered extensively elsewhere (and at Daily Kos), Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, has revealed that most of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocents, and moreover, shockingly, that the Bush Administration knew this from the get-go, belying Cheney's fabrications about the "worst of the worst." Here's Wilkerson from The Washington Note article earlier this week:

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

And yet days after this revelation, we get this kind of crap from the current administration, as reported by Associated Press, via the Miami Herald:

Obama says in a broadcast interview [on 60 Minutes tonight] that some of the people released from the prison camps in southeast in Cuba have rejoined terrorist groups. He also says U.S. officials have not always been effective in determining which prisoners will be a danger once they are let go.

If you think I'm too harsh on Obama, read the Sunday editorial in today's New York Times (H/T Stephen Soldz):

we did not expect that Mr. Obama, who addressed these issues with such clarity during his campaign, would be sending such confused and mixed signals from the White House. Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas.

Meanwhile, today's UK Guardian is reporting that despite Obama's comments above, his administration will change previous U.S. policy and allow some former Guantanamo prisoners to be resettled in the United States:

The White House is set to reverse a key Bush administration policy by allowing some of the 240 remaining Guantánamo Bay inmates to be resettled on American soil.

The US is pushing for Europe to take a share of released inmates, but the Obama administration is reconciled to taking some of them, even though there will be noisy resistance from individual states....

The cases of the 240 inmates are being reviewed by a team of experienced US prosecutors to determine whether there is a basis for criminal charges. It remains unresolved what to do if there is a substantial "third category" of detainees who are deemed to pose a security threat, but against whom there is insufficient evidence to file criminal charges either because evidence was obtained under torture or because it is in the form of classified intelligence.

In a 90-minute interview on CBS tonight, Obama struck back at the former vice-president Dick Cheney over his charge that the new Guantánamo policy was putting US security at risk. The president said his predecessor's policy of indefinite detention was unsustainable and had generated anti-US sentiment without making the country safer.

Despite the change in policy, there was this ominous portent for the future:

The Obama administration is still contemplating the option of military courts martial, reconstituting the Bush-era military commissions or even instituting some new form of preventive detention.

The dance being done by current and former administration officials over the abominable crimes conducted at Guantanamo and elsewhere are dizzying in their vertiginous lurchings from mea culpas to lies to attempts at "reform."

Saudi Gitmo Prisoner, Cleared for Release, But Refused Transfer from Maximum Security Detention, Remains on Hunger Strike

Andy Worthington brings the case of Guantanamo hunger striker Ahmed Zuhair to our attention in a posting last Friday. (If this link isn't working, try this one.) Zuhair, a father of ten children, was arrested in Pakistan, and ultimately was sent to Guantanamo, accused of associations with Al Qaeda. He has been accused of being involved with the bombing of the USS Cole, and of the murder of an American in Bosnia in 1994 or 1995, among other supposed crimes or dubious connections (see Wikipedia link).

Yet the U.S. government decided in an Administrative Review Board hearing last December 23 that he was cleared for release from Guantanamo. Worthington notes that "he was not informed until February 10, and his lawyers were not told until February 16," noting:

This rather makes a mockery of the Guantánamo authorities’ complaints about the “threat” he poses, and the allegations, still cited in news reports, that “US authorities allege that he trained with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and was a member of an Islamic fighting group in Bosnia in the mid-1990s,” but above all it confirms — as if any confirmation were required — that, in the isolated world of Guantánamo, what counts against the majority of the prisoners is not the supposed rationale for their detention in the first place, which is often nothing more than a distant memory, but their behavior in detention.

Zuhair has been identified as having "history of disciplinary infractions", no doubt associated with his hunger strike, which began in June 2005. On March 18 of this year, the government refused a deal with Zuhair whereby he would end his years-long hunger strike if he were moved from the high-security Camp 6, where prisoners endure "the isolation of a prison block modeled on a maximum security prison for convicted criminals on the US mainland," to the lesser regimen of Camp 4. The government says it's afraid of the precedent such a move might make. This is in spite of the fact that Zuhair has been cleared for release!

So his hunger strike continues, and the record of the Obama administration releasing any of the many innocent men held at Guantanamo in the two months Obama has been in charge remains at a pitiful... one! (That one release was Binyam Mohamed.) According to his attorney, on his last visit to Mr. Zuhair:

... he weighed no more than 100 pounds, and “also appeared to be ill, vomiting repeatedly during meetings” at the prison. “Mr. Zuhair lifted his orange shirt and showed me his chest,” Kassem explained. “It was skeletal.“ He added, “Mr. Zuhair’s legs looked like bones with skin wrapped tight around them.”

Andy Worthington concludes, "While this reflects badly on the prison authorities, I believe it also reflects badly on the Obama administration."

CACI International Loses Bid to Spike Torture Lawsuit

According to a CNN report:

U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee rejected claims by defense contractor CACI that the company was immune from accountability over claims of physical abuse, war crimes and civil conspiracy.

Reports of torture and humiliation by soldiers and civilian contractors against Iraqi detainees created a political, diplomatic and public relations nightmare for the Bush administration in the months and years after the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Four Iraqi detainees have sued in U.S. federal courts, alleging contract interrogators assigned to the Baghdad Central Prison — known as Abu Ghraib — subjected them to beatings and mental abuse, then destroyed documents and video evidence and later misled officials about what was happening inside the facility.

Center for Constitutional Rights has been following the case and providing part of the legal representation to plaintiffs. From their information page on the case:

The suit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and federal question jurisdiction, brings claims arising from violations of U.S. and international law including torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; war crimes; assault and battery; sexual assault and battery; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent hiring and supervision; and negligent infliction of emotional distress. There are also civil conspiracy and aiding and abetting counts attached to most of these charges. Through this action, Plaintiffs seek compensatory and punitive damages.

In the case of one prisoner:

Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid was detained from 2003 until 2005, during which he was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib “hard site” for about three months. While detained there, CACI and its co-conspirators tortured Mr. Rashid by placing him in stress positions for extended periods of time, humiliating him, depriving him of oxygen, food, and water, shooting him in the head with a taser gun, and by beating him so severely that he suffered from broken limbs and vision loss. Mr. Rashid was forcibly subjected to sexual acts by a female as he was cuffed and shackled to cell bars. He was also forced to witness the rape of a female prisoner.

Among the heinous acts to which the four Plaintiffs were subjected at the hands of the defendant and certain government co-conspirators were: electric shocks; repeated brutal beatings; sleep deprivation; sensory deprivation; forced nudity; stress positions; sexual assault; mock executions; humiliation; hooding; isolated detention; and prolonged hanging from the limbs.

All of the plaintiffs are innocent Iraqis who were ultimately released without ever being charged with a crime. They all continue to suffer from physical and mental injuries caused by the torture and other abuse.

In a related story, TheDay.com is reporting:

Thousands of Iraqis held without charge by the United States on suspicion of links to insurgents or militants are being freed by this summer because of little or no evidence against them.

CIA Withholds List of over 3,000 Torture Tapes Documents from Public Release

Last Friday, the ACLU revealed that it "has a list of roughly 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency." Only two days earlier, the ACLU had formally asked Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor "to investigate the authorization to use torture at CIA secret prisons," following Mark Danner's article at the New York Review of Books detailing a leaked ICRC report on torture of CIA prisoners.

(The accompanying picture above is an actual sketch by a U.S. MP Reserve Sargeant of how Dilawar was tortured at Bagram prison.)

According to a report on the CIA documents list by Jason Leopold:

The number of documents – but not their contents – was mentioned Friday in a Justice Department letter from Lev Dassin, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Dassin told Judge Hellerstein that unredacted versions of the materials would be available for only him to review "in-camera" on March 26. The CIA also refused to provide the ACLU with a list of individuals who watched the videotapes prior to their destruction because that information "is either classified or otherwise protected by statute."

The number of relevant documents – "roughly 3,000," according to the letter – adds weight to the belief that CIA interrogators were in frequent communication with headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and with senior Bush administration officials who were monitoring the harsh techniques used and approving them one by one or even in combination.

And there was this interesting speculation by Emptywheel at Firedoglake:

Take a look at this list of FOIA exemptions, and you'll see why that may be rather interesting. For example, trade secrets might protect the identities of contractors who had viewed or retained the torture tapes. There's the physical safety exemption that they earlier cited in regards to their destruction of the tapes--but if they invoked this exemption, it might reveal that they're worried about the identities of non-CIA employees being released. There are law enforcement exemptions they might invoke if DOJ had reviewed these torture tapes in 2004 in response to a criminal referral by CIA's Inspector General.

Or the truly interesting possibility--that CIA might claim some identities are exempt from FOIA because they are presidential records more generally exempt from FOIA, which would come into play if someone at the White House had watched the torture tapes.

Rise in Torture Allegations Against Mexican Army

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times carried a report on a sharp increase in allegations of human rights abuses by the Mexican Army, as the Mexican government steps up its campaign against drug traffickers throughout the country.

The allegations include illegal searches, arrests without cause, rape, sexual abuse and torture, eight Mexican and international rights groups said in a report prepared for presentation to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington.

In 28 cases, the report said, the alleged violations resulted in death.

The groups said the number of complaints to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission jumped to 1,230 last year, from 182 in 2006. Calderon launched his anti-crime offensive in December 2006, and assigned the army a leading role....

More than 7,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the last 15 months, according to government and media estimates.

Darius Rejali on Long History of CIA Torture Abuse

The winner of the 2007 Human Rights Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association for his massive study, Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali, has a new article at AlterNet detailing some of the history behind recent revelations of U.S. torture.

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.

Dejali covers grisly, sadistic techniques now documented in use by the CIA within recent years, including the "ice-water cure," "the cold cell," "water-boarding," "standing cells," "High-cuffing," and more. Here's Dejali on "Sweatboxes and coubarils":

Abu Zubaydah says, "Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow.... The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 feet 6 inches] in height." The large box, which Abu Zubaydah says he was held in for up to two hours, is a classic sweatbox. Sweatboxes are old, and they came into modern torture from traditional Asian penal practices. If you've seen Bridge on the River Kwai, you know the Japanese used them in POW camps in World War II. They are still common in East Asia. The Chinese used them during the Korean War, and Chinese prisoners today relate accounts of squeeze cells (xiaohao, literally "small number"), dark cells (heiwu), and extremely hot or cold cells. In Vietnam, they are dubbed variously "dark cells," "tiger cages," or "connex boxes," which are metal and heat up rapidly in the tropical sun.

Abu Zubaydah was also placed into the smaller box, in which he was forced to crouch for hours, until "the stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful." This smaller type of box was once called a coubaril. Coubarils often bent the body in an uncomfortable position. They were standard in French penal colonies in New Guinea in the 19th century, where some prisoners were held in them for 16 days at a stretch.

Both kinds of boxes entered American prison and military practice in the 19th century. They were a standard part of naval discipline, and the word sweatbox comes from the Civil War era. In the 1970s, prisoners described sweatboxes in South Vietnam, Iran (tabout, or "coffin"), Israel, and Turkey ("tortoise cell"). In the last three decades, prisoners have reported the use of sweatboxes in Brazil (cofrinho), Honduras (cajones), and Paraguay (guardia). And after 2002, Iraqi prisoners held in U.S. detention centers describe "cells so small that they could neither stand nor lie down," as well as a box known as "the coffin" at the U.S. detention center at Qaim near Syria.

Other News

Al-Marri is Held Without Bail Pending Trial

UN Launches Probe of Secret Detention Sites

New pressure in Uighurs’ cases

Islamabad High Court Calls for Repatriation of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and Investigation into Her Missing Children

BREAKING -- Newsweek reports that release is imminent of three of the secret Bush administration OLC memos:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were “ugly” and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a “truth commission” on torture.

Note this, from the same article:

"I now know we were not fully and completely briefed on the CIA program," Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told NEWSWEEK. A U.S. official disputed the charge, claiming that members of Congress received more than 30 briefings over the life of the CIA program and that Congressional intel panels had seen the Red Cross report.

Other Resources

Torture Documents released under Freedom of Information Act

Law professor David Luban's classic essay, "Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb"

I close this first installment with a quote from the preeminent American poet, Walt Whitman:

Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
Whatever appears, whatever does not appear,
     we are beautiful or
sinful in ourselves only.

(O Mother--O Sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy'd us,
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

This week's WTR was put together with the assistance of Patriot Daily News Clearninghouse. Thanks, PDNC!

