tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50485590016548201582024-03-05T07:24:14.109-08:00Invictus"Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd"Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.comBlogger1260125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-51205461082500354752021-11-05T15:00:00.001-07:002021-11-05T15:00:44.171-07:00Deadly Democracy: Lancet Study Confirms Millions Died From Capitalist "Shock Therapy"The world has become so inured to mass death, perhaps the following will merit little comment or outrage among our political punditry, even if the story did make the back pages of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/world/europe/16europe.html">New York Times</a>.
A new <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60005-2/fulltext">Lancet study</a>, "Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis," confirms what has been known but little discussed in the past eight to ten years: <b>millions of people, mostly men of employment age, died</b> as a result of the effects of the "shock therapy" transition from a collectivized to a privatized economy in Russia and other formerly "communist" states in East Europe. According to the <i>Times</i> article, by 2007 "the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985."
Back in 2001, a <a href="http://www.unicef-irc.org/presscentre/presskit/monee8/monee8_key.pdf">UNICEF-IRC study</a> had already claimed 3.2 million unnecessary deaths due to capitalist restoration. The Lancet study cites other figures, with up to "10 million missing men because of system change." As a result, adult mortality rates soared, up almost 13% in Russia, with much of the increase attributable to the mass unemployment that followed the collapse in state enterprises. The study noted, "the Russian population lost nearly 5 years of life expectancy between 1991 and 1994."
Other factors affecting the disastrous increase in the death rate included poor health care, rising HIV rates, higher alcoholism and drug addiction rates, as well as the effects of acute psychosocial stress, massive corruption, impoverishment, rising social inequalities, and social disorganization.
The effects of neo-liberal "shock therapy" on Russia and other East European countries (Russia being the hardest hit) were also felt by the children of the region. According to the UNICEF-IRC study noted above, tuberculosis rates rose by 50%; 150,000 children were added to the public care rolls (while overall population was dropping by millions); there were high levels of child malnutrition, and the number of children under age 5 fell by one-third.
This was not just a jolt of "shock therapy," it was a social tsunami that devastated the region. According to the Lancet, the more rapid the rate of privatization, the higher the death rate.
<blockquote>Radical free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed policy was called shock therapy, with three major elements: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause an irreversible shift to a market-based economy....
Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.</blockquote>As the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of free-fall, due to the unbridled policies of financial deregulation, and an evisceration of the tax base through so-called "trickle-down" economics with its massive tax cuts to the very rich, we should all ponder, with awe and great sadness, the final denouement of the Cold War, with its frenzy of capitalist restorationist policies in the old Soviet Union, and the tremendous human cost it involved.
It is also important in understanding where Russia is politically today, i.e., what were the social circumstances that produced the Putin regime. Ever since the contrived <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/stopping-pro-nato-russophobic-insane.html">Georgia-South Ossetia</a> conflict last summer, it has appeared that the military-industrial complex of the U.S. is looking to find new "enemies," should the public taste for the "Global War on Terror" lessen with an Obama administration, and fatigue over the fruitless and largely fictional "hunt" for Osama bin Laden and the crimes and disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps most of all, the sheer horror of the loss of life, the human tragedy of the return of "democracy" (in its free enterprise garb) to the former Soviet Union, is what we need to ponder. The truth behind the privatization policies of economists like Harvard-educated <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/19980601/wedel">Jeffrey Sachs</a> -- now head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University -- has been hidden for years now behind glibly optimistic statements of economic progress in now-capitalist Russia. Take for examine this summary of a 1997 article in the <i>Journal of Comparative Economics</i> on <a href="http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Economics/Bank-privatization-in-post-communist-Russia-the-case-of-Zhilsotsbank-part-2.html">"Bank privitization in post-communist Russia"</a>, typical of the way the changes in Russia have been reported by the dominant social and educational Western elite:
<blockquote>The privatization of Zhilsotsbank of Russia demonstrates that the process of privatization can contribute to the eradication of the government's role in the corporate governance of banks. Incumbent bank managers obtained control rights over new private banks following Zhilsotsbank's decentralized privatization. The swift eradication of government from direct ownership of numerous banks, combined with broad licensing rules, has enabled the Russian banking industry to be over 75% private. Mosbusinessbank, a big commercial bank formed from 26 Zhilsotsbank branches, is one of the most profitable banks the old state banking system has produced.</blockquote>There is not a word on the social cost of this increased profitability. In fact, the social disaster in Russia due to privatization and the restoration of capitalism in Russia is barely known or understood in the U.S., outside a sense that gangsterism was increased thereby.
The truth about world history since the end of World War II has largely been kept from the U.S. population, e.g. the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Paperclip#Related_operations">recruitment</a> of Nazi war criminals into U.S. government research programs, including the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen">intelligence</a> agencies, the <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/us-in-korean-war-machine-gunning.html">mass murders</a> in the 100,000s by U.S. allies in Korea (with U.S. connivance), the budget of U.S. intelligence agencies and the extent of the latter's covert actions around the globe, and the CIA's <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/vermont-state-hospital-implicated-in.html">mind control project</a> with its enlistment of top levels of social, medical and psychological personnel throughout the 1950s-1970s, and the <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/still-photos-from-edgewood-arsenal.html">secret medical experiments</a> upon these programs involved.
The level of trust in what the U.S. government says is very low right now, thanks to the crimes of the Bush administration. The incoming Obama administration is sending mixed messages about what it intends as regards the past record of the United States. On one hand, the Obama people promise an open government and transparency; on the other hand, Obama himself says he intends to look forward and not backwards when it comes to former administration crimes, applying this standard even to such crimes as torture.
As we consider the pressing need to hold the U.S. to account, no matter what administration is in power, we might reflect upon the famous words of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner: <i>"The past is never dead. It's not even past."</i> Shakespeare made essentially the same point hundreds of years earlier: <i>"What’s past is prologue."</i>Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-6119297903437863372019-01-16T14:29:00.001-08:002019-01-16T14:29:23.617-08:00CIA Director Haspel Reported at CIA Torture Site in Polandby Jeffrey Kaye<br />
<a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/first-thailand-then-guantanamo-now-poland-what-was-cia-director-haspels-actual-role-in-the-rdi-d942806a46b2">Originally posted at Medium.com</a><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjth81tM4SERMzmytiYXZEr12Aa9IuPJWrcMfJx2J08DT_4lTO9YOYCzOw6LZuEdtG1bxgCEMlgDycwT4LLH7YbEPmryrD13dMe4oQ1BYFQATsdyTRl8loRHOHBNmqBczeqUf_MxMGBsvo/s1600/Gina_Haspel_confirmation.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="697" data-original-width="1239" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjth81tM4SERMzmytiYXZEr12Aa9IuPJWrcMfJx2J08DT_4lTO9YOYCzOw6LZuEdtG1bxgCEMlgDycwT4LLH7YbEPmryrD13dMe4oQ1BYFQATsdyTRl8loRHOHBNmqBczeqUf_MxMGBsvo/s320/Gina_Haspel_confirmation.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;">Photo: C-SPAN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>On January 8, Carol Rosenberg at the <i>Miami Herald</i> <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article223835570.html" target="_blank">reported</a> that Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel had possibly been Chief of Base at a CIA black site at Guantanamo in 2003 and/or 2004.<br />
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</i> The revelation was drawn from a redacted <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992-Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.html" target="_blank">transcript</a> of a classified 9/11 military commissions hearing on November 16, 2018. The redacted transcript of that meeting quoted Rita Radostitz, a defense attorney for Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), as saying Haspel was “chief of base” at Guantanamo during the time her client had been held in a CIA black site at the Cuba-based facility.<br />
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According to Rosenberg, “Chief of base is a CIA term for the officer in charge of a secret foreign outpost.”<br />
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Radostitz had joined other military commissions defense attorneys in questioning whether Haspel had engaged in “unlawful influence” pertaining to the prosecution of her client after Haspel became first Deputy Director of the CIA in February 2017, and later was confirmed as CIA director three months later.<br />
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Coincidence or not, the ability of Military Commissions defense attorneys to approach CIA officers believed to be involved in or witness to torture of their clients was curtailed after Haspel acquired greater power within CIA.<br />
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Strangely, neither Rosenberg or anyone else reporting on the new development noted that Radostitz also claimed that Haspel had been present at yet another CIA black site, this one in Poland.<br />
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<b>Detention Site BLUE</b><br />
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Radostitz argued that the inability to question witnesses or speak about classified information attorneys had gathered made it very difficult to defend their clients. In the context of the Poland revelation, Radostitz was asking for permission to present the information about Haspel’s work in Poland to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).<br />
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According to the document, Radostitz told the court, “… we request permission to provide information to the Senate Select Committee that Gina Haspel was in Site Blue or #4.” The designation “#4” would seem to relate to where in the sequence of new black sites the Poland site would fall.<br />
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“Detention Site Blue” was the name the SCCI gave to the CIA’s Polish black site in their report on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program.<br />
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It is not clear that anyone in Congress ever got Radostitz’s information. Requests for comment from both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, were not returned as of the time of publication.<br />
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According to the SSCI report, the Poland site was the scene of unauthorized interrogation methods used on al-Nashiri, including having a gun placed next to his head, and operating “a cordless drill near al-Nashiri’s body.” The CIA officer involved, as well as the Poland black site Chief of Base, were later supposedly disciplined by CIA for these unauthorized actions, and both later retired from the CIA.<br />
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But was Gina Haspel present during these events?<br />
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During the Senate confirmation process of President Trump’s nomination of Haspel as CIA director, four Democratic senators on the committee wrote to the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, asking him to “declassify all Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) information related to any involvement by Ms. Gina Haspel, the current Acting Director of the CIA, in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYeunlH1CxGFKUESkYYW_ylthb0svqnOXJtbZDNK2o6C3zhQekZgAyTxv_ELwKvbcOlctT-zqUphm-GtS-x-1S-Pxab2epn8VHaWsRxnyym5YcnIP6poDUZkb0ys2ANxAhau6g1_Uv6Y/s1600/Screenshot+2019-01-13+12.51.34.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="1402" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYeunlH1CxGFKUESkYYW_ylthb0svqnOXJtbZDNK2o6C3zhQekZgAyTxv_ELwKvbcOlctT-zqUphm-GtS-x-1S-Pxab2epn8VHaWsRxnyym5YcnIP6poDUZkb0ys2ANxAhau6g1_Uv6Y/s320/Screenshot+2019-01-13+12.51.34.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;">Photo: From unclassified Guantanamo Military Commissions hearing, Nov. 16, 2018 (pg. 203 of PDF)</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Nothing concerning Haspel’s work or presence at any CIA black sites except the “Cat’s Eye” site in Thailand was ever mentioned during Haspel’s confirmation process for CIA director.<br />
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Before the SSCI report was released, an important January 2014 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-hidden-history-of-the-cias-prison-in-poland/2014/01/23/b77f6ea2-7c6f-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html?utm_term=.9270af66aa17" target="_blank">article</a> by Adam Goldman at the <i>Washington Post</i> described the Poland secret site, which CIA called code name “Quartz,” after <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/poland-cia-secret-prison-black-site/357344/" target="_blank">purchasing</a> the old Polish intelligence training site at Stare Kiejkuty, north of Warsaw.<br />
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During the approximately 3 years of its operation, “Quartz,” which was supposedly built to house two prisoners, held at least five prisoners, among them KSM, <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-politics-and-media-still-get-wrong-about-abu-zubaydah" target="_blank">Abu Zubaydah</a>, and alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. According to the Post account, Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were taken to the Polish prison on December 5, 2002.<br />
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“The CIA prison in Poland was arguably the most important of all the black sites created by the agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” Goldman wrote.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfsUEWKUfs00NUWcClPPss7l6HkZ7MnwGs8-UjblsBD1Khm5lNPyJ6R9ScBVsISpPo7TfJbx9OtCoDreY-J0cndVKNmYIZ1w2j-3o2IuQEdG3r7TeMPyO0Vkz98F5uBO1lSHK9RrzK5k/s1600/640px-Stare_Kiejkuty_-_fotopolska.eu_%2528121752%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfsUEWKUfs00NUWcClPPss7l6HkZ7MnwGs8-UjblsBD1Khm5lNPyJ6R9ScBVsISpPo7TfJbx9OtCoDreY-J0cndVKNmYIZ1w2j-3o2IuQEdG3r7TeMPyO0Vkz98F5uBO1lSHK9RrzK5k/s320/640px-Stare_Kiejkuty_-_fotopolska.eu_%2528121752%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;">Photo: Outside the prison grounds at Stare Kiejkuty. Source: mamik / fotopolska.eu [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>In July 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/07/landmark-rulings-expose-poland-s-role-cia-secret-detention-and-torture/" target="_blank">ruled</a> that Poland had <a href="https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/spotlights/Margulies-Landmark-Ruling-Black-Sites-Program.cfm" target="_blank">violated</a> the rights of Abu Zubaydah when he was detained and tortured by the CIA at Stare Kiejkuty.<br />
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The legal consequences of the torture continue to mount. <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-politics-and-media-still-get-wrong-about-abu-zubaydah" target="_blank">According to Charles Church</a> at <i>Lawfare</i>, “As a result of the complicity of both Poland and Lithuania in Abu Zubaydah’s captivity and torture, the European Court of Human Rights <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/07/landmark-rulings-expose-poland-s-role-cia-secret-detention-and-torture/" target="_blank">ruled</a> that both nations owed him 100,000 euros each.”<br />
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<a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-politics-and-media-still-get-wrong-about-abu-zubaydah" target="_blank">According to a <i>Just Security</i> report</a> last year, in May 2018 ECHR also “handed down…judgments in two cases involving European countries that had hosted CIA ‘black sites’ in their territory.” In both cases — <i><a href="https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#%7B%22tabview%22:[%22document%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-183685%22]%7D" target="_blank">Al Nashiri v. Romania</a></i> and <i><a href="https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#%7B%22tabview%22:[%22document%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-183687%22]%7D" target="_blank">Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania</a></i> — ECHR found that Poland and Lithuania, “through their cooperation with CIA extraordinary renditions of the applicants, had committed multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.”<br />
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<b>New Questions</b><br />
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This new revelation regarding Gina Haspel’s presence at “Site Blue” in Poland, along with the apparent outing of her Guantanamo posting, raise a host of new questions about Gina Haspel’s involvement with the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program. Her presence at Poland and Guantanamo goes along with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/us/politics/gina-haspel-cia-director-nominee-trump-torture-waterboarding.html" target="_blank">earlier</a>, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/gina-haspel-black-site-cia-nashiri-interrogation-cable" target="_blank">well-publicized</a> <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2017/06/07/rights-group-seeks-arrest-of-cia-deputy-director/" target="_blank">accounts</a> of Haspel’s posting at the CIA black site in Thailand during the time al-Nashiri was waterboarded there, and her role in the destruction of torture videotapes from the Thai-based CIA prison.<br />
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Last December, I broke the <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/revealed-there-were-two-cia-torture-programs-151bb80d69c1" target="_blank">story</a> that the CIA’s RDI program was not the only torture program run by the CIA. The article also detailed revelations from a <a href="https://www.aclu.org/report/summary-and-reflections-chief-medical-services-oms-participation-rdi-program" target="_blank">memorandum</a> by the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services showing that the highly-classified and monitored RDI program appeared to hide illegal experimentation on CIA detainees, at least in part under the cloak of “quality control.”<br />
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Meanwhile, a separate CIA black site program in Afghanistan (and possibly elsewhere) was conducted without much CIA oversight, especially from medical personnel, as can be discerned from both the testimony of the Chief of CIA’s Office of Medical Services, and from the fragmentary narrative provided in the SSCI Executive Summary of its unpublished investigation into CIA’s detention and interrogation program.<br />
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Haspel’s alleged presence at the Poland black site raises the question of possible prosecution of America’s top spy chief for war crimes. Poland is a member of the International Criminal Court, and Haspel could be considered liable for war crimes committed on its territory. (<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/could-cia-nominee-gina-haspel-be-prosecuted-for-war-crimes" target="_blank">See this analysis</a>.)<br />
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In addition, according to legal documents <a href="https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/2017_05_22_PUB-AZubaydah-Margulies-Decl.pdf" target="_blank">posted online</a>, as of May 2017, there was still an investigation by the Organized Crimes Division of the Regional Public Prosecutor’s office in Kraków, Poland into the operations of the CIA’s black site and complicity by Polish officials.<br />
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Drawing on questions former CIA officer John Kiriakou asked <a href="https://www.opednews.com/articles/Newly-Declassified-Documen-by-John-Kiriakou-Document-Release_Gina-Haspel_Guantanamo-Prison_Torture-190109-496.html" target="_blank">in print</a> after the news surfaced regarding Haspel’s work at Guantanamo, one wonders when exactly Haspel was at the Poland black site? Was she involved in the torture of prisoners there? Were videos made of the interrogations and torture, and did Haspel then also destroy them? Did she disclose her time at the “Quartz” black site to the SSCI prior to her nomination hearing?<br />
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Given the amount of new information surfacing, the question arises whether or not Haspel committed perjury during her Congressional hearings, or whether or not Congressional personnel colluded with members of the Trump administration, including Haspel, in hiding the totality of her participation in the CIA’s torture program.<br />
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The biggest question remains whether there is any political will by those in power to pursue these questions in a legal or political setting, or whether the mainstream press or human rights groups will continue to press the issue at all.<br />
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— — — — — — — —<br />
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Link to full but <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992/Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.pdf">redacted transcript</a> below of a November 16, 2018 Military Commissions hearing is taken from the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992-Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.html" target="_blank">public posting</a> by Carol Rosenberg and the Miami Herald. The actual Military Commissions website posting for the same hearing spans three different URLs, <a href="https://www.mc.mil/Portals/0/pdfs/KSM2/KSM%20II%20%28806Transcript16Nov2018%29_Part1.pdf" target="_blank">Part One</a>, <a href="https://www.mc.mil/Portals/0/pdfs/KSM2/KSM%20II%20%28806Transcript16Nov2018%29_Part2.pdf" target="_blank">Part Two</a>, and <a href="https://www.mc.mil/Portals/0/pdfs/KSM2/KSM%20II%20%28806Transcript16Nov2018%29_Part3.pdf" target="_blank">Part Three</a>. The relevant quotes upon which this article relies can be found in the last 10 pages or so of Part Three.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992/Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.pdf">https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5669992/Redacted-transcript-of-closed-9-11-trial-hearing.pdf<br />
</a><br />
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Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-59904832915228972882018-07-31T13:57:00.000-07:002018-11-09T13:25:09.558-08:00Trump Ordered Guantanamo to Stay Open, Now APA to Vote on Overturning Ban on Psychologists at Guantanamo<a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/trump-ordered-guantanamo-to-stay-open-now-apa-to-vote-on-overturning-ban-on-psychologists-at-cd8dd905be12">originally posted at Medium.com</a><br />
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The American Psychological Association’s Board of Directors and Council Leadership team have endorsed a new agenda item for APA’s upcoming national meeting in early August. Labelled <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4614719-NBI-35B-APA-Council.html">New Business Item (NBI) 35B</a>, the resolution would overturn a 2015 APA decision calling for the removal of all psychologists from Guantanamo, stating psychologists may not work in “settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law…or the US Constitution.”<br />
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An exception had been made for non-military or independent psychologists who could treat detainees when “they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”<br />
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The proposed change comes after President Trump issued an executive order in January 2018 reversing President Obama’s stated, but unfulfilled, promise to close Guantanamo. Trump has announced that he intends to send newly captured “terrorists” to the Cuba-based military prison, though none have been sent there as yet.<br />
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[<b>Update, August 10, 2018:<i></i></b> On August 8, at a vote by APA’s Council of Representatives, the proposal to allow psychologists to return to sites like Guantanamo, that are considered illegal and stand outside of international law, or where human rights abuses routinely take place, was defeated by a vote of 105 to 57, with 15 abstentions.]<br />
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<b>Psychologist Participation in Torture</b><br />
<br />
The current APA policy prohibiting psychologists from working at Guantanamo followed a series of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-psychological-association-collaborated-on-torture-justification.html" target="_blank">scandals</a> relating to the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/06/katherine-eban" target="_blank">participation of psychologists in torture</a> by both the Department of Defense and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/20/us/cia-torture.html" target="_blank">the Central Intelligence Agency</a>. In August 2017, two CIA contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/cia-torture-psychologists-settle-lawsuit" target="_blank">settled</a> a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of two CIA torture victims and the family of one CIA detainee who died in custody. The terms of the settlement have been kept confidential.<br />
<br />
In 2008, a referendum was first proposed by rank-and-file members of the APA that called for removal of psychologists from Guantanamo and CIA “black sites” where torture and other human rights violations were conducted. APA fought that referendum and delayed its implementation.<br />
<br />
But in the aftermath of a <a href="http://www.apa.org/independent-review/revised-report.pdf" target="_blank">2015 report</a> by an independent investigator, Chicago attorney David Hoffman, which documented numerous contacts between APA officials and DoD and CIA contacts, particularly pertaining to the development of APA’s “Psychologists in National Security” policy, APA fired some officers, and others resigned, while the banning of psychologists at sites like Guantanamo was finally made official APA policy.<br />
<br />
This author has <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2015/06/03/new-questions-about-conflict-of-interest-throw-doubt-on-apas-independent-investigation-on-cia-links/" target="_blank">contended</a> the Hoffman report soft-pedaled the influence of CIA on APA affairs, noting that David Hoffman previously worked with and still has <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2014/12/07/apa-independent-torture-review-led-by-attorney-who-worked-with-cias-tenet/" target="_blank">“limited, occasional contact”</a> with former CIA special counsel, Kenneth J. Levit, and George Tenet, who was CIA director during the time CIA’s “enhanced interrogations” torture program was implemented.<br />
<br />
But the loudest criticism of APA and Hoffman came from a number of people named in the Hoffman Report itself, who have <a href="http://www.hoffmanreportapa.com/resources/2017%2008%2028%20Behnke%20et%20al%20v%20Hoffman%20et%20al%20Cmplt%20Pkg.pdf" target="_blank">sued</a> David Hoffman and APA, <a href="http://www.hoffmanreportapa.com/" target="_blank">contending</a> the report made “false claims,” defamatory statements, and omitted key documents that would show APA officials were not involved in any unethical or illegal activity.<br />
<br />
In a February 2018 <a href="http://www.hoffmanreportapa.com/resources/release%20Feb.%2022.pdf" target="_blank">open letter</a> to APA membership, key members of the lawsuit turned to APA for assistance. “We ask APA members to press the Council and the Board to take control back from the lawyers’ hands, and to bring this painful chapter in the APA’s history to a fair and prompt end,” they wrote.<br />
<br />
It would seem that help was already on the way. In August 2017, two members of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, a small but influential group within APA, put forward a new resolution meant to undo the banning of psychologists from treating detainees at Guantanamo and similar “illegal” sites.<br />
<br />
The authors of the new resolution are Sally Harvey, a past president of the military psychology division, and Carrie Kennedy, Division 19’s representative to APA Council and the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Military-Neuropsychology-Carrie-H-Kennedy/dp/0826104487" target="_blank">former Chief of Behavioral Health Services for detainees at Guantanamo.</a><br />
<br />
Harvey is also a co-mover of another resolution up for consideration at the upcoming APA council meeting next month (NBI 13D). This resolution would remove the Hoffman report from the APA’s website for alleged “inaccuracies.”<br />
<br />
Inside APA, there’s some fear of unknown legal repercussions if the report were taken down. The APA’s ad hoc Committee on Legal Issues (COLI), which <a href="http://www.apa.org/about/offices/ogc/committee.aspx" target="_blank">styles itself</a> the “think tank” for APA’s Board of Directors, has recommended rejecting this particular resolution.<br />
<br />
<b>“Outside the Law”</b><br />
<br />
Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/fw0ftfpcgdbx0ot/NBI-35B-APA-Council.pdf?dl=0" target="_blank">NBI 35B</a>, the resolution that would bring psychologists back to Guantanamo, has COLI’s support. In a May 25, 2018 letter to the Board, COLI “unanimously” supported the change that would let psychologists treat detainees “held outside of…either International Law…or the US Constitution,” i.e., outside customary legal detention. Some have said <a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9780814737361/" target="_blank">“outside the law”</a> itself.<br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614719/NBI-35B-APA-Council.pdf">NBI 35B APA Council (PDF)</a><br />
<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4614719/NBI-35B-APA-Council.txt">NBI 35B APA Council (Text)</a><br />
</noscript>Even more, COLI told the Board, “Beyond approving the amendment, COLI encourages broadening the provision to also allow psychologists to be involved in the practice and policy of humane interrogations…. [COLI] recommends that the Resolution be revised to more explicitly allow for the inclusion of psychologists in the practice of humane information-gathering approaches.”<br />
<br />
Dan Aalbers, the author of the original APA membership referendum calling for the psychologist ban at Guantanamo, told me via email, “This bill must be defeated. Not only would it return psychologists to Guantanamo, it would signal organized psychology’s willingness to participate in Trump’s interrogation program. Indeed we know that one section of APA leadership decided to endorse the bill <i><b>exactly</b></i> because it held out the promise that psychologists could once again be involved with interrogations in sites that violate international law.”<br />
<br />
Five other psychologists have added themselves as cosigners to 35B, including Robert Resnick, PhD; Jeffrey Younggren, PhD; Deirdre Knapp, PhD; Avi Kaplan, PhD; and Keely Kolmes, PhD. Dr. Younggren is a highly public figure in APA who for many years gave APA public continuing education courses on ethics to psychologists, while Dr. Resnick is a former APA president.<br />
<br />
This return to participation of psychologists in interrogations would rewind the clock back to the darkest days of the Bush administration’s torture program, and a period when DoD renditioned hundreds of detainees from around the world to Guantanamo. Forty detainees still remain in indefinite detention at Guantanamo, the majority of them never charged with any crime after 15 or so years imprisonment.<br />
<br />
According to the Kennedy-Harvey resolution, a change in APA policy is needed because otherwise APA is in violation of anti-trust laws. Even more, they claim that denying military psychologists access to detainees at places like Guantanamo puts the U.S. at risk of violating Geneva Conventions protocol, which maintains “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated…. Prisoners of war shall have the attention, preferably, of medical personnel of the Power on which they depend and, if possible, of their nationality.”<br />
<br />
The new resolution seems to ignore the fact the policy begun by President Bush, and continued by every President since, asserts the detainees at Guantanamo are “unlawful” or “unprivileged” combatants meriting the designation “detainee,” but not “prisoners of war,” with its attendant rights and privileges in the Geneva Conventions.<br />
<br />
<b>A “Back Door” for “Potential Further Harm”</b><br />
<br />
Not every group within APA agrees with changing the “no detainee treatment” policy. According to APA materials provided to Council members, APA’s Board of Professional Affairs (BPA) worried “that any change could be perceived as APA providing a back door for psychologists assisting in exposing detainees to potential further harm or endorsing torture.”<br />
<br />
BPA didn’t think that was the intent of the new resolution, but believed “there is insufficient information to properly assess the consequences of this change” and “insufficient evidence to assess consequences of approval.” BPA officials worried about issues surrounding psychologists having to respond to chain of command within a “black site.”<br />
<br />
In addition, the Board of Psychology in the Public Interest (BAPPI) opposed amending the previous APA policy to allow psychologists to treat detainees at Guantanamo and “black sites.”<br />
<br />
