Bagram Interviews, ACLU Letter on Child Prisoners, Obama Seals Up Secrets

Yesterday [11/28], my [Daily Kos] diary on the Washington Post and New York Times articles regarding the existence of torture at a black-site, Special Operations-run prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, sparked a lot of comments. These spanned the spectrum from incredulity at the torture reports to speculations regarding Obama's place in this story.

I want to do a number of things with this follow-up diary. I'd like to highlight one of the New York Times prisoner interviews (long excerpts of which are now posted at the Times), that of Hamidullah, a 42-year-old poor farmer from rural Kandahar Province, who due to the war had to leave his farm, and now tries to make his living as a "spare auto-parts dealer".

I also want to take note of a letter from the ACLU to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates "on efforts to bring U.S. policy regarding the treatment, detention and trial of juveniles into compliance with international law." In addition, I think it's worth noting a special report at the Boston Globe on the struggle between the Obama administration and spy agencies over the declassification of decades of secret government documents.

The interview with Hamidullah

I've chosen to highlight this interview because the seizure, detention, interrogation, and release of this 42-year-old farmer took place entirely within Obama's months as commander-in-chief. Note that, per the earlier articles, the White House had no comment to make on this and other stories published over the weekend.

There can be, of course, no independent verification of Hamidullah's story. That would be impossible at this point. The existence of the Bagram black site prison is "classified." However, the New York Times noted that the interviews were conducted independently, and were consistent in their details with what other human rights workers interviewing detainees had reported. Since these prisoners were released, I'd add, and not considered ideological or organized opponents of the U.S., they don't, it seems to me, have any particular advantage in making the reports they do.

From the Hamidullah interview (as much as I believe fair use will allow - all bold emphases I have added):

I was in my house with my family, and we had a guest. It was night; about 11:30 p.m. They raided the house and arrested me and my guest. They tied my hands and blindfolded me. A kind of hood was put on my head. It was five and a half months ago in early June....

Then they put me in the Tor jail. I can’t remember the number of days I spent there because it’s hard to tell days from nights in the black jail, but I think every day they came twice to ask questions.

They took me to their own room to ask the questions. They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me. But the problem was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep....

The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place. It is a place where everybody is afraid. In the black jail, they can do anything to detainees.

Hamidullah notes that the Red Cross is not allowed "to see or communicate" with any of the prisoners. He reports his being stripped naked in front of the interrogators and interpreters. While he says he didn't literally see anyone tortured, he could hear "crying" and "moaning" of other prisoners.

When they took us they tied up our hands and blindfolded us and covered our ears....

When I was in the black jail it was very difficult. I couldn’t even think how I felt. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I banged on the doors for hours and no one came. It was too difficult.

It may be easy for some to dismiss Hamidullah's tale, or the fact that he feared at the time he would never get out of the main Bagram prison, after transferred there from the black site, because he'd talked to other prisoners who had been there "for years." But for those who do, they should think of the moral burden carried by themselves for making such a dismissal, under these circumstances. What we need instead is a full investigation. No more secrets!

ACLU Asks Obama Administration to Comply with UN Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict

Before the Washington Post published their story on the Bagram black site, highlighting the torture of teenaged captives of U.S. Special Forces, earlier this month the ACLU had written a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, "requesting updated data on juveniles in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan and information on efforts to bring U.S. policy regarding the treatment, detention and trial of juveniles into compliance with international law."

In May 2008, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child conducted a review of U.S. compliance with the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The U.S. is a signatory of this protocol. The review found that 513 Iraqi children were imprisoned by the U.S. military as "imperative threats to security." Moreover, the U.S. "had transferred an unknown number of additional children to Iraqi custody." As of April 2008, approximately 10 juveniles were reported being held at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.

We know now, thanks to the Washington Post article the other day, which interviewed two teenaged prisoners previously incarcerated at the Bagram black site, what kind of mistreatment, amounting to torture, in my opinion, these children and teens have experienced.

From the Post article:

The two teenagers -- Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 -- said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

The ACLU letter to Gates noted that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its review had uncovered reports of juvenile mistreatment by the U.S. military, including length of detention and conditions of confinement of juvenile detainees, and lack of adequate access to education, legal services and physical and psychological recovery services.

The committee also was concerned that children were being charged and prosecuted for war crimes without consideration for their status as juveniles. Last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Canadian Guantánamo detainee Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces, will be charged in a military commission for allegedly throwing a hand grenade that killed an Army medic and wounded others in Afghanistan.

The human rights community and progressives in general should see to it that Gates' feet are held to the fire on this, and pressure put on the Obama administration to fulfill their obligations to the Protocol on Children in Armed Conflict.

The full letter to Gates can be found here. The full report of the U.N. CRC is here (PDF).

Report: Obama to Maintain Secrecy on Millions of Military/Intel Docs

While not specifically about torture or the Bagram base, not too tangentially, this story about the fight over state secrecy, in terms of ever finding out what this government does, is important. The Boston Globe has a special report by Bryan Bender on how the Obama administration, flummoxed by intelligence agency interference and obstinacy regarding the declassification of documents, many over 25 years old, has led Obama to decide to continue the secret hold on these materials, which originally were to be released on Dec. 31 of this year.

The release was an extension of earlier holds put on the declassification by both Clinton and Bush administrations. The Bender article describes the struggle within the state bureaucracy over these documents, and it's difficult to see anyone, including Obama, who to his credit has made some play for greater transparency and openness, looking good about what is unfolding. The Obama administration appears to not have just been defeated on this, but some of their new proposals apparently are contrary to earlier policies regarding openness made in the early days of the administration.

From the Boston Globe article:

WASHINGTON - President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.

The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials....

The failure to meet the disclosure deadline “does not augur well for new, more ambitious efforts to advance classification reform,’’ said Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “If binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance.’’

Besides the larger picture around declassification and ever knowing our own history, the failure to declassify even old documents -- in this case, over 400 million pages of documents going back to World War II -- means that the scandals and abuses of the present day are also likely to never be fully understood or revealed, including the facts around U.S. use of torture.

It is time this country squarely face the momentous task of changing the direction we are headed. Recent events are clearly demonstrating the folly of putting all hope of change into one man, or even the electoral process alone, per se. We need powerful investigations, a vibrant and active press and citizenry, and a political leadership that is not afraid to make the hard choices.

If Obama makes a decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and not begin a withdrawal, it will be a decision as fateful as Bush's to illegally invade Iraq. It will be near-impossible to double-back on this path once launched (indeed, the fact that Obama is about to escalate the war is related to the instance of first invading that country).

As an example of how it otherwise could be, see Ray McGovern's excellent article at Truthout, discussing a different president's decision on a different war, and a sober assessment of how things could have been different.

Originally posted at Daily Kos

Torture at Bagram Makes Headlines

Washington Post, November 28, 2009, Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate

KABUL -- Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban....

The holding center described by the teenagers appeared to have been a facility run by U.S. Special Operations forces that is separate from the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main American-run prison, which holds about 700 detainees. The teenagers' descriptions of a holding area on a different part of the Bagram base are consistent with the accounts of two other former detainees, who say they endured similar mistreatment, but not beatings, while being held last year at what Afghans call Bagram's "black" prison.

New York Times, November 28, 2009, Alissa J. Rubin

Kabul, Afghanistan - An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. In this case, that means isolating certain prisoners for a period of time so interrogators can extract information or flush out confederates.