Two Important Notices

National Lawyers Guild Files Complaint With California State Bar Against William Haynes

(H/T David Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org)

Former Department of Defense General Counsel Recommended Torture, Harsh Interrogation Techniques

San Francisco - The National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF) is filing a complaint with the California State Bar today against former Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes. The complaint against Haynes, who now works for the Chevron Corporation in San Ramon, states that he "breached his duty as a lawyer and advocated for harsh tactics amounting to torture in violation of U.S. and international law .... advocacy that directly lead to detainee abuses at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib facilities."

A copy of the complaint is available upon request or can be accessed at:

http://www.nlgsf.org/committees/againsttorture.php.

The complaint will be mailed to the State Bar Los Angeles office and hand-delivered to the State Bar Office in San Francisco, where there will be a 12:30 press conference.

Press Conference
State Bar Office
180 Howard Street
Monday, March 16, 12:30 PM

"We believe Mr. Haynes must be held accountable, just as any other lawyer would be," said Carlos Villarreal, Executive Director of the NLGSF. "But we are filing this complaint today not out of motivation to harm Mr. Haynes, but to ensure that torture is again relegated to the status it had before the Bush Administration's tenure, and that the harmful, sometimes deadly, and completely ineffective policy of torture is truly deterred."

While working for the Department of Defense, Haynes ignored the serious concerns coming from all branches of the military and recommended in a memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, approval of certain harsh interrogation techniques, including removal of clothing, stress positions, and the use of dogs against detainees. The Senate Armed Services Committee has described the memo as “grossly deficient.”

"Powerful leaders can and do engage in illegal acts and inhumane treatment of others. These leaders often rely on lawyers and the legal system to give the appearance of legitimacy to an illegal agenda. Sadly, there always seems to be lawyers willing to do the bidding of powerful rulers," said Sharon Adams, attorney member of the NLGSF. "The State Bar must uphold ethics and the rule of law, and repudiate Mr. Haynes’ actions."

Haynes worked with other lawyers in the Bush administration who have yet to face consequences for their advocacy of torture and other wrongdoing, including former Justice Department lawyer and current UC Berkeley School of Law Professor John Yoo. "We are in a position where even members of the new administration are suggesting criminal charges against Bush officials for torture and other crimes are off the table since many of these officials relied on legal advice," said Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild Office in Los Angeles. "If the lawyers are not held accountable for their misdeeds, then essentially high crimes with serious consequences have been committed but nobody is to blame."

As a Registered in House Counsel for the Chevron Corporation, Haynes was not required to take the California Bar Exam but is also not able to appear in court or practice law beyond giving advice to Chevron. He is, however, required to "abide by all of the laws and rules that govern members of the State Bar of California," according to California Rules of Court.

***********************

Received via e-mail from Center for Constitutional Rights. For more on CCR campaigns against torture and indefinite detention and for prosecutions of Bush officials for war crimes, visit their website. Get involved! Contribute!

As the atrocities of the Bush administration continue to be exposed, it is critical now more than ever to keep up the pressure and demand accountability from the high-ranking officials responsible for torture and war crimes.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a pan-American body dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights, is conducting a hearing at the request of CCR and the World Organization for Human Rights USA. On Friday, March 20, 2009 CCR President Michael Ratner will argue that U.S. officials must be held accountable for human rights violations, on live webcast on Friday, March 20, from 3:15 PM to 4:15 PM at http://www.oas.org/OASpage/Live, the website of the Organization of American States. It will be archived thereafter at the IACHR website, http://www.iachr.org.

CCR and HRUSA will argue that the Commission should:

• Issue official recommendations to the United States to engage in criminal investigations and prosecutions for torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment;
• Reform laws that prevent the victims of U.S. policies from learning the truth about these abuses; and
• Make reparations to victims of human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government.

By the way, kudos to Michael Ratner of CCR, who spoke out against the proposed Senate hearings or "Truth Commission" proposed by Senator Leahy as a "whitewash."

Speaking to Raw Story, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a human rights attorney, says he is opposing Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy’s proposed 'Truth Commission' because it doesn’t go far enough.

"We’re talking about a whitewash with Leahy. Are we some Latin American country where we don’t have a democracy robust enough to try people?" Ratner said. “[Leahy’s] essentially diffusing the issue so there’s not as much pressure on prosecution. It’s not really going to go far. [The commission is] going to divert us for a few years and we’re never going to see something come out of it.”

Ratner said he and the Center for Constitutional Rights want to see criminal prosecutions of officials at the highest level of the Bush administration, the so-called “principals” who were the architects of controversial polices and signed off on them.

“Cheney has openly said that he approved the water boarding memo and that he would do it again,” Ratner said, adding, “My view is you absolutely have to have prosecutions to have deterrents [for future executive power abuses].”

My own take on Leahy's whitewash hearings, including a detailed breakdown of the witnesses the House Judiciary Committee called on March 5 to examine the proposal, appears in my article, "Birth of a Whitewash: Who Testified at Leahy Commission Torture Hearings?" (which was picked up by both The Public Record and the Chicago Sun Times).

CIA Director Panetta Skewered: "Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose"

Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, and an intelligence agency veteran, has written a withering review at The Public Record of the first months of Leon Panetta's tenure as Director of the CIA.

According to Goodman, Panetta compares to two previous poor managers of the CIA, Porter Goss and George Tenet. Panetta "ignored the Senate’s own investigation of CIA intelligence on Iraq that documented the misuse of intelligence... [while] guaranteeing to the Senate intelligence committee that he would make no leadership changes at the CIA, even though he was taking charge of a political culture that has been dominated by the cover-up of key intelligence failures."

As a result, Panetta has left in place the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, who was a leading figure in the operations directorate when the program of extraordinary renditions went into full swing; the introduction of the use of torture and abuse even before a memorandum from the Department of Justice sanctioned such measures; and the establishment of the secret prisons or “black sites” that the CIA used to conduct so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

If President Obama and Leon Panetta were serious about stopping torture and abuse as well as extraordinary renditions that led to torture and abuse in third world countries, then why would they not adjust the chain of command to remove those high-ranking individuals responsible for these measure?

An excellent question, if you assume the predicate of the question, i.e., that Obama and Panetta are actually serious about stopping torture. In fact, decisions to utilize the Bagram prison for individuals rendered from anywhere, without recourse to judicial review, and to defend the Rumsfeld torture machinery against any exposure, while granting the administration the same claims to executive power under the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Bush did, argues that the Panetta policy is consistent with Obama's new (old) national security policy.

The latest news concerns Panetta's announcement that he was appointing former U.S. senator Warren Rudman as a "Special Adviser" to the Senate Intelligence Committee's announced hearings on CIA "past practices in terrorist detention and interrogation."

Goodman has Rudman's number, too:

Panetta has established his own review group within the Agency but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group.

The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that is currently being investigated by the FBI. Members of NCS would have a great interest in making sure that the Senate committee did not receive the worst of the evidence in this investigation. By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the review group and the Senate intelligence committee, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the Senate intelligence committee in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Senator Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates.

The political maneuvering around the interrogations/torture/detentions issue is fierce. One could get whiplash from following all the twistings and turnings and gyrations of the actors involved. The latest participant is Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson's article at The Washington Note is titled "Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay."

"Some" is right. While the article has some interesting insights into the internecine struggles within the Bush administration over legitimating its policy decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and how they disregarded evidence from the beginning that the vast majority of the prisoners they were harvesting were totally innocent, the real purpose of the article is to paint Colin Powell as an innocent. Nay, even a closet rebel holding down the worst excesses of the Bush administration. It's a nice fairy tale.

The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one.

For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated.

This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney....

But their ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war, by their own pronouncements, had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, its not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.

Hmm... I don't seem to remember Colin Powell denouncing the "war on terror" rhetoric anytime back in 2004, or even 2008 (despite his endorsement of Barack Obama, who also uses "war on terror" rhetoric on occasion). And wasn't Powell one of the "principals" at National Security Council meetings held in the White House that, according to an ABC report last year, "discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency", and in particular the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002? And was not this fact recently verified in a secret ICRC report linked to Mark Danner who published excerpts in the New York Review of Books just earlier this week? And weren't the following all present at these Principals meetings where torture was approved: "Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft"?

Of course this is all true, and Wilkerson's piece is a clever mea culpa for Powell, Armitage, and secondarily Rice, who all may be feeling the cold breath of indictments breathing down their necks. Cheney, it seems, has taken a different tack, brazenly lashing out in various interviews about the rightness of his administration's policies, and the dangers (supposedly) of following Obama's leadership changes. (Armageddon? again? -- And where is Donald Rumsfeld these days, anyway, last seen watching Oliver Stone's movie "W"?)

The cover-up of U.S. government torture continues apace. The problem is that too much is known. They are counting now on whitewash fake exposes, faux investigations, and time to take people's minds off what really happened. They are hoping that public rage towards AIG bonuses will siphon off the outrage energy, leaving little left for any concerted push for prosecutions and real government reform.

Their strategy may yet work, but it's up to the American people to stand them down. It will take as much fervor as we have got. The opposition is formidable, but our dedication is, too. And I am counting on the bedrock moral goodness of the American people. It is there. Do not doubt it. And it has not yet spoken its final word.

AIG Scandal: America Wakes Up To Extent of Capitalist Thievery

The news that AIG executives were to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses (maybe as high as $450 million!), even after a $170 billion dollar bailout, has fueled a populist revolt not seen since the initial shock of the economic crisis hit Americans last October. When Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told American Insurance Group CEO, Edward M. Liddy, that government loans to AIG might be renegotiated as a result, Liddy responded with "grave concern" over the firm's ability to retain "talented staff."

Talented in rip-off, that is. But former New York governor and supposed scourge of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer, is reporting over at Slate that the outrage in the media over the bonuses is a diversion. (H/T Inky99 at Daily Kos.) Not that they aren't an outrage, the scandal misses the larger crime: the siphoning off of billions of taxpayer dollars to a handful of companies, who insured their highly risky investments with AIG. These companies have received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money. Now they are to receive 100% on the dollar reimbursement for their losses from AIG. Spitzer comments:

The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash?....

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

No reason? No explanation? But there is always a reason. Always an explanation, though Spitzer may not want to go there.

Private ownership of the wealth and capital, freed of most regulatory restraints, is the distal cause, while the proprietors of this capital have gone on an orgy of thievery that may have never been seen in the history of civilization, outside of a world war.

Consider the new TALP plan ("Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility"), which bobswern has dissected so well over at Daily Kos (bold in original).

1.) $2 trillion in taxpayer funds with no salary restrictions to recipients....
2.) Shadow Bankers get almost all of their investment money for free, from you. [Shadow bankers consist of "non-bank financial institutions that, like banks, borrow short, and in liquid forms, and lend or invest long in less liquid assets... via the use of credit derivative instruments which allow them to evade normal banking regulations," e.g., hedge funds, investment banks, "structured investment vehicles," etc.]
3.) Shadow bankers will skim administrative fees off the top of $2 trillion, first.
4.) Government has virtually no say in terms of regulating what these entities must do with the money once they give it to them. [And on and on...]

Congress has responded to constituent anger, and hearings are being held even today (see liveblogging of those hearings by Emptywheel over at FDL). But while more details will leak out, it's unlikely we will see much more than the spectacle of what Chris Floyd describes as "faux shock in the Beltway over Wall Street fat cats paying themselves big bonuses with the free money that Washington knowingly gave them."

The following points will never be mentioned:

... the capitalist class is a definite concrete group composed of those who own and have a monopoly over the means of production (including loanable capital). The capitalist class is bound together by innumerable personal, familial and organizational filiations; the atomized non-capitalist entrepreneur -—the central figure of bourgeois economic theory -— is a fiction. The capacity to borrow is strictly limited by one’s ownership of the capital assets required for security against loans. In reality, credit under capitalism is always rationed, on the basis of specific monopoly complexes involving financial, industrial and commercial capitalists.

The ingrown nature of the capitalist class, who has united to unleash a frenzy of greed and stealing, is no better illustrated than by the biography of Obama's Treasury Secretary Geithner. Born to a scion of the capitalist class -- his father was a prominent leader of the Ford Foundation -- Geithner's early career (after attending the best Ivy League schools) was working for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C. He began working for various divisions of the Treasury Department as early as 1988, when he was 27 years old. He was close to two former Treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. During the George W years he worked at the Council of Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2003, he became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a few years later joined the elite, Rockefeller Foundation organized "Group of Thirty."

