Free Fayiz Al Kandari: New MSNBC Interview with Major Barry Wingard

Crooks and Liars has posted a recent interview with Major Barry Lingard, the Guantanamo attorney defending Fayiz Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari. Al-Kandari is a Kuwaiti citizen, imprisoned at Guantanamo since 2002. Al-Kandari's case has been championed by well-known blogger GottaLaff at The Political Carnival.

Like a number of idealistic Muslims, Fayiz al-Kandari was caught up at a young age by the suffering of Muslims in the war in Bosnia. He became very active in charity work, and this work led him to Afghanistan. As Andy Worthington told it in a recent essay:

After realizing that Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the Islamic world, and that its people might benefit from his assistance, [Fayiz] decided to visit, to provide assistance to the Afghan people, but was shocked to discover, on the ground, that “those people had less than anyone I had ever met.”

In a village, he met up with local officials, and agreed to provide work for some of the local people, building two wells and repairing a mosque. Life was peaceful and productive for two months — and the dreadful events of September 11, 2001 were far away, and of little import in this remote location — but in October, after the US-led invasion began, he recalls hearing the sounds of explosions in the distance and was surprised when the village erupted in celebration, as the locals were overcome with joy that they were again at war.

The reason was not to do with fighting, but with the opportunity to make money from the war’s fallout. As al-Kandari explained to Lt. Col. Wingard, in the days that followed, the local people clambered onto trucks and drove towards the places where bombs had dropped the day before, hoping to gather shrapnel to sell as scrap metal before rival villages beat them to it. Because they were short of manpower, the villagers sometimes took their children and sent them out to watch for explosions across the mountains, and al-Kandari recalls the children demonstrating how they would handle metal that was still hot by bouncing it between their hands.

But Fayiz became one of a number of Arabs (he is originally from a well-to-do Kuwaiti family) who was sold to the Americans for bounty money.

Andy Worthington describes what happened next:

In Guantánamo, Fayiz al-Kandari’s refusal to accept that “there is no innocent person here” has marked him out as a particularly resistant prisoner — and resistant prisoners are given a particularly hard time. Over the years, he has been subjected to a vast array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, as Lt. Col. Wingard described them, “have included but are not limited to sleep deprivation, physical and verbal assaults, attempts at sexual humiliation through the use of female interrogators, the “frequent flier program,” the prolonged use of stress positions, the use of dogs, the use of loud music and strobe lights, and the use of extreme heat and cold.”

Despite all this, he has not been “broken,” and has been able, unlike Fouad al-Rabiah and numerous other prisoners, to resist making false confessions about his own activities. He has also refused to make false confessions about the activities of other prisoners, despite being offered many opportunities to do so, and despite being told about others who have made false allegations against him.

Al Kandari's attorney, Major Barry Wingard, has made clear that the evidence against his client is based on far-fetched hearsay evidence. Wingard has been outspoken in his criticism of the Guantanamo military commissions and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other inhumane types of treatment.

Fayiz al-Kandari, along with over a hundred other Guantanamo prisoners, deserve their fair day in court. The prisoners who have been granted release via habeas petitions or other legal remedy, but who are still held in Guantanamo for an indefinite confinement, should be released immediately. Let them be allowed to live freely in the country that incarcerated and held them illegally, and tortured them. If there is some chargeable crime, and evidence of such crime, let them be tried as anyone would be, in a court of law, not a bogus military kangaroo court.

From a Washington Post op-ed by then Lt. Col. Wingard, last July 1:

Guantanamo has become a dark symbol of the standard of justice the United States has meted out in the "global war on terror." Protecting American lives is paramount, but it is not true that we can be safe only by ignoring our country's values and imprisoning people for the better part of a decade without their legal rights.

Each time I travel to Guantanamo Bay to visit Fayiz, his first question is, "Have you found justice for me today?" This leads to an awkward hesitation.

"Unfortunately, Fayiz," I tell him, "I have no justice today."

(H/T Tosfm)

Jason Leopold on ACLU's Indictment of Obama Over Lack of Torture Accountability

Jason Leopold has a fantastic, comprehensive article up at Truthout on the ACLU's reaction to the Obama Nobel Prize speech, in the context of the congealing policies of the Obama administration in opposition to demands for accountability for torture. The article also updates the current situation regarding any possible investigations or hearings on U.S. torture. (Hint: don't hold your breath, but don't give up all hope, either.)