Besides issues surrounding detainee confidentiality (detainee medical information had previously been used by interrogators to pressure detainees, leverage phobias, etc.), BAPPI pointed out that military psychologists are subject to the military chain of command:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“ It is impossible to provide a therapeutic relationship when the psychologist involved works for the organization (i.e., the Military) that is detaining the individual…. Psychologists in military service at isolated detention centers are likely to be particularly vulnerable to conflicts because of both physical isolation and national security constraints.”</blockquote>
On the other side of the issue, the APA Ethics Board essentially signed off on the proposed new policy. Allowing psychologists to treat detainees was “consistent with the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.”<br />
<br />
In particular, the Ethics Board said the policy would be consistent with APA’s principles concerning Beneficence and Non-Maleficence, as well as Ethics Standards 3.01 (Unfair Discrimination), and 3.04 (Avoiding Harm).<br />
<br />
The standard regarding avoiding harm reads, in part, “Psychologists do not participate in, facilitate, assist, or otherwise engage in torture, defined as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person….”<br />
<br />
But according to medical experts, the policy of indefinite detention, alone, at Guantanamo is tantamount to torture or <a href="https://www.cvt.org/End-Indefinite-Detention" target="_blank">cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment</a>. According to <a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/download/file/20219/irrc_857_2.pdf" target="_blank">an article</a> in the International Review of the Red Cross, “indefinite detention may raise issues under the peremptory international law rule against torture….the International Committee of the Red Cross… has access to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay and has observed their deteriorating psychological condition, leading to a high number of suicide attempts.”<br />
<br />
In this author’s own research via Freedom of Information Act, one detainee who supposedly killed himself at Guantanamo in 2006, Mohamed Al Hanashi,<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank"> explicitly cited</a> the actions of the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo for leading him to take his life. I believe this event occurred during the time Carrie Kennedy was operational at Guantanamo (though she was not the “Chief Psychologist” there).<br />
<br />
Another detainee who allegedly died by suicide, Adnan Latif, cited the lack of confidentiality between himself and a nurse as a reason for his wanting to die. Moreover, numerous detainees over the years <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/world/guantanamo-bay-doctors-abuse.html" target="_blank">have complained</a> about the <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/31762/medical-complicity-cia-torture/" target="_blank">actions of medical personnel</a>, including psychologists.<br />
<br />
Supporters of current APA policy intend to fight the military psychologists’ bid to amend the policy denying psychologists access to detainees for the purposes of either care or assisting interrogations.<br />
<br />
Aalbers told this reporter: “Never again should psychologists be involved in the business of torture, never again should organized psychology aid violations of fundamental human rights.”Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-78880962511850885582018-03-31T19:32:00.000-07:002018-05-03T14:52:14.861-07:00Marine Corps Colonel Describes U.S. Use of Germ Warfare in the Korean War (Updated, 5/3/18)Frank H. Schwable was the highest ranking prisoner of war to confess in detail about the U.S. biological warfare campaign in North Korea and China during the Korean War. He describes in the three "confessions" or depositions below how that campaign evolved, what the men undertaking it felt about the campaign, the "effectiveness" of the use of bioweapons, and the security surrounding the covert use of bacteriological weapons.<br />
<br />
This unique document has been suppressed in the West for decades. Schwable, and others who also gave information on germ warfare to their captors, were said to be "brainwashed," tortured, and to have otherwise produced untruthful false confessions. After the war, Schwable and other prisoners who "confessed" were repatriated to the United States and threatened with court martial if they did not renounce their testimony. They all did so.<br />
<br />
To my knowledge this is the first posting online in any blog or news site of these astonishing documents. Col. Schwable's statements regarding U.S. bacteriological warfare are posted here in the spirit of truthful inquiry and an airing of all facts.<br />
<br />
In the instance of fairness, and for purposes of historical analysis, Col. Schwable's written recantation of these statements is <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4451937-Schwable-s-Recantation.html" target="_blank">available for viewing here</a>. Every reader will be able to be compare this latter statement with the depositions you can read below.<br />
<br />
While critics of the premise of U.S. biological warfare in Korea cite the supposed coercion or torture of the captured airmen, few mention that upon repatriation they were subjected to a great deal of stress to recant. Upon Schwable's return, Marine Corps commandant, General Lemuel Shepherd, ordered the Colonel's appearance before a court of inquiry.<br />
<br />
Although in the end, Schwable received no formal disciplinary action, his military career was all but ended. Meanwhile, all the returning airmen who confessed to use of biological weapons were subjected to psychiatric evaluations and multiple interrogations after their return to U.S. military authorities. (See Raymond B. Lech, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Soldiers-Raymond-B-Lech/dp/0252025415" target="_blank">"Broken Soldiers",</a> Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000 - While Lech is a proponent of the "menticide" view of how the North Koreans and Chinese treated their captives, his is maybe the most full account of what the returnees faced.)<br />
<br />
The following three depositions were printed in a “<i>Supplement to ‘People’s China,’</i> March 16, 1953, pgs. 3-13. Photostats of them can be found online at URL: <a href="http://massline.org/PeoplesChina/PC1953/PC1953-06-MissingP15-18-OCR.pdf">http://massline.org/PeoplesChina/PC1953/PC1953-06-MissingP15-18-OCR.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<i>These transcriptions follow the spelling, punctuation, and grammar (including use of commas) in the original. Note: there are some accompanying photos at the original link above.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifPOBs0MbXAHiGCyPlrDHNDywD7XmOWwMULs3DpWl_Q-_B_sSN0z8rIx3BlCLtitwhMJDzBKcHPnQr9_y7GukVxo0z6JPB7sGL1Plms43t_ujrWL9TB5xQWdObF29KQ8jJPymWmaHX5y8/s1600/Screenshot+2018-03-31+15.31.16.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="694" data-original-width="552" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifPOBs0MbXAHiGCyPlrDHNDywD7XmOWwMULs3DpWl_Q-_B_sSN0z8rIx3BlCLtitwhMJDzBKcHPnQr9_y7GukVxo0z6JPB7sGL1Plms43t_ujrWL9TB5xQWdObF29KQ8jJPymWmaHX5y8/s320/Screenshot+2018-03-31+15.31.16.png" width="254" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Col. Frank Schwable as POW, from <i>People's China</i>, March 16, 1953</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
__________________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>DEPOSITIONS BY COLONEL FRANK H. SCHWABLE,</b></div>
<div style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<b>FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE 1ST MARINE</b></div>
<div style="font-weight: bold; text-align: center;">
<b>AIRCRAFT WING, U.S. MARINE CORPS</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: 700;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;">MAIN DEPOSITION OF COLONEL FRANK H. SCHWABLE</span></div>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">
</span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
North Korea</div>
<br />
I am Colonel Frank H. Schwable, 04429, and was Chief of Staff of the First Marine Aircraft Wing until shot down and captured on July 8, 1952. <br />
<br />
My service with the Marine Corps began in 1929 and I was designated an aviator in 1931, seeing duty in many parts of the world. Just before I came to Korea, I completed a tour of duty in the Division of Aviation at Marine Corps Headquarters. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Directive of the Joint Chiefs of Staff</b></div>
<br />
I arrived in Korea on April 10, 1952, to take over my duties as Chief of Staff of the First Marine Aircraft Wing. All my instructions and decisions were subject to confirmation by the Assistant Commanding General, Lamson-Scribner. Just before I assumed full responsibility for the duties of Chief of Staff, General Lamson-Scribner called me into his office to talk over various problems of the Wing. During this conversation he said: "Has Binney given you all the background on the special missions run by VMF-513?" I asked him if he meant "suprop" (our code name for bacteriological bombs) and he confirmed this. I told him I had been given all the background by Colonel Binney.<br />
<br />
Colonel Arthur A. Binney, the officer I relieved as Chief of Staff, had given me, as his duties required that he should, an outline of the general plan of bacteriological warfare in Korea and the details of the part played up to that time by the First Marine Aircraft Wing.<br />
<br />
The general plan for bacteriological warfare in Korea was directed by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in October, 1951. In that month the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a directive by hand to the Commanding General, Far East Command (at that time General Ridgway), directing the initiation of bacteriological warfare in Korea on an initially small, experimental stage but in expanding proportions.<br />
<br />
This directive was passed to the Commanding General, Far East Air Force, General Weyland, in Tokyo. General Weyland then called into personal conference General Everest, Commanding General of the Fifth Air Force in Korea, and also the Commander of the Nineteenth Bomb Wing at Okinawa, which unit operates directly under FEAF.<br />
<br />
The plan that I shall now outline was gone over, the broad aspects of the problem were agreed upon and the following information was brought back to Korea by General Everest, personally and verbally, since for security purposes it was decided not to have anything in writing on this matter in Korea and subject to possible capture.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Objectives</b></div>
<br />
The basic objective was at that time to test, under field conditions, the various elements of bacteriological warfare, and to possibly expand the field tests, at a later date, into an element of the regular combat operations, depending on the results obtained and the situation in Korea. <br />
<br />
The effectiveness of the different diseases available was to be tested, especially for their spreading or epidemic qualities under various circumstances, and to test whether each disease caused a serious disruption to enemy operations arid civilian routine or just minor inconveniences, or was contained completely, causing no difficulties. Various types of armament or containers were to be tried out under field conditions and various types of aircraft were to be used to test their suitability as bacteriological bomb vehicles.<br />
<br />
Terrain types to be tested included high areas, seacoast areas, open spaces, areas enclosed by mountains, isolated areas, areas relatively adjacent to one another, large and small towns and cities, congested cities and those relatively spread out.<br />
<br />
These tests were to be extended over an unstated period of time but sufficient to cover all extremes of temperature found in Korea. <br />
<br />
All possible methods of delivery were to be tested as well as tactics developed to include initially, night attack and then expanding into day attack by specialized squadrons. Various types of bombing were to be tried out, and various combinations of bombing, from single planes up to and including formations of planes, were to be tried out with bacteriological bombs used in conjunction with conventional bombs. <br />
<br />
Enemy reactions were particularly to be tested or observed by any means available to ascertain what his counter-measures would be, what propaganda steps he would take, and to what extent his military operations would be affected by this type of warfare.<br />
<br />
Security measures were to be thoroughly tested – both friendly and enemy. On the friendly ride, all possible steps were to be taken to confine knowledge of the use of this weapon and to control information on the subject. On the enemy side, every possible means was to be used to deceive the enemy and prevent his actual proof that the weapon was being used.<br />
<br />
Finally, if the situation warranted, while continuing the experimental phase of bacteriological warfare according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive, it might be expanded to become a part of the military or tactical effort in Korea. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Initial Stage</b></div>
<br />
The B-29s from Okinawa began using bacteriological bombs in November, 1951, covering targets all over North Korea in what might be called random bombing. One night the target might be in North east [sic] Korea and the next night in North west [sic] Korea. Their bacteriological bomb operations were conducted in combination with normal night armed reconnaissance as a measure of economy and security.<br />
<br />
Early in January 1952, General Schilt, then Commanding General of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, was called to 5th Air Force Headquarters in Seoul, where General Everest told him of the directive issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and ordered him to have VMF-513 – Marine Night Fighter Squadron 513 of Marine Aircraft Group 33 of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing – participate in the bacteriological warfare program. VMF-513 was based on K8, the Air Force base at Kunsan of the 3rd Bomb Wing, whose B-26s had already begun bacteriological operations. VMF-513 was to be serviced by the 3rd Bomb Wing.<br />
<br />
While all marine aircraft (combat types) shore based in Korea operate directly under the 5th Air Force, with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing being kept in- formed of their activities, when a new or continuing program is being initiated, the 5th Air Force normally has initially informed the Wing as a matter of courtesy. <br />
<br />
Towards the end of January, 1952, Marine night fighters of Squadron 513, operating as single planes on night armed reconnaissance, and carrying bacteriological bombs, shared targets with the B-26s covering the lower half of North Korea with the greatest emphasis on the western portion. Squadron 513 coordinated with the 3rd Bomb Wing on all these missions, using F7F aircraft (Tiger Cats) because of their twin engine safety.<br />
<br />
K8 (Kunsan) offered the advantage of take off directly over the water, in the event of engine failure, and both the safety and security of over water flights to enemy territory.<br />
<br />
For security reasons, no information on the types of bacteria being used was given to the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.<br />
<br />
In March 1952, General Schilt was again called to 5th Air Force Headquarters and verbally directed by General Everest to prepare Marine Photographic Squadron One (VMJ-1 Squadron) of Marine Aircraft Group 33, to enter the program. VMJ-1 based at K-3, Marine Aircraft Group-33's base at Pohang, Korea, was to use F2H-2P photographic reconnaissance aircraft (Banshees).<br />
<br />
The missions would be intermittent and combined with normal photographic missions and would be scheduled by the 5th Air Force in separate, Top Secret orders.<br />
<br />
The Banshees were brought into the program because of their specialized operations, equipment, facilities and isolated area of operations at K-3. They could penetrate further into North Korea as far as enemy counter-action is concerned and worked in two-plane sections involving a minimum of crews and disturbance of normal missions. They could also try out bombing from high altitudes in horizontal flight in conjunction with photographic runs.<br />
<br />
During March, 1952, the Banshees of Marine Photographic Squadron One commenced bacteriological operations, continuing and expanding the bacteriological bombing of North Korean towns, always combining these operations with normal photographic missions. Only a minimum of bomb supplies were kept on hand to reduce storage problems, and the 5th Air Force sent a team of two officers and several men to K-3 (Pohang) to instruct the Marine specialists in handling the bombs.<br />
<br />
The Navy's part in the program was with the F9F’s (Panthers), AD’s (Skyraiders) and standard F2H’s (Banshees), which as distinct from the photographic configuration, using carriers off the east coast of Korea.<br />
<br />
The Air Force had also expanded its own operations to include squadrons of different type aircraft, with different methods and tactics of employing bacterio- logical warfare. This was the situation up to my arrival in Korea. Subsequent thereto, the following main events took place.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Operational Stage</b></div>
<br />
During the latter part of May, 1952, the new Commanding General of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, General Jerome, was called to 5th Air Force Headquarters and given a directive for expanding bacteriological operations. The directive was given personally and verbally by the new Commanding General of the 5th Air Force, General Barcus.<br />
<br />
On the following day, May 25, General Jerome outlined the new stage of bacteriological operations to the Wing staff at a meeting in his office at which I was present in my capacity as Chief of Staff.<br />
<br />
The other staff members of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing present were: General Lamson-Scribner, Assistant Commanding General; Colonel Stage, Intelligence Officer (G-2); Colonel Wendt, Operations Officer (G-3) and Colonel Clark, Logistics Officer (G-4).<br />
<br />
The directive from General Barcus, transmitted to and discussed by us that morning, was as follows:<br />
<br />
A contamination belt was to be established across Korea in an effort to make the interdiction program effective in stopping enemy supplies from reaching the front lines. The Marines would take the left flank of this belt, to include the two cities of Sinanju and Kunuri and the area between and around them. The remainder of the belt would be handled by the Air Force in the center and the Navy in the east or right flank.<br />
<br />
Marine Squadron 513 would be diverted from its random targets to this concentrated target, operating from K-8 (Kunsan) stiff serviced by the 3rd Bomb Wing using F7Fs (Tiger Cats) because of their twin engine safety. The squadron was short of these aircraft but more were promised.<br />
<br />
The responsibility for contaminating the left flank and maintaining the contamination was assigned to the commander of Squadron 513 and the schedule of operations left to the squadron's discretion, subject to the limitations that:<br />
<br />
The initial contamination of the area was to be completed as soon as possible and the area must then be recontaminated or replenished, at periods not to exceed 10 days.<br />
<br />
Aircraft engaged on these missions would be given a standard night armed reconnaissance mission, usually in the Haeju Peninsula. On the way to the target, however, these planes would go via Sinanju or Kunuri, drop their bacteriological bombs and then complete their normal missions. This would add to the security and interfere least with normal missions.<br />
<br />
Reports on this program of maintaining the contamination belt would go direct to the 5th Air Force, reporting normal mission numbers so-and-so had been completed "via Sinanju" or "via Kunuri" and stating how many "Super-Propaganda" bombs had been dropped.<br />
Squadron 513 was directed to make a more accurate "truck count" at night than had been customary in order to determine or detect any significant change in the flow of traffic through its operating area.<br />
<br />
General Barcus also directed that Marine Aircraft Group 12 of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing was to prepare to enter the bacteriological program. First the AD’s (Skyraiders) and then the F4U’s (Corsairs) were to take part in the expanded program, initially, however, only as substitute for the F7F’s. When called upon, these planes were to fly out of K-6, their base at Pyontaek, Korea, and bomb up at K-8, the Air Force base at Kunsan. Later, if formations were involved with special bombs, planes could then rendezvous with the remainder of their formations on the way to the target. This was to delay as long as possible, the need of establishing a bacterteriological bomb supply at K-6.<br />
<br />
General Jerome further reported that the 5th Air Force required Marine Photographic Squadron One to continue their current bacteriological operations, operating from K-3 (Pohang). At the same time, Marine Aircraft Group-33 at K-3 was placed on a stand-by, last resort, basis. Owing to the distance of K-3 from the target area, large scale participation in the program by Marine Aircraft Group 33 was not desired. Because the F9Fs (Panthers) would only be used in an emergency, no special bomb supply would be established over and above that need [sic] to supply the photographic reconnaissance aircraft. Bombs could be brought up from Ulsan in a few hours if necessary. <br />
<br />
The plans and the ramifications thereof were discussed at General Jerome's conference and arrangements made to transmit the directive to the officers concerned with carrying out the new program.<br />
<br />
It was decided that Colonel Wendt would initially transmit this information to the commanders concerned and the details could be discussed by the cognizant staff officers as soon as they were worked out.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>1st MAW's Operations</b></div>
<br />
Marine Night Fighter Squadron-513<br />
The next day then, 26 May, Colonel Wendt held a conference with the Commanding Officer of Squadron 513 and, I believe, the K-8 Air Base Commander and the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Bomb Wing and discussed the various details.<br />
<br />
The personnel of the 5th Air Force were already cognizant of the plan, having been directly informed by 5th Air Force Headquarters.<br />
Since the plan constituted, for Squadron 513, merely a change of target and additional responsibility to maintain their own schedule of contamination of their area, there were no real problems to be solved.<br />
<br />
During the first week of June, Squadron 513 started operations on the concentrated contamination belt, using cholera bombs. (The plan given to General Jerome indicated that at a later, unspecified date – depending on the results obtained, or lack of results – yellow fever and then typhus in that order would probably be tried out in the contamination belt.)<br />
<br />
Squadron 513 operated in this manner throughout June and during the first week in July that I was with the Wing, without any incidents of an unusual nature.<br />
<br />
An average of five aircraft a night normally covered the main supply routes along the western coast of Korea up to the Chong Chon River but with emphasis on the area from Pyongyang southward. They diverted as necessary to Sinanju or Kunuri and the area between in order to maintain the 10-day bacteriological replenishment cycle.<br />
<br />
We estimated that if each airplane carried two bacteriological bombs, two good nights were ample to cover both Sinanju and Kunuri and a third night would cover the area around and between these cities.<br />
<br />
About the middle of June, as best I remember, the Squadron received a modification to the plan from the 5th Air Force via the 3rd Bomb Wing.<br />
<br />
This new directive included an area of about 10 miles surrounding the two principal cities in the squadron's schedule, with particular emphasis on towns or hamlets on the lines of supply and any by-pass roads.<br />
<br />
Marine Aircraft Group-12<br />
Colonel Wendt later held a conference at K-6 (Pyongtaek) at which were present the Commanding Officer, Colonel Gaylor, the Executive Officer and the Operations Officer of Marine Aircraft Group 12. Colonel Wendt informed them that they were to make preparations to take part in the bacteriological operations and to work out security problems which would become serious if they got into daylight operations and had to bomb up at their own base, K-6. They were to inform the squadron commanders concerned but only the absolute barest number of a additional personnel, and were to have a list of a limited number of hand-picked pilots ready to be used on short notice. Colonel Wendt informed them that an Air Force team would soon be provided to assist with logistic problems, this team actually arriving the last week in June.<br />
<br />
Before my capture on July 8th, both the AD’s (Skyraiders) and the F4U’s (Corsairs) of Marine Aircraft Group-12 had participated in very small numbers, once or twice, in daylight bacteriological operations as a part of regular scheduled, normal, day missions, bombing up at K-8 (Kunsan), and rendezvousing with the rest of the formation on the way to the target. These missions were directed at small towns in Western Korea along the main road leading south from Kunuri and were a part of the normal interdiction program.<br />
<br />
Marine Aircraft Group-33<br />
Colonel Wendt passed the plan for the Wing's participation in bacteriological operations to Colonel Condon, Commanding Officer of Marine Aircraft Group 33, on approximately May 27-28.<br />
<br />
Since the Panthers (F9F’s) at the Group's base at Pohang would only be used as last resort aircraft, it was left to Colonel Condon's discretion as to just what personnel he would pass the information on to, but it was to be an absolute minimum.<br />
<br />
During the time I was with the Wing, none of these aircraft had been scheduled for bacteriological missions, though the photographic reconnaissance planes of the Group's VMJ-1 Squadron continued their missions from that base.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Scheduling and Security</b></div>
<br />
Security was far the most pressing problem affecting the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, since the operational phase of bacteriological warfare, as well as other type combat operations, is controlled by the 5th Air Force.<br />
<br />
Absolutely nothing could appear in writing on the subject. The word "bacteria" was not to be mentioned in any circumstances in Korea, except initially to identify "Super Propaganda" or "Suprop."<br />
<br />
Apart from the routine replenishment operations of Squadron 513, which required no scheduling, bacteriological missions were scheduled by separate, Top Secret, mission orders (or "FRAG" Orders). These stated only to include "Super Propaganda" or "Suprop" on mission number so-and-so of the routine, secret "FRAG" order for the day's operations.<br />
<br />
Mission reports went back the same way, by separate, Top Secret despatch, stating the number of "Suprop" bombs dropped on a specifically numbered mission.<br />
<br />
Other than this, Squadron 513 reported their bacteriological missions by adding "via Kunuri" or "via Sinanju" to their normal mission reports.<br />
<br />
Every means was taken to deceive the enemy and to deny knowledge of these operations to friendly personnel, the latter being most important since 300 to 400 men of the Wing are rotated back to the United States each month.<br />
<br />
Orders were issued that bacteriological bombs were only to be dropped in conjunction with ordinary bombs or napalm, to give the attack the appearance of a normal attack against enemy supply lines. For added security over enemy territory, a napalm bomb was to remain on the aircraft until after the release of the bacteriological bombs so that if the aircraft crashed it would almost certainly burn and destroy the evidence.<br />
<br />
All officers were prohibited from discussing the subject except officially and behind closed doors. Every briefing was to emphasize that this was not only a military secret, but a matter of national policy.<br />
<br />
I personally have never heard the subject mentioned or even referred to outside of the office, and I ate all of my meals in the Commanding General's small private mess, where many classified matters were discussed.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Assessment of Results</b></div>
<br />
In the Wing, our consensus of opinions was that results of these bacteriological operations could not be accurately assessed. Routine methods of assessment are by (presumably) spies, by questioning POWs, by watching the nightly truck count very carefully to observe deviations from the normal, and by observing public announcements of Korean and Chinese authorities, upon which very heavy dependence was placed, since it was felt that no large epidemic could occur without news leaking out to the outside world and that these authorities would, therefore, announce it themselves. Information from the above sources is correlated at the Commander-in-Chief, Far East level in Tokyo, but the over-all assessment of results is not passed down to the Wing level, hence the Wing was not completely aware of the results.<br />
<br />
When I took over from Colonel Binney, I asked him for results or reactions up to date and he specifically said: "Not worth a damn."<br />
<br />
No one that I know of has indicated that the results are anywhere near commensurate with the effort, danger and dishonesty involved, although the Korean and Chinese authorities have made quite a public report of early bacteriological bomb efforts. The sum total of results known to me are that they are disappointing and no good.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Personal Reactions</b></div>
<br />
I do not say the following in defense of anyone, myself included, I merely report as an absolutely direct observation that every officer when first informed that the United States is using bacteriological warfare in Korea is both shocked and ashamed. I believe, without exception, we come to Korea as officers loyal to our people and government and believing what we have always been told about bacteriological warfare – that it is being developed only for use in retaliation in a Third World War.<br />
<br />
For these officers to come to Korea and find that their own government has so completely deceived them by still proclaiming to the world that it is not using bacteriological warfare, makes them question mentally all the other things that the government proclaims about warfare in general and in Korea specifically.<br />
<br />
None of us believes that bacteriological warfare has any place in war, since of all the weapons devised bacteriological bombs alone have as their primary objective casualties among masses of civilians – and that is utterly wrong in anybody's conscience. The spreading of disease is unpredictable and there may be no limits to a fully developed epidemic. Additionally, there is the awfully sneaky, unfair sort of feeling dealing with a weapon used surreptitiously against an unarmed and unwarned people.<br />
<br />
I remember specifically asking Colonel Wendt what were Colonel Gaylor's reactions, when he was first informed and he reported to me that Colonel Gaylor was both horrified and stupefied and said he’d like to “turn in his suit.” Everyone felt like that when they first heard of it, and their reactions are what might well be expected from a fair minded, self respecting nation of people.<br />
<br />
Tactically, this type of weapon is totally unwarranted – it is not even a Marine Corps weapon – morally it is damnation itself; administratively and logistically as planned for use, it is hopeless; and from the point of view of self respect and loyalty, it is shameful.<br />
<br />
<i>F. H. Schwable, 04429<br />
Colonel, U.S.M.C.<br />
6 December, 1952</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>SECOND DEPOSITION OF COLONEL FRANK H. SCHWABLE</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
North Korea</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>General Jerome’s Conference</b></div>
<br />
Brigadier General Jerome, Commanding General, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, called a conference of staff officers of the Wing on 25 May, 1952. This was on the day after General Barcus, Commanding General, 5th Air Force, had directed General Jerome to extend the bacteriological warfare conducted by the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing into its operational stage.<br />
<br />
This conference was held behind closed doors in the Commanding General’s office at Wing Headquarters. No notes were taken nor written material involved and discussion was in moderate tones of voice. Present, in addition to General Jerome, were: Brigadier General Lamson-Scribner, Assistant Commanding General; myself, Chief of Staff; Colonel Stage, Intelligence Officer; Colonel Wendt, Operations Officer and Colonel Clark, Logistics Officer.<br />
<br />
The conference was extremely informal. As I have said, no notes were taken, but he following is a substantially correct account of what took place as best I remember it seven months later.<br />
<br />
General Jerome opened by saying: “Yesterday I talked for some time with General Barcus, with only Colonel Mason [5th Air Force Operations Officer] present. What I have to tell you will shock you as it did me; nevertheless we have to continue to carry out 5th Air Force orders while shore based in Korea.”<br />
<br />
He then checked whether everyone present was familiar with the current bacteriological warfare program of “Super Propaganda” (or “Suprop”) bombing of random targets. All hands either nodded or said, “Yes Sir,” and he went on:<br />
<br />
“You are aware that F7F’s [Tiger Cats] have been carrying out a Suprop program since early this year, and that this spring our F2H’s [photographic reconnaissance, Banshees] entered the program as well as certain other Air Force squadrons with which I am not familiar. The program, up to this point, has been using random bombing in an effort to cover all types of terrain features.”<br />
<br />
“Now a radical shift of operations has been directed! General Barcus stated that a contamination belt is to be established across the central part of North Korea with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing assuming responsibility for the left flank, to include Sinanju and Kunuri, and the area around and between these cities. The Air Force will take the larger center area from the Kunuri to within about 30 miles of the east coast, and the Navy will take the right flank. Gentlemen, this means we are shifting to the operational stage in this miserable kind of warfare!”<br />
<br />
The General paused for a moment and no one uttered a word. He went on to describe the details, which went like this: “The Marine part of this program will be conducted initially by VMF 513 – for them, it is actually only a shift of target, from miscellaneous bombing to bombing in a concentrated area. They have the additional responsibility of maintaining the recontamination of the area at intervals not to exceed once in every ten days.<br />
<br />