In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns... in the same year, he is believed to have played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy.

Hmmm... the same guy who organized the AIG bailout, with its non-regulation of monies, including millions for "bonuses" to the same execs who helped manufacture the crisis... naw, that can't be true, can it? (It is.)

Oh, and he "forgot" to pay $35,000 in self-employment taxes over several years.

AIG and the CIA

Another strange aspect of the AIG affair, and one with which to end this post, concerns AIG's links to the CIA, another aspect of the entire scandal that seems to have escaped the mainstream press, if not the bulk of the blogosphere.

From CorpWatch:

Though it is an American company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, AIG makes extensive use of offshore jurisdictions such as Barbados, Bermuda and Luxembourg that are immune from U.S. regulatory and tax scrutiny. They help the company launder profits to evade U.S. taxes and hide insider connections in supposedly "arms-length" deals. This is especially important as the company has moved into financial services and asset management, handling the wealth of “high net-worth” clients -- the mega-rich.

[Board Chairman Maurice] Greenberg has enviable political clout, never so much in evidence as when, with the help of Henry Kissinger -- chair of AIG's international advisory committee and a paid consultant via Kissinger Associates – AIG became in 1995, the first company licensed to sell insurance in China. AIG was the only foreign firm that owned 100 percent of its license there.

The American International Group at its origins was linked to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) the forerunner of the CIA. It grew from the Asia Life/C. V. Starr companies founded by Cornelius Starr who started his insurance empire in Shanghai in 1919, the first westerner to market insurance in China.

Some of the links between AIG and the CIA can take us to some pretty heady conspiracy territory, as in this link from a Ron Paul website:

Since 1997, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., has been a board member of Kroll , and is currently Greenberg's Deputy Chairman for External Affairs. Wisner's father was a founder of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who killed himself over the scandal from his being duped by British-Soviet masterspy Kim Philby. Frank Wisner, Jr., is a director of the George Bush-linked energy giant Enron (a client for whom AIG negotiated payments from Peru over nationalization of Enron operations).

Of course, nothing in this quote above is wrong, but whether these dots connect or not is another matter. Still, the connections between AIG and U.S. government operations is a shadowy land that is worth investigating. Wisner, by the way, stepped left AIG late last year.

Michael Ruppert made an impressive case regarding the intelligence connections of AIG in an article back in 2001. He quotes a September 22, 2000 L.A. Times article by Mark Fritz, the text of which is worth considering as the AIG scandal unfolds.

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy's insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. But, more significantly, the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets, from a brewery in Bangkok to a candy company in Bergedorf.

"They used insurance information as a weapon of war," said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records....

The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William "Wild Bill" Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr.

Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world.

Ruppert, seven years prior to the current economic meltdown, highlighted the uses of reinsurance for national security purposes. From Fritz's article (emphases added):

"Stiefel mapped the entire system," said Naftali, a historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. "Each time I take a piece of your risk, you've got to give me information. I am not going to reinsure your company unless you give me all the documents. That's great intelligence information"....

With the Axis defeat imminent, U.S. intelligence officials focused greater attention on ways the Nazis would try to use insurance to hide and launder their assets so they could be used to rebuild the war machine. It's a task that continues today.

It's no secret that the CIA needs to launder vast amounts of money to fund its secret wars around the world. That's a good deal of what the Iran-Contra affair was about. Alfred McCoy also plumbed these depths in his classic work, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. According to the Wikipedia article on McCoy, in his work just cited:

He also uncovered money laundering activities by banks controlled by the CIA, first the Castle Bank which was then replaced by the Nugan Hand Bank, who had as legal council William Colby, retired head of the CIA [3]. He also alludes to the BCCI, which seems to have played the same role as the Nugan Hand Bank after its collapse in the early 1980s, claiming that "the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI." [3].

There's a lot that is horrifically dirty in the entrails of American capitalism. Why is this huge outflow of capital happening at this time? Where is money going, exactly? Why are the same people who engineered the bailout now in charge of policing it?

Standing outside the intricacies of this scandal, whatever they may be, as uncovered, stand two unassailable facts. One, this breakdown of the capitalist system is causing untold suffering for billions of people around the world. Two, the causes of the economic collapse are complex, and rooted first of all in the inadequacies of the capitalist system -- a system that argues it needs an influx of public monies in the trillions of dollars every fifty to seventy years or so or it will implode. Great system!

But further questions remain: how was this collapse handled? Who benefited? What was the role of secretive government agencies that use sophisticated schemes of investment and money laundering in all this? I don't trust the U.S. government to reveal this to us. The failure of public oversight and the need to preserve a crooked system at all costs led to the downfall of the Stalinist Soviet empire. It seems likely to do the same to the American empire as well, if not now, then someday soon.

Liberal "Hero" Jon Stewart Cozies Up to War Criminal Myers

As even a commenter at The Daily Show's website put it, Jon Stewart's interview tonight with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush, General Richard Myers, was "one of the most fawning, sycophantic interviews I have ever seen Jon Stewart do."

There is no transcript or link to the interview yet. It's too fresh. From my memory, the interview began with Stewart lauding the sacrifice of U.S. troops, and it also ended the same way. A few days after electrifying much of the blogosphere with a critical interview with MSNBC CNBC financial host Jim Cramer, Stewart showed how he can cower when faced with someone with real power, and not a small-time media crony like Cramer.

General Myers was promoted to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs only two weeks before 9/11, after having served as vice chair under President Clinton. As a loyal military man under the evil Bush/Cheney regime, he helped organize the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq that produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and a million or more refugees, all under the guise of a bogus search for supposed weapons of mass destruction.

But that's not all. As Mark Benjamin reported in Salon.com last summer, General Myers was singled out by witnesses for Senator Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee investigation of how torture occurred under Department of Defense sponsorship. Prior to this investigation, faced with Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals, Myers pleaded being out of touch, claiming he had failed to read the military report on the investigation into Abu Ghraib. Later, Myers hoodwinked author Phillipe Sands, who in his book Torture Team, told Myers' tale how he had been hoodwinked by a cabal within the Bush administration, who fooled him into thinking the torture by DoD was actually the application of techniques allowed by the Army Field Manual, and therefore consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. (See this April 2008 article in the UK Guardian.)

But Myers' narrative broke down under the documentary evidence unearthed by the SASC and the testimony of key witnesses at a 2008 hearing of Levin's Armed Services committee. The "plans" under consideration in the quoted selection below concerns a set of "Counter-Resistance Strategy techniques", which were initially discussed at a meeting of military psychologists, high-level Guantanamo officials, and representatives of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in October 2002, the minutes for which I reproduced at this site some weeks ago. The "techniques" included clear abusive and torture techniques, including hooding, nudity, light/auditory deprivation, "wet towel treatments" (waterboarding), isolation, stress positions, 20 hour interrogations, and other horrifying ways to break down an individual.

From Mark Benjamin's fascinating account at Salon.com (emphases added):

According to written correspondence that came to light during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, various military leaders balked at the plans in a series of memos produced during the first week of November 2002. In addition to the criticisms raised by the Army, the Air Force leadership cited "serious concerns regarding the legality" of the list of proposed techniques. The Navy also called for further legal review, and the Marine Corps stated that the techniques "arguably violate federal law."

Because of these concerns, Myers' legal counsel, Rear Adm. Jane Dalton, began a fresh evaluation of the legality of the interrogation tactics. "My recollection is that all four of the [military services] suggested that there needed to be further legal and policy review," Dalton testified. The legal review, she told the committee, would have included further input from the military services and provided for a full airing of their concerns.

But such an analysis threatened to undermine Rumsfeld's agenda -- and that's when Myers stepped in. Dalton testified that Myers ordered her to stop that review because of a request from Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. Haynes was spearheading Rumsfeld's efforts to set up a harsh-interrogation program at the Pentagon. "The best of my recollection as to how this occurred is that the chairman called me aside and indicated to me that Mr. Haynes did not want this broad-based review to take place," Dalton testified. "When I learned that Mr. Haynes did not want that broad-based legal and policy review to take place, then I stood down from the plans."

Dalton said Myers was aware that the military services believed the interrogation techniques might be against the law. "It is my recollection that he was aware of these concerns and that I made him aware of those concerns," she said.

This is war crimes material, and along with Myer's command of the atrocity that was the invasion of Iraq, he shall have to stand in the dock of justice someday, if there is to be accountability for these crimes. Benjamin noted this in his article:

"He is rarely referenced as one of the usual suspects," noted Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School who is following the continuing Senate investigation. "He did play a much more central role" than previously known, Turley said. "The minute the military lawyers expressed concern, they were shut down."

And what did these concerns look like?

On October 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander at Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) sent a memo to a colleague. He was uneasy about what he had read in the Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting Minutes. He told his colleague the comments of Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver and others at the meeting "looks like the kinds of stuff Congressional hearings are made of." The techniques "seem to stretch beyond the bounds of legal propriety."

Quotes from LTC Beaver regarding things that are not being reported give the appearance of impropriety.... Talk of "wet towel treatments" which results in the lymphatic gland reacting as if you are suffocating, would in my opinion; shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.

To return for a moment from the serious to the somewhat mundane, maybe Jon Stewart, who wants to portray himself as some kind of conscience for America, will want to think about history will look back at his shameless performance of fawning obsequiance before a genuine war criminal.

Perhaps Stewart didn't know this history. If not, he should have. That's what he has a staff for. Instead, he promoted Myers book, asking shyly at one point if anyone had spoken up in any administration meetings pre-war with Iraq and said it was "a bad idea." Myers' assertion that the war in Iraq was turning out positive passed without comment by the supposedly assertive and combative, if respectful, Stewart.

I never liked listening to the accolades given Jon Stewart, whose comedy I enjoy, over the Cramer episode, because I had seen him too often cave in before the most reactionary figures. And sure enough, he couldn't wait but a few days before proving me right.

Shame on you, Jon Stewart. And shame on America, which allows war criminals to go on fancy book tours while the people whose lives they destroyed remain in exile, crippled, or for those whose torture Myers cavalierly overlooked, in dark prison cells awaiting some kind of justice.

9/11 Commission Relied on Tortured Confessions

Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, the moniker for one of Daily Kos's most intrepid diarists, has written an article covering the revelations in Newsweek that much of the information in the report of the 9/11 commission was gathered from prisoners who were tortured. NBC news reported:

According to both current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials, the operatives cited by the Commission were subjected to the harshest of the CIA’s methods, the "enhanced interrogation techniques." The techniques included physical and mental abuse, exposure to extreme heat and cold, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

Even more startling, the 9/11 Commission's request for more information may have led to even more torture. Per PDNC's diary:

The 9/11 panel also did not publicly protest the interrogation methods even though there were public reports at the time that the prisoners were being tortured or subjected to "enhanced interrogation." Moreover, despite their suspicions and public news reports, the position of the commission staffers interviewed by NBC News was that interrogation techniques were "not in our mandate."

Finally, the commission "demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions." Newsweek reports that it is a "distinct possibility" that prisoners were subjected to torture in order to answer the questions posed by the 9/11 Commission. Commission members wanted to have direct access to the prisoners to ask questions, but the Whitehouse refused, so questions were passed onto the CIA.

What did the commission members make of all this at the time, these paragons of political virtue, who included Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Tim Roemer, Bob Kerrey and others, and as executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, an old colleague of Condoleezza Rice, and also an NSC member and director of the Aspen Strategy Group? According to the NBC "deep background" article:

9/11 Commission staffers say they "guessed" but did not know for certain that harsh techniques had been used, and they were concerned that the techniques had affected the operatives’ credibility. At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being "tortured."

Major Questions on 9/11

As PDNC points out, Newsweek can't help put notice that the "troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report". No kidding.

The very term, "9/11", can still rouse a great deal of emotion and fear. The idea that much of what we thought we knew about 9/11 is based on torture "evidence"/testimony is about as horrifying as anything I can think of.

Truly the use of torture has spread like a poison and infected everything this country does or claims to stand for. It has invaded the very notion of truth and sullied it beyond recognition.

Moreover, this kind of news will give new credence to those who have seen 9/11 as some kind of government conspiracy. While I am no such conspiracist on this issue, there are certainly strange doings around the 9/11 events.