The stories from former prisoners, including teenagers, independently describe conditions that include solitary confinement and isolation, sleep deprivations, beatings, sexual humiliation, demands for confession, lack of access to the International Red Cross, sensory deprivation (via hooding and earmuffs), and exposure to intense cold.

According to the Post report, earlier this month Colonel John Garrity, described as a commander at the Bagram main facility (not the black Special Ops prison) denied there was any abuse of prisoners at Bagram. The NYT story says Pentagon and White House officials declined comment on the current story, because the Bagram black site is "classified."

A number of bloggers have found it odd that the Bagram story broke in two of the nations papers on the same day. Marcy Wheeler notes that "this story came out just weeks after the Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude floated sending military detainees from Gitmo to Bagram," and not long after the resignation of Obama's special assistant on detainee affairs, Phillip Carter. The black site at Bagram has been, according to Wheeler (quoted by Spencer Ackerman), "long-known".

Daphne Eviatar had big article on Bagram in The American Lawyer last November, and cited a habeas petition from a Bagram prisoner which alleges that prisoners "are regularly tortured and abused, including being starved, severely beaten, forced into painful, contorted body positions, 'waterboarded,' exposed to extremely cold temperatures, and sexually humiliated." (See GRITtv's show "Bagram's Black Hole", first broadcast about ten months ago.) Of course, the current articles by the nation's two premier newspapers cite abuse occurring even under the auspices of the Obama administration.

The Status of Torture in Obama's America

The biggest news, not noted in either story, may be the degree to which much of the U.S. population, and in particular liberals who backed the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who became the first African-American chief executive in U.S. history, have been in denial over the poor record of President Obama on the issue of torture and detention policies. The President began with a big series of presidential orders that supposedly ended the Bush administration's policy of torturing prisoners, and shut down the CIA's black site prisons.

But as we know now, not all the black site prisons were shut down. Nor was the torture ended. Whether its beatings and forced-feedings at Guantanamo, or the kinds of torture described at Bagram, it's obvious that torture has not been rooted out of U.S. military-intelligence operations. In fact, by way of the Obama administration's recent approval of the Bush-era Army Field Manual on interrogations, with its infamous Appendix M, which allows for much of the kind of torture practiced at Bagram, the White House has institutionalized a level of torture that was introduced by the previous administration, but which has been studied and devised over the last fifty or sixty years.

Furthermore, in a June 2009 Air Force document I uniquely reported on last July, I noted that the personnel responsible for some of the torture program deriving from the SERE schools were still allowed "psychological oversight of battlefield interrogation and detention". Are SERE psychologists involved in the Special Operations black site torture at Bagram? Given the close relationship between SERE's parent group, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, I think there's a high possibility of just such involvement.

The state of denial that American liberals and progressives find themselves in over the Obama administration's policies on interrogation and detention are amplified by internal disagreements over Obama's planned escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I believe the Bagram stories release this weekend is related, in part, to the administration's announcement of such escalation later this week. It's as if someone were saying, get used to more stories like this, because the dogs of war are being even further granted their release, and if you don't like what you're hearing, get ready. Special Ops (and General McChrystal, supreme commander in Afghanistan is a Special Operations commander) is in charge now, and these guys don't brook any opposition, and consider themselves a law unto themselves.

Domestically, what will finally happen is a split -- long needed, I'd add -- between the pro-military and anti-militarist wings of the progressive movement over the Afghanistan war, and related issues, such as the persistence of torture and prisoner abuse. For the moment, though, the question is how long will denial exist among liberals and progressives over the persistence of an aggressive military policy and the concomitant crimes against humanity that come with it?

Will Obama's Afghan War Spark Its Own Antiwar Movement?

According to multiple accounts, as the White House leaks the news, building up to his speech at West Point on Tuesday, President Barack Obama, channeling a dead president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and mimicking a live one, George W. Bush, will be calling for an escalation in the Afghanistan War. The administration is said to be considering sending 30-35,000 troops to join the 68,000 U.S. troops already deployed there.

Famously, Obama's head general in Afghanistan, former Special Forces General McChrystal -- a man implicated in torture and war crimes -- had called for 40,000 new troops to fulfill his counterinsurgency plans. It appears that some NATO countries -- primarily Britain, Slovakia, Turkey, Georgia, South Korea and tiny Montenegro -- are positioned to make up the shortfall in troops by adding another four to six thousand, up from the approximately 36,000 non-U.S. troops in the NATO force.

But, according to a posting by fflammeau at Firedoglake, top NATO member Germany is balking:

Days before President Obama escalates the American presence in Afghanistan, Germany’s military chief of staff (General Wolfgang Schneiderhan) and his top aide (Peter Wichert) have resigned over accusations that the German military suppressed evidence of the death of dozens of civilians in an airstrike that killed 142 people. General Schneiderhan’s resignation not only is shaking the Merkel government in Germany, it has raised resistance in Germany (and perhaps other Nato countries) to their involvement in Afghanistan just as Obama seeks more troops from them. In late breaking news... reported by the authoritative Deutsche Welle, top politicians in Germany are now calling for a rethink of their role in Afghanistan and a quick exit strategy. In short, the Germans appear reluctant to play "the poodle role" to Obama.

The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never been about getting Saddam Hussein, or stopping the Taliban, or helping women achieve literacy. They have been about projecting U.S. dominance in that portion of the world, and was made possible by the collapse of Soviet power in the early 1990s.

Since then, China and the European allies (except Britain) have not been especially happy about the expansion of the U.S. in the newly "unipolar" world, but put up with it for the time being. But the writing is on the proverbial wall: sooner or later, Germany, and possibly France and Italy, will tire of U.S. "leadership", and feel they are not getting their piece of the world pie. This re-eruption of European imperialist ambition will mark a new and dangerous chapter in modern foreign affairs. The "terrorist" enemy of today, who themselves replaced the old specter of a soulless Red Army galumphing over Western Europe, will in the future become fear of a new Chinese Red Army, or a reincarnated Wehrmacht, all intent on destroying "our way of life."

Fox News Chides the Left

Meanwhile, Fox News, which like the broken clock gets it right about two times a day, has published an article salivating over both the inevitable pushback against Obama on the Afghan War issue from the Democratic Party's left wing, and also the likely tepid antiwar response from this same group. Quoting Paul Kawika Martin, political director for Peace Action, Fox writer Stephen Clark writes:

The White House has said that the U.S. won't be in Afghanistan for another eight or nine years. But that won't satisfy liberals, Martin said.

Even though Obama's announcement is sure to reawaken the anti-war movement, Martin said, the protests won't be as intense as they were in the Bush era because the movement has been weakened by the economic recession -- some organizations have shed up to 40 percent of staff in the past year, he said -- and is distracted by the national health care debate. He also said many members of the movement voted for Obama and trust him more than the Bush administration.

"So you don't have that same type of anger," he said.

I don't know Martin or his group, so I don't know how reliable they are as a voice of the left, but I do know that the Democratic Party left has fallen down on the torture issue, once Obama indicated that it was time to "look forward" and not "backwards". A small coterie of liberal bloggers, and the nation's top civil liberties groups, opposed this capitulation and still fight bravely on (see the ACLU's latest batch of FOIA docs on the destroyed CIA torture tapes, and some analysis by Marcy Wheeler here and here), but after some desultory hearings about having hearings by Senator Leahy last March, Congress turned to other issues, turning their backs aggressively on those who have been tortured.

While the left hasn't fielded a large-scale antiwar demonstration in years -- really since the beginning of the current Irag war -- there have been some protests. Antiwar and peace groups have not disappeared, and some very intelligent writing in opposition to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has been published of late (see the latest from David Dayen, which notes the opposition to the war from Democrat Bill Hedrick, or Derrick Crowe, or Glenn Greenwald, not to mention the incomparable Chris Floyd).