“VMF 513 will be responsible for maintaining this schedule on their own and specific missions for this contamination program will not show up on “Frag” orders. [Frag orders are merely fragments of a complete operation order, but contain the detailed missions for individual units.] VMF 513 mission reports for these routine flights will merely report their normal night armed reconnaissance, adding the words, ‘via Sinanju’ or ‘via Kunuri,’ for those missions which include special weapons. VMF 513 is to commence these operations as soon as possible using all the normal facilities at K-8 [Air Force Base at Kunsan] as they have been doing, and coordinating as necessary with the 3rd Bomb Wing. Only twin engine F7F’s [Tiger Cats] will be used and all previous safety precautions will continue in effect, like flying over water where possible and dropping Suprop bombs only in conjunction with other bombs and so on.”<br />
<br />
General Jerome continued, in effect: “That part of the program presents no particular problems. It is a shift of targets. The F2H [Banshee] aircraft will continue to be assigned intermittent missions in the program in the ‘Frag’ orders as in the past.<br />
<br />
“The real problems, while not immediate, are nevertheless critical and are occasioned by the fact that this hitherto confined program will now involved [sic] the Groups, their air bases and the many personnel concerned.” There was a decided stirring around by all officers present as this information of the meaning of extended bacteriological warfare hit like a bolt of lightning.<br />
<br />
General Jerome then outlined the further arrangements needed to carry out the part of the expanded bacteriological warfare program assigned to the Wing. He said that Marine Aircraft Group Twelve had to prepare to take part with a limited number of AD’s [Skyraiders] and F4U’s [Corsairs] but that, until otherwise directed, these planes would only be used as substitutes for the F7F’s. As to Marine Aircraft Group 33, they were to be placed on a standby basis to be called on only in an emergency as a last resort.<br />
<br />
“For the time being,” General Jerome said, “our operations will continue at night, but daylight operations are in the offing and we may be called on to include ‘Suprop’ bombs in daylight strikes later. In this connection, General Barcus specifically said to me: ‘If the government decides to announce the use of bacteriological warfare publicly, then it will become a part of all major strikes, and will be so announced in an effort to keep workers away from repairing bomb damage through fear of entering contaminated areas.’ So you can see for yourselves the possible extent of such operations and preparations necessary.”<br />
<br />
However, General Jerome went on, “I do not believe we have to worry about such large scale actions for some time and what I have outlined to you is the essence of the new program.” Then he turned to Colonel Wendt and said:<br />
<br />
“As I have pointed out, VMF 513’s operations become routine with responsibility for their execution in the hands of the squadron C.O. He has been, or will be, notified of the new plan direct by 5th Air Force and warned that the ‘Frag’ orders will make no mention of it. However, I want you to go and see the C.O. personally and tell him that I have been informed and that, while I do not relish the program, it must be carried out as directed. Tell him that he has been given special responsibility for seeing that the contamination of the area is maintained in the 10-day cycles, and if he runs into any trouble and needs help, he is to call on the Wing.”<br />
<br />
Still addressing Colonel Wendt, he said: “Then as soon as convenient, I want you to talk to both Gaylor and Condon so that if they get a ‘Frag’ order specifying ‘Suprop’ some day, they wont [sic] be caught short.” Colonels Gaylor and Condon were the then Commanding Officers of Marine Aircraft Groups 12 and 33 respectively. <br />
<br />
This was the main substance of General Jerome’s opening remarks on the new program and they were followed by an open discussion.<br />
<br />
General Lamson-Scribner inquired whether the program of maintaining the contamination of the area would not interfere with Squadron 513’s normal night armed reconnaissance missions which were so important. Colonel Wendt said that he felt it would ease up 513’s problems because formerly 513 had conducted bacteriological bombing missions all over the southern half of North Korea, clear over to the east coast at times, while still trying to maintain patrols over the Haeju Peninsula. Now, he said, although more special bombs would be involved, all the efforts of 513 would be concentrated in the south western part of North Korea and this should produce more efficient results. <br />
<br />
Colonel Wendt estimated that, after the initial contamination by 513 squadron, if five aircraft each carried two bacteriological bombs a night, they could maintain the replenishment of the area with bacteria in about 3 or 4 nights out of each ten, leaving the remaining nights free from the bother of Suprop. Even on those nights the aircraft would only be temporarily diverted from the main routes they had to cover.<br />
<br />
General Jerome intervened at this point to stress that General Barcus had stated that the establishment of a contamination belt across Korea “would assure the success of the interdiction program.” This implied that, far from interfering with the armed reconnaissance flights, the bacteriological operations would increase the effectiveness of the total effort to stop the lines of supply. <br />
<br />
This remark of General Barcus started a whole field of discussion by all hands in the use of bacteriological weapons in an interdiction program. If my memory is correct, I led off this discussion. Anyway, I said that the Air Force was getting pretty hard up if they had to turn to special weapons to make their interdiction work. I expressed frankly my ideas that a contamination belt could easily be countered by a determined enemy; that it was a prostitution of a strategic weapon to use it tactically; that it was a dreadful thing to use uncontrollable germs and sickness against large manufacturing areas in a major war, but it was even more ruthless and wanton to spread disease clear across the width of a whole country with the meager and indefinite hopes of stopping truck traffic.<br />
<br />
Finally, I said that if we established an effective disease are, I believed the enemy would rush their supplies through with whatever safeguards they have, but with the effect that the disease might well spread to our side since an epidemic is quite impersonal as to whom it affects.<br />
<br />
Colonel Wendt added that two large conventional bombs, in place of two Suprop bombs, on the wings of our night fighters, could do much more effective work if they could be dropped accurately on a bridge, than the whole squadron’s efforts to spread disease in Korea. <br />
<br />
Colonel Clark argued that any concentrated use of Suprop bombs in an area could only lead to complete exposure of the myth that the United States was not using bacteriological warfare. We would make liars out of ourselves and get nothing worthwhile in exchange.<br />
<br />
Everybody started to talk at one time. It was pointed out that Marine aviation is neither organized, trained, nor equipped to use bacteriological warfare since it is not a part of amphibious operations, and that it did not, therefore, seem right that we should be required to use it here in Korea merely because we were under the operational control of the 5th Air Force temporarily. Finally General Jerome held the floor to say that he honestly felt the Air Force was desperate over the interdiction program.<br />
<br />
Several officers added that if we had to use the stuff here, our government should admit it since through POWs, the enemy would find out soon enough. To use Korean people and towns to test bacteriological materials was bad enough, but to progress to the operational stage in a war the size of the Korean war, was simply outrageous because bacteriological warfare is a strategic weapon directed solely on human mass populations – that means mostly civilians – in an effort to stop war production, which does not apply in Korea.<br />
<br />
It was about this point that General Jerome reminded us that we were not there to discuss the pro’s and con’s of using bacteriological warfare in Korea – that decision having already been made “higher up” – but we were to discuss the plan itself and the measures required of the Wing to implement it.<br />
<br />
Then Colonel Clark asked what were the intentions regarding bomb supplies and facilities for the AD’s (Skyraiders). General Jerome reported that he had told General Barcus he would do all in his power to avoid large-scale bombing-up at K-6 (Marine Aircraft Group 12’s base at Pyongtaek) and hoped that General Barcus would keep that in mind when “Frag” orders were written up. He had asked General Barcus for a trained team from the Air Force to handle the bombs initially from K-6. He said that if Marine Aircraft Group 33 was only to be used as a last resort, and was near the basic bomb supply area at Ulsan, he was not going to establish any bomb supply at their base at K-3 (Pohang) over and above that which was being used by the F2H’s (Banshees).<br />
<br />
Colonel Wendt added that if single Skyraiders were substituted for Tiger Cats at night, they would have to go to K-8 (Kunsan) for briefing anyhow and could bomb up there. Even in daylight strikes of a small number of aircraft, there would be no strain in sending them to K-8 for their bacteriological bombs and then having them rendezvous with the rest of the planes en route to the target.<br />
<br />
General Jerome said that a very small number of Marine Aircraft Group 12’s staff officers were to be made cognizant of the possibility of the Skyraiders entering the program, and a handful of specially qualified, hand picked, reliable and loyal pilots informed, so that they could participate at a moments notice without confusion. As to Maine Aircraft Group 33, he would leave it up to Colonel Condon as to whom he would inform but that the number must be small and a list of specially qualified pilots must be kept current.<br />
<br />
Colonel Wendt asked as to whom on our own staff should know and referred particularly to the medical officer. I opposed violently letting the medical officer know on the basis that he did not have a real “need-to-know” in order for the program to function properly. I proposed that no one not present be informed without specific individual clearance by me and the Commanding General, except that both Operations Officer and Logistics Officer, but not the Intelligence Officer, should be authorized to inform the barest minimum number of officers required for efficient functioning of their own sections; that these officers must be majors and above, regulars and not reserves if at all possible and officers who had some time still to do in Korea.<br />
<br />
This brought up the matter of security in general which we all recognized as being one of the main problems.<br />
<br />
General Jerome said: “Tell all those involved that everybody from the top on down, including Barcus and now me, says that this is a matter of national policy, not just military security.” He reported that General Barcus had said that nothing must appear in writing on this program and that the use of the words “bacteriological or germ warfare” or similar terms, was forbidden except for initial identification with the program. <br />
<br />
The discussion on security was long and detailed and ended by General Jerome saying that security was an “all hands’ affair,” that everybody was responsible and everybody had to play their part – that it was a chain of many links and one broken link could destroy the chain. Some officer pointed out that the Chinese had already claimed that the United States was using bacteriological warfare and that since the early days of its use by the B-29’s, many pilots had become prisoners of war and that surely, therefore, the enemy must know by now of its use.<br />
<br />
We all recognized this truth, but, as the General pointed out, if the government chose to deny its use, we in the military had no choice other than to do our best to try and maintain this fiction. He said that, with 300 to 400 men of the Wing being rotated back to the United States each month, it was only a question of time before the truth would be known, and meanwhile, every effort was to be made to make the propaganda fiction as realistic as possible.<br />
<br />
It was generally agreed in this instance that security, as so often is the case, was more to keep knowledge from our own people than it was to conceal facts from the enemy.<br />
<br />
The General closed the conference with a directive summary that went about like this, as best as I can remember:<br />
<br />
Speaking to Colonel Wendt, he said: “You will see VMF 513 tomorrow and tell them that Barcus has cut me in and to go ahead at the earliest on the program. Stress security but, above all, stress the necessity of maintaining the ten-day contamination cycle because this responsibility is being passed directly to them. See Galor and Condon as soon afterwards as you can so that they can start thinking the problems over. Impress Gaylor with the fact that I think that his part will be a small scale effort for some time to come.” To Colonel Clark he said: “You check with Gaylor and see what help he needs in getting a small bomb facility ready.” His last words, addressed to Colonel Stage were: “Keep your ears and eyes wide open, security is essential.”<br />
<br />
<i>F. H. Schawble, 04429<br />
Colonel, U.S.M.C.<br />
19 December, 1952</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>THIRD DEPOSITION OF COLONEL FRANK H. SCHWABLE</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
North Korea</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Security</b></div>
<br />
When the bacteriological warfare program was expanded, all security matters were reviewed at General Jerome’s May 25 conference.<br />
<br />
The one thing that was emphasized in every stage of bacteriological warfare was security and this constituted one of the major problems confronting the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. While we had no operational authority, security is an administrative matter for which we were responsible to the 5th Air Force.<br />
<br />
Every means possible was taken to mislead the enemy and to deny knowledge of these operations to our own personnel.<br />
<br />
Among our own personnel, should they become curious, the aim was to create the impression that the special missions were strictly a form of highly specialized propaganda which could not be disclosed because of the loss of value if prematurely released, and because the sources had to be safeguarded.<br />
<br />
On the enemy side, bacteriological bombs were to be dropped only in conjunction with ordinary bombs so that the specialized nature of the attack could not be detected – or if detected, could not be proved. Any evidence found on the ground would be claimed by our side to be either legitimate propaganda material or flare parachutes and cases. <br />
<br />
At the conference on 25 May, 1952, General Jerome, assisted by General Lamson-Scribner, went over the security measures that would be enforced unless specifically modified.<br />
<br />
Absolutely nothing was to appear in writing referring to the program in its true nature. “Bacteria,” “germ,” etc. were words that we were forbidden to use, as well as the type names of the diseases, except to identify them initially with the program. Official conversations substituted such words as “Super-Propaganda,” “Suprop,” special weapons, special bombs, special missions, etc.<br />
<br />
Mission reports were handled in two ways:<br />
<br />
The routine flights made by Squadron 513 after the commencement of the concentration on the contamination belt, were covered in the Squadron’s normal, secret, mission reports – by dispatch – reporting the targets covered, mission numbers, times, and damage assessed.<br />
<br />
Then the words would be added “via Sinanju” or “via Kunuri,” whichever was pertinent. This would convey to the proper authorities that Squadron 513 had conducted one of its reoccurring, standard missions to maintain the bacteriological contamination in its assigned area in the 10-day cycle.<br />
<br />
The other units, whose missions were intermittent, were scheduled by indicating “Suprop” for, say, mission number so-and-so in Top Secret orders, and would use the “Suprop” code for their reports. They would send in their standard, secret dispatch stating mission numbers, type of aircraft, target coordinates, time over target, bombs dropped (conventional type) or photographic exposures made, flak encountered and any other information. Immediately after, a Top Secret dispatch would also be sent to 5th Air Force by the unit reporting, which would say: “Mission number so-and-so, so many ‘Suprop’.” By this method they reported in code, the number of special bombs dropped on an otherwise normal mission.<br />
<br />
Any reports of aircraft performance, tactics, etc., relative to the bacteriological program, would be reported verbally to the Operations Officer (G-3) and bomb difficulties to the Logistics Officer (G-4) who would further report verbally to the Commanding General who would then decide whether he or another appropriate staff officer would report to 5th Air Force.<br />
<br />
Only those who absolutely needed to know about the program to ensure its efficient functioning, were to be informed. Normally a staff officer and his assistant are cognizant of all matters within their section, so that if one officer is absent, the other can attend to any pertinent matters. It was not so with this program. If the cognizant officer was absent and an urgent matter came up, the question was to be taken to the Chief of Staff, Executive Officer, Commanding Officer or other senior staff officer. The reason I opposed informing the Wing Medical officer was that the program could function without his knowing about it.<br />
<br />
The entire subject was mentioned only in official business when it was necessary to discuss it, and then only behind closed doors and in guarded tones and terms. No “Suprop” mission was mentioned in the General’s daily staff briefing.<br />
<br />
Violations of security in this matter, like violations of security of any regulation of equal importance, were to be the subject of a general court martial. <br />
<br />
Only twin engine aircraft were to be used until the 5th Air Force scheduled the use of AD’s (Skyraiders).<br />
<br />
Only night operations and high-altitude photographic reconnaissance flights would employ special weapons until the AD’s were ordered to participate in daylight.<br />
<br />
Flights would be made to the maximum extent over water and avoiding friendly territory, and bombs were to be jettisoned only in deep water at sea. Bombing-up would be confined to the minimum number of fields – in our case K-8 (Squadron 513’s base at Kunsan) and K-3 (Marine Aircraft Group 33’s base at Pohang) only, until large-scale operations were ordered fromK-6 (Marine Group 12’s base at Pyongtaek).<br />
<br />
Where practicable, a napalm bomb would be carried on the attacking aircraft and retained until the bacteriological bombs were away, in order to ensure the destruction of the plane by fire, if it had to crash.<br />
<br />
General Jerome further directed that only a very limited number of pilots in the operating units were to be involved and they should be the more senior, mature, responsible men; that they should preferably be regular officers making the service their career, and above all, must be men of unquestioned loyalty.<br />
<br />
He also stressed that officers and men involved must be impressed with the vital nature of the security problem, its effects on national prestige and its effects of current enemy action. Pilots must be made to feel that they were a very select group, hand picked for capability and reliability. The point was emphasized to: “Forget it in Korea whenever you can, and when you go home, you never heard of it.”<br />
<br />
Pilots were to be assured of their personal safety from the effects of the materials used in order to avoid a possible breach of security through fear of personal contamination.<br />
<br />
For the same reason, pilots were to be given a brief summary of the general operations to date, to avoid possible breaches of security because of the moral factor if they should think they were the first ones to use this unorthodox form of warfare.<br />
<br />
Dropping of a “Suprop” bomb on the wrong target was to be reported immediately. Pilots were to be made to feel that this was a vital responsibility – not so that disciplinary action would or could be taken, but to keep an accurate record of what areas had been contaminated.<br />
<br />
Breaches of security were to be reported immediately and verbally. Any officer or man who appeared to be persistently curious about the propaganda program, was to be watched very carefully and reported direct to the General. Any pilot included in the program who appeared to be “breaking” in any manner, i.e. who appeared to become careless, rebellious, frightened, hesitant, etc., though combat fatigue or for any other reason, was to be removed immediately from the flight schedule and reported to the General. Any person who appeared to be acting in a suspicious or unnatural manner, was likewise to be reported to the General.<br />
<br />
<i>F. H. Schwable, 04429<br />
Colonel, U.S.M.C.<br />
19 December, 1952</i> <br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-37945981058947063292018-02-20T15:32:00.000-08:002018-02-23T13:13:10.667-08:00The Long-suppressed Korean War Report on U.S. Use of Biological Weapons Released At Last<i>Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.</i><br />
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<a href="https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-long-suppressed-korean-war-report-on-u-s-use-of-biological-weapons-released-at-last-20d83f5cee54" target="_blank">Originally posted at Medium.com</a><br />
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Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]<br />
<br />
Most controversially, both North Korea and China alleged that by early 1952, the U.S. was using biological or germ warfare weapons against both North Korea and China. The U.S. government has strenuously denied this. Nevertheless, captured U.S. flyers told their North Korean and Chinese captors about the use of such weapons. Later, after the prisoners were returned to U.S. custody, counterintelligence experts and psychiatrists interrogated them. They were told under the threat of court martial to renounce their confessions about germ warfare. They all did so.<br />
<br />
The Army Criminal Investigative Division officer in charge of interrogating returning prisoners, including airmen who confessed to use of biological weaponry on North Korea and China, was Army counter-intelligence specialist, Col. Boris Pash. Pash had previously been in charge of security for the most sensitive classified operations of the U.S. government in World War II. He was in charge of security at the Manhattan Project’s Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. (The Manhattan Project was the U.S. crash program to develop the atomic bomb.)<br />
<br />
In the immediate aftermath of the war, military intelligence officer Pash led the Alsos Mission, which searched for Nazi and Italian nuclear scientists and fissionable materials, as well as gathering “intelligence about any enemy scientific research applicable to his military effort,” including biological and chemical weapons. Later, Pash worked for the CIA, and in the 1970s was called before Congressional investigators concerning his alleged participation in Agency assassinations.<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="#_edn2" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5048559001654820158#_edn2">[2]</a><br />
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To convince the world of the truth of their claim the U.S. had dropped biological weapons on their countries, and after turning down the suggestion that the International Red Cross look into the charges, the North Koreans and Chinese sponsored an investigating commission. Using the auspices of the World Peace Council, they gathered together a number of scientists from around the world, most of whom were sympathetic to either the Left or the peace movement. Most surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Joseph Needham.<br />
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The ISC included scientists from a number of countries, including Sweden, France, Italy, and Brazil. The Soviet Union representative, Dr. N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov had been the chief medical expert at the Khabarovsk Trial of the Unit 731 Japanese officers accused of participating in bacteriological (aka biological, or germ) warfare before and during World War II, as well as conducting hideous experiments on prisoners to further that aim. Zhukov-Verezhnikov went on to write scientific articles through the 1970s.<br />
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Needham himself, though pilloried in the Western press for his opinions on the controversy of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, remained a highly lauded scientist for years after the ISC report. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour.[3]<br />
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The ISC travelled to China and North Korea in the summer of 1952 and by September produced the “Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,” which corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations.<br />
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The summary report was only some 60 pages long, but the ISC included over 600 pages of documentary material including statements from witnesses, including airmen involved in dropping the weaponry, as well as captured enemy agents; reports from doctors; journal articles from the United States; autopsy reports and lab tests; and photos and other materials. Most of this documentary material has been all but inaccessible for decades, with only a handful of copies of the ISC report in a few scattered libraries in the United States.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKOLUKH2YPoHh9jlWDHBUJwITleSmjpmghOB_Nb4hdBdRGhXZUY4Chte_G_lrxKO_lvG_mjk7sOdzJGUcEVKP2oN5ejc9PAJnwbas41PnfuRDCJdbul4q56t8dtxbUOx7sqe2GI2tlCaw/s1600/Screenshot+2018-02-20+12.06.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1384" data-original-width="838" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKOLUKH2YPoHh9jlWDHBUJwITleSmjpmghOB_Nb4hdBdRGhXZUY4Chte_G_lrxKO_lvG_mjk7sOdzJGUcEVKP2oN5ejc9PAJnwbas41PnfuRDCJdbul4q56t8dtxbUOx7sqe2GI2tlCaw/s320/Screenshot+2018-02-20+12.06.10.png" width="193" /></a></div><br />
The report concluded that the U.S. had used a number of biological weapons, including use of anthrax, plague, and cholera, disseminated by over a dozen of different devices or methods, including spraying, porcelain bombs, self-destroying paper containers with a paper parachute, and leaflet bombs, among others.<br />
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This article is not meant to examine the full range of opinions or evidence about whether or not the U.S. used biological weapons in the Korean War. It is instead an attempt to publish essential documentation of such claims, documentation that has effectively been withheld from the American people, and the West in general, for decades.<br />
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<b>Controversies</b><br />
<br />
The charges of U.S. use of biological warfare during the Korean War have long been the subject of intense controversy. The reliance, in part, on testimony from U.S. prisoners of war led to U.S. charges of “brainwashing.” These charges later became the basis of a cover story for covert CIA experimentation into use of use of drugs and other forms of coercive interrogation and torture that became the basis for its 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, and much later, a powerful influence on the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program.<br />
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Establishment Cold War scholars have been quick to debunk the ISC report. The most notable attempts in recent years included the publication of purported letters written by officials of the Soviet Union discussing the lack of evidence of U.S. biological warfare, and the decision to manufacture such evidence to fool the West.[4] Subsequently, a 1997 memoir by Wu Zhili, the former director of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army Health Division, was published declaring the purported U.S. use of bacteriological agents in the Korean War was really “a false alarm.” [5]<br />
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If these documents were to be true, as two Canadian scholars who spent years researching the Chinese-North Korean claims of biological warfare, then it would go against the bulk of archival evidence, including interviews with pertinent witnesses in both the United States and China.[6] Some of this archival evidence is quite recent, including the CIA declassification of a good deal of formerly top secret daily signal intelligence cables from the Korean War.[7]<br />
<br />
The cables dealing with North Korean claims of biological warfare, which claims were dismissed by U.S. officials, prove that the North Koreans were serious about the belief they were being attacked by germ weapons, and that they were concerned that reports from the field not be falsified by assiduous if uninformed people sending in reports from the field. There is no evidence that North Korean officials or personnel ever engaged in falsification of evidence of biological warfare.<br />
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There also is plenty of archival evidence to be found in the suppressed Needham report materials. For instance, the Wu Zhili document claims, “‘for the entire year [1952–1953] no sick patient or deceased person was found to have anything to do with bacteriological warfare.”<br />
<br />
From the ISC report, pg. 470But the ISC report documents a number of such deaths, including deaths from inhalational anthrax, a very rare disease almost completely unknown in China at that time. Appendix AA of the report, “Report on the Occurrence of Respiratory Anthrax and Haemorrhagic Anthrax Meningitis following the Intrusion of U.S. Military Planes over Northeast China” details the presence of anthrax by autopsy and laboratory examination in five deaths during March-April 1952. According to U.S. experts who have looked at the details of this report, the conclusions regarding death from inhalational anthrax could not have been faked[8].<br />
<br />
Until recently, there has been no effort to make the original Needham materials available for other scholars or the public to assess for themselves the truth or falsity of their analysis. Last year, scholar Milton Leitenberg uploaded a copy of the ISC report to Scribd, but it is a very rough scan, and not searchable, or easy to use for the public. The release was not advertised and the public in particular remains ignorant of its findings.<br />
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The version of the ISC report published here utilized state-of-the-art book scanning equipment and is text searchable.<br />
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<b>Censorship of Unit 731-U.S. Collaboration on Biological Warfare Data</b><br />
<br />
One important part of the ISC report guaranteed its suppression in the United States after its initial publication. The report discussed the activities of Imperial Japan’s biological warfare detachment, Unit 731, and the U.S. interest in its activities.<br />
<br />
Back in 1952, collaboration between the U.S. and Japanese war criminals using biological weapons was top secret, and totally denied by the U.S.<br />
<br />
But today, even U.S. historians accept that a deal was made between the U.S. and members of Unit 731 and associated portions of the Japanese military that had in fact been experimenting on the use of biological weapons since the mid-1930s, experimentation that included use of human vivisection and barbaric torture of thousands of human beings, most of whom were disposed of in crematoria. In addition, as described in the book chapter by Bernd Martin noted in the bibliography, there was collaboration between the Japanese and the Nazi regime on these issues.<br />
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The U.S. collaboration with Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 was formally admitted in 1999 by the U.S. government, though the documentation for this confession wasn’t published until nearly 20 years later.[9]<br />
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It is a matter of historical record now that the U.S. government granted amnesty to Japan’s chief at Unit 731, doctor/General Shiro Ishii and his accomplices. The amnesty was kept top secret for decades, until revealed by journalist John Powell in a landmark article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in October 1981.<br />
<br />
What came to be known as the Needham report, due to the fact the ISC was headed by the prestigious British scientist, came under immediate fire upon release. The report still remains a flashpoint for scholars. A 2001 article by the UK’s Historical Association detailed how UN and UK government officials collaborated in attempts to debunk the ISC findings. The UK Foreign Office released memoranda saying that claims of Japanese bacteriological warfare, going back to 1941, were “officially ‘not proven.’" (See article by Tom Buchanan in Bibliography.)<br />
<br />
The sensitivity of the material uncovered by the ISC touched two areas of covert US government research. First was the US government’s own plans to research and possibly implement germ warfare. The second issue concerned the confessions of U.S. flyers as to how they were briefed and implemented trial runs of biological warfare during the Korean War.<br />
<br />
China published the confessions of 19 U.S. airmen, but those confessions are also notoriously difficult to obtain. The ISC report published herein does include some of those “confessions,” and the public can be allowed to decide for themselves how authentic or genuine they are.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy26iooysPPNXsJTdzc_ZWhOPrcliTmyRQ-c798oj-vpsCv1Kyrzp0TIXEaOiAymm2aHhqWFx0Jo3gCc2WKZbcm4PpoNcUBvxoAlCs_4gkmKeahVlTLCWNlKkyq7wU-rx5_aAppUuXMlc/s1600/Screenshot+2018-02-20+12.10.12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1228" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy26iooysPPNXsJTdzc_ZWhOPrcliTmyRQ-c798oj-vpsCv1Kyrzp0TIXEaOiAymm2aHhqWFx0Jo3gCc2WKZbcm4PpoNcUBvxoAlCs_4gkmKeahVlTLCWNlKkyq7wU-rx5_aAppUuXMlc/s320/Screenshot+2018-02-20+12.10.12.png" width="320" /></a></div>From testimony of Lt. J. Quinn, ISC report, pg. 614 (PDF)The U.S. claimed that the flyers were tortured, and the CIA promoted the idea they were “brainwashed” by diabolical methods, causing a scare about “commie” mind control programs and “menticide,” which they used to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars for U.S. mind control programs during the 1950s-1970s.<br />
<br />
The programs, codenamed Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKULTRA, among others, used experiments on unwitting civilians, as well as soldiers undergoing supposed anti-torture training at the military’s SERE schools. I have shown via public records that CIA scientists continued to use experiments on “stress” at SERE schools after 9/11, and believe such research included experiments on CIA and/or DoD held detainees. That such research did take place can be inferred from the release in November 2011 of a new set of guidelines concerning DoD research. This newest version of a standard instruction (DoD Directive 3216.02) contained for the first time a specific prohibition against research done on detainees. (See section 7c.)<br />