Blistering Indictment Leveled Against Obama Over His Handling of Bush-Era War Crimes:

To many human rights advocates, however, Obama’s high-minded declaration rang hollow in light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.

Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place" and that his administration "is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims."

But it’s clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials....

"We're increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration's stance on accountability for torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. "On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture."

Read the whole article.

Call for Inquest into Bogus UK Investigation Into David Kelly's "Suicide"

According to an article in the Daily Mail, six UK doctors will release a report sharply criticizing the Hutton Inquiry investigation into the supposed suicide of British scientist and weapons expert David Kelly in 2003.

Kelly was reportedly believed to be behind a leak to "the source of a [BBC] story that Tony Blair's government 'sexed-up' its dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq." According to the Daily Mail, Kelly predicted he might be killed. Yet the coroner's investigation into his death was halted by the British government, which declared an inquiry by cronies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be sufficient. After years of controversy, the protesting UK doctors are not only preparing release of a dissenting report, they are asking the British High Court to reopen the inquest into Kelly's death. The law firm of Leigh Day and Co. are assisting them.

From the Daily Mail article:

The six [doctors] are Michael Powers, a QC and former coroner; trauma surgeon David Halpin; Andrew Rouse, an epidemiologist who established that deaths from cutting the ulnar artery – as claimed in Dr Kelly's case – are extremely rare; Martin Birnstingl, another surgeon; plus Stephen Frost and Chris Burns-Cox.

Lord Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by severing an ulnar artery in his left wrist after taking an overdose of prescription painkillers but he skated over the controversies about the causes of death....

Dr Kelly's death certificate states that he died of a haemorrhage, but the results of a post mortem examination have never been made public....

We have concentrated on the finding on the death certificate that the primary cause of death was a haemorrage. We are spelling out why he could not have died from a cut to the small ulnar artery.'

One of the doctors, who preferred not to be named, added: 'When the Romans committed suicide they would slit all four arteries in a warm bath, which keeps the blood flowing. The arteries would close up in the open air and you would not lose that much blood.'

A book on the unanswered questions surrounding the case by Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker concluded that Dr Kelly may have been murdered by Iraqi exiles – but the finger has also been pointed at MI5 and the CIA.

H/T to The Anomaly at Daily Kos, whose diary on the UK proposed investigation is worth reading in full.

And I know, I've written a number of stories lately about suspicious suicides affecting key figures in the U.S. Global War on Terror. But I didn't invent the stories, and it certainly may have a lot more to do with U.S. and UK SOP in these affairs than it does with any morbidity on my part. Only one way to know for sure: let's open the investigations and expose truth to the light of day.

Obama's Nobel Speech a Pathetic Cover-up for U.S. Crimes

Barack Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech was lauded by most of his supporters, even though it was one of the most bellicose speeches ever given by a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The irony of awarding the prize to a man who is escalating the war in Afghanistan by tens of thousands of soldiers, and uses unmanned aerial drones to assassinate individuals, irregardless of the known innocents killed in the process, was not lost on some.

Here's David Lindorff at The Smirking Chimp, a site well-known for skewering George W. Bush and his policies for years:

It's not a[s] much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We're talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan....

...under President Obama, Guantanamo's terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

Lindorff also noted the failure of the Obama administration to ratify the international anti-landmine treaty. Bill Moyers noticed that too, and wrote an article with Michael Winship looking at the obscenity of giving a "Peace" prize to a man who can't stop a policy that kills thousands each year, many of them children.

The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia. Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Amongst that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed.

Just days before Obama flew to Oslo to make his Nobel Peace Prize speech, an international summit conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, to review the progress of the treaty. The United States sent representatives and the State Department says our government has begun a comprehensive review of its current policy.

Last year 5,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines, often placed in the ground years before, during wars long since over. They kill or blow away the limbs of a farmer or child as indiscriminately as they do a soldier. But still we refuse to sign, citing security commitments to our friends and allies, such as South Korea, where a million mines fill the demilitarized zone between it and North Korea.

One could write a treatise on the number of lies and sick doctrine enumerated in Obama's speech. But because it was said by a popular Democrat, and not by a Republican -- especially by the Chimp himself, Bush -- it's given a pass.

The fact the United States launched an illegal war in Iraq, killing many tens of thousands, and likely hundreds of thousands, still occupies that country, and in the process tortured an untold number, breaking international laws and covenants willy-nilly... this went unmentioned.