One such unanswered aspect of the affair appeared in respected journalist James Bamford's recent book on the NSA post-9/11, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

In the first chapter of the book, Bamford reports how Tom Wilshire, a high-level CIA deputy chief at Counter-Terrorism Center, spiked a report on the travel of a known associate of a terror center in Yemen to New York City. From Bamford's book (pp. 19-21 -- emphases added):

Doug Miller, one of three FBI employees at Alec Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed. A possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by bin Laden's ops center, was on his way to a secret al-Qaeda meeting [in Kuala Lampur] and would soon be heading for America's largest city. At 9:20 a.m. [roughly Dec. 1999], started pecking out a message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters, who could then put [Khalid al] Mihdhar on a watch list to bar him from entry.

But inexplicably, the message -- known as a Central Intelligence Report (CIR) -- was spiked by his CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station. At about 4:00 p.m., one of the CIA analysts assigned to the station, a twenty-nine year old woman, typed a note onto it: "pls hold off on CIR for now per Tom Wilshire." Without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally. He had done everything by the book....

Miller then told his FBI colleague Mark Rossini what happened. Rossini had spent many years working on terrorism cases in the bureau, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, and had been assigned to Alec Station for several years. he was both perplexed and outraged that the CIA would forbid the bureau's notification on a matter so important. "Doug came to me and said, 'What the fuck?'" said Rossini, who took the matter up with Wilshire's deputy.... "So the next day I went to her and said, 'What's with Doug's cable. You've got to tell the bureau about this.' She put her hand on her hip and said, 'Look, the next attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia -- it's not the FBI's jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to know about it, we'll let them know. But the next bin Laden attack's going to happen in Southeast Asia.'" It made no sense to Rossini. The potential terrorists were coming to the U.S. -- not to Southeast Asia. Neither Rossini nor Miller was questioned by the 9/11 Commission.

"They refused to tell us because they didn't want the FBI... muddying up their operation," said one of the FBI agents assigned to the station....

Having forbidden Miller and Rossini from notifying their headquarters about Mihdhar's planned travel to the U.S., the CIA then proceed to lose Mihdhar and Hamzmi when they took off for a brief visit to Bangkok, en route to the U.S....

On January 14, the chief of Alec Station told senior officals that the search for Khalid al-Mihdhar and the others was still going strong. In fact, it had been over for days. The next day, the FBI agent Doug Miller sent an e-mail to Tom Wilshire asking what happened to his CIR to FBI headquarters warning of Mihdhar's plans to travel to the U.S. "Is this a no-go or should I remake it in some way?" he asked. He never received a response.

At almost the same moment, Mihdhar and Hazmi's plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport.

Mihdhar and Hazmi died along with everybody else after they helped hijack American Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Will someone please stop asking for torture information and goddamn ask Tom Wilshire what the hell he was doing suppressing the CIR on Mihdhar. Someone also might want to investigate the coincidental loss of the tail of the two suspected terrorists after they left Kuala Lumpur.

I'm sure this doesn't represent the sum total of unanswered questions about 9/11. The diarist's own article raises a new one: who ordered or approved the use of tortured information in the investigation? They should be headed to jail, and pronto.

Looked at from another angle, the news reported above could have concerned any damn government report. If a government uses tortured evidence for military and intelligence purposes, that's evil, and bad enough (and illegal, and should be prosecuted).

But when torture is used by civil commissions as a basis of investigation, then the entire nation has jumped the shark, and we are in waters so deadly and deep, I don't know how we all don't drown.

Leaked! International Red Cross Report on CIA Torture

Mark Danner has scooped the NY Times, the Washington Post and other papers by publishing in the current New York Review of Books an essay quoting long excerpts of a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on "high-value" prisoners held in CIA black site prisons. The interviews took prior to their release in late 2006, and the report itself is dated February 2007, and likely was sent originally to then CIA Acting General Counsel, John Rizzo.

The prisoners interviewed by ICRC personnel included Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Walid Bin Attash, and twelve others, all of whom, the ICRC concluded, were submitted to torture. From the report's conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Mark Danner, who obviously has seen the entire 43 page report, calls the report "a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page." He reproduces a portion of its chilling Table of Contents. This is no bedtime reading:

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

As one follows the narratives of the various prisoners, Danner notes that one can see the construction of the CIA-Bush torture program unfold in all its brutalizing variety before one's eyes. Even, as caught Emptywheel's eye in her reading of Danner's article, prisoner Abu Zubaydah can notice that the torturers are experimenting on the type and effects of various torture methods upon him. From Zubaydah's narrative (emphasis added):

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds.... I don't know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted....

A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me.... I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before....

This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times....

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor....

I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.

Indeed, as Danner points out, there were changes to the interrogation-torture procedures. Since all the prisoners were kept isolated and out of contact with each other, the overall similarity of the treatment appears valid, and the differences and changes accurate. Danner reports:

Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the "long-time sitting" -— the weeks shackled to a chair—that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.

Nudity, on the other hand, is a constant in the ICRC report, as are permanent shackling, the "cold cell," and the unceasing loud music or noise. Sometimes there is twenty-four-hour light, sometimes constant darkness. Beatings, also, and smashing against the walls seem to be favored procedures; often, the interrogators wear gloves.

In later interrogations new techniques emerge, of which "long-time standing" and the use of cold water are notable....

A clear method emerges from these accounts, based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, and repeated beatings and "smashings"—though from this basic model one can see the method evolve, from forced sitting to forced standing, for example, and acquire new elements, like immersion in cold water.

Danner makes the connections which I and others have made between these techniques and the study of torture and "brainwashing" undertaken by the CIA and the military over 50 years ago, which culminated in the codification of such procedures in the CIA counterintelligence interrogation KUBARK manual of the early 1960s.

The NY Review article also confirms the ABC news report of approximately a year ago that reported how each variation and application of the torture techniques was vetted by the White House:

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers "briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee," including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who "then signed off on the [interrogation] plan." At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a "golden shield" from the Justice Department -— the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous "torture memorandum," written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002... Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees —- "whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning" -- in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed." At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

The Danner article, if one hasn't noticed yet, is must reading. He leaves nary a stone unturned: the complicity of some Congressional Democrats, the disaster which was the cover-up inspired Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the lies told by Bush and other administration officials to hide the truth of what was being done.

But, Danner also notes that, strangely, and for anyone who cared to read, there has been plenty of notice of what was happening in the "dark" crevices of U.S. foreign policy, even back to those dismal early months in 2002, when the torture gulag was fired up. "'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities" reads one headline from a Washington Post article from December 26, 2002.

Danner fails to make mention of the codification of many of these CIA procedures in the current version of the Army Field Manual (isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation), nor is there any discussion of the use of drugs on prisoners, which has surfaced in other prisoners' narratives of their incarceration. But what Danner does capture is the sense of psychic numbing that occurs as one reads over and over of how the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" was used on this prisoner and that prisoner, as one become inured to the brutality.

After a long discussion about the relative intelligence "value" of torture, Danner settles into a discussion about what we must do now. He certainly understands that there is a very important need to educate the public about what must be done. He is a little less certain that prosecutions should or can take place, but can see how hobbled the Obama administration is by this legacy, and how, despite Obama's wish to not look back and move forward, "he and his Department of Justice will be haunted by what his predecessor did."

Many officials of human rights organizations, who have fought long and valiantly to bring attention and law to bear on these issues, strongly reject any proposal that includes widespread grants of immunity. They urge investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration officials. The choices are complicated and painful. From what we know, officials acted with the legal sanction of the US government and under orders from the highest political authority, the elected president of the United States. Political decisions, made by elected officials, led to these crimes. But political opinion, within the government and increasingly, as time passed, without, to some extent allowed those crimes to persist. If there is a need for prosecution there is also a vital need for education. Only a credible investigation into what was done and what information was gained can begin to alter the political calculus around torture by replacing the public's attachment to the ticking bomb with an understanding of what torture is and what is gained, and lost, when the United States reverts to it.

I am one of those voices who speak loudly for prosecutions. But the more I read and understand, I see that the issue goes much farther than simply torture qua torture, or whether there should be a Truth Commission or prosecutions.

The corruption of government and the inability of the governmental ruling classes to interrupt or terminate the program of state-sanctioned torture, or stop the black propaganda fed, and well-plotted campaign to go to war in Iraq, or take command of an economic bubble and unregulated set of bogus financial schemes until they ballooned out of control and sought to bankrupt the entire country, this corruption and moral-political bankruptcy implicates immensely wide swaths of the government and ruling classes.

We are in a very tight spot, historically speaking. It is true that a significant section of civil society, located primarily among some human rights and civil liberties organizations, but with some links as well even into layers of the military (particularly military attorneys), are seeking some kind of change, some way in which a system of accountability can be secured. But they are laboring under the collective weight of a political system that cannot even look at itself in the mirror. Danner notes Obama and Holder's play to keep some of this information secure under "state secrets privilege" by the Executive Branch. The very leaking of the ICRC document shows what he thinks of that.

I don't have any simple answers. I know that we must only try and move towards the light. Our compass must be the dictates of justice and mercy, and also truth. We wish to build a better world. We know there are those who have... well, different ideas. We must be able to combat ignorance, and be smart ourselves. Learn from the past, prepare for the future. We must not flinch from what we need to do. We cannot go backwards. The world is already slipping backwards at an alarming rate. The ICRC report itself is documentary proof of that.

Let us move forward.

Update, roughly 11 pm, PDT:

The Washington Post has just put up their article covering the story. It has a nice tidbit for those who like to track down thing or speculate about who leaked the ICRC report, and why? (H/T http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2009/3/15/212138/793/254#c254ericlwis0)

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group's strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

The New York Times has posted a shortened version of the Mark Danner article on their Op-Ed page. (Double H/T to out of left field and to Stephen Soldz)

Speaking of Stephen Soldz, his remarks about the actions of military and CIA psychologists in the torture, made at a listserv for anti-torture psychologists, are worth repeating here (I've added the link within):

We must remember that the techniques detailed in these documents were designed by psychologists. These psychologists were present at the APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception. APA [American Psychological Association] has never explained why these torturers were invited or what they said or what was said to them. Nor have the APA leaders who invited and participated with these torturers expressed any remorse that they may have aided their torture. Rather, they tried to hide the attendance at this conference, even claimed to have "misplaced" it. And they have tried to change the subject to whether or not these torturers were "APA members", as if its fine to aid torturers if they aren't members.

Accountability for US torture MUST include accountability for those who aided the torturers, including those in the APA leadership who contributed. Continued silence is not acceptable. The truth must come out. We must pressure any Truth Commission or other accountability process to explore the role of the APA, other psychologists, and other health professionals, in the US torture program.

Well put, Stephen. And many thanks to all those for helping push the Daily Kos version of this blog posting, with its important anti-torture news and commentary to the top of the recommended list there. I won't be happy, though, until the issue is pushed to the top of the nation's agenda, and a history-making review and prosecution of these crimes begins.

Short Shots in Anti-Torture Wars

With little time to post for the next few days, I wanted to give my readers a few juicy morsels to chew over.

There's Emptywheel's analysis at Firedoglake of the new Department of Justice brief, re the withdrawal of the “Enemy Combatant” definition for Guantanamo "detainees". Most are lauding it as some great victory. But it's yet another Obama cosmetic miracle: looks like progress on the outside, but is plain old ugly Bush on the inside. From EW's article:

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces. [my emphasis]

The President has the authority ... the President determines ... the President has the authority.

You see, it's still the same unitary power, stripped of the baggage of Bush's vocabulary. And even as they abandon Bush's vocabulary, they progressively expand the reach of that authority to include just about all those whom Bush already determined were enemy combatants, no matter how nebulous that person's ties to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doing its best to derail the lawsuit by Rasul et al. against Donald Rumsfeld and former Bush administration officials for "torture; prolonged arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; cruel and unusual punishment; denial of liberties without due process, and preventing the exercise and expression of their religious beliefs." None of these victims were ever charged with a crime.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent reports (H/T to Stephen Soldz):

Dismissed at the urging of the Bush administration, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the case was sent back to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington for reconsideration, because the Supreme Court had ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions. It wasn’t clear what effect that ruling might have on the Rasul case.

Although some civil rights lawyers had hoped the Obama administration would change the government’s position — or at least try to settle this case, which is at the very least an embarrassment to the United States – the former prisoners had no such luck. Today, the Justice Department filed a brief arguing, as it did in Padilla’s case against Yoo, that government officials are not liable for torture, abuse, denial of due process or religious rights, because the right of Guantanamo prisoners not to suffer those abuses at the hands of the U.S. government was not clearly established at the time.