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I believe a strong case can be made that while coercive methods, primarily isolation, was used on the U.S. prisoners of war who later confessed, that their confessions were primarily true. The idea that only false confessions result from torture is in fact false itself. While false confessions can result from torture (as well as less onerous methods, such as the Reid Technique, used by police departments throughout the United States today), actual confessions can also sometimes occur. I have first-hand experience working with torture survivors to know that is true.<br />
<br />
Even so, it is a fact that all the POWs who confessed use of germ warfare later recanted that upon return to the United States. But the terms of their recantations are suspect. The recantations were made under threat of courts-martial, and after interrogations by U.S. counterintelligence agents and psychiatrists. The archival evidence of the flyers debriefings have been destroyed or lost due to fire (according to the government). Meanwhile at least one scientist working at Ft. Detrick at the time admitted to German documentary investigators before he died that the U.S. had indeed been involved in germ warfare in Korea. (See the documentary video, “<i>Code Name: Artichoke</i>.”[10])<br />
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<b>An “actual investigation… could do us psychological as well as military damage”</b><br />
<br />
The charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War are even more incendiary than the now-proven claims the U.S. amnestied Japanese military doctors and others working on biological weapons who experimented on human subjects, and ultimately killed thousands in operational uses of those weapons against China during the Sino-Japanese portion of World War Two. The amnesty was the price paid for U.S. military and intelligence researchers to get access to the trove of research, much of it via fatal human experiments, the Japanese had developed over years of studying and developing weapons for biological warfare.<br />
<br />
During the Korean War, the U.S. strenuously denied charges of use of germ weapons and demanded an international investigation through the United Nations. The Chinese and North Koreans derided such offers, as it was United Nations-sanctioned forces that were opposing them in war and bombing their cities. But behind the scenes, the U.S. government initiated a campaign to impugn the ISC report, something they found difficult, as it turned out, according to a CIA-released document I revealed in December 2013. The document also showed the U.S. considered the call for a UN investigation to be mere propaganda.<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="#_edn11" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5048559001654820158#_edn11">[11]</a><br />
<br />
At a high-level meeting of intelligence and government officials on July 6, 1953, U.S. authorities admitted behind closed doors that the U.S. was not serious about conducting any investigation into such charges, despite what the government said publicly.<br />
<br />
The reason the U.S. didn’t want any investigation was because an “actual investigation” would reveal military operations, “which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage.” A “memorandum from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) detailing this meeting specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed “8th Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare).”[12]<br />
<br />
Charges of chemical warfare by the Americans during the Korean War were part of a report by a Communist-influenced attorneys’ organization visiting Korea, and their findings were dismissed as propaganda by U.S. authorities and commentators. But the PSB memo suggests perhaps they were right.<br />
<br />
Not long after I published the PSB document and accompanying article, scholar Stephen Endicott wrote to remind me that he and his associate Edward Hagerman, co-authors of the 1998 book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (see bibliography), had found material themselves that indicated U.S. calls for “international inspection to counter the Chinese and North Korean charges… was less than candid.”<br />
<br />
Endicott and Hagerman found that U.S. Far East Commander, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, had “secretly given permission to deny potential Red Cross inspectors ‘access to any specific sources of information.’” In addition, they documented a State Department memo dated June 27, 1952 wherein the Department of Defense notified that it was “impossible” for the UN ambassador at the time to state that the U.S. did not intend to use “bacteriological warfare — even in Korea.” (p.192, Endicott and Hagerman)<br />
<br />
<b>The Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial</b><br />
<br />
The ISC report also references the December 1949 war crimes trial held by the USSR in Khabarovsk, not far from the Chinese border. The trial of Japanese war criminals associated with Units 731, 100 and other biological warfare divisions followed upon a near black-out of such issues at the larger Toyko war crimes trials held by the Allies a few years before.<br />
<br />
At the time of the Khabarovsk trial, U.S. media and government officials either ignored the proceedings, or denounced them as yet another Soviet “show trial.” The Soviets for their part published the proceedings and distributed them widely, including in English. Copies of this report are easier to find for purchase used, though expensive, on the Internet. Additionally, in the last few years Google made a copy of the former Soviet volume available online (see Bibliography). But no scholarly edition has ever been published.<br />
<br />
Even so, U.S. historians have been forced over the years to accept the findings of the Khabarovsk court, though the general population and media accounts remain mostly ignorant such a trial ever took place. The fact the Soviets also documented the use of Japanese biological experiments on U.S. POWs was highly controversial, denied by the U.S. for decades, was a quite contentious issue in the 1980s-1990s. While a National Archives-linked historian has quietly determined such experiments did in fact take place, the issue has quietly fallen off the country’s radar. (See L. G. Goetz in bibliography.)<br />
<br />
The relevancy of these issues is of course the ongoing propaganda war between the United States and North Korea, as well as Pentagon reallocation of resources to the Asian theater for a possible future war against China. But it is the clear threat of a nuclear exchange between North Korea and the United States that calls for clarity around the issues that have led to the mistrust between the two countries. Such clarity demands the release of all information that would help the U.S. populace understand the North Korean point of view. Such understanding, and acting upon such knowledge, may be all that separates us from a catastrophic war that could potentially kill millions of people.<br />
<br />
The history behind the Korean War, and U.S. military and covert actions concerning China, Japan, and Korea, are a matter of near-total ignorance in the U.S. population. The charges of “brainwashing” of U.S. POWs, in an ongoing effort to hide evidence of U.S. biological warfare experiments and trials, also has become entwined in the propaganda used to explain the U.S. post-9/11 torture and interrogation program, and alibi past crimes by the CIA and Department of Defense for years of illegal mind control programs practiced as part of MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, ARTICHOKE, and other programs.<br />
<br />
I hope that readers will feel free to disseminate this article without any copyright reservations, as well as the ISC report itself, an orphaned document from the Cold War.<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Daniel Barenblatt, <i>A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation</i>, HarperPerennial, 2005<br />
<br />
Tom Buchanan, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the ‘Germ Warfare’ Allegations in the Korean War,” The Historical Association, Blackwell Publishers, 2001<br />
<br />
Dave Chaddock, <i>This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since</i>, Bennett and Hastings Publishers, 2013<br />
<br />
Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, <i>The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea</i>, Indiana University Press, 1998<br />
<br />
Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, “Twelve Newly Released Soviet-era `Documents’ and allegations of U. S. germ warfare during the Korean War,” online publication, 1998, URL: <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/12SovietDocuments.htm">http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/12SovietDocuments.htm</a><br />
<br />
Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, “False Alarm? ‘The Bacteriological War of 1952’: Comment on Director Wu Zhili’s Essay,” online publication, June 1, 2016, URL: <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf">http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf</a> [accessed May 14, 2017]<br />
<br />
Sheldon H. Harris, <i>Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare</i>, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up, rev. ed., Routledge Press, 2002<br />
<br />
Linda Goetz Holmes, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp, Naval Institute Press, June 2010.<br />
<br />
Jeffrey Kaye, “CIA Document Suggests U.S. Lied About Biological, Chemical Weapon Use in the Korean War,” Shadowproof, Dec. 10, 2013, URL: <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/#">https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/#</a> (accessed May 14, 2017)<br />
<br />
Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing Bacteriological Weapons [Testimony and Exhibits from the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial], Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950, published as free e-book at Google Books, URL: <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ARojAAAAMAAJ">https://books.google.com/books?id=ARojAAAAMAAJ</a> [accessed May 14, 2017]<br />
<br />
Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” Cold War International History Project, Bulletin 11, 1998<br />
<br />
Milton Leitenberg, “China’s False Allegations of the Use of Biological Weapons by the United States during the Korean War,” CWIHP Working Paper #78<br />
March 2016, URL:<br />
<a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/chinas-false-allegations-the-use-biological-weapons-the-united-states-during-the-korean">https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/chinas-false-allegations-the-use-biological-weapons-the-united-states-during-the-korean</a> [accessed May 14, 2017]<br />
<br />
Jeffrey A. Lockwood, <i>Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War</i>, Oxford Univ. Press, 2010<br />
<br />
Bernd Martin, “Japanese-German collaboration in the development of bacteriological and chemical weapons and the war in China,” in <i>Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion</i> (Christian W. Spang, Rolf-Harald Wippich, eds.), Routledge, 2006<br />
<br />
John Powell, “A Hidden Chapter in History,” <i>Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists</i>, October 1981<br />
<br />
Peter Williams and David Wallace, <i>Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets</i>, Hodder & Stoughton, 1989 [Note: The U.S. version of this book, published by Free Press, does not include Chapter 17 on the Korean War, which is only available in the British Hodder & Stoughton version.]<br />
<br />
<b>Footnotes:</b><br />
<br />
[1] Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography, 2013, Belknap Press, pg. 100.<br />
<br />
[2] “Boris Pash and Science and Technology Intelligence,” Masters of the Intelligence Art series, U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Ft. Huachuca, undated. URL: <a href="http://huachuca-www.army.mil/files/History_MPASH.PDF">http://huachuca-www.army.mil/files/History_MPASH.PDF</a> (retrieved 1/20/2018)<br />
In regards to Pash’s association with the CIA, we don’t know when his involvement with the Agency began, but it appears to have been quite early. Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt told Congressional investigators in 1976 Pash was involved in assassination activities for the CIA during the 1960s. See “Executive Session, Saturday, January 10, 1976, United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, D.C.” URL: <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1976-Executive-Session-Hunt-testimony-on-Pash.pdf">http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1976-Executive-Session-Hunt-testimony-on-Pash.pdf</a> (retrieved 1/20/2018)<br />
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[3] See URL:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham" target="_blank"> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham</a> (retrieved 1/20/18). The article drew the information from Winchester, Simon (2008), <i>The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom</i>. New York: HarperCollins.<br />
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[4] Leitenberg, Milton. (1998). Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations. <i>Critical reviews in microbiology</i>. 24. 169–94. 10.1080/10408419891294271.<br />
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[5] “Wu Zhili, ‘The Bacteriological War of 1952 is a False Alarm’,” September, 1997, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Yanhuang chunqiu no. 11 (2013): 36–39. Translated by Drew Casey. <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/123080">https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/123080</a><br />
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[6] “False Alarm? The Bacteriological War of 1952 — Comment on Director WuZhili’s Essay” by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Department of History, York University (ret.), June 2016, <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf">http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf</a><br />
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[7]“Baptism By Fire: CIA Analysis of the Korean War Overview,” URL: <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/baptism-fire-cia-analysis-korean-war-overview">https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/baptism-fire-cia-analysis-korean-war-overview</a><br />
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[8] For a full discussion, see “Updated: The Suppressed Report on 1952 U.S. Korean War Anthrax Attack,” <a href="https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/revealed-suppressed-report-on-1952-us.html">https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/revealed-suppressed-report-on-1952-us.html</a><br />
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[9] Jeffrey S. Kaye, “Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals,” Medium.com, May 14, 2017, URL: <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982">https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982</a><br />
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[10] URL: <a href="http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/">http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/</a><br />
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[11] Jeffrey Kaye, “CIA Document Suggests U.S. Lied About Biological, Chemical Weapon Use in the Korean War,” Shadowproof, Dec. 10, 2013, URL: <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/">https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/</a> (accessed February 21, 2018)<br />
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[12] For the actual memorandum document, see URL: <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003300190004-6.pdf">https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003300190004-6.pdf</a>Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-12179559550970542072018-02-07T11:53:00.002-08:002018-02-07T11:54:30.977-08:00Trump Administration Setting Up Padded Cell for Guantanamo Detainees<a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/trump-administration-solicits-materials-for-padded-cell-at-guantanamo-3675f4369c80" target="_blank">Originally posted at Medium.com</a><br />
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The nightmare that is Guantanamo never seems to end. Even before President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/politics/trump-guantanamo-bay-reverse-obama/index.html" target="_blank">reversed</a> an <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=85670" target="_blank">Obama Administration order</a> to close the detention center at Guantanamo — an action never completed — the Pentagon issued a formal solicitation for material to construct a padded cell at the Cuba-based prison.<br />
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Padded cells in psychiatric hospitals are used to supposedly safely contain violent patients. Some legal authorities have <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/detention-in-padded-cell-violates-human-rights-1.590961" target="_blank">condemned</a> the use of padded cells, which “involves a form of sensory deprivation, in that the prisoner is denied the opportunity of any meaningful interaction with his human faculties of sight, sound and speech — an interaction that is vital if the integrity of the human personality is to be maintained.”<br />
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On January 19, the Department of the Army listed a solicitation for materials (number W91WRZ-18-Q-0016) <a href="https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=62c3f3fa21bafbda41e9804499e9bb1e&tab=core&_cview=0" target="_blank">at the website</a> of the General Services Administration, explaining the padding was meant for a “US Government mental health or psychiatric room in a detention medical facility” at “US Navy Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”<br />
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The Army described the planned room as being 7 feet by 12 feet, 4 inches, or 84 square feet in total. The cell is to be 8 feet, 3 inches high. The padding is to cover “the interior of walls, floor, ceiling, and steel hinged door and door frame,” and constructed “to prevent destruction by teeth, hand tearing, [or] small metal objects.”<br />
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According to the Army’s announcement, the installation date for the padded cell will be sometime between February 28 and March 31, 2018. The material will ship to Guantanamo from the Blount Island Terminal in Jacksonville, Florida. The bid, which must have been made by January 29, was to also include labor for installation of the material in the cell itself.<br />
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<b>Guantanamo Causes Mental Illness</b><br />
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There have been numerous reports of mental illness at Guantanamo, including allegations of suicide. The autopsy for one detainee, Mohammed Al Hanashi, who in June 2009 <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/new-foia-documents-show-guantanamo-suicides-unlikely-72ff098fe745" target="_blank">supposedly strangled himself to death</a> with a piece of his underwear, described multiple attempts to harm himself with head banging. Medical authorities <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">noted</a> that Al Hanashi’s mental illness was itself caused by the “conditions of confinement” at Guantanamo.<br />
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Other detainees have been described as severely mentally ill at U.S. naval base-sited prison. In 2016, it was revealed that military authorities had hidden the fact that a key early torture victim, Mohammed Al Qahtani, had a lifetime history of mental illness.<br />
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Many detainees have been apparently driven insane by the abusive conditions at Guantanamo. A <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/06/09/locked-alone/detention-conditions-and-mental-health-guantanamo" target="_blank">June 2008 report</a> by Human Rights Watch warned that the abusive conditions of confinement at Guantanamo, in particular the widespread use of solitary confinement, was precipitating significant mental illness in detainees, just as it does <a href="http://jaapl.org/content/38/1/104" target="_blank">in America’s Supermax prisons</a>.<br />
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In November 2016, an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/world/guantanamo-bay-doctors-abuse.html" target="_blank">exposé</a> in The New York Times documented how high levels of secrecy, prisoner mistrust, and the “shadow of interrogation” negatively affected the treatment of the mentally ill at Guantanamo. A month earlier, another Times article <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/world/cia-torture-guantanamo-bay.html" target="_blank">described</a> how “[b]eatings, sleep deprivation, menacing and other brutal tactics have led to persistent mental health problems among detainees held in secret C.I.A. prisons and at Guantánamo.”<br />
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In my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a>, in-depth descriptions, based on Freedom of Information Act documents, show what it was like to be in the psychiatric unit at Guantanamo. Prisoners were involuntarily drugged, their complaints of being tortured ignored by the medical professionals present. At least one prisoner died while being held in the supposedly safe confines of the Guantanamo Behavioral Health Unit (BHU). Another was found dead within 24 hours of release from the BHU.<br />
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The solicitation for materials to build a new padded cell at Guantanamo is yet another indicator that the U.S. government has no intention of shutting down that facility. Indeed, it expects that it will drive even more prisoners insane. The construction of a padded cell could be interpreted as a humane gesture to protect seriously mentally ill prisoners intent on self-harm. Or it could be understood as yet another element of a wide-spread and deeply thought-out torture apparatus. The history of Guantanamo argues strongly for the latter.<br />
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Meanwhile, it is sobering to consider that President Trump’s decision to keep Guantanamo open received very little opposition from Democratic Party spokespeople. Presumptive frontrunner for the 2018 Democratic Party nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, never mentioned Trump’s stance on Guantanamo in his reply to Trump’s recent State of the Union address, despite the fact Trump <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2018-state-of-the-union-address/read-trump-s-state-union-address-n843016" target="_blank">announced</a> his Guantanamo decision in the speech. (Sanders is formerly on record as calling for the closure of Guantanamo, but his record is <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-voting-history/" target="_blank">somewhat checkered</a>.)<br />
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<b>Experimental “Battle Lab”</b><br />
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It is distressing to see how disturbingly easy it has been to bury the real purpose of Guantanamo, which was to create an <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2015/03/15/us-government-classifies-term-battle-lab-in-war-on-terror-in-pentagon-report/" target="_blank">experimental “battle lab”</a> on interrogation and detention techniques, whose aim was to <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/JTF_GTMO_%27SERE%27_Interrogation_Standard_Operating_Procedure" target="_blank">“break” the detainees</a> held in U.S. custody, and to “exploit” them for purposes of information, propaganda, and intelligence purposes, e.g. to force them to work for U.S. government intelligence agencies.<br />
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While the situation surrounding government torture incrementally improved under President Obama. But the UN Committee Against Torture announced in 2014 that the U.S. was still using torture techniques in its Army Field Manual on interrogations. Given this context, the moves by the Trump Administration to roll back even the gains made during the previous administration are disturbing.<br />
It is hard to imagine that more prisoners will not ultimately be sent to Guantanamo, or that we might even see the reinstitution of the CIA’s detention program, most likely under the hysteria engendered by some national security “emergency.”<br />
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Guantanamo represents the final failure of the American dream. It is the antithesis of human liberty. Enhancing Guantanamo’s facilities is not in anyone’s interest, unless it be those who profit by its construction and maintenance.<br />
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Perhaps some hope lies in the efforts of advocates like the Center for Constitutional Rights, which issued a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2018/01/31/guantanamo-attorneys-blast-trump-keep-gitmo-open-order" target="_blank">statement</a> about Trump’s decision to keep Guantanamo open:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Trump’s executive order is not the last word on the fate of Guantánamo, any more than his attempted Muslim bans and arbitrary transgender military ban — struck down by the courts — were the last word on those matters. CCR has filed a new legal challenge to the illegality and racism driving Trump’s Guantánamo policy and demanding detainees’ release. It is the courts, not the authoritarian-in-chief, that will ultimately determine the fate of the men detained at Guantánamo.</blockquote>
(H/T to Stephen Soldz for noticing the Army’s solicitation to begin with — JK)Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-70326283726240743932018-01-11T07:32:00.000-08:002018-01-15T17:42:30.385-08:00Shut Down Guantanamo! Free Book on Detainee Deaths to Mark 16th Anniversary of US Torture Site<a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/free-book-on-detainee-deaths-to-mark-16th-anniversary-of-guantanamo-gulag-1d56c299523b">Originally posted at Medium.com<br />
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[<b>Please note:</b> the ebook giveaway mentioned in this article has expired.]<br />
This Thursday, January 11, marks the 16th anniversary of the opening of Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, Cuba. The base has held detainees in times past, particularly thousands of Haitians who fled political persecution in the 1990s, many of whom the U.S. ultimately sent back to uncertain fates in their homeland.<br />
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But the detention of “war on terror” prisoners that began in January 2002 was something different, as the U.S. was determined to imprison many of them for an indeterminate time. Even worse, the U.S. military <a href="https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/us-government-classifies-term-battle.html">experimented with implementation of a torture regime</a>, in coordination (and sometimes rivalry) with the CIA’s own “enhanced interrogation” torture experiment.<br />
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While the torture of detainees became widely known with the publication of pictures from Abu Ghraib, and later from investigations by different Senate committees, less publicized were the deaths that occurred inside the razor-topped fences surrounding Guantanamo’s Camp Delta. All together, the U.S. government admits to nine detainee deaths at Guantanamo since January 11, 2002, seven by supposed suicide.<br />
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Even so, at least one government document exists that indicates there were more deaths at Guantanamo than have been otherwise reported. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120306053751/http://www.health.mil/dhb/afeb/meeting/Transcripts/Day1Transcripts.pdf">Minutes from a February 2002 meeting</a> of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board explain that some prisoners who were flown to Guantanamo directly from Afghanistan battlefields in very early 2002 <a href="https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/unreported-detainee-deaths-at_19.html#.WlT2JVQ-egQ">“died of the wounds they arrived with.”</a><br />
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But these other deaths, and the facts surrounding the deaths of seven detainees via purported suicide, remain largely unreported. The exceptions to this blackout on coverage include the work of <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/23/guantanamo-bay-suicides-299432.html">former Guantanamo guard, Joseph Hickman</a>, and the continuing attention to all things Guantanamo by <a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2017/11/05/guantanamo-suicides-unlikely-says-investigator-jeffrey-kaye-in-new-edition-of-his-book-cover-up-at-guantanamo/">British journalist Andy Worthington</a>.<br />
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Hickman famously reported on the strange doings he saw going on one June night in 2006, when he saw detainees being transported to what appeared to be a CIA black site at Guantanamo. They were later found dead in their cells. No one knew at the time — not even Hickman — that the head counts for the cellblocks where the three detainees had been held were falsified the night of their death.<br />
This last revelation was among many I found in my FOIA-based research concerning the deaths of two detainees at Guantanamo. This research was necessitated because most of the mainstream media had failed in their task to investigate the real goings on at Guantanamo, even after it was clear that the U.S. was engaging in gruesome behaviors, including torture, at their military and CIA detainee facilities.<br />
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My research culminated in the 2016 publication of my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI"><i>Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri</i></a>. An updated, expanded second edition was released last year, and I have also published some of the book’s findings at Medium.com (see <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/new-foia-documents-show-guantanamo-suicides-unlikely-72ff098fe745">here</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/computer-irregularities-at-guantanamo-taint-investigation-into-detainee-deaths-8a96e5480737">here</a>). All FOIA documents related to the book were also <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/">placed on line for public use</a>.<br />
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While the book concentrated on records from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the very suspicious deaths of Al Amri and Al Hanashi, it also included a chapter on the death of Adnan Al Latif, new information into the deaths of three detainees in 2006, and the aforementioned early unreported deaths at Guantanamo.<br />
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To commemorate this awful sixteenth anniversary of the detention of “war on terror” prisoners at Guantanamo, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI"><b>I am offering my ebook for free for one day: January 11, 2018</b></a>. (After that, the book will return to its very reasonable regular price. The book is also <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed/dp/1520587090/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">available in paperback</a> as well.)<br />
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I hope this release will aid in educating the public about the full, true nature of the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo, and arouse debate and protest over the failure of the U.S. to close this facility, and end its practice of abusive interrogations and torture, whether conducted by its own personnel, or by foreign state proxies.<br />
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For a capsule overview about U.S. policy on these matters, see the ACLU’s webpage, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/detention/guantanamo-numbers">“Guantanamo by the Numbers.”</a><br />
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President Trump is threatening to open up Guantanamo to further prisoners and bring back the harsher forms of torture the U.S. was embarrassed into giving up some ten years ago. (The U.S. still uses interrogation techniques that amount to torture, however.) The first steps in opposing Trump and his military allies on this involve arming oneself with facts.<br />
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On January 11, download my ebook<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a></i>. It won’t cost you anything, and you will be downloading truth for use in the battle against barbarism, because barbarism is what Guantanamo represents.Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-61707245006083447282017-12-21T08:20:00.000-08:002018-02-21T13:03:58.757-08:00Updated: The Suppressed Report on 1952 U.S. Korean War Anthrax Attack<div class="DC-embed DC-embed-document DV-container" id="DV-viewer-3678863-ISC-Anthrax-Attack-Appendices">
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3678863/ISC-Anthrax-Attack-Appendices.txt">ISC Anthrax Attack Appendices (Text)</a><br />
</noscript>[<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3678863/ISC-Anthrax-Attack-Appendices.pdf">Link to download PDF of the document above</a>]<br />
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With the U.S. threatening a pre-emptive attack on North Korea for the latter's pressing development of a nuclear warfare capability, it is more imperative than ever that the history of the U.S.-North Korea conflict be made available to the world, the better to assess the claims made by both sides.<br />
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While many see North Korea as a dictatorship run by a madman or evil, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-whats-really-behind-north-koreas-nuclear-provocations/">others see a rational government</a> - dictatorial, yes - that seeks to defend itself against a power that once obliterated its country in war, and threatened it with nuclear weapons. Indeed, even today, the U.S. says it will not forego using nuclear weapons against North Korea and even executes military war games with South Korea that involve practice runs with nuclear bombers almost up to the border of North Korea.<br />
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Back in the early 1950s, during the Korean war, until the Soviets began to fly MiGs over the Korean peninsula in defense of the North Koreans, the U.S. had near unconstrained freedom of airspace over North Korea and China, and in particular, dropped <a href="http://www.moonofalabama.org/images5/MacArthur.jpg" target="_blank">hundreds of thousands of tons of Napalm</a> on North Korea, wiping out nearly every city, and contributing to <a href="http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html" target="_blank">over a million civilian deaths</a>, maybe 15% of the entire population. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur found the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.<br />