But the old antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s was spearheaded by a generation of leftists who are no longer on the scene: Stalinists and Maoists, Trotskyists and social-democrats, pacifists and anarchists. If there are some remnants (World Can't Wait gets a hefty amount of organizational drudge work -- and enthusiasm -- from the rank and file of Bob Avakian's old Revolutionary Communist Party), the left as a whole is anemic, and if one is looking for antiwar fervor from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's Congressional Democrats, they will be strain their necks from searching. The most "radical" proposition coming from those ranks is a threat to raise a surtax to pay for Obama's war campaign.

Fox News forgot one important point. The escalation of the Afghanistan War will not work, not even by the standards of the U.S. military. But the current crop of military leaders, and their civilian hangers-one, are drunk on their vision of a unipolar world, led by the progeny of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, and feeling almost omnipotent, having gotten away with waging a totally illegal war, and spread torture across dozens of countries, all while the populace back home indicated a persistent proclivity for indifference (or fearful complacency, which amounts to the same thing in the end).

Whether Obama is the tool of the hawks, or playing along for time, or even really believes the Global War on Terror inanity (and yes, right-wingers, I know there are dangerous terrorists; they just aren't enough of a danger to anywhere come near changing political and military reality to the degree it has changed, e.g. Patriot Act, torture, invading and destroying other countries), whatever Obama's own intentions are almost doesn't matter.

Days before President Obama escalates the American presence in Afghanistan, Germany’s military chief of staff (General Wolfgang Schneiderhan) and his top aide (Peter Wichert) have resigned over accusations that the German military suppressed evidence of the death of dozens of civilians in an airstrike that killed 142 people. General Schneiderhan’s resignation not only is shaking the Merkel government in Germany, it has raised resistance in Germany (and perhaps other Nato countries) to their involvement in Afghanistan just as Obama seeks more troops from them. In late breaking news... reported by the authoritative Deutsche Welle, top politicians in Germany are now calling for a rethink of their role in Afghanistan and a quick exit strategy. In short, the Germans appear reluctant to play "the poodle role" to Obama.

The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never been about getting Saddam Hussein, or stopping the Taliban, or helping women achieve literacy. They have been about projecting U.S. dominance in that portion of the world, and was made possible by the collapse of Soviet power in the early 1990s.

Since then, China and the European allies (except Britain) have not been especially happy about the expansion of the U.S. in the newly "unipolar" world, but put up with it for the time being. But the writing is on the proverbial wall: sooner or later, Germany, and possibly France and Italy, will tire of U.S. "leadership", and feel they are not getting their piece of the world pie. This re-eruption of European imperialist ambition will mark a new and dangerous chapter in modern foreign affairs. The "terrorist" enemy of today, who themselves replaced the old specter of a soulless Red Army galumphing over Western Europe, will in the future become fear of a new Chinese Red Army, or a reincarnated Wehrmacht, all intent on destroying "our way of life."

Fox News Chides the Left

Meanwhile, Fox News, which like the broken clock gets it right about two times a day, has published an article salivating over both the inevitable pushback against Obama on the Afghan War issue from the Democratic Party's left wing, and also the likely tepid antiwar response from this same group. Quoting Paul Kawika Martin, political director for Peace Action, Fox writer Stephen Clark writes:

The White House has said that the U.S. won't be in Afghanistan for another eight or nine years. But that won't satisfy liberals, Martin said.

Even though Obama's announcement is sure to reawaken the anti-war movement, Martin said, the protests won't be as intense as they were in the Bush era because the movement has been weakened by the economic recession -- some organizations have shed up to 40 percent of staff in the past year, he said -- and is distracted by the national health care debate. He also said many members of the movement voted for Obama and trust him more than the Bush administration.

"So you don't have that same type of anger," he said.

I don't know Martin or his group, so I don't know how reliable they are as a voice of the left, but I do know that the Democratic Party left has fallen down on the torture issue, once Obama indicated that it was time to "look forward" and not "backwards". A small coterie of liberal bloggers, and the nation's top civil liberties groups, opposed this capitulation and still fight bravely on (see the ACLU's latest batch of FOIA docs on the destroyed CIA torture tapes, and some analysis by Marcy Wheeler here and here), but after some desultory hearings about having hearings by Senator Leahy last March, Congress turned to other issues, turning their backs aggressively on those who have been tortured.

While the left hasn't fielded a large-scale antiwar demonstration in years -- really since the beginning of the current Irag war -- there have been some protests. Antiwar and peace groups have not disappeared, and some very intelligent writing in opposition to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has been published of late (see the latest from David Dayen, which notes the opposition to the war from Democrat Bill Hedrick, or Derrick Crowe, or Glenn Greenwald, not to mention the incomparable Chris Floyd).

But the old antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s was spearheaded by a generation of leftists who are no longer on the scene: Stalinists and Maoists, Trotskyists and social-democrats, pacifists and anarchists. If there are some remnants (World Can't Wait gets a hefty amount of organizational drudge work -- and enthusiasm -- from the rank and file of Bob Avakian's old Revolutionary Communist Party), the left as a whole is anemic, and if one is looking for antiwar fervor from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's Congressional Democrats, they will be strain their necks from searching. The most "radical" proposition coming from those ranks is a threat to raise a surtax to pay for Obama's war campaign.

Fox News forgot one important point. The escalation of the Afghanistan War will not work, not even by the standards of the U.S. military. But the current crop of military leaders, and their civilian hangers-one, are drunk on their vision of a unipolar world, led by the progeny of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, and feeling almost omnipotent, having gotten away with waging a totally illegal war, and spread torture across dozens of countries, all while the populace back home indicated a persistent proclivity for indifference (or fearful complacency, which amounts to the same thing in the end).

Whether Obama is the tool of the hawks, or playing along for time, or even really believes the Global War on Terror inanity (and yes, right-wingers, I know there are dangerous terrorists; they just aren't enough of a danger to anywhere come near changing political and military reality to the degree it has changed, e.g. Patriot Act, torture, invading and destroying other countries), whatever Obama's own intentions are almost doesn't matter.

The real direction of American politics and society is being decided in this next period. Will it follow the road of Cheney and Bush, albeit with a supposedly kinder face, or will the forces who believe in social justice, world peace, promotion of economic equality, and a fight against the forces of exploitation, torture, and war profiteering, wake up, fight, and realize that failure to act is a profound evil in and of itself? It makes other evil possible.

Protest Letter to Obama on Failure to Release Torture Evidence

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and a host of other organizations, including Alliance of Justice, Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, After Downing Street, Veterans for Peace, American Muslim Voice, and many others, have sent a letter (PDF) to President Obama asking him to withdraw his opposition to the release of photos of detainee abuse. The letter continues (italics in original):

More broadly, we write to remind you of the context in which this issue arises, explain why transparency and robust accountability are a strategic national security imperative, and to expose the self-interest of voices counseling against accountability.

You recently received a letter from seven former CIA directors “urg[ing] you to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations....” We are grateful that you dismissed their self-serving and internally inconsistent diatribe, and instead affirmed “that nobody’s above the law.”

On the other hand, your actions in other arenas indicate a troubling willingness to sweep torture under the rug, rather than openly address our nation’s regrettable recent history....