There are plenty of noble sentiments voiced in the speech, talk about dignity, hope, and freedom. But U.S. leaders have spewed such pablum for decades. Talk of a "just peace" in Afghanistan mimics Nixon's appeal for a "just peace" in Vietnam.

Obama (who used the term "just peace" three times in his speech):

This brings me to a second point — the nature of the peace that we seek. For peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.

Nixon, in his famous "Silent Majority" speech, Nov. 3, 1969:

It has become clear that the obstacle in negotiating an end to the war is not the President of the United States. It is not the South Vietnamese Government.

The obstacle is the other side's absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join us in seeking a just peace. And it will not do so while it is convinced that all it has to do is to wait for our next concession, and our next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants.

Obama appeared for one moment to have a seizure of bad conscience, telling the world (emphasis added):

We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

Maybe Obama once had good intentions. I believe that he does think he's doing the right thing. But then you twist up your mind and conscience after you've sold yourself to the powers that be, and have worked on their behalf for so long.

No, Obama will not right the wrongs of this world. But he's not even trying any more. Instead, he has become President Huckster, trying to sell the U.S. Democracy brand to foreign and domestic consumers. Standing in the unemployment line, one is not likely to be so willing to buy it this year, fancy Nobel bauble or not. The same for the children of the dead and tortured, who instead will line up to staff the new HQ of the "insurgents", the "terrorists" and disgruntled who just won't settle for the fact that U.S. runs the world, and you'd better listen to what they say, or they will blow you up.

For When Your Spirits Are Down

Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a stellar performance of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony in F minor for the opening concert of Carnegie Hall's 1997 season.

Obama FAIL on Healthcare (Petition)

Jane Hamsher has posted the following at FDL, which a copy of an email being sent out in the wake of breaking news of the full sellout on healthcare reform by the Democrats, brokered by the Obama administration. I fully endorse Jane's message, and encourage readers to sign the petition.

Obama FAIL

The Senate is cutting a deal to kill the public option by giving the President the “trigger” that his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been fighting for since he took office.

Shoveling taxpayer dollars into “too big to fail” insurance companies is not the change I voted for. The failure to establish a public option to control medical costs and increase competition is President Obama’s failure alone.

Sign our petition to President Obama: the triggered public option is your failure, and it’s up to you to fix it. Click here to sign:

http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/obamafail

When Barack Obama announced his health care plan in 2007, he said insurance premiums for a family of 4 would be cut by $2500. This plan will see premiums increase $1000 each year.

Obama said “coverage without cost containment will only shift our burdens, not relieve them.” This plan does nothing to meaningfully contain spiraling health care costs.

Obama said “it’s time to let the drug and insurance industries know that while they’ll get a seat at the table, they don’t get to buy every chair.” This plan includes a deal between the White House and PhRMA that guarantees there will be no negotiation for Medicare prescription drug prices.

Obama said he’d go after the drug companies who “sell the same exact drugs here in America for double the price of what they charge in Europe and Canada.” But the White House deal not only doesn’t do that, it bans the reimportation of cheaper drugs from Canada.

What does this deal do? It forces Americans to buy the products of large corporations, then the IRS penalizes them if they refuse.
The Senate’s triggered public option is a failure of Barack Obama. Let him know. Click here to sign our petition:
http://action.firedoglake.com/obamafail

Obama is the only one who can save the public option and make these statements more than mere campaign promises. The fight isn’t over, and we need to let Obama know that a failed public option will be his fault. Thanks for all you do.

Best,
Jane Hamsher
Firedoglake

Click here to sign the petition.

New Soldz Article Pounds Gelles/FBI Story on Al Qahtani Interrogation

Psychologist Stephen Soldz has written a scathingly accurate article on ex-PENS task force member Michael Gelles, and the truth behind the myth that Gelles and others intervened at Guantanamo and tried to stop the abusive interrogation of Mohamed Al Qahtani and replace it with a benign and more effective form of "rapport"-based interrogation.

Soldz describes, in The "Ethical Interrogation": The Myth of Michael Gelles and the al-Qahtani Interrogation, how the FBI and other interrogators working in the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo in late 2002, proposed an interrogation approach to a psychiatrically debilitated Al Qahtani that would exploit months of isolation and abuse with -- another year of near-total isolation! 