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Most controversially, both North Korea and China maintain that the U.S. used biological or germ warfare weapons against both North Korea and China during the Korean War. The U.S. has strenuously denied this. Captured U.S. flyers who told their North Korean and Chinese captors of the use of such weapons were told under the threat of courts martial to renounce such confessions after they were returned to U.S. custody. They all did so.<br />
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To convince the world of the truth of their claims, the North Koreans and Chinese, sponsored a purported independent commission, using the auspices of the World Peace Council, gathering together a number of leftist scientists from around the world. Most surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Sir Joseph Needham. The ISC travelled to China and North Korea in the summer of 1952 and by the end of the year produced a report that corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations.<br />
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This posting is not meant to examine the full range of opinions or evidence about whether or not the U.S. used biological weapons in the Korean War. It is instead an attempt to publish essential documentation of such claims, documentation that has been withheld from the American people, and the West in general, for decades. I am publishing here Appendices AA and BB from the <i>Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China</i>.<br />
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I introduced that report to the world and posted the report itself <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2015/01/26/lost-document-from-the-cold-war-international-scientific-commission-report-on-bacterial-warfare-during-korean-war/">online back in January 2015</a>. But the report itself is only some 60-odd pages long, and I was unable at that time to post or publish any of the voluminous appendices that documented the claims of the report. (I am reposting the original executive summary report at the close of this post, for reference sake.) The ISC appendices are crucial in assessing the claims made in the report, and the later denials from U.S. and other allied governments, such as Great Britain.<br />
<br />
Appendices AA and BB concern claims of air attacks against various villages in Northeastern China in the Spring of 1952. Using the same kinds of insect (fleas, beetles, etc.) and related "vectors" (such as dropping feathers or rodents) that were studied intensely by Imperial Japanese military scientists and doctors as part of the infamous Unit 731 program. In a matter of proven historical record, but still largely unknown in the United States, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, with knowledge of scientists working out of the Army's Ft. Detrick chemical and biological warfare labs, gave amnesty to the Unit 731 war criminals, who conducted their biological warfare experiments on live prisoners, who were incinerated after the Japanese scientists were done with them.<br />
<br />
In the executive report, the ISC examined claims of a biological warfare attack in the town of "K'uan-Tien, which lies in the southeastern part of Liaotung province near the Yalu River," as well as a number of other "localities in the provinces of Liaotung and Liaohsi." They looked in depth at five "fatal human cases of respiratory anthrax and haemorrhagic anthrax," including "a railwayman, a tricycle-rickshaw driver, a housewife, a school-teacher, and a farmer." They considered the extreme, indeed, unprecedented appearance of this disease in that part of the world, and the fact that respiratory or inhalational anthrax had earlier been the subject of research by Ft. Detrick scientists. The analysis included laboratory examination from the bodies and from insects discovered in the area and believed to be spreading the disease, after being dropped by U.S. aircraft. <br />
<br />
The ISC concluded (pg. 34 of the summary report, which can be accessed at end of this post):<br />
<blockquote>
On the basis of the evidence presented, and on their own searching and prolonged interrogation of a considerable number of witnesses, both medical and lay, the Commission was compelled to conclude that the delivery of various biological objects contaminated with anthrax bacilli to many places in the two Chinese provinces had taken place, and that this had given rise to a number of cases of a mortal infection hitherto unknown in the region, namely pulmonary anthrax and ensuing haemorrhagic meningitis. Eye-witness statements impossible to doubt indicated American airplanes as the vehicles of delivery of the infected objects.</blockquote>
The U.S. denied all biological warfare charges. They demanded the International Red Cross be allowed to independently examine the evidence and document the charges. But unknown to all, in secret meetings of top U.S. Pentagon, the CIA, and State Department officials, gathered together as the U.S Psychological Strategy Board, agreed that there never would be any independent investigation, as the Eighth Army was conducting operations during the Korean War which if they became known ("e.g. chemical warfare") "could do us psychological as well as military damage.” (See <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/">full article here</a>.) The scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman found similar evidence of an unwillingness to really examine the North Korean/Chinese/Soviet charges in their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-United-States-Biological-Warfare/dp/0253334721">1998 book on the BW controversy</a>. <br />
<br />
The controversy has simmered every since. <br />
<br />
But convergent evidence of the charges was made in Chapter 13 of the 2006 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Cultures-Biological-Weapons-since/dp/0674016998/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=">Deadly Cultures</a>. Entitled "Allegations of Biological Weapons Use," the chapter was written by Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis. While these authors were highly dubious of the claims of U.S. biowarfare, they couldn't discount the anthrax charges. Primarily, they found that the description of inhalational anthrax made at this time - for instance, the wide range of incubational periods reported for the Chinese cases - came before a detailed scientific examination of such cases of anthrax had already been studied. But the ISC description was peculiarly apt and prescient. <b>Furmanski and Wheelis concluded that the deaths documented by the ISC as due to inhalational anthrax had to be real and not faked.</b><br />
<br />
"These results must have been from real human inhalation anthrax cases, since the information did not exist in 1952 to have allowed fabrication using textbook or medical literature sources," Furmanski and Wheelis wrote. (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Cultures-Biological-Weapons-since/dp/0674016998/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=">See pg. 260 of Deadly Cultures.</a>)<br />
<br />
But I should note, Furmanski and Wheelis in the end did not conclude this was full evidence of biological weapon attack. Indeed, they concluded it must have been of natural origin, though how such a coincidence of widely dispersed, unprecedented appearance of the disease occurred coinicentally with charges of biowar attack.<br />
<br />
What they solely relied on for their conclusion was an April 2004 "personal communication" from a U.S. scientist that isolates from the B. anthracis samples from China, which by inference included those from the 1952 putative attack were "subjected to genomic analysis, and all were clearly indigenous to China." Furmanski and Wheelis believe that despite the "highly suspicious" nature of the inhalation anthrax cases discussed in the 1952 ISC Needham report, the genomic analysis proved that the anthrax cases reported to the ISC were of natural origin, and not from a U.S. biological warfare attack. <br />
<br />
I have been in touch with all the people involved in this supposed genomic analysis, and while I find it odd that nothing was every published on this genomic or DNA analysis, I will leave a full analysis of the refutation of the ISC report on this score for a future and more scholarly essay. In the meantime, I have decided to publish the ISC documentation as in the West all we ever seem to get are what Cold War scholars publish. Even when critics of the U.S. historical account publish, the actual documentation is thin. This leaves us reliant on the authority of the scholars, which is an extraordinary situation.<br />
<br />
[<b>Update, December 21, 2017</b> - In spring 2017 I contacted U.S. anthrax expert Martin Hugh-Jones, whom Furmanski and Wheelis had referred to in their book as the source of a "genomic analysis" that showed the inhalation anthrax cases in China could not have come from U.S. stocks of anthrax. Professor Hugh-Jones referenced a Chinese scientist, Wang Bingxiang, who worked on bacterial vaccines at the Langhou Institute of Biological Products, who Hugh-Jones said had supplied samples of the 1952 anthrax cases to the Special Pathogens Lab (SPL) at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University.<br />
<br />
I subsequently contacted both a U.S. scientist, Kimothy Smith, who Professor Hugh-Jones said worked on the identification of the anthrax strains brought from China to the SPL, and Mr. Wang in China. Neither of them backed up Hugh-Jones' story that the 1952 anthrax strain had been identified, much less worked on. Wang denied knowing anything even about it. Prof. Hugh-Jones subsequently told me in an email, "And as it seems that no one, including the Chinese, have any cultures from the 1952 'incident' (true or false) matters must remain at that. It was a time rife with governmental disinformation, especially by the Chinese & Soviets, so one must be cautious with any personal conclusions."<br />
<br />
Professor Hugh-Jones did not reference any possible governmental disinformation from the U.S. side. But the failure to dismiss the inhalation anthrax accounts from the ISC, which Furmanski and Wheelis found so compelling that only the presence of supposed "genomic analysis" - now discredited - could dispel, means that hard evidence indeed exists to prove the presence of U.S. biological warfare attack upon China, and most likely North Korea, during the Korean War.<br />
<br />
For his part, Professor Furmanski in correspondence to me maintains for other reasons that the North Korean and Chinese claims of germ warfare attacks were a hoax. He does this for a number of reasons, and seems among them to embrace the fairly recent publication of a Chinese official at the time, Wu Zhili, who had a posthumous publication stating the germ warfare attacks were a "false alarm," one which was then amped up for propaganda reasons into a full-scale campaign around the ostensibly false charges.<br />
<br />
Few have embraced my main concerns, which center around the suppression of information in general around this historical incident. I cannot speak to North Korean or Chinese suppression, but I can document and obviously comment about the suppression by the U.S. and its allies, as information slowly is obtained about them. I can also encourage others to pursue original documents and do their own analysis, as I have done.<br />
<br />
For his part, despite much professional obloquy, Dr. Needham maintained until the day he died that the U.S. had indeed used biological weapons against the North Koreans and the Chinese. His investigation went far beyond that detailed in this essay, and concerned more than the dissemination of anthrax.<br />
<br />
Was there any fraud involved in Chinese, North Korean, or Soviet evidence of germ warfare attacks by the U.S.? I think it's possible there was, just as a suspicious patient might exaggerate symptoms to get the attention of a doctor they fear isn't taking them seriously. The importance of the suppressed ISC report is the attention given to many multiple sources of evidence. Sir Joseph Needham wasn't one of the leading scientists of his day for nothing. He understood the scientific approach to evidence.]<br />
<br />
I hope that the publication of this material will lead to a greater effort by U.S. and European media and other commentators to assess the real history of U.S. and North Korean and Chinese relations, the better to counter the claims of the hawkish Trump administration and Pentagon spokespeople, who are threatening to plunge this country, and possibly the world, into a terrible new war, painting the North Koreans as unreasonable and dangerous people. But any fair historical account will see that while not by any means perfect, the North Korean regime has plenty to complain about and fear from U.S. intervention.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3678910/ISC-Executive-Report.pdf">ISC Executive Report (PDF)</a><br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3678910/ISC-Executive-Report.txt">ISC Executive Report (Text)</a><br />
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<br />
Original version of this article, without update, was published on April 26, 2017<br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-78017980026168229742017-10-31T10:55:00.000-07:002017-10-31T10:55:24.516-07:00Book Review - Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to TortureThis review is adapted from my <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1BVCWL1WO1AOS/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B01EG7A6VK">posting</a> at Amazon.com<br />
<br />
Mark Fallon's new book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unjustifiable-Means-Pentagon-Government-Conspired-ebook/dp/B01EG7A6VK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509467653&sr=8-1&keywords=mark+fallon">Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture</a></i>, is the story of one man's journey towards bitter illumination. It is also the story of a nation's journey into a moral abyss.<br />
<br />
Fallon was a top counterintelligence official and investigator, someone who believed in patriotic idealism, who discovered a core of thuggery inside the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus. From 2002 to 2004, he was a top official for the government's Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF). Rather than turn aside (something repugnant to him), he tried to intervene against the barbarism of torture. What he encountered was the corruption of institutions to which he otherwise had been loyal, which he had served for decades. The book is the story of what he experienced and what he felt driven to do.<br />
<br />
But this book also has a metastory, manifested in the form of words, sentences, paragraphs and ultimately pages of redactions. The repeated blackened lines of typeface represent the arm of that same torturing government Fallon opposed reaching into the reader's own personal universe, that sacred connection between reader and author. The shadow of the evil that conjured up torture, and then acted to protect it, seeps into the realm of the reader him or herself.<br />
<br />
As anyone who has studied the torture issue for some time can readily see, many of the redactions are embarrassingly stupid, including censorship of names that were recorded in otherwise declassified government documents, or opernly reported by the press. But other redactions are serious and frightening, such as the attempt to still hide the full story about the torture of Mohammed Al Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker.<br />
<br />
Mark Fallon is a congenial author, and he wishes to convey some of the shock and outrage he felt as the full implementation of the CIA's torture program unfolded, born out of the government's embrace of modern psychological and psychiatric forms of control over human behavior, and spread into the military.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't look to this book for a full history of how that all took place, nor does the author pretend to present such a history. His is the account of a whistleblower. His former position inside Guantanamo and corridors of the Defense Department apparatus provides a unique and invaluable perspective of just how the torture policy spread and how it was covered-up.<br />
<br />
In the end, Fallon witnesses the bureaucratic institutions to which he pledged fealty fatally infected by the virus of torture. His is a harrowing journey, and one that, it is clear from the narrative, haunts him still.<br />
<br />
Along with books recently written by former detainees themselves, this book by someone on the other side of the interrogation booth is essential reading. I think the torture scandal is even far deeper and darker than even Mark Fallon presents it -- and his is a pretty dark portrayal -- but U.S. readers in particular must understand the courage it took for some of the government's most loyal and idealistic officials and servants to confront those in power with the truth of their crimes.<br />
<br />
I believe that the torture policy began far earlier than after 9/11, and was inimitably linked to long-time policies of war and conquest. It's current manifestation was itself a logical extension of the "war on terror." From that standpoint, one can see Fallon's battle against torture, and others like him (some of whom he discusses in the book), is important and certainly courageous, as the people they come to oppose are seriously dangerous, with a great deal of power behind them.<br />
<br />
Rather than the sense of failure that haunts Mark Fallon -- many times he bemoans the fact he could not actually stop the full torture program -- his moral awakening at a dire time in history is a triumph of the human spirit.<br />
<br />
The confrontation with the urge to torture goes back centuries now, to Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, and on to Nuremberg, to those who organized ad hoc tribunals against Vietnam War crimes in the 1960s, to citizens in North Carolina today trying to bring their own state government to account for its collaboration with CIA torture, and many, many more. The latter include those I've known in the psychology profession who have fought to end collaboration with torture and war crimes in their own profession.<br />
<br />
The fight against torture is something that has unfolded over generations, and sadly, I've come to realize, will take generations more to win. But what Mark Fallon and others like him achieved was significant. Some of the torture was cut back. The policy dragged out of the shadows and exposed in public. It is not so easy for the torturers to operate as before.<br />
<br />
In the end, Mark Fallon's book is a document about a significant time in our history. Every partisan of human rights and liberty will want it on their bookshelf.Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-72462392414659823462017-09-17T15:07:00.001-07:002017-10-16T20:40:13.450-07:00Detainee Reported Gitmo Guards Having Oral Sex, 2 Weeks Later He Was DeadHaving received hundreds of new pages of information regarding the deaths of Saudi detainee Abdul Rahman al Amri (ISN199) and Yemeni detainee Mohammed Salih Al Hanashi (ISN78) at Guantanamo, I've now finished revising my book, <u>Cover-up at Guantanamo</u>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">published at Amazon</a>*.<br />
<br />
The new version is now online and ready to be purchased and downloaded. It's full of new revelations that will interest all who have followed or are still following the deaths of these two detainees, and others who have died at Guantanamo.<br />
<br />
As a sneak preview, I thought I'd reveal one of the more disturbing, if not bizarre, details surrounding Al Amri's case. It just might also represent a motive for his murder by Guantanamo authorities.<br />
<br />
Al Amri was found in his cell, almost dead (he still apparently still had a pulse), on May 30, 2017. According to guard accounts, he was hanging from a rope made from his bed sheet, attached to a second piece of sheet-derived rope whose end was ripped or torn into ten different strands and then looped through very small holes in an air conditioning vent some nine feet up off the floor. <br />
<br />
As people can read when they buy the new 2nd, revised edition of my book, the method by which Al Amri supposedly died is very suspicious, not just that it seems nearly physically impossible for this particular detainee to have killed himself in the way described, but because the time it would have taken the 5'6" Al Amri to get up on some apparatus to tie the rope to the air vent almost nine feet up off the floor was far longer than <i>very</i> tight surveillance at Guantanamo made possible.<br />
<br />
There's much more to the story, of course, but I wanted to mention one aspect that leads to the question of motive.<br />
<br />
Perhaps Al Amri was not in fact a suicide, but was murdered. While it sounds outlandish, the fact is it's possible that guards at Guantanamo, having been reported to be having oral sex while on duty, decided to kill the detainee who blew the whistle on them. <br />
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According to a sworn statement by a Guantanamo linguist, dated June 5, 2007 - six days after Al Amri died - and released to me via FOIA request, approximately two weeks before he died, Al Amri asked for an interpreter. The linguist responded.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, besides being an interpreter for detainees, this linguist also started each day listening to tapes made of detainee talk or chatter the night or day before, making transcripts of them for officials for "exploitation as well as interpretation." This linguist may have had more to do with certain details surrounding Al Amri's death, but you'll have to get my book to read about it. <br />
<br />
The linguist told the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which was looking into Al Amri's death:<br />
<blockquote>
"When I arrived, ISN 199 informed me that the guards were performing oral sex on each other. I asked him how he knew. He responded that while he was not able to see the act, he could hear what was going on. At no time did ISN 199 allege that he had been sexually assaulted or violated by any of the guards."</blockquote>
Now there can really only be three possibilities here: either 1) the guards were really having oral sex; or 2) guards or interrogators were trying to make Al Amri think guards were having oral sex, as a way of messing with his mind. The use of sexualized situations or abuse as a means of torture of the religious Islamic detainees has been well documented, and anyone who saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib knows about that.<br />
<br />
Finally, 3) perhaps there was no indication of oral sex taking place at all and the entire thing was a figment of Al Amri's imagination. If so, it would indicate a possibility of mental illness, or maybe a past instance of sexualized abuse or behavior, predisposing Al Amri to believe in such a situation as his guards having oral sex with each other. (There are other more distant possibilities, such as the linguist making the whole story up, or that guards were not having oral sex with each other, but with other detainees. But these all seem very unlikely.)<br />
<br />
What makes the story noteworthy is that Al Amri was found dead in his cell about two weeks after making this allegation. Furthermore, the circumstances of his case are highly suspicious. He was found hanging in his cell with his hands tied "snugly" behind his back in a figure-eight fashion, attached via a rope made from bed sheets (prison sheets that weren't supposed to tear) to an air vent far above his reach.<br />
<br />
NCIS tried to hide the fact of Al Amri's hands being tied behind him, not reporting on it in Executive Summaries of their investigation to NCIS and Guantanamo higher-ups. They did, however, tell the autopsy doctors, but misrepresented the circumstances, telling them the bindings were bound "loosely," the better to lead to an inference Al Amri did it to himself.<br />
<br />
According to the FOIA documents released, the guard who actually cut the hand bindings off Al Amri described them as "snugly" bound. (All the relevant documents are now posted at <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/" target="_blank">GuantanamoTruth.com</a>.)<br />
<br />
As readers of the new edition of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a>* will know, investigators ruled out his standing on either the cell toilet or sink to reach the vent from which he was hanged. There was no evidence that the other possibility -- standing on a folded bed mattress -- happened either. Even if he managed to reach the vent, it would have taken a lot longer to construct this death apparatus than the every three minutes or less constant visual surveillance upon him would have allowed.<br />
<br />
The mainstream press let the death of this detainee for the most part go unexamined. I hope with the revelations here and in my book, about which I intend to write other stories, will lead authorities to look very seriously at what really happened inside Guantanamo, and that a process of accountability for the crimes there will commence.<br />
<br />
[*<b>Reader note:</b> As of September 18, 2017, the updated revised version of <i>Cover-up at Guantanamo</i> is available in both paperback and its ebook version. Buy the paperback and get the ebook for only $1.99 more.]<br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-46028573637713621052017-08-11T10:59:00.001-07:002017-08-15T07:57:42.245-07:00Guantanamo Detainee Was Disciplined by Putting Him in the MorgueYou'd think the crazy things done to prisoners of the United States in the "war on terror" couldn't get any more bizarre. The U.S. government has waterboarded prisoners, placed them in coffin-like confinement boxes, threatened them with drills, given them forced enemas of hummus and pasta, and sealed them up in all-white rooms and blasted music at them night and day.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AISN_00156%2C_Adnan_Farhan_Latif.jpg" title="By JTF-GTMO (File:ISN 156's Guantanamo detainee assessment.pdf) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons"><img alt="ISN 00156, Adnan Farhan Latif" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/ISN_00156%2C_Adnan_Farhan_Latif.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
<small>By JTF-GTMO (File:ISN 156's Guantanamo detainee assessment.pdf) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</small><br />
<br />
But a newly surfaced document, part of a FOIA release on the death of Guantanamo detainee Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif in September 2012, seems to state that subsequent to an alleged rock throwing incident by Al Latif on July 25, 2012, he was taken to Guantanamo's morgue for some unspecified punishment.<br />
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<br />
Even more, a series of reports, beginning July 25, and ending August 2, indicated that Al Latif had been sent to or located in the "morgue." The reports were each labeled "DIMS Observation/Disciplinary Report Form" and classified "Secret." See end of this post for all the documents. DIMS stands for "Detainee Information Management System" and is the primary documentary record at Guantanamo for literally everything a detainee does or happens to him. For more on DIMS, see my <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39537-mystery-surrounds-guantanamo-detainee-s-suicide">Truthout article</a> here.<br />
<br />
I asked the JTF-Guantanamo Public Affairs Office for an official explanation. I queried, "Was Mr. Latif imprisoned for a time in the morgue at Guantanamo as some kind of discipline or punishment for perceived or actual infractions?"<br />
<br />
Commander John Robinson at PAO replied tersely, "We don't discuss details of camp operations." (I've asked whether this means they don't deny Al Latif was placed in the morgue as discipline. I've not yet had a reply but will update this post when I do.)<br />
<br />
[<b>Update, August 15, 2017:</b> Today received a further communication from JTF-GTMO's Public Affairs Office, responding to a second query of mine on August 11. I had asked if military authorities weren't really going to deny use of the morgue as a disciplinary action. Commander Robinson wrote back:<br />
<blockquote>
"JTF GTMO does not discuss the details of camp operations or specific locations of specific detainees. However, the morgue is only used for proper handling of detainee remains, not for detention. In response to apparent confusion regarding Detainee Information Management System data received via FOIA, please note that when an electronic query is conducted in DIMS, a detainee's 'Current Location' in block 7 will show the physical location (updated to date) of the detainee at the time the search was conducted. The 'Current Location' in block 7 is not associated with the "Date" of the report shown in block 2. Therefore, the location 'Morgue' in block 7 was the updated (most current) location of the detainee at the time the electronic file query in DIMS was conducted."</blockquote>
This would seem to negate the essence of the claims made in this article. But in the service of transparency, I'll leave open what I wrote as a cautionary tale about the use of government documents, and because the other points in the article are still relevant. I'd note, as you'll see in update below, this explanation for the surfacing of the location as the "morgue" as something generated by computer or software dynamism was first brought to my attention by Charlie Savage of The New York Times.]<br />
<br />
The period July 25 to August 2, 2012 produced a flurry of disciplinary reports on Al Latif. Only three days earlier, the Supreme Court had refused to hear Al Latif's appeal of a lower court's overturn of his habeas appeal. For the young Yemeni detainee, the Supreme Court's decision was devastating, condemning him to an unending detention with no hope of knowing when it would end. Such indefinite detention has been <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/indefinite-detention-june2011.pdf">found to be extremely emotionally and mentally stressful</a>.<br />
<br />
Indeed, Al Latif's behavior became more erratic and confrontative after he was in effect sentenced to indefinite detention, following the Supreme Court's decision. If we can believe camp accounts, Al Latif assaulted guards and a nurse with urine and feces, threw a rock at a guard in a watch tower, and possibly even grabbed for a guard's gun in the recreation yard. Only a little over a month later, he was found dead in his cell in Camp 5, ostensibly from a drug overdose of prescription antipsychotic medication. He was also suffering from pneumonia only a day after being medically cleared to be moved from the Behavioral Health Unit (BHU) at the Detainee Hospital to Alpha Block at Camp 5.<br />
<br />
During the period in question in this article - July 25 to August 2, 2012 - Al Latif was ostensibly quartered in the BHU for ongoing suicidality and psychotic behavior. The registered nurse who worked closely with him told government investigators after Al Latif's death that during the period we're looking at Al Latif was “particularly agitated about events that had taken place the previous two days....” <br />
<br />
The nurse described Latif as "jumping from the bed to the sink to the table to the toilet.” The jumping behavior would not stop. There was a lot of back and forth about giving Al Latif a forced injection of drugs to calm him. He refused the injection, and in the end, they opted to simply observe him, though there were other times when the prisoner was supposedly agitated when he was involuntarily injected with the drug Haldol to sedate him.<br />
<br />
While the government isn't about to explain what really happened, reading between the lines, it looks like Al Latif became very upset when the Supreme Court denied his habeas appeal. His protests and psychological regression overwhelmed camp personnel, who responded ham-handedly by upping the discipline on him. While he was sprayed with pepper spray and involuntarily drugged, it looks like they also imprisoned him in the morgue for hours each day, returning him to the hospital later each day.<br />
<br />
While it seems Al Latif was driven insane, or at least driven to desperate acts of defiance and protest by his despair at conditions at Guantanamo, things definitely seemed to get worse after July 25, the first day at the morgue. What happened to Al Latif there? Was he placed in a coffin-like box, as happened to Abu Zubaydah at a CIA "black site" prison? Was he threatened with death? Did he have contact with a corpse, or a fake corpse? Did Guantanamo authorities try to worsen his already fragile mental health?<br />
<br />
We don't know the exact answer to the questions above, but given the macabre imagination of the torturers in the U.S. government, anything is possible.<br />
<br />
[<b>Update, 8/12/2017</b>: Journalist Charlie Savage at the New York Times saw the documents online, and thought a simpler explanation for the "morgue" location could be that, since the documents contained "dynamic content" (as described at the top of each report), the "current location" was really simply the last location for Al Latif at Guantanamo. That would have been Guantanamo's morgue. In other words, the document automatically updated when it was processed for FOIA. Mr. Savage links to <a href="https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/RUN/How+to+archive+pages+with+dynamic+content" target="_blank">this webpage</a> as an explanation. I think it's a possibility, at this point, and will look more into this explanation.]<br />
<br />
The entire episode is an indication of how much we still don't know about the U.S. torture activities undertaken by both the CIA and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, apparently the U.S. is trying to <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article165286797.html">suppress the publication of a "tell-all" book about Guantanamo</a> from an insider, Mark Fallon, who worked with the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2004.<br />
<br />
There is also the fact the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, to fully declassify and release their report on CIA torture.<br />
<br />
Only a public outcry against torture and its effects, the human costs of which are staggering, will put an end to this censorship. Societal indifference to such inhumanity is highly damaging, the effects of which are to brutalize the society and render it less able to fend off authoritarian or even totalitarian impulses from above.<br />
<br />
NOTE: The documents released from SOUTHCOM that are the basis for this story came from a FOIA I filed some years ago. The initial filing for the documents, however, was made by Jason Leopold, a journalist who now works at Buzzfeed, and with whom I worked on various stories about torture a few years back. Jason followed the Al Latif story for some time (see <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/07/20137324426228887.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12171-sold-into-a-piece-of-hell-a-death-of-innocence-at-gitmo">here</a>). I've previously covered Al Latif's death as well, most recently in my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>AL LATIF "MORGUE" DOCUMENTS</b><br />
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If the embedded documents below don't work for you, you can <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3923293-Annotated-Latif-Morgue-Documents.html">download them here</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3923293/Annotated-Latif-Morgue-Documents.txt">Annotated Latif Morgue Documents (Text)</a><br />