We claim, on the one hand, that our military deployments advance human rights, reflecting our historical legacy as a champion of those issues. But this claim will continue to lack contemporary credibility until robust accountability — and prosecution — dispels the cloud of torture and abuse that unfortunately lingers over U.S. foreign policy.

Beyond the impact such prosecution may have on the intelligence community and our foreign allies and supporters, we also speak on behalf of millions of Americans from all walks of life, demographics, professions, backgrounds, and communities who are appropriately appalled by the CIA’s abuses....

We recognize your understandable desire to look forward rather than back. The ongoing secrecy surrounding evidence of torture, however, amounts to suppression of evidence. You yourself have affirmed that “nobody’s above the law,” even while acting to keep the dark past from being brought to light by pursuing a policy of secrecy.

While Congress has authorized your administration to disregard court orders to disclose photos documenting abuse, the Department of Defense retains—and we request that you exercise — the authority to declassify and release the photos. Torture apologists have concocted the self-serving ruse that releasing the photos would undermine the safety of U.S. troops deployed abroad, ignoring the sad reality that any potential harm to our troops inheres in the criminal conduct depicted in the photos, not their potential disclosure....

Worse yet, the secrecy your administration maintains over torture evidence — much of which appears to have been destroyed by the CIA in an effort to cover its criminal trail — appears to reflect the worst conceivable reason not to enforce the law: deference to a political calculus. The possibility that robust accountability may prove contentious, and potentially interfere with the actualization of your administration’s agenda on unrelated policy matters, is an illegitimate basis on which to resign enforcing the law.

Moreover, failing to investigate those who conceived, planned, and orchestrated violations of international law does not reflect political neutrality. In fact, the current investigation, limited to some junior agents, reflects pre-judgment in favor of alleged torturers. Your administration’s decision to hide torture evidence unfortunately compounds past crimes and further erodes the rule of law.

Please see the link to read the whole letter, which is amply documented with footnotes. Regarding the letter's claim in the penultimate paragraph above, re the CIA's destruction of evidence, see the ACLU's latest release of a "Vaughn Index" of the denied documents in the investigation of the destruction of the CIA torture videotapes, and some wonderful examinations by Emptywheel/Marcy Wheeler (here and here and here) about what that Index might reveal anyway about matters relating to the CIA's crimes.

Purge at the White House on Torture & Detainee Policies? (Updated)

Stephen Soldz is speculating on his blog, and I'm buying it:

It’s beginning to look as if the... Obama administration may be purging those officials who don’t understand that human rights take last place, after placating the intelligence community and looking strong so Liz Cheney doesn’t mock them.

This is a reasonable conclusion drawn from today's breaking news that Phillip Carter, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, suddenly resigned his post last Friday. Carter was known as sympathetic to human rights causes, and in his writings at Slate's "Convictions" and the Washington Post's "Intel Dump" had been quite critical of the Bush Administration's torture/detention program, and its legal underpinnings. (See his "Genesis of Torture" piece from June 18, 2008.)

Now, Carter follows the resignation of Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig, another administration official involved in detainee policy, and closely associated with the policy of closing Guanatanamo. It sure looks like a purge is taking place, and out of it Gates and the CIA will come out looking stronger. Or, is this a price paid for the bill due for allowing KSM and four others to be tried in civilian courts? Steep price, then. Most see the Craig resignation as a scapegoating for the failed Guantanamo policy.

It appears the battle over Guantanamo has been waged, and the human rights community and the prisoners lost. By all accounts, Guantanamo isn't going to be closed anytime soon. Obama is saying sometime next year (no deadlines anymore). Andy Worthington has blogged on what a disaster the failure to close Guantanamo amounts to, especially for the prisoners there, many of whom have been cleared for release, but have nowhere to go.

For what it's worth, here's a bit from today's Washington Post article on Carter's resignation:

Phillip Carter, who was appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, said in a brief telephone interview that he was leaving for "personal and family reasons" and not because of any policy differences with the administration....

Carter, a lawyer and Iraq veteran, was responsible for coordinating global policy on detainees.

Since taking office, he has helped craft new policies that will allow hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan to challenge their indefinite detention under a new review system. Carter was also involved in the administration's effort to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, which holds 215 detainees.

His departure comes at a critical moment for the administration, as it attempts to find a location in the United States to stage military tribunals and place some detainees in indefinite detention.

Update: (Wednesday, 12:30pm, PST) Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler) reports in her own posting on the Carter resignation that Carol Rosenberg at The Miami Herald has some excellent reporting on the story. Rosenberg's story strongly hints that Carter's resignation is related to Obama's determination, or so it appears, to continue the indefinite detention of some Guantanamo prisoners. Carter's last task? He was sent to check out a possible Guantanamo replacement penal facility in Thomson, Illinois.

It appears more and more likely Carter couldn't stand his squeezed lemon role, caught between the right-wing "pragmatists" and pro-war crowd at the White House, and his former NGO constituency. See the Post article, where Carter's best attempts to get ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations to be more cooperative with what Obama was doing at Guantanamo were spurned. Carter appears to have done the right thing and resigned, unable to maintain his integrity in the Obama administration. What kind of fate does that hold for Dawn Johnsen, said to soon be considered at last for confirmation as head of Obama's Office of Legal Counsel?

Glenn Greenwald has a post up on Carter, too, looking in more depth at Carter's progressive, pre-Obama administration background.

Murder at Guantanamo? The Strange Death of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi

First reported at Truthout (additional material added since the original article is in brackets)

With recent news reports centering on Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that some Guantanamo detainees would be prosecuted in federal court and revamped, albeit flawed military commissions, important stories from previous months related to the prison facility continue to sink ever deeper into the swamp of our collective amnesia.

One example is the death that occurred at Guantanamo last June of Yemeni prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi. Al Hanashi's death was reported as an "apparent suicide," and about four weeks later, Mike Melia of The Associated Press reported that Yemeni officials claimed Al Hanashi died of "asphyxiation." The article vaguely notes that self-strangulation may have been the cause of death.

While self-strangulation is rare, it is possible. However, news reports point out that the prisoner was kept under 24/7 observation (possibly on video) in the Guantanamo prison psychiatric ward. Furthermore, psychiatric patients on this ward are said to be sedated. How could this "suicide" happen? The death is being investigated by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which doesn't inspire trust, as recent revelations have shown it to be capable of some extremely bad behavior on some of its investigations.

But the suicide story has about worn out, as a November 15 Huffington Post article by journalist Naomi Wolf - who has followed the al Hanashi story - reports that Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt has confirmed that "the status of the investigation into Mr al-Hanashi's death ... is now a Naval criminal investigation - meaning that he is no longer considered a suicide but a victim of a murder or a negligent homicide."

[Since this article first appeared in Truthout on November 20, a story by Daphne Evitar in The Washington Independent reports that Ms. Evitar spoke to Lt. Cmdr. DeWalt, who indicated that the fact of the Naval criminal investigation did not mean the Navy considered the death a possible homicide. I would like to add that in the Mike Melia/Associated Press story quoted above, it is reported that previous investigations into the death of Guantanamo suicides -- all deaths by hanging -- have taken two years or more to complete.]

On January 17, 2009, al Hanashi was summoned to meet with top Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. David Thomas, and Army Col. Bruce Vargo, commander of the joint detention group. Afterwards, and with no explanation, al Hanashi never returned to the general prison population and ended up in the prison's psychiatric ward, where he was found dead some months later. No other details are known, though an AP story notes the following (emphasis added):

Attorney Elizabeth Gilson, who represents another detainee at the psychiatric ward, said she heard details about the suicide from her client but cannot divulge them because the information is classified. She described the force-feeding as "abusive and inhumane.