That would seem to contradict previous statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that torture (including waterboarding) and other abuses are clearly illegal, now and always, and that the president can’t simply override that prohibition.

And meanwhile, on the homefront, you'd never know it because the silence is so deafening, but the ACLU released a major study on the effects of the Patriot Act. Their press release states:

“Reclaiming Patriotism” reveals that in the years since its passage, the Patriot Act has paved the way for the expansion of government-sponsored surveillance including the gutting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and a recent revamping of the Attorney General Guidelines to allow law enforcement to conduct physical surveillance without suspicion. Indeed, over the last eight years, numerous expansions of executive authority have worked in tandem to infringe upon our rights. Only by understanding the larger picture of the combined effects of Patriot Act, the amendments to FISA, the guidelines for physical surveillance and other expansions of power can Congress make an informed, consistent and principled decision about whether and how to amend all of these very powerful surveillance tools.

You can go read the report at this link.

Finally, the other day I reported on the attempt by former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray's to speak before a hearing of the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad. JCHR shunted aside the request more than once. I'm still not sure he actually spoke, but his website posted today this article, Trying Again to Stop Torture: My Formal Statement for the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Here's the conclusion from Murray, fighting the fight against state-sanctioned torture from Great Britain:

Conclusions

1. All CIA intelligence is received by the UK. MI6 has seen the fruits of every CIA waterboarding session and rendition torture. Very many will have been passed on to ministers and senior officials.

2. Ministers decided the principle of the universality of the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement was more important than any aversion to torture. We could not refuse this material from the CIA without compromising the basic agreement.

3. Ministers did know they were receiving intelligence from torture. There was a definite, internally promulgated and legally cleared policy to receive intelligence from torture, directed in person by Jack Straw.

4. The format of intelligence reports contains a deliberate double blind; by excluding the name of the detainee from the final report, Ministers can state they have never knowingly seen intelligence from torture.

5. The government’s public lines that we do not condone, endorse, encourage or instigate torture, even that we condemn it and work against it, do not answer the key question:

“Are we prepared on a regular basis to receive intelligence from torture?”

That question is capable of a one word answer. The true answer is yes. The government refuses to give a straight answer.

A Farce in the Making? New Task Force on Interrogations and Detention

According to the New York Times, Obama administration Attorney General Eric holder announced today he would appoint a new "special envoy" on Guantanamo, former assistant secretary of state for European affairs in the Bush Administration, Daniel Fried.

Also on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named two government lawyers with national security experience as staff directors of task forces set up by President Obama to analyze detention issues.

J. Douglas Wilson, a senior federal prosecutor in California, is to lead an analysis of guidelines for interrogation and transfer of detainees to other countries. Brad Wiegmann, a senior Justice Department national security lawyer, is to help lead a task force charged with recommending the legal rules for detention of future terrorism suspects.

These men are not exactly household names, although Fried has had some notoriety over the years, having to act as apologist for Bush policies to the Europeans. Here's a bit about how he operated from a Craig Murray blog posting from May 2006, US officials give weight to reports of CIA kidnappings in Europe:

"More than one source in the CIA...told us that between 30 and 50 people have been transported by extraordinary rendition," Italian Socialist MEP and committee rapporteur Giovanni Claudio Fava told reporters in Strasbourg.

According to Mr Fava, the information MEPs received when meeting with the US state department's top legal advisor, John Bellinger, assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried, members of the US Congress, lawyers and NGO representatives had been "patchy and inconsistent."

One of these MEPs (members of the European Parliament), Roger Helmer, wrote in February 2006 about his encounter with Fried on the question of extraordinary renditions and use of European countries for CIA secret flights:

Appeals for senior US officials to explain their government’s actions to the parliament are unlikely to pass first base. Asked last week whether the US was going to comply with MEP demands, assistant secretary for European affairs Daniel Fried avoided the question with the usual Washington mantra. “America was committed to protecting people against terrorism and would do so according to existing legal conditions and values,” he said. The administration was already talking to “thoughtful Europeans.” But does that mean MEPs?

Who is going to look deeper into the qualifications of Mr. Fried to take on this post? Why was he picked. A reporter for the Washington Post asked Mr. Fried directly about the rendition issue at a "press roundtable", November 2005 in Berlin. What he got back was classic Bush double-talk and obfuscation. Listen to Holder's new Guantanamo "special envoy" talk around the rendition issue:

Question: Ambassador Fried, my name's Craig Whitlock, with the Washington Post here in Berlin. I want to follow up on some of your comments about terrorism. As you may know, there has been an increasing level of discomfort as of late in Europe with some of the tactics and methods the United States has used in the war on terrorism. There's a German prosecutor who's been investigating the alleged rendition of a German citizen from the Balkans to Afghanistan. A few days ago, Italian prosecutors from Milan filed extradition requests for 22 CIA operatives involved in kidnapping in (inaudible), and in the last couple of weeks there have been a number of (inaudible) in Europe, including the Council of Europe, who have said they're going to investigate reports of the CIA operating secret jails for terrorism suspects in eastern Europe. What sort of response have you been hearing from your European allies in regards to the U.S. methods like these in the war on terrorism? Are you hearing a lot of complaints, and is this affecting relations in terms of security methods and tactics in the war on terrorism?

Ambassador Fried: I have not heard a great deal from my European colleagues. I'm aware of course of the press reports. I'm not going to discuss the allegations either way. It is true that these issues are debated in Europe; they are debated in the United States. The recent terrorist bombings in Amman, Jordan -- the suicide bombings of the hotels -- remind us, as if we needed reminding, of the kind of terrorist enemy we face. I suppose I'm glad I live in a country where these issues are debated. We act, the United States acts, and will act, consistent with the law and with international norms. These are difficult issues; it is a difficult enemy we're fighting. I wish that we didn't face an enemy that obeys no rules, but we do have rules to obey and we will obey them.

The Usual Suspects - Wiegmann and Wilson

I certainly never heard of these two career attorneys. I did a little preliminary investigation, and they seem like highly suspect characters to put in charge of a task force to investigate detention and interrogation issues for the government, and the viability of the current Army Field Manual as a guideline for interrogations.

According to AFP:

The Attorney General appointed J. Douglas Wilson, currently the chief of the National Security Unit in the US Attorney’s Office for the northern district of California to lead a task force that will review US policies on interrogation and the transfer of detainees.

Wilson’s team will review whether the “Army Field Manual interrogation guidelines … provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence to protect the nation, and whether different or additional interrogation guidance is necessary,” the US Justice Department said.

It will also examine US policy on rendition—the transfer of individuals to other nations for interrogation—and will establish rules ensuring policies “comply with domestic and international legal obligations … and that individuals do not face torture or inhumane treatment.”

Brad Wiegmann, a deputy chief of staff in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, was appointed to lead a review of US detention policies, together with a representative of the Department of Defense.

Looking up Brad Wiegmann, I found few references on the net. Here he shows up as an attorney for the Department of Defense, circa 1998 in a deposition, as part of “Filegate” (a Judicial Watch file).

Then, at this link, we find Mr. Wiegmann listed as a recipient of an email in a long list of emails linked to the missing memos on torture and detention policy, a list of which is at Pro Publica. I'm not sure how the emails relate to the missing memos, as they were found by googling Wiegmann, but the file name links them to the missing memos story. Perhaps I can find out more from the Pro Publica people in the next few days.

In any case, in the list of emails I discovered online, Brad Wiegmann is listed as NSC (National Security Council), and most likely is listed in about seven other emails, as someone in the OLC loop with the other attorneys discussing the Geneva Conventions, the Convention on Torture, interrogation issues, etc.

The 5/28/04 memo is the only one with listed with the name “Brad Wiegmann”, the others all say “John B. Wiegmann”, who is also listed as NSC. It’s possible that John B. Wiegmann and Brad Wiegmann are two different people. John Wiegmann currently seems to work at Dept of State.

The 5/28/04 memo was sent to “Brad Wiegmann (NSC), A Erdmann (NSC), Carl J. Tierney (DOD), Brad Clark (OSD) [Office of the Secretary of Defense?]” from C. Kevin Marshall (OLC), and cc’d to “Jack Goldsmith, Howard Nielson (all OLC)”. The memo is described as “E-mail among OLC, NSC, and OSD with draft OLC analysis re: Geneva Conventions”.

I don’t know C. Kevin Marshall, the author of the memo Wiegmann received, except to say he’s a Federalist Society member. He also shows up in the recent Bradbury memo as a cite for the reasoning against the right of the President to suspend treaties.

Googling J. Douglas Wilson, I came across this statement “given to DOJ Inspector General investigators in 2002 by a DOJ Prosecutor named John De Pue, a 25 year veteran of DOJ”. The situation involved concerned the interrogation of "American Taliban", John Walker Lindh, who had been interrogated without an attorney, even after he asked for one. I'd note that he was also tortured. De Pue asked Daily Kos's own Jesselyn Radack, then at Department of Justice's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office whether information from Lindh would be accepted in court if gotten without an attorney present. Radack replied it would not, but they went ahead with the interrogation anyway.

The following quote then comes from a follow-up investigation on the Lindh affair. From De Pue:

… the Chief of the Appellate Section emailed me expressing the view that any such interview would not be subject to suppression. She subsequently emailed me a memorandum J. Douglas Wilson, formerly of the Appellate Section and presently the Criminal Chief of the San Francisco US Attorney’s Office … concluding that the sole remedy for a “McDade” violation was to discipline the responsible attorney and that suppression of any resulting statement was unwarranted.”

This latter quote is important because it shows Wilson arguing that even if a defendant's right to counsel is violated, no "suppression of any resulting statement" should occur. Given the long period in which Guantanamo and other U.S.-held prisoners in the "war on terror" were held and tortured without recourse to an attorney, one of the major issues involved in any future prosecutions of these individuals will concern the admissibility of evidence. One can argue that Wilson was only doing the bidding of his bosses, but under the circumstances of the terrible Bush years, it seems like a weak argument to me.

J. Douglas Wilson also co-wrote National Security Investigations and Prosecutions, which costs $194, so I'm not likely to buy it very soon.

This treatise presents the law governing, and related to, national security investigations (NSIs). An NSI is an investigation conducted by the United States government to acquire information about foreign threats to the national security, e.g., international terrorism. National security law is often inaccessible, and can be particularly hard to follow when divorced from the context of historical tradition, governmental structures, and operational reality in which it functions. This treatise explores the full background of NSIs, both from a pre-911 and a post-911 perspective, providing a powerful tool for any attorney handling a case involving a national security investigation or prosecution.

The book is co-written with David Kris. Here’s some interesting facts about Wilson's co-author (I'm looking for anything I can find to help me understand who these men are that Holder has appointed, so please forgive the detour):

David S. Kris was the Assistant Deputy Attorney General for national security issues in the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) from 2000 to 2003. He had worked his way up through the DOJ. He is now a counsel, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, and Senior Vice President at Time Warner.

Kris had been a high-ranking DOJ lawyer in the Bush administration for several years, and had appeared before Congress to advocate for the administration’s positions regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the USA PATRIOT Act. He had furthermore previously appeared before Congress in his personal capacity, after leaving the DOJ, to continue advocating for the government to have enhanced flexibility under FISA and the PATRIOT Act. This background caused his strong criticism of the administration’s legal claims to be considered particularly notable.

Finally, here’s an interesting case that Wilson lost as U.S. Attorney, when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit threw out an interrogation after finding that the defendant was denied his Sixth Amendment right to counsel…. Interesting.

U.S. v Harrison, 213 F.3d 1206, (9th Circuit, 2000)

I’m smelling a big fat rat. Two rats (three if you include Holder, four if you include Obama). When you consider the strange bias that affected Senator Leahy's selections for testimony about a possible Truth Commission on Bush-era crimes on torture, and also the adamant stand the DoJ has taken on protecting state secrets at the expense of the right of tortured individuals to sue the government for damages, then you can only come to one conclusion.

The United States government is planning to do all it can to cover-up the crimes of the Bush Administration. It must find a way to blow off steam related to societal outrage over the torture, the unnecessary and deadly wars, the attacks on civil liberties. I expect we will hear more reports from the government like the whitewash report on current conditions at Guantanamo given by Admiral Walsh last month.