</noscript>Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-76558055367199154532017-08-04T10:13:00.002-07:002017-08-04T10:13:53.732-07:00Saudi government defends imminent protest-related executions The following is an August 4 press release from the international human rights and legal group, <a href="http://www.reprieve.org.uk/">Reprieve</a>. I'd note only that Saudi Arabia is a firm ally of the United States, and U.S. apologia for that government's human rights violations have been going on for decades.<br />
<blockquote>Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Justice has released a rare <a href="http://www.spa.gov.sa/1653851">response</a> to criticism over the imminent execution of 14 Saudi nationals on protest-related charges - including juveniles and a man with disabilities. The statement, released today, makes a number of apparently false claims about the trial of the 14.<br />
<br />
The Saudi government is facing criticism over plans to execute the 14, who were arrested in the wake of protests and sentenced to death on protest-related charges in a secretive counter-terrorism court. Among the group is a juvenile, Mujtaba al Sweikat, who had a place to study at university in Michigan, but was arrested at the airport en route to the USA; and Munir Adam, who has disabilities. Both men were tortured into making false confessions, which were used against them at trial. Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the 14 protest-related death sentences, meaning the executions are now imminent.<br />
<br />
In a <a href="http://www.spa.gov.sa/1653851">statement</a> released today, Sheikh Mansour Al-Qafari, the spokesman of the Ministry of Justice, responded to criticism over the standard of the trial of the 14. The statement claimed that all trials before the controversial Specialised Criminal Court - which sentenced the 14 to death - meet international standards for fairness and due process, and allow for access to lawyers, the preparation of a defence, and even access to the trials by media and human rights observers.<br />
<br />
The public statement on the executions is at odds with assessments by the UN, as well as rights groups such as human rights organization Reprieve. Reprieve has established that at least one defendant, Mujtaba, was never permitted to see a lawyer; in Munir's case, no evidence against him was presented at trial. Mujtaba told the court at trial that he was tortured into a false confession, but this claim was dismissed by the judges and never investigated.<br />
<br />
In November 2016, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said of the Specialized Criminal Court that “such a special court, specifically designed to deal with so-called terrorism cases, raises serious concerns about its lack of independence and due procedure.” The UN Committee Against Torture has accused judges of the Court of “repeatedly refus[ing] to act on claims made by defendants facing terrorism charges that they had been subjected to torture”.<br />
<br />
Today’s Saudi statement also claimed that death sentences are only handed down for the most serious crimes. However, the Saudi authorities continue to carry out executions for non-violent alleged crimes, including political protest and drug offences. Some of the 14 men were convicted of offences such as using mobile phones to organise demonstrations, and using social media.<br />
<br />
Commenting, Maya Foa – Director of Reprieve – said: “Saudi Arabia’s attempts to justify these 14 unlawful executions are appalling. This statement is a serious mischaracterisation of the trial process against the 14 men, and it is risible to claim that a protester like Mujtaba – who never even saw a lawyer – received a fair trial. Governments close to Saudi Arabia – including the Trump Administration and the UK – must urgently call on the Kingdom to halt these executions.”</blockquote>According to Reprieve, English translations for the Saudi documents linked in their press release can be arranged via request. Reprieve’s London office can be contacted on: <a href="mailto:alice.gillham@reprieve.org.uk">alice.gillham@reprieve.org.uk</a>, or +44 (0)7792 351 660.Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-4753949666106974392017-07-20T14:40:00.001-07:002017-07-20T14:40:54.889-07:00Spam Poem<b>Spam Poem</b><br />
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<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-77717440065028865002017-07-19T11:02:00.000-07:002017-07-19T11:02:30.400-07:00Writing to NARA to Stop CIA Destruction of RecordsFollowing <a href="https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2017/07/18/tomorrow-is-deadline-to-submit-comments-to-stop-cia-plan-to-destroy-important-files/">a story at Unredacted</a>, the blog for The National Security Archive, regarding the potential changes in the rules allowing destruction of historical CIA documents, I wrote the following letter. Today is the deadline to submit comments to <a href="mailto:request.schedule@nara.gov">request.schedule@nara.gov</a>. I strongly recommend readers mail their comments in ASAP!<br />
<blockquote>Margaret Hawkins<br />
Acting Director, Records and Management Services<br />
National Archives and Records Administration<br />
8601 Adelphi Road<br />
College Park, MD 20740-6001<br />
Request.Schedule@nara.gov<br />
<br />
Dear Ms. Hawkins:<br />
<br />
I was alarmed to read that the National Archives had tentatively approved a CIA request to destroy a number of potentially important documents that are 30 years old or older, including classified information related to the Agency’s official actions abroad, investigative files from the offices of the Inspector General, Security, and Counterintelligence, and files relating to CIA assets (spies) that the CIA itself does not deem “significant.”<br />
<br />
This action would amount to a destruction of history itself, as there is no guarantee that the government operations covered by these records exist anywhere else, even if the CIA maintains that it does. Historians have too often seen documents destroyed. It was as recent as the late 1990s that historian <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/proof-us-agencies-destroyed-evidence-of.html">Sheldon Harris complained</a> of government officials (in this case, Department of Defense officials) destroying government records on U.S. collaboration with Unit 731 Japanese war criminals after he and other historians and journalists had expressed interest in such documents. See his letter <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1999-11-10/pdf/CREC-1999-11-10-bk2.pdf">republished</a> in the November 19, 1999 issue of <i>Congressional Record</i> (pp. S14542-S14543).<br />
<br />
I've had my own experience with disappearing records. In 2012, I filed a FOIA on investigative files from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on a Guantanamo detainee who died in custody in June 2009. I subsequently received notice that crucial computer records from the day the detainee had died (and the day after) <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39537-mystery-surrounds-guantanamo-detainee-s-suicide">had gone "missing"</a> and were irretrievable as a result. While I cannot say with assurance they were deliberately destroyed, it was a very suspicious disappearance.<br />
<br />
In this brief review, I'd note that the CIA itself has a history of destroying important documentation, <a href="http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet4/brief4.gfr/tab_j/br4j1.txt">from the bulk of the files pertaining to the MKULTRA program</a> of the 1950s and 1960s, to the November 2005 destruction of videotapes of the interrogation and torture of detainees, which a court had ordered preserved. <br />
<br />
This is an urgent matter, and the proposal to destroy historical records is contrary to the functioning of a democratic government and a strong civil society. I strongly request that NARA reconsider its pending approval of the CIA’s proposed schedule, N1- 263-13-1, until NARA can better assure the public that records of permanent historic value will not be allowed to be destroyed by the CIA.<br />
<br />
In this matter, I am in accord with The National Security Archive, OpenTheGovernment, and other organizations, who ask that NARA pause the approval of CIA N1-263-13-1 until NARA is able to verify beyond a reasonable doubt to the public that: 1) the records set for destruction are in fact not historically valuable, as the CIA’s claims, and 2) The records and information that the CIA claims are captured elsewhere are in fact preserved. I also request that "Item 30-3a: Declassification Referral Files" be re-designated for preservation. We strongly believe that these files do have significant research value, as they provide an invaluable tool and a roadmap for researchers to identify documents that were once designated as too secret to disclose to the public, but will be subject to release at some point in the future. Executive Order 13526 states, “No information may remain classified indefinitely;” NARA must ensure safeguards so that no previously secret, historically valuable, information is improperly destroyed.<br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
<br />
Jeffrey Kaye, Ph.D.</blockquote>Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-23126522779795604182017-05-30T06:58:00.000-07:002017-05-30T06:58:10.780-07:0010 Yr. Anniversary of Gitmo Detainee's Death, New Documents Show Suicide ImprobableTen years ago today, Abdul Rahman Al Amri was found dead in Cell 211, B Block, upper tier, at Guantanamo's Camp Delta's Camp 5. The Saudi detainee was found hanging from an improvised rope attached to the air vent just under the ceiling, about nine feet up. Al Amri was 5'5" tall.<br />
<br />
Al Amri was found with his hands tied "snugly" behind his back. He had no history of suicide attempts, and was considered a "detainee of interest." He weighed only 125 pounds.<br />
<br />
The autopsy tested for the presence of antimalarial drugs, even though there was no malaria at Guantanamo. Al Amri had been a prisoner there for five years. He had never seen an attorney, but new documents I've received show he had papers that supposedly contained attorney-client communications. Those papers have not been released.<br />
<br />
But NCIS has released a new trove of documents to me via a years-long FOIA request. I will be soon posting those publicly, as well as updating my analysis of those documents in my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a>.<br />
<br />
The new documents confirm what I already suspected, that Al Amri did not die a suicide. In fact, the prisoner, subject to checks every three minutes, and with his room bugged, if not under video surveillance, would have taken a long time to create and set-up his suicide apparatus, according to the NCIS investigator who examined the death scene.<br />
<br />
As this investigator wrote, noting the complex fashion in which the rope was attached to the air vent:<blockquote>The attachment of the cloth to this grate would have been time consuming as the cloth appeared to have been weaved through ten holes to assure that it would support a weighted object. It was difficult to ascertain how the cloth attachment was facilitated through gross scene examination. A request was made of this facility to have the grate removed for further inspection and study. The height of the grate on the wall was at a location in which the weaving necessary to attach the cloth to the grate would have been challenging for a shorter detainee. (Note: the detainee had been measured at a height of 66" at the time of the autopsy examination [5' 5" tall].) Standing on the nearby toilet or sink would allow this access but it would put the person at an angle in which further support would have been required through balancing with a hand or upper body.... There was no indication of recent use of the sink or toilet to climb as dust was found on the top surface of both the sink and toilet....</blockquote>There will be much more to say about this and other new facts about Al Amri's death in the coming weeks. But it is not too late to remember his death, and the fact that his death and others at Guantanamo have never been independently investigated. I believe that when I explain all that is to be revealed about Al Amri's death, calls for a new investigation should be made.<br />
Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-81740445605492386422017-05-20T09:13:00.001-07:002017-05-20T09:15:54.855-07:00Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals[<i><b>The following is a portion of an article published initially at Medium.com. The length of the article (over 7000 words) precludes my reposting the full essay here. But approximately half is posted below. <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982">Please follow this link to read the entire work.</a></b></i>]<br />
<br />
Upon my request, both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have released copies of a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3720697-DOJ-Copy-Cooper-1998-Correspondence.html">December 1998 letter from DOJ official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center</a>. In the letter, Rosenbaum admitted to Cooper that after World War II the United States government had classified records pertaining to a Japanese military unit that engaged in biological warfare experimentation and field trials on humans. <br />
<br />
The letter, one of two released to this author, confirmed the U.S. "essentially assisted Japan in covering up the atrocities perpetrated by the unit.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp1GFzxi0NVDwUOX_6ubeMwkbZ6lJBRN_6zXd5WVsAMvd2oQNKXvIcuILE5MFUUN0psw60w0ZbuQLV0e4XXfxZqq5NLG8dt4w87lu68MUKZ8RKxK6iDsmtRanUh5Qq0rsZUm0io4RoGGc/s1600/Screenshot+2017-05-14+15.14.58.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp1GFzxi0NVDwUOX_6ubeMwkbZ6lJBRN_6zXd5WVsAMvd2oQNKXvIcuILE5MFUUN0psw60w0ZbuQLV0e4XXfxZqq5NLG8dt4w87lu68MUKZ8RKxK6iDsmtRanUh5Qq0rsZUm0io4RoGGc/s320/Screenshot+2017-05-14+15.14.58.png" width="320" /></a><br />
In 1998, Rosenbaum was director of DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), while Rabbi Cooper was associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. The occasion for the correspondence was the Wiesenthal Center’s sponsorship of a “Trans-Pacific Video-Conference on Japanese Wartime Atrocities,” held at the Center’s own Museum of Tolerance on August 16, 1998.[1]<br />
<br />
Reported briefly in the press at the time [2], Rosenbaum’s letter of December 17, 1998 ended any doubts that the U.S. government had given scientists and military personnel associated with the notorious Japanese biological warfare program of the 1930s-1940s “immunity [from prosecution at the International Military Tribunal, Far East] in return for their human experimentation research data.”[3]<br />
<br />
This appears to have been the first time that any U.S. government official admitted publicly and officially that the U.S. had proposed an amnesty for the members of Japan’s Unit 731 and assorted components, known to have murdered thousands of prisoners in illegal biological experiments, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians in biological warfare operations predominantly in China, but also the Soviet Union, from 1939 until nearly the end of World War II. <br />
<br />
While Rosenbaum’s letter was quoted in the press, and in a 2002 Congressional Research Service report, the letter itself, and a November 1998 letter to Cooper also on the subject of Japan’s war crimes, were never released publicly. These letters are now available with the publication of this article, along with supporting documentation that until now was also not available. <br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3720697/DOJ-Copy-Cooper-1998-Correspondence.pdf">DOJ Copy Cooper 1998 Correspondence (PDF)</a><br />
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<a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3720697/DOJ-Copy-Cooper-1998-Correspondence.txt">DOJ Copy Cooper 1998 Correspondence (Text)</a><br />
</noscript>This article looks at some of the salient issues in regards to aspects of these new documents, including the motivation for the U.S. amnesty action, the question of experimentation on U.S. and allied prisoners of war (and its possible cover-up), and the question of assigning culpability to those involved. The article concludes with remarks on these matters by both Rosenbaum and Cooper, who were interviewed for this article in Spring 2013. (The delay in publishing this information was occasioned by personal matters.)<br />
<br />
<b>Unit 731</b><br />
<br />
Beginning with John Powell’s 1980 article, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime,” and a subsequent article in the October 1981 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “A Hidden Chapter in History”, revelations concerning long-hidden or suppressed aspects of Japanese war crimes began to surface in the U.S. and Western press. Powell shocked the American public by writing about and producing documentary evidence of a cover-up of “Japan’s use of biological warfare against China and the Soviet Union.”[4]<br />
<br />
The primary Japanese military unit associated with the biological warfare research and production of weaponry was known as Unit 731, although there were a number of other military units also involved. Powell (1981) wrote, “The American government’s participation in the cover-up, it is now disclosed, stemmed from Washington’s desire to secure exclusive possession of Japan’s expertise in using germs as lethal weapons.” <br />
<br />
The original promise of amnesty for information was made after a discussion some months after the end of World War II between the Ft. Detrick’s Colonel Murray Sanders and General Douglas MacArthur, according to numerous accounts of Unit 731’s history. The finalization of such a deal, however, took a few years, and was not without controversy within government circles.<br />
<br />
Powell (1980) quoted a July 1, 1947 memo from two U.S. doctors associated with bacteriological research that Japanese researchers had thousands of slides of human tissues taken from their experiments on prisoners. The slides and reports from the Unit 731 researchers were available if the U.S. could provide assurances the Japanese doctors and scientists would be saved from war crimes prosecution. The two doctors, Edward Wetter and H. I. Stubblefield argued that since "any 'war crimes' trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interests of defense and national security of the U.S." <br />
<br />
The vagueness of the language – “it is felt” – appears to indicate their message was something discussed comprehensively in their circle, in particular by scientists from the Army’s Ft. Detrick, which was the center of a major crash program in biological warfare research begun during the war, and intelligence officers.[5] Ft. Detrick personnel had been in charge of the debriefing of the Unit 731 doctors and scientists, while various documents speak to the sharing of such information with intelligence agencies. <br />
<br />
According to Powell, Wetter and Stubblefield furthermore indicated “the knowledge gained by the Japanese from their experiments ‘will be of great value to the U.S. BW research program’ and added: ‘The value to the U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution.’”<br />
<br />
The furor over Powell’s revelations peaked in the mid-1980s with public controversies over Japanese biological warfare (BW) experiments on U.S. and allied prisoners of wars. Congressional investigators ignored evidence of such experiments on U.S. POWs. It wasn’t until the publication of Linda Goetz Holmes’s book, <i>Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan's Mukden POW Camp</i> (Naval Institute Press, June 2010) that any mainstream historian accepted such experiments even took place. The entire episode is still ignored in the press accounts of World War II history.<br />
<br />
Subsequently, the scandal around Unit 731 appeared to die down publicly, until it was revived approximately a decade later. In 1995, there were two major narratives published on Unit 731 and the U.S. immunity deal. One was an article by Nicolas Kristof in the <i>New York Times</i>. The other was historian Sheldon Harris’s book, <i>Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-up</i>.[6] The publication and controversy surrounding the publication of Iris Chang’s book, <i>The Rape of Nanking</i>, in November 1997, also brought greater attention to the issue of Japanese atrocities during World War II.<br />
<br />
<b>Amnesty to Protect Collaboration and to Protect U.S. Biowar “Expertise”</b><br />
<br />
The supporting documentation for this article includes two memoranda for the record from the early 1980s by Norman Covert, then Chief of Public Affairs and historian for the U.S. Army at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. Rosenbaum’s December 17 letter had quoted liberally from the latter of these two memoranda.[7] While it is worth considering the portions Rosenbaum did not quote, the selection revealed to Rabbi Cooper, taken from Covert’s May 5, 1982 Memorandum for the Record, explained the U.S. rationale for the Unit 731 amnesty:<br />
<blockquote>
The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to keep Top Secret any information about the Japanese Biological Warfare Program. The Joint State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee expressed its desire that the information be retained in US hands exclusively and certainly it should be kept from the Soviet Union.... <br />
<br />
In the [June 26, 1947] memorandum written by Dr. Edward Wetter and Mr. H. I. Stubblefield[8] for the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee for the Far East, the decision not to prosecute LTG [Lieutenant General Shiro] Ishii [founder and leader of Unit 731 and the biological warfare program] was discussed. “An agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed.”<br />
<br />
.... Scientists in the US program said the information was not of significant value, but it was the first data in which human subjects were described. It indicated the Japanese program reached a level of expertise in 1939 that was never advanced because of lack of resources. Any prosecution of LTG Ishii and his associates would have exposed the Japanese capability <b>in addition to US expertise</b>. It would have been difficult to retain such information in US-only hands in such a case. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and SCAP [Supreme Command Allied Powers] agreed there would be little gained by such prosecution and deferred, offering LTG Ishii immunity in exchange for detailed information. [bold added for emphasis]</blockquote>
The Covert memorandum was certainly a kind of spin, although Mr. Covert himself may not have been aware of the full extent of U.S. crimes. Even so, he admitted to this author in an interview for this article that at the time he wrote the memos he was concerned mainly with “protecting Ft. Detrick[‘s]” reputation. The May 5 memo, and an earlier one Covert wrote on November 17, 1981, were a response to media attention following the Powell disclosures. The November 17 memo was undertaken as a rewrite of the May 5 memo for the purpose of submission to the Secretary of the Army.<br />
<br />
“News media was beating me to death on that,” Covert said, referring to the strong response to the Powell articles. “The Memorandum for the Record was to cover your ass, a record of what I had done.” <br />
<br />
Covert added there had also been “several legislative requests” for more information on the Unit 731 material as well. He also recalled that the Department of Justice had also contacted him on one occasion during this period, although he did not remember the details. Rosenbaum indicated in his interview that DOJ had likely been involved in some capacity in the postwar discussions surrounding the granting of amnesty to Ishii and associates.<br />
<br />
The question of the value of the Japanese data and biological samples is a matter of conjecture, while the controversy over the use of such data (and similar data from the Nazi concentration camp experiments), including use of operational knowledge in purported U.S. germ warfare attacks on North Korea and China during the Korean War, is a separate, though related issue.[9] At one point, Covert said U.S. scientists found the Japanese research “not of significant value.” He appeared to have gotten this information from speaking to Ft. Detrick scientists still resident in the Frederick, Virginia area. In addition, Covert appeared to give little credence to evidence that came from Soviet sources.<br />
<br />
But elsewhere, writing about Ft. Detrick representative Dr. Norbert Fell's interrogation of Shiro Ishii, Covert wrote in his November 17, 1981 memo, "The data on human testing appeared to have significant value to the U.S. BW Research programs at Camp Detrick." Some months later, in his May 5, 1982 memo, Covert concluded, “It is certain the Japanese had a full-scale BW effort and achieved a level of expertise working with many traditional BW agents.” <br />
<br />
A later report by Doctors Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, also from Ft. Detrick, was quite direct when considering the value of getting the Unit 731 data. “Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation,” they wrote.[10]<br />
<br />
To conclude the discussion on the value of Unit 731’s data, it is worth noting a May 1947 memo from MacArthur’s office to the War Department and Major General Alden Wiatt of the Chemical Warfare Service on the BW human experiments, “confirmed tacitly by Ishii” to interrogators. The memo was obtained by author William Triplett, and also describes the intersection of the amnesty agreement with unnamed intelligence agencies:<br />
<br />
"Data already obtained from Ishii and his colleagues have proven to be of great value in confirming, supplementing and completing several phases of U.S. research in BW, and may suggest new fields for future research.... For all practical purposes an agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this Government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed."[11]<br />
<br />
MacArthur’s command told the War Department, “valuable technical BW information as to results of human experiments and research in BW for crop destruction probably can be obtained….”<br />
<br />
Ft. Detrick’s Norbert Fell resumed interrogations of Shiro Ishii two days after this memo was sent....<br />
<br />
[<i><b>To see the rest of this article, <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982">click through to read at Medium.com</a> - Relevant footnotes for portion published here are posted below - JK</b></i>]<br />
<br />
[1] <i>China News Daily</i>, Aug. 14, 1998, <a href="http://www.cnd.org/CND-US/CND-US.98/CND-US.98-08-14.html">http://www.cnd.org/CND-US/CND-US.98/CND-US.98-08-14.html</a>. CNET reported on the conference at the time: URL http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-214541.html. See also the original announcement of the event by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, archived online at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19981203135255/http://events.broadcast.com/events/swc/nanjingmassacre/">http://web.archive.org/web/19981203135255/http://events.broadcast.com/events/swc/nanjingmassacre/</a> (all accessed May 14, 2017).<br />
<br />
[2] See <i>Stars and Stripes</i>, week of March 15 – 28, 1999, vol. 122, no. 6, reposted online at <a href="http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5850/deathcamp.html">http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5850/deathcamp.html</a> (accessed May 14, 2017). <br />
<br />
Reference was also made in a Congressional Research Service report by Gary K. Reynolds in December 2002, “U.S. Prisoners of War and Civilian American Citizens Captured and Interned by Japan in World War II: the Issue of Compensation by Japan,” online at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080406073324/http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usprisoners_japancomp.htm">http://web.archive.org/web/20080406073324/http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usprisoners_japancomp.htm</a> (accessed May 14, 2017).<br />
<br />
[3] Letter, Eli Rosenbaum to Abraham Cooper, December 17, 1998.<br />
<br />
[4] Powell’s 1980 article was published in the <i>Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars</i>, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime” (Oct.-Dec. 1980, vol. 12, no. 4.) See URL: <a href="http://criticalasianstudies.org/assets/files/bcas/v12n04.pdf">http://criticalasianstudies.org/assets/files/bcas/v12n04.pdf</a> (accessed May 14, 2017). <br />
<br />
Powell’s 1981 article is available online, reproduced as part of the Congressional Record on November 10, 1999, <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/11/feinstein.html">http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/11/feinstein.html</a> (accessed May 14, 2017) Powell died in Dec. 2008.<br />
<br />
In the middle 1970s, John Saar at the <i>Washington Post</i> wrote a story, “Japan Accused of WW II Germ Deaths” (Nov. 19, 1976), that described a Japanese documentary by Haruko Yoshinaga, aired by the Tokyo Broadcasting System on Unit 731. “Japanese scientists killed at least 3,000 Chinese prisoners in World War II in bacteriological warfare experiments and escaped prosecution by sharing the findings with US occupation forces…. Press officers at the US Defense and Justice Departments said they had no information on the charges but would investigate,” Saar wrote. (See URL: <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19761119&id=5E0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XCkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6053,6138361">http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19761119&id=5E0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XCkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6053,6138361</a> - accessed May 14, 2017) But no one in the Western press pursued the story further until Powell published his first article four years later.<br />
<br />
The impact of Powell’s expose can be gauged by the fact that 60 Minutes interviewed Powell for an on-air segment, “War Crime,” on April 4, 1982. The transcript for this episode is available beginning on pg. 352 in this large PDF file online: URL <a href="http://philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us/pdf/bios/sandy_and_search_for_truth.pdf">http://philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us/pdf/bios/sandy_and_search_for_truth.pdf</a>. <br />
<br />
Morley Safer narrated: "During World War II, the Japanese military experimented with germ warfare. Their guinea pigs were Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. For a variety of reasons, the American government kept it all a secret."<br />
<br />
[5] The U.S. World War II program in both chemical and biological warfare is discussed in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, <i>A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare</i>, Random House, 2002.<br />
<br />
[6] Nicolas D. Kristof, “Unmasking Horror -- A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity,” <i>New York Times</i>, March 17, 1995, URL: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html">http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html</a> (accessed May 14, 2017).<br />
<br />
Routledge published an expanded, revised version of <i>Factories of Death</i> in 2002. Harris died a few months later.<br />
<br />
[7] My thanks to Mr. Norman Covert for sharing certain documents. The attempt to obtain the documents through official channels is a story in itself. A DoD spokesman had referred my query to Fort Detrick. Ft. Detrick’s FOIA office referred me to the National Archives. But the documents did not apparently exist there either. They may or may not constitute documents that Mr. Covert claims were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick’s commanding officer in 1998.<br />
<br />
[8] “Mr. H. I. Stubblefield” was in fact Dr. Henry I. Stubblefield, a bacteriologist who we know, at least in 1954, was on the Chemical Corps Advisory Council, according to an in-house history of Ft. Detrick written by Norman Covert. See URL: <a href="http://www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/chapter09.cfm">http://www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/chapter09.cfm</a>. Coincidentally, along with two other researchers, he had co-authored with Andrew C. Ivy an article in 1934, “Protective Action of Sodium Thiocyanate against Dysentery Toxin (Shiga): An Experimental Study in Dogs and Rabbits.” Ivy was later to be a major figure testifying on medical ethics at the Nuremberg trials.<br />
<br />
According to Powell (1980), Dr. Wetter was at the time of the SWNCC memo “Panel Director” of the “Committee on Biological Warfare.” Powell does not say, but it appears likely this was the secret “DEF” committee, the third of three secret committees formed during the World War II years by the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council. See URL: <a href="http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/archives/collections/cbw-1941-1948.html">http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/archives/collections/cbw-1941-1948.html</a> (accessed May 14, 2017). Wetter later went to work as a civilian employee for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development (<a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/officialregister1955unit/officialregister1955unit_djvu.txt">http://www.archive.org/stream/officialregister1955unit/officialregister1955unit_djvu.txt</a>). According to the 1955 Official Register of the United States, p. 114, Wetter worked in this office as “Executive Secretary, Committee and Panel on Special Operations.” <br />
<br />
[9] See Till Bärnighausen, “Data generated in Japan’s biowarfare experiments on human victims in China, 1932–1945, and the ethics of using them,” <i>Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics</i>, Taylor and Francis, 2010. <br />
<br />
On the Korean War allegations, see Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, <i>The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea</i>, Indiana University Press, 1998.<br />
<br />
[10] Op. cit., Bärnighausen, p. 97.<br />
<br />
[11] See William Triplett, <i>Flowering of the Bamboo</i>, Woodbine House, 1985, pp. 241-250.<br />
<br />
[<i><b>To see the rest of this article, <a href="https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982">click through to read at Medium.com</a></b></i>]<br />
<br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-68531726581834268462017-04-02T10:57:00.000-07:002017-04-02T11:25:24.315-07:00Proof US Agencies Destroyed Evidence of Japan's WWII Medical War CrimesThe letter published below came from the <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1999-11-10/pdf/CREC-1999-11-10-bk2.pdf" target="_blank">November 19, 1999 <i>Congressional Record</i> (pp. S14542-S14543)</a>. Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, Northridge, wrote the letter, which alleged the destruction by various U.S. military agencies of records concerning Japanese war crimes during World War II. Harris had been investigating these crimes, as well as actions by the U.S. government to cover-up them up. In one instance, Harris claimed "sensitive" documents were destroyed at Dugway Proving Ground as "a direct result" of research he had initiated there.<br />
<br />