Soldz quotes "former police investigator and veteran Army counterintelligence operative David DeBatto" on the likely result of the plan Gelles was proposing:

"That [the initial three-months isolation] is an excessively long time and on the face of it, violates the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and international law. Two major problems I have with this is first, solitary is a punishment reserved for the worst kind of behavior by inmates in a prison, not for refusing to answer questions. Second, it is the worst possible way to interrogate anyone and will almost always produce negative results."

There's a lot more I could say about Dr. Soldz's excellent article, but for now I simply want to direct my readership to it. I'll have more to comment in a few days.

In the meantime, I'll note that in the same batch of material from the ACLU FOIA release upon which Stephen drew for the article, I found this strange admission from an anonymous member of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, in a memo addressed to Raymond S. Mey in FBI's Counterterrorism Unit, Marion Bowman (Senior Counsel for National Security Affairs) and various Special Agents in the Bureau's Miami office. The memo's date is 5/30/2003. (Note, Mey's name is redacted on the latest version of this memo, which otherwise unredacts much of the text; but Mey's name appears on earlier versions.) Emphasis is added to quote below:

Although SERE techniques may be effective in eliciting tactical intelligence in a battlefield context, the reliability of information obtained using such tactics is highly questionable, not to mention potentially legally inadmissible in court.

Now, since this memo was written to complain about the use of "aggressive interrogation tactics" at Guantanamo, which we know were based on the SERE techniques, it's interesting to see this FBI agent note that such techniques "may be effective" on the battlefield. Why even make this comment? Was it understood that Special Forces were already using such techniques in theater operations? Is torture okay in certain circumstances?

Just asking...

Seton Hall Report on Guantanamo "Suicides": "Death in Camp Delta"

Marcy Wheeler reports this morning on the new Seton Hall University School of Law/Center for Policy and Research report, Death in Camp Delta (PDF). Drawing on evidence in the Seton CPR report, she notes that government claims that the three men found dead by purported suicide, June 10, 2006, were in reality practitioners of "asymmetrical warfare," i.e., not suicide or homicide victims, is highly dubious:

As the report describes, for the three detainees to have really committed suicide, they would have all had to have done the following:

• Braided a noose by tearing up their sheets and/or clothing
• Made mannequins of themselves so it would appear to the guards that they were asleep in their cells
• Hung sheets to block the view into the cells, a violation of SOPs
• Tied their feet together
• Tied their hands together
• Shoved rags in their mouths and down their throats
• Hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling
• Climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around their necks and released their weight, resulting in death by strangulation
• Hung dead for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards

The amount of surveillance of prisoners at Guantanamo makes most of these suicide stories suspicious. The new report (which at over 100 pages I haven’t fully absorbed yet, am much beholden to EW for taking such quick notice and posting) makes it clear that the prisoners were under constant surveillance. Note that autopsy reports demonstrate that two of the prisoners had been dead for two hours prior to being discovered. One of the prisoners had a broken hyoid bone, a clear sign of manual strangulation.

I’m working on a follow-up to the story of Mohamed Saleh Al Hanashi, another purported Guantanamo "suicide" from earlier this year. While that story is not complete yet, I can reveal one thing from that material. Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, the Director of Public Affairs at Guantanamo, told me in a telephone interview on Nov. 24 that while he couldn’t confirm the extent of video surveillance, he could confirm that “all detainees are on line-of-sight” monitoring, “or at most a 3 minutes check on every detainee in the facility.” How these three prisoners, who were in separate, non-contiguous cells, were able to do all that Marcy notes above, and not be noticed for hours boggles the imagination, and suggests — no, demands, a fuller investigation.

While one is thinking of the all the great work done by Mark Denbeaux and the whole Seton Hall University School of Law team, it would do everybody some good to go back and look at their December 2007 report, Captured on Tape: Interrogation and Videotaping at Detainees in Guantanamo (emphasis in original):

More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002.

Every interrogation conducted at Guantánamo was videotaped.

The Central Intelligence Agency is just one of many entities that interrogated detainees at Guantánamo.

The agencies or bureaus that interrogated at Guantánamo include: the Central Intelligence Agency and its Counterterrorism Center; the Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI; Defense Intelligence Analysis (DIA); Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT); Army Criminal Investigative Division (ACID); the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI); and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Private contractors also interrogated detainees….

One Government document, for instance, reports detainee treatment so violent as to “shake the camera in the interrogation room” and “cause severe internal injury.” Another describes an interrogator positioning herself between a detainee and the camera,in order to block her actions from view.