This will be a bitter truth for many to swallow. Just because you are popular doesn't mean such popularity can carry you forever if you advocate or protect an unjustifiable policy, as LBJ did on Vietnam. If Obama persists in protecting the torturers from any accountability, and even worse, maintains portions of the old Bush torture program, then he may yet face the political fate of LBJ in terms of loss of popularity, and possibly electoral opposition. But all that is years away, and what matters now is that we do not accept half-hearted or tainted efforts to investigate torture, but turn up the pressure for real investigations and prosecutions.

Obama and Holder should shelve their plans to appoint the tainted Fried and the obscure but suspicious Wiegmann and Wilson. A special prosecutor should be appointed and a blue ribbon panel with members of human rights groups, academia, labor, and the press to work alongside government officials in a real democratic review of the illegal detention and interrogation policies undertaken by this government.

Now that would be democracy in action. That would be... Change!

Torturers Told Binyam: "“We’re going to change your brain"

David Rose at the British paper The Mail got the scoop that was former Guanatanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed's "world exclusive" post-release interview. Entitled "How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions", the article presents a brief biography of Mr. Mohamed's troubled life, including the experience of racial prejudice in the United States (Binyam is Ethiopian-born), abandonment by his father, and later the adoption of his mother's religion, Islam.

But the article's most sensational sections describe his torture by Pakistani, Moroccan, and U.S. officials, who all the while were in collaboration with British intelligence services, who not only were feeding them questions, but also withholding exculpatory evidence as well. The torture was horrendous:

Documents obtained by this newspaper - which were disclosed to Mohamed through a court case he filed in America - show that months after he was taken to Morocco aboard an illegal 'extraordinary rendition' flight by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, MI5 twice gave the CIA details of questions they wanted his interrogators to put to him, together with dossiers of photographs.

At the time, in November 2002, Mohamed was being subject to intense, regular beatings and sessions in which his chief Moroccan torturer, a man he knew as Marwan, slashed his chest and genitals with a scalpel....

... Mohamed also described how he was interrogated by an MI5 officer in Pakistan in May 2002, before his rendition to Morocco....

He said the officer knew he had already been tortured numerous times after his capture the previous month, with methods that included days of sleep deprivation, a mock execution and being beaten while being hung by his wrists for hours on end.

He said this torture in Pakistan made him confess to a plan that was never more than fantasy - to build a 'dirty' radioactive bomb.

Over and over, the article presents evidence of U.S. and British collaboration in the interrogation and torture of Binyam Mohamed. Telegrams are sent back and forth, lines of inquiry are proposed, a "case conference" is held between U.S. and British intelligence at MI5 HQ in London.

The full extent of the collaboration and the torture are partly obscured by the fact that the British High Court reluctantly (and with public protest) have acceded to the demands of the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to withhold the publication of secret documentation of Mr. Mohamed's torture -- documents already seen by Mohamed's attorneys, but not the public -- because it would supposedly harm U.S.-British intelligence cooperation.

The Mail article states that Miliband lied about whether or not the Obama administration is threatening the British over revealing these secrets, as the Bush administation had. Thus, it is unclear to what extent the Obama administration is cooperating in the British suppression of the documents. The Obama administration is on record as telling BBC that it is grateful that the British are committed to state secrecy. On the other hand, a letter detailing the contents of the redacted documents sent by Mohamed's attorney to President Obama was itself mysteriously redacted. One thing is clear: we don't yet have the full story here.

In the Dark Prison: Brainwashing & Confessions

The worst part of Mohamed's captivity, by his own account, is the five months he spent at the "dark prison" the CIA ran at an undisclosed location near Kabul, Afghanistan. The Obama administration has by executive order closed all CIA prisons except those "used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." One wonders if five months can be considered "short-term" or "transitory"? Given the torture evidence by Mr. Mohamed, this question is especially apposite.

From Binyam Mohamed's description of the "dark prison":

Kabul's dark prison was just that: a place where inmates spent their days and weeks in total blackness....

'The toilet in the cell was a bucket. Without light, you either find the bucket or you go on your bed,' Mohamed says.

'There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day....

'While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled....

'The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn't stand straight nor sit.

'I couldn't sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.

'You got a shower once a week, with your arms chained above you, stripped naked, in the dark, with someone else washing you.

'The water was salty and afterwards you felt dirtier than when you went in. It wasn't a shower for washing: it was for humiliation.'

In Kabul, Mohamed says the food was also contaminated, and he often suffered from sickness and diarrhoea....

'The floor was made of cement dust. Whatever movement you made, the air would be full of cement and I started getting breathing problems.

' My bed was a thin mattress on the floor, surrounded by that dust.'

And what was all this torture for? According to Mr. Mohamed, it was during his stay at the Dark Prison that U.S. interrogators went beyond inducing confessions. They wanted him to finger other individuals, and use him to testify in the military commissions trials they were planning. Later, when Mohamed arrived in Guantanamo in September 2004, interrogators got worried Binyam would testify he only "confessed" or gave information because he was tortured, and tried to conduct "clean" interrogations, so they could say the testimony was uncoerced. They demanded he give his confession "freely". After Obama was elected president and announced Guantanamo would close, Mohamed says his treatment became more brutal.

The entire Mail article goes into much, much more detail, and makes important reading for those trying to understand what kinds of crimes the U.S. and UK governments have committed when they undertook the torturing of individuals in their custody. Andy Worthington has also written an excellent summary and review of Binyam's interview, and furthermore, writes from the standpoint of one who has followed both Mr. Mohamed's case, and that of a myriad of other Guantanamo prisoners for years now.

Andy Worthington's article makes abundantly clear that the torture of prisoners like Binyam Mohamed was not about, or at least not solely about, the collection of information. It was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an earlier interview with Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith:

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”

This emphasis on brainwashing -- for that is the popular terminology for such an assault on the psyche of a prisoner -- is a key component of the kind of psychological torture that was researched by both the United Kingdom and the United States in the years following World War II. It highlighted the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, stress positions, manipulation of the environment, of food, the use of humiliation and both sensory deprivation and sensory overload upon the prisoner. The idea was to overwhelm the nervous system and make a human being collapse without a blow being made, without scars, without evidence usable in court.

Much to the chagrin of some in the government, I suppose, the Moroccans had some ideas of their own regarding torture, and it included the use of razor blades. According to the Mail account, there are plenty of pictures of Mr. Mohamed's scarred penis in his files. That may be bad news for somebody, if anyone's head is ever going to fall over this monstrosity of a treatment.

Prosecute Those Who Ordered and Operated the Torture Program

But the real criminals sat or still sit in the highest chairs of government. The political will to hold them to account is crippled by the need to save the integrity of the system in the eyes of a scared and cynical populace -- scared by a collapsing economy, and cynical because they too have lost all faith in the integrity of their leaders, and are placing all their hopes now in the charismatic Barack Obama. For his part, Obama has indicated he will be more socially progressive than his predecessor -- he just eliminated the anti-science blockade of funds on stem cell research that Bush had used to hamstring such projects.

But Obama has also indicated that he will go so far on torture and national security reform and no farther. He has no intention of significantly reforming the CIA. He plans to leave a substantial remnant force of up to 50,000 troops or "advisers" in Iraq after a U.S. "withdrawal"... two or more years from now. He is escalating U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and has taken actions to make prisoners in that theater of operations even less available to review of conditions by any U.S. court than were the prisoners in Guantanamo. All the while, he maintains that the Army Field Manual, with its reliance on isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and fear, along with loose controls on stress positions and drugging of prisoners, is the "gold standard" of U.S. interrogation of "illegal enemy combatants."

The Binyam Mohamed case is one that wakes people up, at least it has in Great Britain. (See Glenn Greenwald's story comparing the U.S. to British coverage of the case.) But damn if I don't know what it will take to unfreeze U.S. society on this topic. Torture remains a little understood and embarrassing subject in U.S. circles. It's dimly recognized that if the lid were totally taken off, much of the establishment leadership in the U.S. would be revealed as culpable, or at least compromised. Hence, mainstream opinion makers are attempting to keep whatever scandals within "reasonable" limits.

Politics can be strange sometimes. The mainstream opinion makers are usually pretty good at what they do, especially the left-wing versions of them. But they don't often have to deal with such incendiary material, and a dedicated coterie of attorneys, bloggers, journalists, and even some politicians and military officers, who don't want to see this issue die before accountability takes place.

Let Craig Murray Tell Parliament What He Knows of UK Torture Involvement

Uncle $cam left this as a comment in a recent post, but I thought it worthy of an upgrade to a full posting:

Your Help Needed - Reveal Torture to Stop It

A lot of you know who who Craig Murray is. At the moment he has an appeal on his site - he's asking people to email the UK's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to ask that he be heard next Tuesday, on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad. The executive is putting pressure on the committee to exclude him.

In Craig's words:

---
I need everybody to send an email to: jchr@parliament.uk to urge that I should be allowed to give evidence. Just a one-liner would be fine. If you are able to add some comment on the import of my evidence, or indicate that you have heard me speak or read my work, that may help. Please copy your email to craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk.

Please also pass on this plea to anyone you can and urge them to act. Help from other bloggers in posting this appeal would be much appreciated.
---
Briefly, his background is that he was UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan. The government there was (still is) torturing people and giving intelligence thus obtained to the CIA, which sent it to MI6 and the Foreign Office. Craig sent a series of telegrams to the FO objecting to this policy. The policy ended up being approved by Jack Straw and Craig was fired.

Send an email - even if the only effect is to embarrass that fucker Straw, it's at least that.

From the site publishing the appeal, Mr. Murray further states his case:

The evidence I am trying to give the parliamentary committee is this:

I wish to offer myself as a witness before the Joint Commission on Human Rights on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad.

I appeared as a witness in person before both the European Parliament and European Council's enquiries into extraordinary rendition. My evidence was described by the European Council's Rapporteur, Senator Dick Marty, as "Compelling and valuable".

The key points I wish to make are these:

- I was British Ambassador in Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.

- I learned and confirmed that I was regularly seeing intelligence from detainees in the Uzbek torture chambers, sent me by the CIA via MI6.

- British Ministers and officials were seeing the same torture material.

- In October/November 2002 and January/February 2003 I sent two Top Secret telegrams to London specifically on the subject of our receipt of intelligence gained under torture. I argued this was illegal, immoral and impractical. The telegrams were specifically marked for the Secretary of State.

- I was formally summoned back to the FCO for a meeting held on 7 or 8 March 2003 specifically and solely on the subject of intelligence gained under torture. Present were Linda Duffield, Director Wider Europe, FCO, Sir Michael Wood, Chief Legal Adviser, FCO, and Matthew Kydd, Head of Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, FCO.

- This meeting was minuted. I have seen the record, which is classified Top Secret and was sent to Jack Straw. On the top copy are extensive hand-written marginalia giving Jack Straw's views.

- I was told at this meeting that it is not illegal for us to obtain intelligence gained by torture, provided that we did not do the torture ourselves. I was told that it had been decided that as a matter of War on Terror policy we should now obtain intelligence from torture, following discussion between Jack Straw and Richard Dearlove. I was told that we could not exclude receipt of specific material from the CIA without driving a coach and horses through the universality principle of the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement, which would be detrimental to UK interests.

- Sir Michael Wood's legal advice that it was not illegal to receive intelligence got by torture was sent on to me in Tashkent (copy attached).
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Wood.pdf- On 22 July 2004

I sent one further telegram on intelligence got by torture, with a lower classification, following FCO communications on the subject. Copy attached.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Telegram.pdf
It was my final communication before being dismissed as Ambassador.

In conclusion, I can testify that beyond any doubt the British government has for at least six years a considered but secret policy of cooperation with torture abroad. This policy legally cleared by government legal advisers and approved by Jack Straw as Secretary of State.

Craig Murray
2 March 2009

Like other whistleblowers, Craig Murray put his career and livelihood, if not his life, on the line. He deserves an email of support.

Truth Commission or Prosecutions of Bush Officials?

In both the UK and the USA, the fight against government secrecy, which is used to cover-up crimes by which the state commits aggressive war, torture, and other acts against the civil rights and liberties of their own and foreign citizenry, is being conducted at a high pitch. With the demise of the hated Bush regime, those who pushed the US state to the brink of out and out dictatorship are intent on keeping their reputations and power intact, and their bodies out of jail.

Today, in chat rooms, on phone calls, on email listservs and over cocktails and bedroom pillows, a debate is going on about what to do to ensure the terror apparatus of the Bush years is fully disassembled, and the perpetrators exposed and held accountable. Should their be a truth commission? Should there be prosecutions? Should we look forward and not backward (as if we will know where we are going if we don't know where we have come from)?