Harris' letter was entered into the record by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was speaking about the controversies at the time about the ongoing classification even 50 or more years after the fact of documents pertaining to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan war crimes. In particular, the 1990s had seen a <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-18/local/me-1014_1_japanese-war-crimes">growing campaign</a> to expose the activities of Japan's World War II biological warfare experiments and subsequent operational bacteriological and chemical warfare campaigns, which have collectively come to be known under the rubric of the campaign's most notorious brigade, Unit 731, led by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.<br />
<br />
The kick-off for the controversy was the publication in the Oct. 1981 <i>Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists</i> of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=PQsAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=JAPAN%E2%80%99S+BIOLOGICAL+WEAPONS:+1930%E2%80%931945%E2%80%94A+HIDDEN+CHAPTER+IN+HISTORY+(By+Robert+Gomer,+John+W.+Powell+and+Bert+V.A.+Ro%C2%A8+ling)+When+this+story+first+reached&source=bl&ots=TXovrecbad&sig=AVrGM86qOqDgLD_7UP8kdHnyVlM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wOejUajoFIGpiQK5joG4Bw&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=JAPAN%E2%80%99S%20BIOLOGICAL%20WEAPONS%3A%201930%E2%80%931945%E2%80%94A%20HIDDEN%20CHAPTER%20IN%20HISTORY%20(By%20Robert%20Gomer%2C%20John%20W.%20Powell%20and%20Bert%20V.A.%20Ro%C2%A8%20ling)%20When%20this%20story%20first%20reached&f=false">"Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945 - A Hidden Chapter in History,"</a> written by Robert Gomer, John W. Powell, and Bert V.A. Roling. Feinstein entered the entire article into the <i>Congressional Record</i>, along with another letter from historian Sheldon Harris, who had written a book on Unit 731 and the U.S. cover-up of their activities. According to Harris and Gomer/Powell/Roling, the U.S. had amnestied the Unit 731 scientists in order to get at the unethical data from human experiments on prisoners, data derived from intentional infliction of disease followed often enough by vivisection. The 731 survivors were incinerated or buried in mass graves.<br />
<br />
Historians <a href="http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf">have documented</a> the massive amount of destruction of records by the Japanese military, including many if not most of the records for Unit 731 and associated units. Professor Harris's letter references the U.S. destruction of records, and not the larger, and even more problematic destruction of records by the Japanese authorities.<br />
<br />
The Japanese government denied any biological/chemical war crimes, while the U.S. slowly declassified some incriminating documents, but would not come out and say what the U.S. had done in relation to the Japanese doctors and scientists. Some of the Unit 731 personnel were tried in 1949 in a <a href="http://www.zpu-journal.ru/en/articles/detail.php?ID=278" target="_blank">special war crimes trial</a> by the Soviet Union. Much of what we know about Unit 731 and associated biological and chemical warfare divisions comes from this trial, which for years was derided in the West. (Google Books has <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Materials_on_the_Trial_of_Former_Service.html?id=ARojAAAAMAAJ" target="_blank">republished a free ebook of the Soviet transcripts</a> from the trial.)<br />
<br />
In January 1999, President Bill Clinton, "in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (PL 105-246)... <a href="http://www.archives.gov/iwg/about/" target="_blank">established</a> the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)." But it wasn't until May 2000 that Congress, "as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2001... extended the IWG's life to December 2004 through passage of the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/iwg/about/iwg-title-8.html" target="_blank">Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, P. L. 106-567</a>." The IWG's name was accordingly changed to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. According to the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/iwg/about/" target="_blank">IWG website</a>, declassification of U. S. Government records related to imperial Japan's war crimes then became an official part of the IWG's mission.<br />
<br />
The IWG ended its declassification mission in March 2007 (extended from an original 2004 ending date). It subsequently published a <a href="https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf" target="_blank">final report to Congress in September 2007</a>. Some resources have been placed online for researchers, primarily <a href="http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/select-documents.pdf" target="_blank">Select Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 1934-2006</a>.<br />
<br />
While over 100,000 previously unclassified documents related to Imperial Japan's biological warfare program were reportedly released via IWG's efforts, no further discussion or elaboration took place regarding Professor Harris's documentation of the destruction of records held by different U.S. military agencies.<br />
<br />
The following is the text of Professor Harris's letter, which can be <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1999-11-10/pdf/CREC-1999-11-10-bk2.pdf" target="_blank">found online as part of the Congressional Record</a>, or also here. It can also be <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/11/feinstein.html" target="_blank">accessed here</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
GRANADA HILLS, CA,<br />
October 7, 1999</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hon. SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN,<br />
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
DEAR SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Several Asian American activists organizations in California, and organizations representing former Prisoners of War and Internees of the Japanese Imperial Army, have indicated to me that you are proposing to introduce legislation into the United States Senate that calls for full disclosure by the United States Government of records it possesses concerning war crimes committed by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. I endorse such legislation enthusiastically. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My support for the full disclosure of American held records relating to the Japanese Imperial Army’s wartime crimes against humanity is both personal and professional. I am aware of the terrible suffering members of the Imperial Japanese Army imposed upon innocent Asians, prisoners of war of various nationalists and civilian internees of Allied nations. These inhumane acts were condoned, if not ordered, by the highest authorities in both the civilian and military branches of the Japanese government. As a consequence, millions of persons were killed, maimed, tortured, or experienced acts of violence that included human experiments relating to biological and chemical warfare research. Many of these actions meet the definition of "war crimes" under both the Potsdam Declaration and the various Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the post-war period. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I am the author of "Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up" (Routlege: London and New York; hard cover edition 1994; paperback printings, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999). [Note: a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Factories-Death-Japanese-Biological-American/dp/0415932149" target="_blank">revised edition was published</a> in 2002 - ed.] I discovered in the course of my research for this book, and scholarly articles that I published on the subject of Japanese biological and chemical warfare preparations, that members of the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps committed heinous war crimes. These included involuntary laboratory tests of various pathogens on humans—Chinese, Korean, other Asian nationalities, and Allied prisoners of war, including Americans. Barbarous acts encompassed live vivisections, amputations of body parts (frequently without the use of anesthesia), frost bite exposure to temperatures of 40–50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, injection of horse blood and other animal blood into humans, as well as other horrific experiments. When a test was completed, the human experimented was "sacrificed", the euphemism used by Japanese scientists as a substitute term for "killed." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In my capacity as an academic Historian, I can testify to the difficulty researchers have in unearthing documents and personal testimony concerning these war crimes. I, and other researchers, have been denied access to military archives in Japan. These archives cover activities by the Imperial Japanese Army that occurred more than 50 years ago. The documents in question cannot conceivably contain information that would be considered of importance to "National Security" today. The various governments in Japan for the past half century have kept these archives firmly closed. The fear is that the information contained in the archives will embarrass previous governments. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here in the United States, despite the Freedom of Information Act, some archives remain closed to investigators. At best, the archivists in charge, or the Freedom of Information Officer at the archive in question, select what documents they will allow to become public. This is an unconscionable act of arrogance and a betrayal of the trust they have been given by the Congress and the President of the United States. Moreover, ‘‘sensitive’’ documents—as defined by archivists and FOIA officers—are at the moment being destroyed. Thus, historians and concerned citizens are being denied factual evidence that can shed some light on the terrible atrocities committed by Japanese militarists in the past. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Three examples of this wanton destruction should be sufficiently illustrative of the dangers that exist, and should reinforce the obvious necessity for prompt passage of legislation you propose to introduce into the Congress: </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. In 1991, the Librarian at Dugway Proving Grounds, Dugway, Utah, denied me access to the archives at the facility. It was only through the intervention of then U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, Dem., Utah, that I was given permission to visit the facility. I was not shown all the holdings relating to Japanese medical experiments, but the little I was permitted to examine revealed a great deal of information about medical war crimes. Sometimes after my visit, a person with intimate knowledge of Dugway’s operations, informed me that "sensitive" documents were destroyed there as a direct result of my research in their library. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. I conducted much of my American research at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The Public Information Officer there was extremely helpful to me. Two weeks ago I telephoned Detrick, was informed that the PIO had retired last May. I spoke with the new PIO, who told me that Detrick no longer would discuss past research activities, but would disclose information only on current projects. Later that day I telephoned the retired PIO at his home. He informed me that upon retiring he was told to ‘‘get rid of that stuff’’, meaning incriminating documents relating to Japanese medical war crimes. Detrick no longer is a viable research center for historians. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. Within the past 2 weeks, I was informed that the Pentagon, for ‘‘space reasons’’, decided to rid itself of all biological warfare documents in its holdings prior to 1949. The date is important, because all war crimes trials against accused Japanese war criminals were terminated by 1949. Thus, current Pentagon materials could not implicate alleged Japanese war criminals. Fortunately, a private research facility in Washington volunteered to retrieve the documents in question. This research facility now holds the documents, is currently cataloguing them (estimated completion time, at least twelve months), and is guarding the documents under ‘‘tight security.’’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Your proposed legislation must be acted upon promptly. Many of the victims of Japanese war crimes are elderly. Some of the victims pass away daily. Their suffering should receive recognition and some compensation. Moreover, History is being cheated. As documents disappear, the story of war crimes committed in the War In The Pacific becomes increasingly difficult to describe. The end result will be a distorted picture of reality. As an Historian, I cannot accept this inevitability without vigorous protest. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Please excuse the length of this letter. However, I do hope that some of the arguments I made in comments above will be of some assistance to you as you press for passage of the proposed legislation. I will be happy to be of any additional assistance to you, should you wish to call upon me for further information or documentation. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sincerely yours,<br />
SHELDON H. HARRIS,<br />
<i>Professor of History emeritus,<br />California State University, Northridge</i></blockquote>
In a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3534411-Ft-Detrick-Letter-on-731-Document-Destruction.html" target="_blank">March 30, 2007 Memorandum</a> for the "Director, US Army Records Management and Declassification Agency" on the matter of "Japanese War Crimes - Record Search at Fort Detrick, Maryland", William H. Thresher, Chief of Staff at US Army Medical Command, referenced the Harris charges of destruction of records at Fort Detrick. Thresher was responding to a request from the Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) "for information concerning records of interest to the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG)."<br />
<br />
It is worth noting that this memorandum was written even as the IWG had just finished its declassification project.<br />
<br />
Thresher wrote, "In early 2007, the USAMRIID [US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] performed a thorough search for any remaining responsive records, including records regarding Unit 731, and found no records." The search included "the Commander and other senior personnel."<br />
<br />
Thresher then turned to allegations by Professor Sheldon Harris concerning possible destruction of records at Fort Detrick. He reviewed the controversy:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Professor Harris, in his letter, dated 7 October 1999, stated that the recently-retired Public Information Officer at Fort Detrick (Mr. Norman Covert) told Professor Harris that upon retiring he was told to get rid of documents relating to Japanese war crimes. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The USAMRMC [US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command] is unaware of any authority at Fort Detrick or the USAMRMC requesting destruction of any responsive original records, or of copies of Fort Detrick or USAMRMC documents not previously provided to Dugway or NARA.</blockquote>
Professor Harris died on August 31, 2002. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has written about his 1999 letter to Senator Feinstein detailing his charges about the destruction of records by US military officials. If it were up to the powers that be, this would be an example of government censorship lost in the whirlwind of moving events. But it seems an episode worth reviving, if nothing else as a documentation of an important episode in the history of exposing U.S. and Japanese biological warfare history.<br />
<br />
A few years back, Norman Covert confirmed to this author his contention that his commanding officer at Ft. Detrick was the superior officer who told him to destroy the weapons.<br />
<br />
And there the controversy stands to this day.<br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-52904451312161752212017-03-26T18:06:00.001-07:002017-03-26T18:06:59.634-07:00The Talking Dog interviews author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo"[The following was graciously allowed for <a href="http://www.thetalkingdog.com/archives2/001896.html">reprint by The Talking Dog</a>, who has interviewed many key figures who have been fighting the U.S. use of torture for years. His website is a special go-to place for those who want to know what this fight really looks like. His many interviews can be <a href="http://www.thetalkingdog.com/">accessed here</a>. Key interviews include those with Gitmo attorneys <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000836.html">Brent Mickum</a>, <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000758.html">Candace Gorman</a>, <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000626.html">Michael Ratner</a>, and <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000525.html">Joshua Denbeaux</a>, as well as physicians <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000511.html">Dr. David Nicholl</a> and <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000657.html">Dr. Steven Miles</a>, and former Guantanamo Army Arabic linguist <a href="http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000633.html">Erik Saar</a>, among many other worthy individuals. His interviews are informed and always of interest.]<br />
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Jeffrey S. Kaye is a native Californian is a practicing psychologist in San Francisco, Calif. Dr. Kaye has a bachelors degree from the University of California, Berkeley and he received his doctorate from The Wright Institute in Berkeley. After working as a cab driver, an assistant casting director, a proofreader, a typographer, and assorted odd jobs, he settled down and became a clinical psychologist in his middle age. He still has a full-time psychotherapy practice in San Francisco, California. Dr. Kaye also taught Adult Development and History and Systems of Psychology to Bay Area graduate students in psychology. For 10 years he worked part time with Survivors International, conducting both assessment and psychotherapy of torture victims. After 9/11, he became involved with other psychologists in protesting the use of psychological expertise in the CIA and Department of Defense interrogation programs, which have widely been exposed as including torture and other forms of cruel treatment of prisoners. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI">"Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri" is his first eBook</a>. He has published articles on torture and other subjects at Truthout, The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Alternet, and other online websites, and he maintains the blog <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/">"Invictus"</a> and the website <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/">Guantanamo Truth</a> (where he posts the results of his Guantanamo related Freedom of Information requests and key source documents.)<br />
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On March 25, 2017, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Kaye by email exchange.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Where were you on 9/11?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I was living in San Rafael, California at the time. I’m not a very religious or superstitious person, but on the morning of 9/11 I was awoken around 6pm with a nightmare. People and cars and cows (!) and other items were falling down out of the sky. It was bizarre, and scary enough it work me up. I felt creepy, but shook it off as I had to start the day: get my daughter ready for school and myself ready for the commute to work in San Francisco. I never watch TV in the morning, nor did I listen to the news in those days. But after I dropped my daughter off, I got on the freeway and quickly was in the typical commute crawl. Out of the corner of my eye I could see people making strange faces. One woman had her mouth agape in shock. I turned on the news and heard about the planes hitting the World Trade Center and Pentagon. This was before the buildings had collapsed. I rushed home to watch some on TV, and then headed into work late. I figured my daughter was safe at school, and my wife would pick her up later. I remember thinking, this is so strange, so bizarre. I thought about my dream. I imagined that thousands were dead (after the buildings collapsed). It all felt unreal. Amazingly, in my psychotherapy practice that day, not one person mentioned the terror attack. That added to the surreal atmosphere of the day.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Your book, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed/dp/1520587090/">Cover-Up at Guantanamo</a>," is a detailed takedown of the official story surrounding three prisoners suicides-while-in- detention-at-Guantanamo, in three separate incidents spanning a five year period (or, if you like two suicides and a "bonus" chapter on a third), noting, among other things. deliberate decisions to turn off the detainee data management system moments after the discovery of a suicide, documents (and forensic physical evidence, such as fabric that may have been implicated in the death) missing, or apparently deliberately suppressed, from investigative records, along with the usual overarching redactions and secrecy that define Guantanamo as the default. Before we take them on, I have a couple of pet theories I'd love to hear your take on. As you know, the first alleged suicides at Guantanamo, three simultaneous, took place on the night of 9 June 2006 (reported on 10 June 2006), four and a half years into the operation of the prison. By then, the Supreme Court opened up the possibility of habeas and lawyers were running around Guantanamo. It was also obvious that so called actionable intelligence from non-high value prisoners was a fantasy, and that the bulk of GTMO prisoners were, as feared, taxi drivers and farmers and missionaries and otherwise people of no "intel" value, actionable or otherwise. Oh-- Dubya got reelected as well. That said, I wonder if, to be brutally blunt about it, the compelling need to keep prisoners alive kind of dissipated. Further, I wonder if, by 2006, the staff that rotated into GTMO, particularly in the medical and psychological areas, was, well, just less top-notch (if that term ever applied) than staff earlier, and this was a factor in the "suicides". While <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_homicide_accusations#Joseph_Hickman_account">Joe Hickman</a> believes that those first three deaths were homicides, and he's likely right, I posit whether it could be gross negligence homicide rather than intentional murder... In other words, let's hypothesize that some sick game of dry-boarding for example which earlier would have been stopped well before the edge of death, by '06 could be pushed just a few seconds or inches further...just a little less quality control... It was less of a "catastrophe" as it were, if GTMO prisoners died on site. Can you comment on any of that? I'd also like to toss out an "Occam's Razor" explanation: after years and years of extreme boredom (even boredom at having to inflict the sort of abuse they were ordered to do), prison and medical staff just suffered periodic breakdowns in doing their jobs-- they just fell asleep at the wheel, whether of keeping contraband out or watching prisoners on schedule and so forth or taking steps to prevent suicides. Can you comment on any of this? </em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> It’s worth remembering at every stage that so much has been shrouded in secrecy, that we really don’t know. I think Joe Hickman is right and the three prisoners in 2006 were murdered. It may have been “accidental,” but I don’t think so in their case. After the first died, there should have been some concern by interrogators, or whoever was torturing these prisoners, about what they were doing. But three died, and there was more than one trip in and out to Camp No. Why were these detainees given disorienting drugs (at least one was tested for mefloquine)? Were they dryboarded, or was it even worse than that. The same goes for one of the prisoners whose death I examined, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Rahman_al-Amri">Abdul Rahman Al Amri</a>. He was likely murdered himself. In fact, it seems he was executed (hands tied behind his back, a former compliant prisoner, perhaps even an informant, turned hunger striker, his file was very heavily redacted, with hundreds of pages withheld). <br />
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Now, we know (or believe we know) that there were many suicide attempts in the first few years at Guantanamo, or at least there were actions attributable to self-harm. Did the strenuous efforts to prevent suicide wane as the years wore on? Perhaps. There is the possibility that those who were difficult mental health cases (Al Hanashi, Al Latif, and Inayatullah) were killed or allowed to die by withdrawal of care or allowance of self-harm as a result of counter-transference hatred among guards and/or clinical staff. I remember I volunteered at San Francisco Suicide Prevention in the early 1990s. I read about a case where two suicide prevention workers in Sacramento were so incensed and fed up with a “chronic” suicide caller that they drove to his house and tried to strangle him. When I brought up the subject in my own agency, no one wanted to discuss it. I thought that strange. But then later I learned that hostility towards difficult patients is real problem in hospitals. The way Guantanamo was staffed, possibly with poorly trained and less talented staff, but more importantly, with heavy turn-over and therefore poor institutional memory and lousy <em>esprit de corps</em>. I also believe, due to the fact medical decisions were subordinated to military or intelligence officials’ needs, there was a deterioration in the culture of caring that took place. I saw some nurses from the Behavioral Health Unit at Guantanamo speak at the 2007 American Psychological Convention. They seemed like automatons to me, as they lied about the pronounced evidence of personality disorders and the lack of PTSD at Guantanamo.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>I'd like to acknowledge the nine prisoners who died in custody at Guantanamo. I haven't been able to find the descriptions of all nine men in the same place, so I'll try to put it together in this question. Let's do a quick overview of the ultimate "forever prisoners"- the nine men whose life ended as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. <br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Abdullah_Ahmed">Ali Abdullah Ahmed (Salah Ahmed al-Salami)</a> (June 10, 2006) suicide [by hanging]<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_Shaman_Turki_al-Habardi_Al-Utaybi">Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi</a> (June 10, 2006) suicide [by hanging]<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Talal_Al_Zahrani">Yasser Talal al Zahrani</a> (June 10, 2006) suicide [by hanging] <br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Rahman_al-Amri">Abdul Rahman Ma'ath Thafir al Amri (May 30, 2007)</a> suicide [by hanging- hands tied behind]<br />
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2007/dec/31/nation/na-gitmo31">Abdul Razak or Abdul Razzak Hekmati </a> (December 30, 2007) [cancer]<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Ahmed_Abdullah_Saleh_Al_Hanashi">Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi</a> (June 1, 2009) suicide [self-strangulation]<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awal_Gul">Awal Gul</a> (February 2, 2011) [cardiac arrest]<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inayatullah_(Guantanamo_detainee_10029)">Inayatullah, born Hajji Nassim</a> (May 18, 2011) suicide [details not disclosed, but found "hanging by bedsheet"]<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Farhan_Abd_Al_Latif">Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif</a> (September 8, 2012) suicide [apparent drug overdose]<br />
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I'm going to defer to Joe Hickman on Ahmed, al-Utaybi and al-Zahrani (<a href="http://www.thetalkingdog.com/archives2/001754.html">my interview with Joe is here</a>) and I think it's fair to say that your book is the definitive work on the controversial deaths of al-Amri, al-Hanashi and Latif. I'm wondering if you have done any research or have any particular take on the other three deaths-- Inayatullah, so mysterious that we're usually not even given a cause of death besides "suicide" (<a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article1938282.html">I suppose "hanging by a bed sheet" is an explanation</a>), or the cardiac arrest of a man my age [I was born in 1962] on an elliptical machine of Awal Gul, something that <a href="https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2012_12_01_archive.html?m=0#.WM67bfnyuUk">his family believes is a cover-up of something more insidious</a>, and of course, the death of a 68 year old prisoner Abdul Razzak Hekmati by cancer while undergoing treatment? Whether or not you have specifically researched the other deaths, can you comment on overall media reaction to them, including international media, and can you comment on what I'll call the extraordinarily helpful irony that, but for their deaths, we might be looking at 50 prisoners still at GTMO rather than 41 (even though a couple of the "suicides" were "cleared for transfer")? Also, with respect to the other deaths by suicide, including those you profile, in an inordinate number of cases, the prisoners somehow managed to tie their own hands before hanging themselves... is that common in suicides, and does that not dramatically make one question whether, at minimum, these were "assisted" suicides [if not, as Joe Hickman suggests, murders]? Also, please comment on "the suicide note" of al-Hanashi.</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I have indeed looked briefly at the deaths of Awal Gul and Inayatullah/Nassim. Both raise questions even upon a superficial look. I have not had the time to really dig into their deaths. The timeline around Gul’s death seems suspicious. And how did Inayatullah/Nassim ever get past guards to carry a blanket into the recreation yard, which he supposedly used then to hang himself? It’s not like you can hide a blanket!<br />
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The media reaction to the deaths has for the most part been awful. <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-guantanamo-suicides/">Harpers did open up their pages to Hickman and Scott Horton</a>. But when in 2010 the story got an National Magazine Award there was significant growling from the rest of the media. Most amazing, to me, was the tirade of abuse coming from the pages of Adweek, an advertising industry stalwart. That must have thrown editors into a frenzy, with what I believe was practically explicit warning to stay away from these kinds of story, derogated as irresponsible conspiracy-mongering. From that time forward, you did not see stories about the deaths at Guantanamo. A year earlier, Al Hanashi’s death had garnered a good deal of attention. But there was, except for myself, no follow-up. It was as if marching orders had been given. Major journalists who had worked on the torture story – Mark Benjamin at Salon, Jane Meyer at The New Yorker – were either condemnatory of the Harpers piece, or silent.<br />
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In general, the press does not attempt to look beyond the official story at Guantanamo, and this is especially true when it comes to the deaths at Guantanamo. I’ve never seen the <em>Miami Herald’s</em> Carol Rosenberg, for instance, question the government narrative around any of these deaths, or at least I’ve seen nothing in print. I tried to get people interested in the fact I discovered a government meeting in February 2002 where the deaths of early arrivals at Guantanamo, from “battlefield wounds,” was casually discussed, even after I verified with the government official that he had in fact been told of such deaths. It was as if such evidence fell like sterile seeds onto a hard, barren rocky and soilless field. I write about that in my book, too.<br />
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You ask about the tying of hands in the case of four of the suicides. Uniquely, Al Amri’s hands were tied behind his back. The three 2006 prisoners found dead had hands bound in front, and some sort of masks on their faces, not to mention rags stuffed down their throats. None of this seems natural. The government alleges that the 2006 deaths were really a form of Al Qaeda mass suicide, conducted in a ritualistic manner as a form of “asymmetric warfare.” They are totally silent about Al Amri, even seemed to try and hide the circumstances of his death. I did some research on whether hands tied behind the back was a typical finding in suicide cases. No, it is rare. Apparently it can be done. But the authorities I consulted said that you would have to take seriously the possibility also of foul play. I see no indication that government investigators ever considered such a possibility. Indeed, in Al Amri’s case, actual evidence was thrown away or destroyed.<br />
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Al Hanashi’s so-called suicide note written on the last day of his life indicated that he was tired of living because of the prospect of abuse of the Koran and Islam in general, and the threat to turn the psychiatric unit at Gitmo over to harsher forms of discipline. He also that very day been pointedly rejected by a leading medical provider when he complained of being tortured. All of this could have led to a decision to kill himself. But as I show in my book, the means by which he killed himself, if he did so by himself, came from unauthorized access to materials he should not have had. Meanwhile, an earlier document, written about a month before, suggested he had consulted with Islam authorities inside Guantanamo and they had said suicide was acceptable to God under the conditions they were in. Internally, Guantanamo officials told medical personnel that Al Hanashi was on some sort of directed suicide list. Certainly Al Hanashi had indicated a wish to die and made multiple suicide attempts in the weeks and months leading up to his death. The “suicide note” never indicates that he was going to kill himself that very day, so I don’t think we can call it a suicide note strictly speaking.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>One subject I found of interest was the crazy weight fluctuations you have described from the available unredacted records-- how a prisoner might go from, say, a thin 130 lbs. to Auschwitz survivor level of 80, sometimes even, 70 lbs. in a matter of weeks, and then back. You have noted a few possible explanations for this, including deliberate withholding of food in an effort to break the men or otherwise psychologically control them as part of broader psychological experimentation and torture, force-feeding, including pumping detainees up with fluids,hunger striking, or of course, mis-recording, whether as a result of outright negligence or incompetence in weighing or recording or for some more deliberate purpose, You hinted at it in your book, but do you have your own working theory on what the hell was going on with these wildly disparate weight readings?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I know there have been some in the medical and legal community who have examined this issue. I’m not at liberty to discuss their research. Thus far it has not been published, and I’m not certain it ever will be. I’ve shown that some of the weight fluctuations seem almost impossible to believe. I’m not sure it’s even physically possible to gain 30 or 40 pounds in a matter of days. The forced-feeding is abusive, it goes without saying. They certainly didn’t want a Gitmo version of Bobby Sands on their hands. <br />