The Government kept meticulous logs of information related to interrogations. Thus, it is ascertainable which videotapes documenting interrogations still exist, and which videotapes have been destroyed.

This earlier Seton Hall report on the suicides has more information about the prisoners. One of the latter, Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani, was only 17 years old when he was arrested by anti-Taliban forces in late 2001. He was never accused of being al Qaeda, but he was, again, like Hanashi, one of the prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif at the time of the prisoner uprising in late 2001 (where John Walker Lindh was also captured). It’s unknown if, like Hanashi, he was later sent to Shabraghan Prison, where he could have heard of the mass killings by Dostum and (arguably) U.S. Special Forces.

Meanwhile, in the current report just released, readers may wish to take a look at Appendix J, “Missing and Redact ed Pages.” One hundred eight-six of 191 photo pages in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigative file are listing as “missing”. The photos are said to be located at parent Guantanamo command, SOUTHCOM. Another big chunk of missing or redacted pages: 250 SOUTHCOM documents.

Meanwhile, 91 pages of documents from the Armed Forces Medical Examiners are likewise “missing.” I suppose we should be thankful the Seton Hall investigative crew got the autopsies. I have a feeling this new Seton Hall study will be worth examining in detail.

Addendum: Scott Horton has an article at Huffington Post on the new Seton Hall Guantanamo revelations, Law School Study Finds Evidence Of Cover-Up After Three Alleged Suicides At Guantanamo In 2006:

The Seton Hall study concludes that the NCIS investigators made conclusions completely unsupported by facts. For instance, they concluded that the three prisoners committed suicide as part of a "conspiracy." But, according to the study: "The investigations... fail to present any evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, all other evidence is inconsistent with the conclusion that the detainees conspired"....

When the NCIS report was finally released, it was redacted so heavily as to make it almost incomprehensible. More than a third of the pages were fully redacted, and very few pages were released without some redaction. The NCIS report itself is highly disorganized, without an index or even a chronological progression in its recounting of events. All this appears intended to make review and criticism of the report much more difficult. While the redaction of names of service personnel is appropriate, it is difficult to understand why many other redactions were undertaken.

Human Rights Watch is calling for the release of the unredacted NCIS report. HRW's Joanne Mariner stated, in response to a request for comment, that "the heavy-handed nature of the redactions to the publicly-released reports of the investigations makes it impossible to get a clear picture of the events of that night. We think that the heavy redactions currently found in the documents -- by which names, dates, and other key facts are completely obscured on many pages -- raise concerns about whether the military is trying to hide embarrassing facts."

Also, here's a link to the PDF of the fragmentary NCIS report itself, released, as Horton points out, two years after the fact.

A Final Update, 10:45 pm -- "Gitmo Meets Lord of the Flies" (Denbeaux):

Glenn Greenwald has an article up on the Seton Hall report:

There is one way that a meaningful investigation could be conducted into what happened to these three detainees: a lawsuit filed in federal court by the parents of two of the detainees against various Bush officials for the torture and deaths of their sons -- who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any wrongdoing (indeed, one had been cleared for release). By itself, discovery in that lawsuit would shed critical light on what was done to these detainees and what caused their deaths.

The problem, however, is that the Obama DOJ has been using every Bush tactic -- and inventing whole new ones -- to block the lawsuit from proceeding.

Also, Scott Horton, who was interviewed on the story by Keith Olberman tonight (video), has an interview with the reports main author, Mark Denbeaux, over at Huffington Post.

Using Photos of Abu Zubaydah's Torture to Intimidate and Threaten Other Prisoners

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The set-up of Abu Zubaydah as an Al Qaeda bigwig may have been meant, among other things, for use in intimidation and torture of other prisoners. Andy Worthington recounts how a prisoner captured with Zubaydah, Omar Gharmesh, reported to another prisoner in Syria's infamous Palestine Branch prison, where they were sent via "extraordinary rendition," that he was shown pictures of a tortured Abu Zubaydah and told, “If you don’t talk, this is what will happen to you.”

What has not been reported until now is that another prisoner reports that he and a number of other detainees at Guantanamo were also shown pictures of a tortured and injured Abu Zubaydah.