Several journalists, including Naomi Wolf, were on a tour of Guantanamo at the time of al Hanashi's death. They were not allowed to report on the death until after they had left the base.

Who was Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi?

Al Hanashi was no ordinary prisoner. He was a spokesman for the other prisoners, who had selected him last year to be their representative. Like the other four prisoners who have died of supposed suicide at Guantanamo, al Hanashi was a long-term hunger striker. While al Hanashi had been on hunger strike until at least last May, and his weight had fallen under 90 pounds, he was supposed to finally be getting a chance to meet with an attorney.

Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi was a Taliban supporter, who - according to Guantanamo expert Andy Worthington - "was one of around 50 prisoners at Guantanamo who had survived a massacre at Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in northern Afghanistan, at the end of November 2001, when, after the surrender of the city of Kunduz, several hundred foreign fighters surrendered to General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, in the mistaken belief that they would be allowed to return home." This was the same prison revolt and subsequent massacre by US, British and Northern Alliance forces where John Walker Lind was also captured and later tortured by US operatives.

The Qala-i-Janghi uprising came only days before a mass prisoner exchange took place with CIA-supported warlord Dostum, which, as New York Times writer James Risen noted recently, resulted in the killing of perhaps as many 2,000 Taliban fighters, who had surrendered at Kunduz. Serious questions have been raised about US involvement or knowledge of the mass killings. Physicians for Human Rights has initiated a campaign to expose the truth about the massacre, having documented the existence of mass graves at Dasht-e-Leili, as well as tampering with the grave sites. According to a US State Department account, witnesses to the killings have been murdered.

General Dostum is a supporter of the Karzai government, and was back in Kabul earlier this month to claim a post in the government's cabinet. According to a McClatchy report, he had to return to Turkey (where he resides periodically in exile) when the US complained about his presence to the Karzai government. The US has been trying to convince both domestic and international critics of its Afghanistan policy that the Afghanistan government can clean up its act, even though President Karzai's claim to legitimacy rests on a phony election that saw over one million fake ballots (about one-quarter of the total votes case, according to a New York Times story). The other major candidate recently pulled out of a run-off election, claiming it couldn't be fairly run.

Al Hanashi's Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) record documents the fact of his November 2001 surrender, his imprisonment and wounding at Qala-i-Janghi, and the fact he was shipped off to Shabraghan Prison, where he spent the next four weeks or so recuperating in the prison hospital. Also in the hospital were survivors of the Northern Alliance transfer from Kunduz, victims of a war crime as thousands were "stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers" (New York Times story). Some of the survivors ended up in Shabraghan Prison, the wounded in its meager hospital facilities.

Did al Hanashi talk with survivors of the Dostum mass killings? Did he hear tales of US Special Operations soldiers or officers involved? Was he killed to keep his silence? We don't know, but there are plenty of other reasons that US authorities may have wanted al Hanashi silenced.

Former Guantanamo inmate, Binyam Mohamed, who knew al Hanashi, believes the 31-year-old Yemeni force-fed hunger striker didn't commit suicide. He told Naomi Wolf recently that reports that al Hanashi was "an upbeat person with no mental problems and would never have considered suicide." As Wolf noted in an article last September:

As their designated representative, al-Hanashi knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.

Hence, another theory of possible homicide would be that al Hanashi knew too much about US torture and abuse. A person with some knowledge of the situation at Guantanamo has told me that it's possible that al Hanashi was removed, or allowed to die, simply because he had been too independent, too rebellious and a potential leader inside the prison. Naomi Wolf explained in an article last September how a hunger striker might die from force-feeding.

It is worth considering how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate, liquid, overfeeding by tube, to which Guantanamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea and deadly dehydration that can stop one's heart.

However, at the time of his death, al Hanashi was said to have already terminated his hunger strike.

Another odd coincidence surrounding his death concerns the transfer of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a "high-value" detainee, who has been at Guantanamo since September 2006, to a New York federal court, only a week after al Hanashi was found not breathing in Guantanamo's psych ward. Ghailani was facing charges concerning his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The link between Ghailani and al Hanashi is significant for one reason only: According to Andy Worthington, Ghailani, who was tortured in the CIA's black prisons, fingered al Hanashi in 2005 as having been at "'the al-Farouq camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated in the years before 9/11 with Osama bin Laden] in 1998-99 prior to moving on to the front lines in Kabul."

But according to al Hanashi and all other sources, al Hanashi came to Afghanistan only in early 2001. Hence, his possible testimony at a trial in New York City, establishing that Ghailani's admissions were false, and likely coerced by torture, may have been a hindrance to a government bent on convicting the supposed bomber. Interestingly, as Worthington points out, the other four embassy bombers were not kept in CIA black prisons or tortured, but convicted in a US court for the bombings in May 2001. (Ghailani sits in Metropolitan Correctional Center, still awaiting trial.)

Al Hanashi's death, coming only weeks before he was, after seven long years imprisonment, to meet finally with an attorney, brings to mind the untimely death of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, also at first reported as a suicide, in a prison cell in Libya last May. Al-Libi, too, was supposed to meet soon with people from the outside, according to a report from Newsweek. As is the case with Al-Libi, the al Hanashi death has a strange feel to it. The ACLU has called for an independent investigation into detainee deaths at Guantanamo, including that of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi.

Perhaps the most telling fact concerning al Hanashi's death is how silent and disinterested the mainstream media, and even some in the blogosphere, seems to be. A leader of the prisoners is reported as having strangled himself. Not long after becoming a spokesperson for the prisoners, al Hanashi is called to see the top officers at the prison, and is never seen again (outside of the psych ward) until he is found dead. By all accounts, he is kept in a part of the prison where there is constant surveillance. Other witnesses have tales to tell, but their stories are kept classified. His death is a possible convenience for any number of state actors, including prison officials, federal prosecutors and those portions of the Obama administration and military concerned with pressing the war in Afghanistan.

Many would like to look away from the crimes done in the name of US "security" at Guantanamo and other "war on terror" prisons in the Bush/Cheney years, and believe that these things are of the past. But increasingly, Americans are waking up to the fact that something very wrong and bad is still occurring regularly at Guantanamo and perhaps other US facilities. The US administration will not even let members of Congress go and interview prisoners in Guantanamo. What do they have to fear?

What will the NCIS investigation reveal about the death of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi? It's been six months since his death. We deserve some answers now.

The "Non-Lethality" Lie: Tasers Have Killed Hundreds Since 2001

H/T to Stephen Soldz, who has been following news on taser abuse for some time, including this recent report on police tasering a 10-year-old child, with the child's mother's consent no less.

In a posting last Saturday, Soldz highlighted an oped in the Tennessean by Jared Feuer, Southern regional director for Amnesty International USA.

Since 2001, about 400 people have died — 39 this year — after being Tasered by law enforcement personnel in the U.S. Amnesty International believes it is time to reconsider the use of Tasers. We believe this is even more essential as Taser International has issued new recommendations calling on law enforcement to avoid shocking people in the chest. This is the first time Taser has admitted a potentially serious health risk with the devices, and we believe it underscores our call for a full evaluation of their use....

The reasons for these deaths are an open question; what we do know is that a Taser gun exposes the victim to a 50,000-volt shock that continues until the officer releases his or her finger or the battery depletes. Such a shock overrides the body’s central nervous system, causing uncontrollable contraction of muscles and instant collapse. In a manufacturer’s study, it was found that additional shocks are required one-third of the time.