As I wrote in yesterday's posting:

I recommend my readers go to CCR's webpage on Prosecutions and Accountability and follow the action steps there. They include a letter that can be signed to Sen. Leahy:

We are also calling upon Sen. Patrick Leahy, who... [held] a hearing on March 4 of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss a “truth commission” to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, to support prosecutions for those government officials who violated the law. Sign a letter to Sen. Leahy and the Judiciary Committee calling for them to support prosecutions, and to oppose any immunity for the architects of these torture programs.

Birth of a Whitewash: Who Testified at Leahy Commission Torture Hearings?

There has been plenty of controversy on the issue of conducting a Congressional or independent investigation into the interrogations policy and torture activities of the Bush administration over the last seven or eight years.

One of the primary worries by those who oppose a "truth and reconciliation"-style investigation is that it would preempt possible prosecutions, or at worst, be a cover-up of some of the worst crimes involved. Those who favor such an investigation believe that is only with a broad investigation will all the information really be unearthed.

The hearing today by the Senate Judiciary Committee -- "Getting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry" -- chaired by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), was called to explore options for investigating past torture and counter-terrorism policy. The committee called six witnesses, some for, some against such an investigation. But a close look at the backgrounds and affiliations of even most of the pro-investigation witnesses should give us deep pause, and ask what kind of commission are we being set up for?

The witnesses included some out and out conservatives, or individuals dubious about the investigatory process -- men like David B. Rivkin, Jr., who opposes the investigation, and supported most of Bush's program, such as suspension of Geneva rights for "enemy combatants", and Jeremy Rabkin, who wrote, After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention" in a collection of essays edited by cold warrior ex-CIA chief R. James Woolsey.

The other four witnesses were a mixed bag. They appeared to believe the Bush administration had gone way overboard after 9/11, at least when it came to treatment of prisoners. Three of the four witnesses have background that make them dubious reporters, and argue, as well, that they may have another agenda they wish to advance. These three -- Thomas Pickering, Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (Ret.), and John J. Farmer, Jr. -- all have either gone on the record with far-right views on the "war on terror", or have associations with actions by the government that themselves are associated with torture.

Let me provide what evidence I have collected in a relatively short period of time. It is not definitive, but I think enough to give serious pause to consider just how this most important discussion is proceeding at the congressional level.

Our Man in El Salvador: Death Squads, Rigged Elections, and Iran/Contra

Thomas Pickering has a history as a reliable agent for murderous U.S. foreign policy. This is from an op-ed at the Council of Foreign Relations (all emphases in this posting are added, unless otherwise noted):

Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to El Salvador from 1983 to 1985, says that, while it was U.S. policy to publicly denounce the death squads, their “kind of tactics [were] tacitly supported by the U.S. government, even though [they] were freelance.” Other analysts are more blunt. “We did back the guys who went after the bad guys,” says Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985. “And [we] defined ‘bad guys’ pretty broadly.” According to William Leo Grande, a professor at American University and the author of a major study of the conflict, Washington knew that the intelligence it passed to the Salvadoran government eventually made its way to the paramilitaries. “We did support the guys who organized them,” he says, “so it’s a little precious to deny that we supported the death squads themselves.”

Pickering also got caught up in a dispute between mob political cliques in the U.S. and El Salvador, when Sen. Jesse Helms, who was aligned with his protege the torturer Roberto D’Aubuisson and his ARENA party, spilled the means on a CIA election manipulation to put their man, Jose Napoleon Duarte in as president, during a raging civil war with tens of thousands targeted by death squads and torturers.

As a result, enraged D’Aubuisson supporters plotted to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Mr. Helms sent a letter to these partisans that said:

Ambassador Pickering has been the leader of the death squads against democracy. Mr. Pickering has used his diplomatic capacity to strangle liberty during the night.

Senator Helms was censured by the Senate for conducting his own foreign policy. Luckily, Ambassador Pickering escaped murder.

Thomas Pickering started his career working in the intelligence field. “Between 1959 and 1961, Ambassador Pickering served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department…” (State Dept bio)

Note that in a 1988 New York Times article, Pickering was fingered as one of the Iran-Contra enablers, passing along appeals for weapons from the Contras to Oliver North, and never reporting it, despite the fact such assistance was supposedly illegal at the time. Pickering was then ambassador to El Salvador, and up to his ears in death squads, CIA electoral manipulations, and a counter-insurgency bombing campaign that killed thousands and made refugees of many thousands more.

Pickering and his ilk are not men to be trusted. They are brought in here for one reason only: they are “fixers”, like the guys the mob brings in to clean up the mess after the hit’s been done. Nell, whose initial comment at Emptywheel's live blogging diary at Firedoglake spurred this entry of mine, put it this way:

Leahy has lined up respected establishment operatives (aka reliable tools of imperial foreign policy) to push for a commission of inquiry. I actually agree with most of Pickering’s testimony, especially about leaving the door open for prosecution and therefore being very sparing with grants of limited immunity.

But Pickering’s presence, particularly as he appeared today to represent the outermost limit of opinion among this crop of witnesses, signals to me as strongly as anything can that this commission will play the same role as “plucky reformer” Napoleon Duarte’s “fragile democracy” played in El Salvador during Amb. Pickering’s stint there: a crowd-pleasing facade created to hide the continuation of the same poisonous policy.

More of the Usual Suspects: Gunn

Vice Admiral (ret.) Lee Gunn is presented to the committee as President of the American Security Project. He also is president of their Institute of Public Research at CNA Corporation, a federally funded research and development center in Washington, D.C. [CNA stands for Center for Naval Analyses, as I discovered elsewhere; it doesn't say so at their website.] IPR-CNA works on nice and reform-like programs, though a large part of IPR's work is consultation on "homeland security operations and strategic policy development." That would include papers done under Gunn's division, such as "SMART Policing":

As part of the recent paradigm shift towards counter-terrorism, police are adopting intelligence led policing strategies (sometimes referred to as “information-led policing”) which have sought to use information analysis and intelligence more strategically to guide leadership decision making and law enforcement operations. And more recently, police departments in the higher risk urban areas have also begun to make more extensive use of electronic surveillance....

Many jurisdictions are already employing some SMART policing approaches, such as the use of new technologies for more efficient data collection and display, information sharing, and data analysis. SMART policing programs can be grown in law enforcement agencies across the country through a comprehensive, federally-driven, national technical assistance program.

This kind of "policing", highlighted by pervasive use of cameras, ethnic profiling, data mining, attacks upon the Fourth Amendment, and "Electronic surveillance technologies that employ software capable of identifying behavioral anomalies," among other police state techniques.

But Gunn's association with CNA bespeaks even more troubling associations. Down the hall from IPR, so to speak, at CNA’s Stability and Development Program, part of CNA Strategic Studies, we find some interesting connections with major counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Carter Malkasian, formerly assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) as an advisor on counterinsurgency, directs the Stability and Development Program, which focuses on counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and post-conflict reconstruction. The team provides objective, analytic perspectives—grounded in an understanding of actual operations—to support decision-makers charged with planning and conducting security and development operations.

The range of issues includes: insurgency and counterinsurgency, ethnic conflict, development of indigenous forces, economic development of war-torn states, “Phase IV” reconstruction efforts, and the establishment of political institutions.

The team most recently spent time on the ground in Afghanistan advising Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

What are PRTs?

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are “non-kinetic” operations carried out jointly by small number of lightly armed military personnel and civilian staff from the diplomatic community and development agencies to promote governance, security and reconstruction throughout the post-9.11 Afghanistan and Iraq. PRTs can be characterized in two ways: one as a miniature of multidimensional peacekeeping operations or “peacekeeping-lite,”and the other as an extended civil-military operation center (CMOC) or “super-CMOC.”

And the PRTs have some questionable activities, beyond humanitarian work:

The PRTs have critics in the international aid community. A recent analysis from the think tank Overseas Development Institute, said “In Afghanistan, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were perceived as blurring the lines between humanitarian and military action.”

Amnesty International ran across some shady operations conducted by some of the PRTs that involved torture:

Amnesty International is concerned that ISAF troops from New Zealand operating in Afghanistan and particularly the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) could be involved in transferring detainees to Afghan security forces.

While New Zealand was not one of those countries surveyed in the AI report, NZ is a participant in the ISAF and has a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan.... “The NZ PRT (107 personnel as of October 2007) Bamyan is tasked with maintaining security in Bamyan Province. It does this by conducting frequent presence patrols throughout the province.”, [sic] may apprehend and transfer detainees,” says Amnesty International Spokesperson Gary Reese.

In March this year, Amnesty International raised our concerns to Hon Phil Goff, Minister of Defence, that the 50-70 detainees handed over to U.S. forces by the NZ SAS could be subject to torture at Guantanamo Bay or other secret detention centres in a third country (through the US practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’).

What happens to those transferred from PRTs operating in Afghanistan to Afghan security forces? They are almost certainly tortured.

Scores of NDS detainees, some arrested arbitrarily and detained incommunicado, that is without access to defence lawyers, families, courts or other outside bodies, have been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including being whipped, exposed to extreme cold, deprived of food and shocked with electrical probes.

Saying all this does not mean that Vice Adm. Gunn is somehow personally involved in torture. But his connection with an agency that is directly involved in activities advising military activities that themselves have been associated with torture makes him a dubious witness, to be sure. At least someone on the Judiciary Committee should have asked him about such links. No one did.

In any case, what we are witnessing is a corralling of all establishment criticism of the interrogations torture, and other crimes of the Bush administration by individuals highly invested in maintaining the legitimacy of U.S. military policy as a whole, including its pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is precisely these operations that involved the mass round-up of prisoners, thousands of whom were and many still remain imprisoned, and an untold number tortured.

More of the Usual Suspects: Farmer

The last of today's witnesses to be examined here is John Farmer, Jr.

Why is this guy testifying? Because he knew how to keep criticism of Giuliani toned down at the 9/11 commission? What’s his view on imprisoning “terrorists”? Does anyone remember his op-ed in the New York Times last year? In the name of reform of how “terrorists” have been treated by the criminal courts, and understanding how the Bushistas twisted criminal law into something unlawful, Farmer doesn’t propose an end to that only. No, he wants to create a new system of preventive detention!

A closer look at the Padilla case and other terrorism prosecutions reveals, to the contrary, that the continued reliance on our criminal justice system as the main domestic weapon in the struggle against terrorism fails on two counts: it threatens not only to leave our nation unprotected but also to corrupt the foundations of the criminal law itself.

The use of the criminal law in terrorist cases has never been an easy fit. After all, the primary purpose of counterterrorism is the prevention of future acts, while the criminal law has developed primarily to punish conduct that has already occurred. The question raised by the Padilla trial is whether a case about an attack that never actually happened can be tried in the criminal courts without transforming the nature of that system itself.

The answer is no. In order to make the criminal justice system an effective weapon, we have already started extending the reach of criminal statutes to conduct that has never before been punishable as a crime….

It is time to stop pretending that the criminal justice system is a viable primary option for preventing terrorism. The Bush administration should propose and Congress should pass legislation allowing for preventive detention in future terrorism cases like that of Mr. Padilla. It is the best way to ensure both the integrity of our criminal law and the safety of our nation.

Rivkin, Rabkin, Pickering, Nunn, and Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Besides Schwarz, who works with the distinguished legal civil liberties-oriented Brennan Center for Justice, this was a stacked list of witnesses, with the majority supporters of the "war on terror" and "homeland security" schemes that are anti-democratic. In the case of Pickering, we have some implicated in collaboration with those who committed exactly the same types of crimes the commission is supposed to address. What a farce! I cannot think of words of base calumny strong enough.

If this is the direction this commission is headed, then it should be boycotted. While I can support the direction an organization like Physicians for Human Rights wants to take such a torture investigation (see their letter to Sen. Leahy, PDF, from earlier today), I think that establishment human rights organization and liberals in general underestimate the entrenched nature of the powers who allowed torture to take place, and have great investment in maintaining the inviolability of the right of the state to use coercive force.

My case study for this -- and it's starting to look less like a cause, than now, sadly, a case study -- is the indifference with which the political elite treated the exposure of the Army Field Manual as riddled with abusive interrogation techniques, amounting to torture. Outside of a handful of blogs and commentators, and a few human rights organizations, including PHR and Center for Constitutional Rights, the issue has gone dead in the water. No one in Congress seems interested. They'd much rather listen to Thomas Pickering, or even David Rivkin.