Ibrahim Mahdi Achmed Zeidan, a Jordanian prisoner transferred from Guantanamo to Jordan two years ago (despite the fact the Jordanians told him they "would beat" him when he was released from Guantanamo), stated in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (Sept. 27, 2004) that he knew about Abu Zubaydah's torture. Zeidan claimed that Zubaydah's statements identifying him had been induced by this torture. How did he know Zubaydah had been tortured, the Guantanamo tribunal asked, and Zeidan replied (bold emphasis added):

We know from the American interrogators, not only me, but also a lot of other detainees on this island know that he was subject to a lot of torture. There was a picture of him, I didn't see it, and someone else did showing the signs of torture on his body.

Two recent news items  -- the revelation Binyam Mohamed was a victim of the same treatment Abu Zubaydah received, and at about the same time (discussed in my last post); and the repeated use of the fact of Zubaydah's torture in the interrogation of prisoners, including oral statements from interrogators and pictures of a tortured Zubaydah -- demonstrate how little we really know about the particulars of the operations of the U.S. torture program.

Nor do we know very much about what is going on even now, in an era of supposed transparency by the Obama administration. The Washington Post and New York Times each had articles over the weekend about torture occuring at a remaining, "classified" black site prison run by Special Operations at Bagram Air Base. The Post article used testimony from two Afghan teens, one of whom said he had been forced to watch pornography while also looking at a picture of his mother. The Times article, with 42-year-old displaced farmer Hamidullah, described a period of torture that took place since Obama became president.

Also demonstrating how little we still know about the extent of U.S. torture and abusive detention policies, in early November the ACLU wrote 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."

As for Abu Zubaydah, it seems likely at this point that his torture was singled out for special treatment and photographic propagation because he was being set-up as a major figure. After his cover story as a key leader was embedded in the public's mind (and remember that Ron Suskind found that Bush was the major figure in pushing the importance of Zubaydah). the fact of his torture was then paraded before other prisoners in an effort to scare and intimidate them. Meanwhile, a major scandal and investigation have involved the CIA's admitted destruction of videotapes of Zubaydah's interrogation. Were the photos of Zubaydah's torture also destroyed?

The similar torture of Binyam Mohamed and perhaps others, even quite early on, took place in total secrecy. For this part of the torture narrative, the United States and its British ally have been trying mightily to suppress all knowledge, but thanks to the intrepid morality of some British judges, they have failed.

As Andy Worthington noted, propagating knowledge of this "evidence of widespread torture and abuse prior to the August 2002 torture memo... may well have to be the focus of our pressure as writers and activists if, as anticipated, the OPR [Office of Public Responsibility] report on the OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] lawyers ends up having had its teeth removed."

UK Revelations Challenge Known Torture Narrative

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The fight in a United Kingdom courtroom over secret documents related to the torture of former Guantanamo prisoner and rendition victim Binyam Mohamed has resulted in a striking new revelation, as reported by Mohamed's attorney Clive Stafford Smith and British journalist Andy Worthington. Newly unredacted material from a previously censored portion of an earlier ruling by a UK court significantly expands the timeline and scope of the introduction of SERE-style "enhanced" interrogation techniques."

The newly released passage in the court's previously censored ruling describes how the torture techniques described in the infamous August 1, 2002 "Bybee memo" (PDF) -- written to provide a green light for the torture of Abu Zubaydah -- were used on Binyam Mohamed by unnamed U.S. agents while Mohamed was held in custody in Pakistan in April and May 2002. This was some four months or so before the authorization "authorization" of these techniques.

Here is the key unredacted passage, from the UK court's latest filing on the case (PDF), emphasis added:

One of those memoranda dated August 1 2002, from Mr. J.S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney-General, to Mr. John Rizzo, acting General Counsel of the CIA, made clear that the techniques described [as used upon Binyam Mohamed] were those employed against Mr. Zubaydah, alleged to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.”

The court is talking about techniques used by U.S. agents against Binyam Mohamed while he was first held in Pakistan. The unredacted paragraph makes it "clear" that the techniques in the Bybee memo were earlier used upon Mohamed. The court had originally described these techniques in a seven-page summary of documents that were provided by the U.S. to the UK government concerning Mohamed's Pakistan interrogation. The seven-page summary, written by the judges themselves in lieu of publication of the full documentation, is currently classified at the behest of the British government, and against the protest of the judges themselves. (Marcy Wheeler discussed some of the intricacies of the document trail in a recent posting.)

What is often forgotten about these first interrogations in Pakistan is that they were reportedly performed by the FBI. If that could be established as definitive, then the role of the FBI in the propagation of torture would be significantly different than what is usually reported, i.e., that the FBI forswore torture for rapport-building-style interrogation.

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.