Because law enforcement officers do not know the medical history or condition of those being Tasered, they are not trained, required or able to determine the potential impact of the shock. The result appears to have been fatal for hundreds of people. It is for this reason that Amnesty International has urged that Taser use be limited to situations in which officers are faced with an immediate threat of death or serious injury that cannot be contained through less extreme options, if not suspended altogether pending an independent study to determine why people have died after being Tasered.

Tasers should be outlawed. Instead, police forces are turning in greater and greater numbers to this supposed "non-lethal" force alternative. But its non-lethality is a lie, as this story shows.

Of course, the military is interested, too, as this recent story at Wired explains:

A new electroshock weapon being developed by Taser could zap people up to 175 feet away — and keep on applying pain for as long as three minutes in a row. Which is pretty tough to take, since it only takes a second or two of shocks to make most people cry out in agony.

The new 40mm projectile resembles a super-sized version of the shotgun-fired XREP Taser projectile. And like the XREP, it will attach itself to the target and incapacitate him or her with a series of electric jolts....

“This project will likely increase the standoff range by at least a factor of five over already fielded electromuscular devices,” says Wes Burgei, a project engineer at the U.S. military’s Joint Non-lethal Weapons Directorate, which has given Taser $2.5 million to work on the weapon.

Under the auspices of the new Democratic president, Barack Obama, the worst aspects of the U.S. militarist state and expansion of police powers continues unabated from the Bush years.

What's really news is that the so-called progressive world hasn't yet awakened to this political reality. Thanks to Amnesty, ACLU, CCR, PHR and a handful of other human and legal rights agencies for spending the time and effort to fight back. Have you, dear reader, taken time out to donate money to one of these fine agencies?

Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture "Workshop"?

Originally posted at Firedoglake

Back in May 2007, while researching the activities of the American Psychological Association (APA) in support of the U.S. government's interrogation program, I came across evidence that the APA had engaged in a discussion of torture techniques during a workshop organized by APA and the RAND Corporation, "with generous funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."

The workshop was held at the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters of the privately-held but long linked-to-the-government RAND think tank. APA Director of Science Geoff Mumford acted as liaison to the CIA for the meeting. Susan Brandon, a key APA "Senior Scientist", and former member of the Bush White House's Office of Science & Technology Policy, helped organize the affair, along with psychologist Kirk Hubbard, who was then Chief of the Research & Analysis Branch, Operational Assessment Division of the CIA.

The workshop was titled the "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory", and it discussed new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. Those are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world.

According to the brief APA account:

Meeting at RAND headquarters in Arlington, VA, the workshop drew together approximately 40 individuals including research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists who study various aspects of deception and representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations. In addition, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security were present.... Following brief introductions and welcoming remarks... workshop participants divided into break-out groups to discuss thematic scenarios....

It was one of the particular "break-out groups" that concerned me. According to APA's Public Policy Office, which publishes an online newspaper called (with perhaps an unconscious taste for irony) "Spin," the workshops covered Embassy "Walk-in" informants, Law Enforcement Threat Assessment, and Intelligence gathering ("What are the dimensions of truth?"). But the workshop on Law Enforcement Interrogation and Debriefing had some shocking language

Marcy Wheeler & David Frakt on Torture & the 9/11 Prosecutions

Marcy Wheeler, aka emptywheel, has an important post up today. She has solicited the opinions of Lt. Col. David Frakt on the issues behind the Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants in a New York federal court, and other prisoners in the newly reconstituted military commissions. Frakt was the military attorney for teenaged Guanatanamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad.

Marcy, and key commenter-contributor at her blog, Mary, and others, had been wondering if the decision to move KSM and the others to federal courts wasn't in part due to the fact they could charge the 9/11 prisoners with "material support to terrorism" charges, making it easier to convict them, as such charges have been "used to give wide leeway to prosecutors to charge those for whom intent to commit terrorism may not be easy to prove."

There's much to read and ponder at Marcy's post. I found the discussion of the bogus "laws of war" charges actually brought in the military commissions cases to be very interesting. But in this post of mine today, I'm going to pull from Marcy's blog a portion of Lt. Col. Frakt's comments, which Marcy found particularly important, concerning how the issue of torture was handled by the judge in the military commissions case concerning Mohammed Jawad:

I had another couple of thoughts about why the 9/11 case was transferred to federal court, aside from purely political considerations. The Judge in the case, Colonel Stephen Henley, had made a couple of rulings in the Jawad case (my case) which made the government very nervous. First, he ruled in response to a motion to dismiss that I filed on the basis of torture that he “beyond peradventure” had the power to dismiss all charges on the basis of pretrial abuse of the detainee. Although he declined to dismiss the charges against Jawad, the fact that he would even entertain such a thought was very frightening for the prosecution, since they knew that other detainees had been tortured and abused far worse that Jawad, especially the high value detainees. Judge Henley also indicated that he was declining to dismiss because there were other remedies available, such as giving extra sentencing credit against any ultimately adjudged sentence. Assuming that KSM and his brethren were to get the death penalty, the only remedy for their prior abuse would be to commute the death penalty, the government’s worse nightmare. Also, in response to multiple motions to suppress statements that I filed, he had ruled not only that Jawad’s initial confession was obtained by torture, but that all subsequent confessions were presumptively tainted by the earlier tortured confession. He held that the burden was on the prosecution to prove that subsequently obtained statements were no longer tainted by the earlier torture or coercion. Judge Henley applied the law correctly in each of these rulings, applying well-settled principles of due process from U.S. Supreme Court cases. These rulings provide an opportunity for the defense to put the U.S.’ treatment of these detainees on trial, potentially for months, before ever getting to the merits of the case. And in order for the defense to make comprehensive motions, they would have to be made privy to the full scope of the abuses that had been meted out by the U.S. on their clients and should be given the opportunity to develop such evidence in pre-trial evidentiary hearings, as I did in Mohammed Jawad’s case, including allowing the defendants to testify about the abuses they experienced. Those who claim that this type of sideshow can be avoided in federal court simply don’t understand criminal procedure. The real question will be whether the 9/11 defendants authorize their counsel to make such motions or whether they will continue to seek martyrdom and forgo the opportunity to fully litigate the torture issues. [my emphasis (i.e., emphasis by Marcy Wheeler)]

I would be curious, given Lt. Col. Frakt's suggestion that Judge Henley has provided that "pretrial abuse" is actionable and worthy of remedy, why this was not ruled to be the case in the Jose Padilla proceedings.

US District Court Judge Marcia Cooke, of the U.S. District Court, Southern District, Miami, in an ruling in April 2007 (made without a hearing) rejected Padilla's attorneys' motion for dismissal of Padilla's case due to "outrageous government conduct". That conduct included torture through isolation, profound sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, use of stress positions, use of drugs, and other indignities. Padilla had been held since June 2002 at the Naval Consoldidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina as an "enemy combatant". Original charges of constructing a "dirty bomb" had been dropped.

In Judge Cooke's ruling, she accepted "for the sake of this Order" Padilla's claims of mistreatment to be true, but the abuse supposedly did not amount to sufficient outrageous conduct to throw the case out of court. Why? Because the government claimed it would not use any evidence obtained from interrogations while Padilla was in the brig, i.e., from the time when he was tortured. Therefore, legally, Padilla supposedly has no "remedy" against the government.

It will be interesting to see how events unfold in the KSM et al. trial. I hope Lt. Col. Frakt will turn out to be correct, regarding his assumption the government has a lot to risk re bringing out in court the torture issue.