I recommend my readers go to CCR's webpage on Prosecutions and Accountability and follow the action steps there. They include a letter that can be signed to Sen. Leahy:

We are also calling upon Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is holding a hearing on March 4 of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss a “truth commission” to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, to support prosecutions for those government officials who violated the law. Sign a letter to Sen. Leahy and the Judiciary Committee calling for them to support prosecutions, and to oppose any immunity for the architects of these torture programs.

From DoJ to CIA: Wiretapping, Torture, Stonewalling & Obstruction of Justice

Two stories from today's news highlight the hubris of the U.S. executive branch as regards its assumed right to conduct unrestrained surveillance of its citizens, and engage in torture in violation of all laws.

Both Emptywheel at Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com have done a stellar job tracking the Cheneyesque descent (H/T EW) of the Obama Justice Department when it comes to the question of executive privilege over classified material, especially when it comes to the courts. We already have witnessed the spectacle of the U.S. pressuring a British court on the suppression of documents in the Binyam Mohamed case.

As the Guardian reports it, "UK officials provided the CIA with information used in Mohamed's interrogation in Morocco, where he says he was tortured." For all the frenzied attempt to hide secrets, demands for an investigation grow in Britain.

Ministers yesterday came under increased pressure to set up an independent inquiry into the role of British security and intelligence agents in the US practice of rendering terror suspects to foreign prisons to be secretly and inhumanely interrogated.

Back in the U.S., it's a similar story. In the al-Haramain case, now in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco under Judge Vaughn Walker, an Islamic charity was targeted as "terrorist" and subjected to warrantless wiretapping... or was it that it was caught up in a data-mining sweep under illegal mass surveillance and a "terrorist" case built out of whole cloth? We can't be sure, and partly because the government won't release its documents, and al-Haramain's suit cannot go forward. It's even stranger when the primary document, a log of calls, was initially and mistakenly released to the plaintiffs, who returned it, and now can't get it back in order to pursue their case.

The Quest for Unlimited Executive Power Under Two Administrations

The position taken by the Department of Justice in the latest filing in the case is Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft-Gonzalez-kind outrageous, making preposterous assertions about executive power. Greenwald caught the situation perfectly:

The brief filed by Obama on Friday afternoon (.pdf) has to be read to believed. It is literally arguing that no court has the power to order that classified documents be used in a judicial proceeding; instead, it is the President -- and the President alone -- who possesses that decision-making power under Article II, and no court order is binding on the President to the extent it purports to direct that such information be made available for use in a judicial proceeding....

... after a few symbolic (and potentially important) decrees in the first week, which I praised at the time -- the Obama administration's approach to civil liberties, constitutional protections and the reining in of executive power abuses has been absolutely abysmal. None of this has anything to do with complaints that he hasn't yet done enough. It's the opposite: these are all affirmative, even extraordinary, actions undertaken by the Obama DOJ not merely to copy, but in the Al-Haramain case, virtually to surpass, the worst aspects of the Bush/Cheney/Addington use of extreme secrecy and assertions of unlimited executive power.

The twistings and turnings of the al-Haramain case are being reported and dissected in excruciatingly minute but important detail by Emptywheel and her cohort of experts over at FDL, and the reader is kindly directed there to hear the latest news, e.g., "On Friday, Obama's DOJ submitted four new declarations--presumably to correct the 'inaccurate' information provided in May 2006." What might that "inaccurate" information be? Head on over to EW at FDL and see what the cognoscenti think.

Did I say "Two"? I Meant "Ninety-Two".

In the other big news of the day, the ACLU revealed that the CIA now admits that it destroyed not two, as previously revealed, but 92 interrogation videotapes of "high-profile" prisoners in their custody. The revelation came as part of the ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the ACLU to obtain documents from the CIA. The case is in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.

The admission of greater destruction of evidence came in a letter today from the U.S. attorneys to Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Noting that John Durham's criminal investigation into "the destruction of certain videotaped interrogations of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency" is essentially over, and that the court will likely order an identifying list of destroyed records, with "summaries, transcripts, or memoranda" regarding these records "and any reconstruction of the records' contents," the government, agreeing to gather the appropriate materials, made the following comment:

In the meantime, the CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed.... Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed. This information is included in the CIA Office of Inspector General's Special Review Report, a redacted version of which was previously produced to the Plaintiffs. The CIA will unredact this information from the report and produce it to the Plaintiffs.

Finally, we note that certain of the information ... may be classified or statutorily protected from disclosure, such as the names of CIA employees who have reviewed the tapes.

The government also promised to identify and witnesses who have seen the tapes or had custody of them prior to their destruction.

One wonders why it took that long to make the admission, and we can suppose that Durham already knew something of the amount of destroyed material, as part of his investigation, and that the CIA is doing its best to organize a limited hangout of some sort. I note what the government notes, i.e., that "certain of the information ... may be classified or statutorily protected from disclosure." It remains to be seen how far they will go in hiding more of their crimes.

The Crime of Destruction of Evidence in its Historical Context

I think there are two places in which we have the CIA on record, in-house, so to speak, re taping coercive interrogations (torture). In the KUBARK manual, audio taping of interrogations is recommended, as helping with planning and ongoing interrogations. They had lots of uses for such recordings, as this snippet from KUBARK (CIA counterintellgence interrogation manual, 1961) indicates:

A session with the witness may be recorded. If the witness denounces the interrogatee there is no problem. If he does not, the interrogator makes an effort to draw him out about a hostile agent recently convicted in court or otherwise known to the witness. During the next interrogation session with the source, a part of the taped denunciation can be played back to him if necessary.

Much more recently, in the minutes to the 10/02/02 "counter-resistance strategy" meeting with LTC Beaver, other DoD personnel, and Dave Becker of DIA and CIA general counsel John Fredman, we get the following exchange:

Becker: Videotapes are subject to too much scrutiny in court. We don't want the LEA people in aggressive sessions anyway. [By "LEA," they mean "law enforcement agency", and most particularly, the FBI. - Valtin]

LTC Beaver: LEA choice not to participate in these types of interrogations is more ethical and moral as opposed to legal.

Fredman: The videotaping of even totally legal techniques will look "ugly".

Becker: (Agreed)

As many have noted, there are thousands of hours of videotape, and not only of CIA torture. There were likely lots of tapes made at Guantanamo, too (and many likely also destroyed).

The destruction of interrogation evidence was a primary consideration of these criminals from very early on, as evidenced by this story, now little remembered from last June:

The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.

The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.

Put this all together with the supposed "disarray" of Guantanamo files, and we have a massive cover-up of crimes of a magnitude we have yet to fathom. One thing is for sure, the amount of destroyed tapes and material is far more than even this limited hangout will attest.

The destruction of evidence -- in this case amounting to obstruction of justice -- is nothing new for the CIA. In the early 1970s, the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, along with the head of the CIA's Office Technical Services destroyed most of the agency's MKULTRA files, as then-CIA chief Admiral Stanfield Turner admitted to a Senate panel in 1977. MKULTRA was a massive mind control, "behavioral modification" program. It ran, officially, from 1953-1964, and included even "terminal" experiments with the use of drugs on unwitting subjects. The results of its various studies were incorporated into the CIA model of coercive interrogation, codified in its KUBARK counter-intelligence interrogation manual in the early 1960s. This manual was only declassified in the 1990s. The National Security Archive describes some of the relevant sections in that manual. Warning: those who read this may suffer vertiginous deja vu, thinking of various headlines and exposes in the past seven years:

Under the subheading, "Threats and Fears," the CIA authors note that "the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain." Under the subheading "Pain," the guidelines discuss the theories behind various thresholds of pain, and recommend that a subject's "resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself" such rather than by direct torture. The report suggests forcing the detainee to stand at attention for long periods of time. A section on sensory deprivations suggests imprisoning detainees in rooms without sensory stimuli of any kind, "in a cell which has no light," for example. "An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective," the KUBARK manual concludes.

Government Secrecy and the Struggle for a Free Society

Secrecy is almost always used to protect crimes from the public. It is shameful that an administration that prides itself on transparency -- indeed, Attorney General Holder released today the text of the missing Office of Legal Counsel memos from the post-9/11 era -- has, when it comes to torture and wiretapping, committed itself to such an abysmal recrudescence of Bush-era claims of executive supremacy.

It is not enough to ban waterboarding, as the government has now announced, when abusive techniques of interrogation, including sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation and manipulation of phobic fears is still part of the U.S. arsenal of interrogation techniques, as in the current Army Field Manual.

The CIA is almost an entirely different story. As a rogue element in government, recipient of untold billions of dollars and influence in far-reaching parts of government and society as a whole, it is ceased being, if it ever was, an agent of the democracy it claims to serve, and is instead one of the most dangerous, out-of-control elements inside government. One can only hope that the Durham investigation comes to the necessary conclusions, and that criminal prosecutions begin the restoration of law and order throughout the government.

What seems likely, though, is that the entrenched powers will fight a tooth-and-nail struggle against any restriction upon their freedom of action. Only a period of social struggle, such as occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, will provide the sufficient societal impetus and defense to fight back against these anti-democratic interests and the law-breakers that enable them. One way to begin this fight would be by supporting the call for prosecutions initiated by the National Lawyers Guild and a number of other prominent individuals and groups. If one cannot bring themselves to support that, then one must at a support the call for investigations coming from the Congressional offices of Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers.

Wiretapping, Torture, Stonewalling by government, and Obstruction of Justice by the agencies and players involved -- Watergate was not easy, and this will not be so either. But I feel the tide turning, and we must complete what the Vietnam and Watergate eras failed to achieve: a social revolution in how power is conducted in this country, and an end to militarism and imperialist foreign policy as the raison d'etre for U.S. power.

Five Remarkable Interviews in "The Warning"

The producers of a unique documentary sent me a DVD copy of their independent documentary, "The Warning." They hoped they would get a good review, and they needn't have worried.

"The Warning," written, produced, and directed by Joseph P. Sottile, consists entirely of interviews with five well-known liberal authors (see below). Rather than questions and answers, the interviewees are allowed to speak for themselves. Occasionally, they even read appropriate selections from their works.

But rather than a boring word fest, the seriousness of the work gives it a riveting feel. The subject is nothing less than the descent of the United States into a ruthless totalitarian state, which relies on state torture, an imperial executive, widespread surveillance, the conscious use of fear-laden propaganda, a docile press, and the influence of a radical Christian core of believers to spread the program in institutions throughout civil society.

If we are not yet a fascist state -- and the film steps back from going that far -- we are clearly moving towards that. I would add that the election of Barack Obama may have slowed that descent, but to date, all the factors behind it remain in place, particularly what Kennedy in the film calls "the merger of state and corporate power."

The following text comes from the film's website (emphases in original):

Terrorism. Cronyism. Surveillance. The suspension of basic Constitutional protections. The Patriot Act. Pre-emptive War. Bad intelligence. Torture. Corporate power. Mercenaries. Occupation. The Unitary Executive. Neo-Cons. A never-ending war against "terror."

Something very strange has happened in America. Since 2001, America has taken a radical turn.

Five authors stood up and spoke truth to power, exposing shocking trends towards a police state, an accelerated corporate integration with the state and the blatant subversion of the U. S. Constitution.

Five mavericks asked questions the mainstream media refused to ask, and looked into the dark corners of a closing democracy, a changing economy and growing empire.

* Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
* Naomi Wolf: The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
* Chris Hedges: American Fascists; the Christian Right and the War on America
* Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
* Joe Conason: It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush

They expose the forces at work in the transformation of our democracy into a Unitary Executive that uses fear, emergency powers and the supremacy of military command to gather power into the office of the Presidency. The Warning traces the radical steps America had taken toward a new, wholly unconstitutional form of American government.

* The rise of super-patriotism
* Disdain for the importance of human rights and the rule of law
* Use of torture and secret prisons
* Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
* Suppression of dissent
* A controlled mass media
* Obsession with national security
* Religion and ruling elite tied together
* Power of corporations protected
* Rampant cronyism and corruption
* Fraudulent elections

These steps lead to a potential tipping point, from democracy to something different. Something ominous.

T2PTV has created an affiliate program for the film for interested webmasters. I have chosen not to participate, in part because I want to keep this website ad free, but also because I'd rather all monies for this film go to its intrepid makers and marketers. The film is one I can recommend honestly, and because its message is important.

"Parable of the Old Men and the Young"

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretch\ed forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Link