Meanwhile, I thank Marcy/Emptywheel for her excellent reporting, and Lt. Col. Frakt for his standing up for what is right, and fighting this all-important good fight. (If you haven't yet, do spend some time reading Frakt's closing arguments in the Jawad case. Many consider them among the most powerful words yet spoken on the injustice of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld-initiated military commissions system, a system that continues in only slightly modified form in the Obama years.)

Army Threatens Court-Martial For Mother Who Wouldn't Leave Her Child

Dahr Jamail has a story over at Truthout concerning the Army's arrest of U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother about to deploy to Afghanistan, who couldn't find child care for her 11-month-old son after her mother turned out to be unavailable for the job.

According to Ms. Hutchinson's civilian attorney, Rai Sue Sussman, this case is "completely over the top."

The U.S., in its hunger to feed its war machine in Afghanistan, refused to give Hutchinson further delays in order to find appropriate childcare for her son.

Sussman says Hutchinson told her, "It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues."

Sussman told IPS that the Army's JAG attorney, Captain Ed Whitford, "told me they thought her chain of command thought she was trying to get out of her deployment by using her child as an excuse." '

The U.S. could care less about its men and women in uniform. Famously, they sent soldiers to fight their illegal war in Iraq without proper body armor or equipment. It was only a few years ago that a Washington Post report exposed the Army's flagship hospital, Walter Reed Medical Center, as a chaotic mess, poorly serving its overcrowded population of injured and sick veterans.

(It's worth noting that Ft. Hood alleged shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was a psychiatrist working with PTSD patients at Walter Reed from 2003 to early 2009. One can only imagine what a madhouse he worked in, and how it may have contributed to his presumed mental instability. -- Mark Benjamin also has a story up over at Salon, reporting on how a Navy psychiatrist was fired by his military contractor, after reporting conditions were so bad among returning Marines at Camp Lejeune, that stressed-out returning soldiers were ready to "blow" in serious violent outbreaks. The psychiatrist told military inspectors. "many patients' lives are imminently at risk." Instead of listening, they gave the doctor the boot.)

Spc. Hutchinson is still confined to base in Savannah, Georgia. She faces a possible military court martial. Her son, according to a recent AP update, is with his grandmother in California. Originally, after his mother's arrest, the child had been placed in a county foster care system. The grandmother apparently has her hands full with caring for another "special needs" child, and does not know how long she can keep the boy.

According to Hutchinson's attorney, Alexis will not be court-martialed... just yet:

"To me it sounds completely bogus," Sussman told IPS, "I think what they are actually going to do is have her spend her year deployment in Afghanistan, then court martial her back here upon her return. This would do irreparable harm to her child. I think they are doing this to punish her, because they think she is lying."

Sussman explained that she believes the best possible outcome is for the Army to either give Hutchinson the extension they had said she would receive so that she can find someone to care for her infant, or barring this, to simply discharge her so she can take care of her child.

Solitary Confinement, Cruel and Unusual: Stop Torture in U.S. Prisons

Angola 3 News has an excellent an article over at Daily Kos on Torture and Human Rights Violations in U.S. Prisons. What follows is a video and a selection from the article, which is an interview with Bret Grote of Human Rights Coalition/FedUp!


Take Action at www.StopMax.org

Sometime prior to or during 2007, Fed Up! became an official chapter of the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization whose founding chapter was and still remains active in Philadelphia. HRC was the brainchild of prisoners as well. Around the fall of 2007 and early 2008 HRC/Fed Up!—as we were then known—began to focus more exclusively on PA prisons for reasons of capacity and strategy, because, obviously, we have more potential and actual power in this state since we are based here.

During these last two years we have documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations (to view a small portion visit our website) from over 20 prisons in the state system (PA has 27 state prisons). These reports have been collated from thousands upon thousands of pages of prisoner letters and reports, criminal complaints, affidavits and declarations, civil litigation documents, prison records, along with countless hours of interviews and dialogue with current and former prisoners and their family and support people.

What our investigations demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt is that the state of Pennsylvania is operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of "security", wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.

Important New Book Links the Murder of Frank Olson with CIA Cold War Experiments

The following is a review I wrote at Amazon.com for the newly published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. 

H.P. Albarelli, Jr. has written a fully detailed, compelling account of the murder of CIA-linked 1950s Army biochemist Frank Olson. The somewhat surprising death of an otherwise little-known Midwestern scientist would become for contemporary historians, journalists, and researchers -- years after the event -- a crucial nexus providing a gathering point for the multitudinous strands connecting a welter of secretive Cold War intelligence and military programs. 

The Olson case burst upon the public's consciousness in the mid-1970s, along with other revelations at the time concerning CIA and military domestic spying and medical experimentation upon unwitting victims, thanks in part to a landmark expose by then-New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh. Pursued by Olson's family, attorneys, government commissions, newspaper reporters, and even some CIA agents, the truth behind Olson's death after a hundred-foot fall from a Manhattan hotel window on November 28, 1953, has been obscured over the years by a combination of myth, government misdirection, amateurish or hack "research," and, crucially, a lack of access to essential documentation. Now, after almost a decade of research, writer and researcher Albarelli has produced his magnum opus on Olson's death, and it has been well worth the wait.

"A Terrible Mistake" is part history book, part biography, part memoir, and part mystery tale. In order to understand the story of Frank Olson's life and death, and the cover-up surrounding that death, Mr. Albarelli must take the reader on a journey into the history of Cold War experimentation on mind and behavioral control, implemented by a welter of CIA and military programs whose names have passed into the iconic nomenclature regarding the underworld of American covert activities: Project Bluebird, Project MKULTRA, Project Artichoke, MKNAOMI, and others. In addition, because Olson was a government scientist with top secret clearance working on biological weaponry programs for the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the book also offers a peek into this very little reported corner of U.S. history.

The book is quite long, yet remains a page-turner. I won't reveal the mystery Albarelli solves, i.e., who killed Frank Olson and why, but the long build-up describing the various covert operations of the intelligence agencies, well-documented in the book, builds to a startling pay-off.

In the first half of the book, the author describes Olson's life, the government programs that touch upon his work, Olson's death and its aftermath. The latter part of the book picks up from the initial public revelations surrounding his death, coming over 20 years after it occurred, and the following investigations, including the reopening of the murder investigation by the New York City's District Attorney's office in 1996. Throughout, we are entertained by a kaleidoscopic sequence of characters, including former CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and William Colby, CIA psychiatrists, Watergate burglars (for instance, we learn James McCord was the CIA agent initially sent out to deal with Olson's death), former CIA agents, hotel managers, hired assassins, mobsters, high-priced attorneys, dubious informants, U.S. diplomats and generals, politicians (including a mid-1970s appearance by both Don Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney), and many, many more.

This is not just a book about a dusty, decades-old murder case. With the news of the past few years around U.S. use of torture, as well as recent revelations by Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights surrounding possible torture experimentation upon detainees held by the CIA, the history of similar activities by the same United States agencies, as narrated in Albarelli's book, has direct significance to crucial news events of our own day.

I strongly recommend this book. The author's honesty and willingness to look at the facts, rather than wishful thinking, or rely upon accepted wisdom, makes this investigatory journey well-worth the reader's time. The book has a fully-documented "Notes" section, which will satisfy the most avid researcher, or those who wish to double-check the author's assertions. Also included is a section with photographs of key documents.

It seems certain that "A Terrible Mistake" will take its place along other classics of its historical genre. But it is also the most fascinating and entertaining book you will purchase for a long time.

[Full disclosure: the author mentions me in his Acknowledgments section. I had no role in the writing of his book, and my earlier contact with the author amounted to literally a few e-mails. When I wrote the author later and wondered why I was included in the Acknowledgments section, it apparently was due to his appreciation of my own investigations into the current torture scandal, as published in various places online. I thank him for that, but wish to make it clear here that this review is solely based upon my own reading and reaction to this book.]

"The Way Men Live Is a Lie"

The way men live is a lie.
I say that I get so goddamned sick
Of all these pigs rooting at each other's asses
To get a bloodstained dollar -- Why don't
You stop this senseless horror! this meaningless
Butchery of one another! Why don't you at least
Wash your hands of it!

There is only one truth in the world:
Until we learn to love our neighbor,
there will be no life for anyone.

The man who says, "I don't believe in war,
But after all somebody must protect us" --
Is obviously a fool -- and a liar.
Is this so hard to understand!
That who supports murder, is a murderer?
That who destroys his fellow, destroys himself?

Force cannot be overthrown by force;
To hate any man is to despair of every man:
Evil breeds evil -- the rest is a lie!

There is only one power that can save the world --
And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.

By the incomparable Kenneth Patchen, from his book An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), as reproduced in Collected Poems

Andy Worthington on U.S. Tour: "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo" (video)

As Andy Worthington is wrapping up his tour promoting the documentary, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo" (co-directed by Andy and filmmaker Polly Nash), a notice at his blog announces today that the Future of Freedom Foundation has made the film a talk Andy gave before the sceening of the film in Fairfax, VA, available as a 38-minute video entitled “An Evening with Andy Worthington”.

An Evening with Andy Worthington - "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo" from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Andy was also interviewed at Democracy Now! yesterday. The discussion concentrated on plans by the U.S. to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners (Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi) in federal courts, and other Guantanamo prisoners, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Omar Khadr, at Obama's newly refurbished -- and deeply flawed -- military commissions.

What follows is from Worthington's interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: .... At the time of this broadcast, Eric Holder is about to hold a news conference, the Attorney General, announcing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others will be tried in a New York civilian court.

ANDY WORTHINGTON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

ANDY WORTHINGTON: Well, I mean, this is what actually we’ve all been waiting for, to be honest. This was what it was all supposed to be about, was rounding up the people who had a connection to the 9/11 attacks. And, of course, what we’ve actually had over the years is eight years of a prison outside the law holding nearly 800 people, most of whom had nothing to do with it, not to mention all the other prisons that have been used, the secret prisons, the whole CIA program. So, to that extent, it’s good news.

I’m rather disturbed to hear that the second tier of justice, which is the military commission system, has been—we’re apparently going to hear that that’s where one of the men, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is going to be prosecuted, because the administration and the Senate have tinkered with the military commissions, which were essentially revived as the terror trials by Dick Cheney in November 2001. They were once ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. Congress brought them back. They failed spectacularly throughout their history to demonstrate that they were a viable form of justice. And even with these latest amendments, they still fall short of the standards that we would expect from trials and the standards that we would expect from federal court. So it’s rather disturbing to hear that these two layers of justice are still planned....

And, I mean, there is already a problem, which was identified by the administration in summer, and they told the Senate about this, that the charge of providing material support for terrorism is a charge that they think will be subject to appeal in the military commissions system. But the administration has also said they don’t have any problems with trying that in federal courts. So I’m really confused as to why they’re going ahead with it. And, you know, the overall impression it gives me is that they’re trying to rig the system. You know, they have a premier league trial system, and if they have doubts maybe that that’s going to work, then they’ve got this reserve system. And that’s not the way that justice should work, and especially not after the horrors of the last eight years....

I’m surprised there’s no mention there of the habeas corpus petitions, because, you know, this has been an important, very crucial part of the story this year, is that when the men finally secured the right to habeas corpus. And, you know, the Supreme Court last June gave them those rights and made them constitutionally guaranteed, so that lawmakers couldn’t interfere, as they had before. We’ve had thirty-eight cases decided by judges, and in thirty of those cases the judges have said, you know, that the government has failed to provide the evidence used to justify holding these men. Now, that leaves eight people who have—the judges have said, you know, “By a preponderance of the evidence, you have demonstrated that these people had a connection to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and you can continue to hold them.” So, all these people have habeas petitions that are ongoing. And, you know, the administration has to, I think, let this process carry on. And it will result, I have no doubt, in some of these—was it seventy-five?—being cleared.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to an excerpt from your new film, Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. This is Omar Deghayes, a Libyan British resident who was freed from Guantánamo in December of 2007.

OMAR DEGHAYES: The interrogator said to us, “You will be released one day, yes. You will be released, I’ll tell you that. You will be released. But you will not be released from this place until you are broken wrecks. We will release you. You are terrorists. And we will release you, yes. But you will be physically finished, psychologically finished, and you will be nothing.”

The last time I saw my son was when they abducted us in Lahore, and he was six month years old, I think. Very young. Now he’s seven years old. I haven’t seen him since. I think it is the biggest loss I can, the biggest loss I have lost in Guantánamo, really. Not my eye, not my broken finger, not my broken ribs, not my broken nose, not the humiliation, not the sexual abuse, not all that transport and things. All these are bad enough, but the worst, I think, thing that can—that did happen, I lost there, is not the eye; it’s those years of seeing Suleiman growing up.

AMY GOODMAN: And here’s another clip from the film, featuring British lawyers Gareth Peirce and Clive Stafford Smith.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: They will close Guantánamo, but so what? That’s not the end of the story, because there are many, many thousands of prisoners held in US secret custody around the world. Guantánamo is the tiniest tip of the iceberg of that.

GARETH PEIRCE: Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is being reinforced, rebuilt, has now far more prisoners than Guantánamo had.

I had the good fortune to catch Andy on his tour when he spoke in Berkeley at Revolution Books on Wednesday night. He is a rare specimen of an impassioned researcher and activist, a man who, with his landmark book, The Guantanamo Files, really shined light into the dark places of ignorance that surrounded the identities and stories of the hundreds of prisoners rendered to Guantanamo -- a darkness, I may add, deliberately engendered by the United States government. Thank you, Andy, for all your hard work.

U.S. Funding of the... Taliban?!

From a new Democracy Now! article by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, posted over at Truthout:

In a last-minute dissent ahead of a critical war cabinet meeting on escalating the Afghan war, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has cast doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Meanwhile, a report reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack....

“How the US Funds the Taliban” is the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack. The practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. US military officials in Kabul told Roston that a minimum of ten percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts consists of payments to the Taliban.

Well, well, well. Just when I thought the inanity and corruption of the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan couldn't get any weirder... I thought the scandal about Karzai's heroin-kingpin brother had already topped it all. Then there was the excellent article by Jane Mayer on the Predator assassinations in the Ag-Pak war. Now it's U.S. funding of the Taliban. Oh boy, no wonder Obama reportedly doesn't like any of the options presented on Afghanistan.

How about this, President Obama? Withdraw now.

And, by the way, as long as I've brought up the Predator issue, Mayer is now reporting that:

Philip Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial executions, issued a formal warning to the Obama Administration, demanding proof that the C.I.A. program doesn’t violate international law:

While there may be circumstances in which the use of such techniques is consistent with applicable international law, this can only be determined in light of information about the legal basis on which particular individuals have been targeted, the measures taken to ensure conformity with the international humanitarian law principles of discrimination, proportionality, necessity and precaution, and the steps taken retrospectively to assess compliance in practice.