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The primary misunderstood fact about Guantanamo was that it was a facility for experimentation. Top Pentagon brass referred to it themselves as a “Battle Lab in the War on Terror.” Later this embarrassed them and they tried to suppress that fact, even redacting the term in a FOIA document I received. But I was able to cross-check that document with a quote from it in <a href="http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20081211.pdf">the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse</a>, and successfully appeal that redaction.<br />
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The reference in the book is to a decades-old meeting of CIA and military-linked health scientists, one of whom, Josef Brozek, who conducted something called<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment"> the Minnesota Starvation Study in 1944-45</a>, considered then and even now as the definitive study on human starvation and semi-starvation. At a psychiatry symposium on “forceful indoctrination’ in 1956, Brozek told those present, who included the former Chief Medical Officer at Alcatraz, that differential offerings and withdrawals of food, combined with “other forms of deprivation and insults” can induce a “breakdown” in most people. I truly believe the U.S. government analyzed everything that happened at Guantanamo, and that food, even the forced feedings and the prisoners’ own hunger strikes, were used to collect data in their insatiable effort to gain knowledge about human beings so they can be controlled. It is a fantasy that they will ever achieve total control, but that doesn’t keep them from trying.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Let's talk about record-keeping, such as the mysterious disappearance of the seemingly omniscient "DIMS" (Detainee Information Management System) that invariably failed right around the time of any prisoner deaths. In particular in the case of al-Hanashi, it seems an order (from NCIS? Or was it Langley, VA?) came down to stop making recordings in a DIMS system whose instructions included " "Relevant observations" of detainee behavior to be recorded include requests for copies of the Koran; refusals to let their cell be searched; refusal of a meal; visits by non-block personnel; and anything deemed a "significant activity."" And something near and dear to both of us professionally, I suppose, forensic records- in this case, criminal, psychological, medical and so forth... even in the redacted form you received some of them, there was left a great deal to be desired. You also noted, that even with "DIMS' in place, there was an apparent false entry concerning a headcount concerning the three simultaneous 2006 "suicides." Please comment on this, and if you have had a chance to observe other military records, or in the civilian context, can you compare and contrast with what is clearly endemic -- somewhere between "lapses of protocol" and outright deliberate cover-up, quite probably criminal in nature?</em> <br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> The DIMS system did not fail. It was deliberately sabotaged in the case of al Hanashi, as you note– ordered turned off – and manipulated with false information in other cases. In the case of Al Latif, evidently the failure was to enter necessary data, in other words, a human failure, if indeed it was a failure and not a deliberate obfuscation of evidence.<br />
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Unfortunately, I cannot give you an opinion as to the legality of such shenanigans, as I am not legally trained. The only contemporary documents I have experience with are medical records and reports, as well as psychotherapy notes. I also have experience looking at government documents of various sorts, but I don’t believe I have seen anything to match the situation with the DIMS. It would be as if a bank had its security monitoring systems turned off just as a major hack was taking place and money stolen. In this case, men’s lives were stolen from them.<br />
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I think your readers and the common man would hear about all this and think, where there’s smoke there’s fire. This kind of obvious destruction of or tampering with records, or the creation of records, is sadly nothing new. We have the example of the destruction by the CIA of the torture videotapes. Over 40 years ago, just as the revelations around the CIA’s notorious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra">MKULTRA program</a> was taking place, the CIA destroyed massive amounts of documents related to that program. No one was prosecuted or indicted for that. Back in 1999, a U.S. academic told Congress that documents he was seeking about the U.S. biowarfare program and its collaboration with the World War II Japanese war criminals <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731">of Unit 731</a> and similar operations were being destroyed upon his inquiry. The charge was entered in the Congressional Record, and helped lead to the passing of the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act a few years later, and the declassification of the documents. But no one was held to account for what was destroyed. <br />
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Of course, I believe the destruction of records in a criminal case, especially a case of possible murder, would, you’d think, carry even greater penalties and merit greater attention from authorities. But it didn’t, although my book does document an internal investigation by NCIS into the turning off of DIMS in the al Hanashi case. That investigation, however, went nowhere, or its findings were covered-up.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>You are, of course, a practicing psychologist. In that light, can you describe some of the stresses (or stressors) these men were under-- we can talk about the three men [al-Amri, al-Hanashi and Latif] you have profiled, and then talk about the more general "treatment" that men at Guantanamo have been, and as far as we know, still are subjected to. Americans, being on the whole, not very imaginative (or perhaps this is just what the media tells them) generally assume that "torture" has to mean "waterboarding" or some overt act that, say, Torquemada might have employed during the Inquisition, rather than, oh, sleep deprivation, or "stress positions," or constant cell moving, or denial of dignity or indefinite detention itself or any of the other "degrading treatment" that, along with torture, is barred by international and domestic law (including treaty). So... bottom line it, please for the three guys your book discusses, and then, as a practicing psychologist, describe the likelihood that such treatment might result in suicide attempts.</em> <br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> The autopsy report for Mohammad al Hanashi stated that he suffered from “adjustment disorder, anti-social personality disorder and stressors of confinement." What did the military mean by “stressors of confinement”? They do not say, but it can only mean the stressors of an imprisonment that was precisely calculated to break down men psychologically. This was done by applying the formula of DDD – Debility, Dependency, and Dread. This form of torture was codified in a 1950s article by famous U.S. psychologist Harry Harlow, CIA-linked psychiatrist Louis Joylon West, and another researcher. By debility, they meant the physical weakening of the prisoner. <br />
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We’ve already discussed starvation and differential food intake. Other major factors inducing physical weakness included solitary confinement, forms of sensory deprivation and sensory overload (loud music, strobe lights), constant lighting or deprivation of light, exposure to cold, use of drugs, beatings, sleep deprivation, forced exercise, and stress positions. This is likely not a definitive list. By dread, of course they mean induction of fear. This was done by threats to life, to the life and safety of family members, threats of physical harm, use of the sanctioned Army Field Manual technique, used even today, of “Fear Up,” manipulation of phobias (as determined by psychologists), and again, likely more. The whole idea, you see, is to break the prisoner’s sense of self by an attack on the body, its autonomic nervous system, and its sense of personal self and connection to the world in order to produce total dependency, the third D, in the prisoner for purposes of “exploitation.”<br />
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By “exploitation,” the CIA and Pentagon mean not only the gathering of information, but the use of prisoners for other purposes as well: as experimental subjects, as informants, as propaganda tools in show trials. <br />
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But the government had one problem. Individuals exposed to these “stressors of confinement” experienced intolerable pain via the induction of such breakdown. Some, many turned to self-harm to reduce that pain, even at the expense of their own lives. Government documents speak to a rash of suicide attempts in the early years at Guantanamo. Government psychiatrist Elspeth Ritchie, who later gave talks on the neurological effects of mefloquine, and also did government assessments of detainees at Guantanamo, was supposedly sent to Guantanamo in late 2002 to deal with a spate of suicide attempts or “gestures” there. Ritchie later was involved in the training of psychologists and other mental health professionals in the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams used to assist interrogators and Guantanamo camp officials. Even later yet, she became chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia's Department of Mental Health. I believe she is now retired. <br />
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In clinical work, each person’s situation is unique and their response to environmental stressors, even torture, is also individual to them. Not everyone tortured gets PTSD or tries to commit suicide. People also try to commit suicide, or succeed in doing so, who have never been tortured or experienced extreme environmental insult or trauma.<br />
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In the case of the Guantanamo detainees who died by purported suicide, all we can do is look at the evidence we have. In the case of the three detainees who died in 2006, there is no evidence that they were suicidal prior to their deaths. Even the so-called suicide notes were not really suicide notes. <br />
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In the case of the 2007 death of Al Amri, the government has chosen to withhold hundreds of pages of documents from the NCIS investigation into his death. What little information we have is contradictory. There’s a possibility that he was in poor health, and that might have inclined him, along with torture and “conditions of confinement,” to have considered suicide. Additionally, we know there’s a good likelihood that he, along with 2006 “suicide,” Ali Abdullah Ahmed, were administered mefloquine for reasons having nothing to do with malaria or prevention of malaria. Mefloquine is a controversial antimalarial drug that has been documented to cause extreme neurological and psychological side effects, including suicidal behavior. Both Al Amri and Ahmed were tested for the presence of mefloquine in their systems. This was not a routine lab test.<br />
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I think my book adequately documents the persistent suicidal behaviors and thoughts of both Al Hanashi and Al Latif. They suffered greatly and were certainly depressed. It is also certain that their conditions were caused by or exacerbated by mistreatment at Guantanamo. We don’t know the full extent of the harm caused, and we don’t know if their suicides were truly spontaneous. I make a case that they were allowed to happen. In that case, we have murder by medical negligence, or by clever design. I think one would need to see the full panoply of evidence as presented in my book and the documents I published to judge for oneself if that conclusion is merited.<br />
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I’d like to add some convergent evidence to my own findings. In a recently released 2012 psychiatric assessment of the purported USS Cole bomber, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, held at Guantanamo since 2006, after years of torture in CIA black site prisons, Dr. Sandra Crosby stated lacked “appropriate mental health treatment at Guantanamo.” Dr. Crosby said that Al Nashiri’s medical and psychiatric care was “woefully inadequate to his medical needs.” She found that Guantanamo medical professionals, including those in mental health care, were instructed not to inquire into the basis of his mental distress, and to ignore protestations of torture. They misdiagnosed Al Nashiri to cover-up the real nature of his condition and provide stigmatizing diagnoses, like Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3520087-Redacted-Classified-Appendix.html">See PDF page 129</a>) <br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Your book observes that, certainly with the three suicides you profile, that there was "contraband" in the cells (be it in general population camps, or in the "Behavioral Health Unit", a euphemism if not oxymoron), including sheets or underwear one could hang himself with, razors to cut said sheets (or self) or drugs, and then let's juxtapose that with monitoring of cells, supposedly by camera and direct visual observation. Both from the documents you have obtained, people you've talked to, and your own surmise, what do you think was going on? In particular, I'm wondering if we're looking at "gross negligence," "failure to follow standard operating procedures," intentional-assisted-suicide (i.e. homicide) or something else?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I believe that certain detainees were singled out for harm. The reasons are murky. I’d guess that the guards were responsible, if not at least complicit. Al Hanashi and Al Latif were in particular considered troublesome and problematic. It was also believed Al Hanashi was some kind of leader or spokesperson for the other detainees. I think they were hated by medical and guard personnel, if not command officials, and their deaths were therefore facilitated. In other words, it was known they were suicidal, or that they could be driven to suicidal desperation, and the means were provided to them. Can I prove it? No, although there is plenty of circumstantial evidence. There is also testimony that such contraband material was provided to detainees, as well as testimony that in the case of Al Hanashi, Al Amri and Al Latif that they had materials or drugs that could be used to harm themselves, materials that were heavily monitored and controlled by prison authorities. Speaking of monitoring, there is also the fact these detainees were under constant surveillance and searched repeatedly. How they found time to render complex modes of killing themselves without being observed is a mystery to all who have looked at these cases. <br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Let's talk about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bogdan">Col. John Bogdan</a>, whose command pretty much precipitated the most widespread (in terms of percentage of participation) of the many hunger strikes that broke out at GTMO-- a hunger strike so widespread that it captured the public imagination and made Barack Obama start to pick up the pace of periodic reviews and prisoner transfers out. In particular, we're talking about the context of Latif, as it seems that Bogdan wanted him punished for his behavior issues, and so, notwithstanding that he should have been on suicide watch and probably had pneumonia, was transferred back to a camp 5 solitary cell, rather than held in a medical facility. Bogdan seemed unusually martinet-like, even for an unpleasant place like Guantanamo. We should note that, interestingly, no prisoner actually died during the tenure of the notorious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_D._Miller">Gen. Geoffrey Miller</a>. But Bogdan in particular seemed hellbent on making life hell for his prisoners, and while he may have been at an extreme, I think other commanders-- and you note at least one psychologist who evidently walked away from a prisoner/patient in the middle of a consult-- had their role in the prisoner suicides. Can you comment on this (what I call "personnel = destiny")?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> If I read your question correctly, you are asking about the personal culpability of individuals at Guantanamo for the abuse and the deaths. Bogdan is a convenient, if not an apt, scapegoat. He made the decision to move Latif to a cell as punishment, even as he was warned by others that Latif was going to commit suicide. Oddly, Bogdan says he didn’t get the high priority email warning him, but says even if he did, it wouldn’t have changed his mind. Bogdan ran the prison with a heavy hand, and his insensitivity to the distress of the prisoners is clear in what we have of the documentation. But I say Bogdan is a scapegoat, because while he is certainly responsible at least in part for Latif’s death, I’d lay the responsibility more at the hands of the doctors and medical personnel who cleared Latif for transfer out of the detainee hospital’s Behavioral Health Unit. And Bogdan needed that clearance to transfer Latif. These doctors should have seen the signs, for instance, of pneumonia. They also know how distressed Latif was, and how mentally ill he was. They were in charge of watching that medications were actually taken and not hoarded or disposed of. It was even known that Latif was being sent back to a cell where he had previous bad experience causing significant mental distress. Apparently there was some kind of generator hum or something causing constant noise that set him on edge. Interestingly, the high-value prisoner, former CIA prisoner Ramsi bin al Shibh has also protested the use of vibrations and noise in his cell at Camp 7 at Guantanamo. <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article62287467.html">A recent article at the Miami Herald described his accusation of the use of noise and vibrations as a form of sleep deprivation</a>, as it makes it very hard to concentrate or sleep. Did something similar happen to Latif? It seems very possible. Other detainees as well have complained about such sensory disturbance.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Can you comment on the quality of care-- both medical care in general and mental health care in particular-- as you have observed it at Guantanamo, whether from the records you have seen, anecdotal evidence, or otherwise? I note that I have some familiarity with the case of <a href="http://gtmoblog.blogspot.com/">Candace Gorman's</a> client al-Ghizzawi, who, at various times, was told he might have tuberculosis, AIDS, assorted liver problems and other ailments, but who, thankfully, was released before GTMO killed him.</em> <br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I think I have touched on this point already. I will only add that the quality of care at Guantanamo was fatally compromised by the secret nature of the prison, and the subordination of medical care to command and intelligence decision-making. Medical records at Guantanamo, despite many complaints and exposure over the years, remain available to investigators. There is no privacy for the “patients” there. Moreover, the diagnoses of patients was also used to stigmatize prisoners, not to accurately assess condition and thereby treatment. How can you have humane care for prisoners in a torture prison? The answer is you can’t. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t moments of caring by individual providers. Some detainees have testified to that. But these were the exceptions, moments of respite in an inexorable regime of cruelty. The providers involved, by giving themselves over to care, legitimized such cruelty, in my mind. They compromised their ethics and became parties to torture and war crimes, such as illegal experimentation. The academic medical ethics professionals call the problem one of dual loyalty, split loyalty, that is, to the military or CIA and to the canon of medical care. They would like to believe that this divided loyalty could be worked out somehow. But in practice, the individual almost always bows to the coercive authority. In all the years at Guantanamo, we only know of one medical protest, the nurse who a few years ago decided he would not participate in the inhumane forced feedings there. He was threatened with court martial, and while that didn’t happen, his military career was certainly destroyed or fatally compromised.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Your book ends on an interesting note that might strike some as discordant, noting a "holdback" by progressives to criticize the handling of GTMO issues by a Democratic Administration, for short-term electoral benefit. I note that [my college classmate!] Barack Obama actually had charge of Guantanamo for about a year longer than George W. Bush did, and unlike Dubya, Obama promised- consistently-- that he would close the prison at Guantanamo (in practice, he really meant move it, but he didn't even manage to do that). In any event, the point, I suppose, is that once Guantanamo ceased to be a partisan issue associated solely with Dubya, overall public interest waned dramatically, as (you noted) no one it seems wanted to risk undermining Democratic electoral chances by criticizing the policy of a sitting Democrat, notwithstanding, of course, that this is exactly how you end up with Donald Trump, and of course, we did. All that said, we're over 15 years into this, and there are 41 poor bastards still there, of whom three are "convicted" of something by the dubious military commissions, another seven charged in the commissions system (including the alleged 9-11 plotters) will probably die before their commission trials are ever completed, five are "cleared for transfer" (good luck, guys) and 26 are "forever prisoners"-- too dangerous, bla bla bla. Its fairly obvious that, at least for the foreseeable future, Trump is such a target rich environment that getting the public imagination focusing on Guantanamo again seems a long-shot. You and I have been interested in this subject a long time, and neither us nor anyone else seems to have come up with a narrative that Americans care about, even though we believe this will be a blemish of historical proportions, like the Japanese internment, for example. And yet... Obviously, your work, and the work of others interested in running down the horrifying truth about prisoner deaths at Guantanamo is essential to establishing "the story." Do you see anything else on the horizon that can alter the present moribund (I swear, Obama said he would close GTMO so many times, most people believe he already did) narrative?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> Unfortunately I do not. I cannot, however, limit the question of indifference to Guantanamo. What about the pervasive ill treatment of prisoners in U.S.-sited prisons? What about the pervasive racism? The neglect of the homeless? The lack of remorse or moral quandary over the literally millions killed by the U.S. military in my own lifetime?<br />
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The record, to be sure, is ambiguous and not one-sided. There is plenty of mistrust and scandal around the record of CIA torture. But it only goes as far as official Washington or the mainstream press of record shapes the boundaries of acceptable scandal. So while the anal rape of prisoners has finally broken through to public consciousness and has been written about, the drugging of prisoners remains something barely mentioned, and even, at this point, pointedly suppressed.<br />
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I do believe, as I’ve written, that the entire subject of torture has been subordinated to political concerns: first, the need to present the United States as some kind of beacon of human rights in the world, especially in contrast to its “enemies.” And second, as a club to wield over one’s domestic political opponents. In the latter matter, the Democrats, including most of their so-called progressive supporters, have buried protest over torture and crimes committed by Democratic administrations, and tried to present the issue has one of purely GOP perfidy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Torture is bipartisan. Nowhere is this greater represented than by the total failure of the press and, well, nearly everyone, to ignore the recent <a href="http://www.ushrnetwork.org/sites/ushrnetwork.org/files/cat_us_concluding_observations_2014.pdf">UN Committee Against Torture report on the use of torture and “ill-treatment” in the Army Field Manual on interrogation</a>. If such a report was made about Bush or Trump, we’d not hear the end of it. But because it was about activities of the Obama administration, nothing is said or reported. This is criminal and immoral.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <em>Is there anything else I should have asked you about but didn't, or anything else the public needs to know on these critically important issues, particularly as we seem to be heading into even darker times of an ignorant, feckless President who wants to fill Guantanamo with "bad dudes" and facilitate torture?</em><br />
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<strong>Jeffrey Kaye:</strong> I want to mention before I go that I don’t believe all is dark. I don’t want to ignore the many, many people who are incensed by and have acted to stop torture. That includes former detainees, certain members of the armed forces and even the CIA. It especially includes the attorneys for the detainees and the organizations that employ them, including law firms and human rights organizations. Most prominent of the latter include the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Reprieve. The attorneys have gone over and over into the heart of the beast in an effort to represent their clients and try to win their trust. Some have come back and been outspoken in their outrage, even as the government puts legal shackles on what they are allowed to say: attorneys such as Candace Gorman, David Remes, David Frakt, Nancy Hollander, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, Shayana Kadidal and many, many others, too long a list to name. There are also the journalists who have kept the issue alive, and the publications that support their work. While I am critical of some of these journalists, and have said so in this interview, I am also grateful to them for attending to the exposure of these crimes. Journalists such as Jason Leopold, Carol Rosenberg, Michael Otterman, Sheri Fink, Bill Morlan, Mark Benjamin, James Risen, Doug Valentine, Greg Miller, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage and others. The criticism is that some of these journalists have been too quick to accept the government’s limited hangout of events. By limited hangout, I mean that governmental admissions are often too easily accepted as the full narrative, whereas often further crimes are ignored, and the real criminals left off the hook. <br />
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The government’s criminal justice system is the worst villain in this tale, as it has failed to do what it is supposed to do, hold government officials responsible for crimes, and the investigation of those crimes. That is one reason I concentrated on the failures of one of those investigatory agencies, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, in my book on Guantanamo. If we are going to get to the heart of the suppression of the truth, it should start with a close look at those officially responsible for the search for truth. That includes the need for a full declassification of the reports and associated documents of the Congressional investigating committees that have looked into this issue, none of which have recommended any kind of punishment for anyone involved in crimes they themselves documented.<br />
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I finally have to thank you as well, as an excellent example of someone who for years has pursued the truth, and tried to bring what evidence you could to bear before the public to expose these crimes. The interviews you have conducted have been invaluable. It is up to the American people to act. It is part of our historical dilemma that the need for action is acute, while the road to effect such action is unclear or even blocked.<br />
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<strong>The Talking Dog:</strong> <i>I join my readers in thanking Dr. Jeffrey Kaye for that thorough and thought-provoking interview. Interested readers should check out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI">Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation into the “Suicides” of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri</a> . </i></blockquote>
Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-87445811562948780132017-02-20T13:36:00.000-08:002017-02-20T13:37:13.945-08:00Mystery Surrounds Guantánamo Detainee's "Suicide"[<i>This article was written by Jeffrey S. Kaye and first <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39537-mystery-surrounds-guantanamo-detainee-s-suicide">published on February 18, 2017 at Truthout.org</a>. It is reposted here with permission from Truthout. </i><i>Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without <a href="mailto:editor@truthout.org">permission</a>.</i>]<br />
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In January 2002 the US government started incarcerating "war on terror" prisoners at specially built facilities at the Naval base at Guantánamo Bay. On January 25, 2017, a <a href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-draft-of-the-executive-order-on-cia-black-sites/2288/">draft executive order</a> by Trump proposed reversing President Obama's January 2009 executive order to close the Guantánamo detention site.<br />
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The Cuba-sited camp <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/how-guantanamo-became-americas-interrogation-battle-lab">was chosen</a> precisely to keep operations there as secret and unaccountable as possible. What happens inside the facility is carefully hidden from public view, and this is especially true when prisoners have died.<br />
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Officially, the fifth person to die at Guantánamo was a Yemeni prisoner, Mohammad Saleh Al Hanashi. Authorities ruled his death a suicide, but government documents from the investigation into his June 2009 death, released in May 2015, reveal serious tampering with documentary evidence at the scene, calling into question the legitimacy of the investigation into how he died.<br />
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Furthermore, similar tampering seems to have occurred in relation to other detainee deaths. This article will, for the most part, concentrate on the investigation into Al Hanashi's death, following <a href="http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/86847:murder-at-guantanamo">earlier</a> reporting on <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/6981:recently-released-autopsy-reports-heighten-guantanamo-suicides-mystery">his case</a> at Truthout.<br />
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<b>Files "Missing and Unrecoverable"</b><br />
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According to a partial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, into their investigation into the June 1, 2009, death of Al Hanashi at Guantánamo, key evidence from a computer detainee tracking and database system was ordered suppressed in the very first minutes after his body was discovered.<br />
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Numerous documents in the FOIA release relate how in the first minutes after Al Hanashi's body was discovered, an unidentified NCIS agent told Guantánamo staff to turn off the computer database, known as the Detainee Information Management System (DIMS), which monitors all interactions with detainees by camp staff. The question of who ordered this became the object of an internal NCIS investigation that has never been revealed in the press until now.<br />
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As NCIS agents discovered that the order came from someone within NCIS itself, an internal investigation was begun to discover why this violation of standard operating procedure took place. No final conclusion concerning this investigation was part of the FOIA release, and while NCIS's FOIA office told this author all materials were in fact released, the NCIS Public Affairs office failed to return multiple requests for further comment about the shutdown of DIMS.<br />
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Further irregularities, amounting to evidence of a possible cover-up surrounding Al Hanashi's death, appear to have taken place later in relation to the computer database files from Guantánamo's Behavioral Health Unit, where Al Hanashi was incarcerated at the time of his death. Nearly eight months after a FOIA request was filed on the investigation into his death, a July 23, 2012, NCIS memo titled "Missing Material from Dossier" found, "[a]fter an exhaustive search of all sources," that all the DIMS logs from the Behavioral Health Unit (BHU) for the day of and the day after Al Hanashi's death were "missing and unrecoverable." (<i>See Part One, page 5, in documents on this <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/mohammed-salih-al-hanashi/">linked page</a>.</i>)<br />
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Some idea of what was deleted surfaced in another NCIS investigation report from January 2010 -- written before all the DIMS records for the day of Al Hanashi's death and the day after went missing. In this report, the investigating agent noted that the final entry from the DIMS record on the evening Al Hanashi died was "Received medication" (apparently for sleep). The time was 2118, or 9:18 pm. After that, the DIMS record went silent.<br />
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The fact that official notification of the missing computer database logs at Guantánamo came only <i>after</i> a FOIA request was filed with NCIS into its investigation of Al Hanashi's death seems, at least on the surface, suspicious. It suggests that evidence was possibly destroyed after the fact, once deeper journalistic interest in the case was shown.<br />
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The missing logs may have included the identity of the person who ordered the DIMS entries turned off, but short of a full-scale investigation with subpoena powers, we will likely never know who that was now.<br />
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The NCIS FOIA materials, which are at times heavily censored, discuss other irregularities with the investigation, including the failure to properly maintain the security of evidence central to a verdict of suicide, which was sent by US mail for laboratory analysis.<br />
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<b>A Pattern of Suppressing Evidence?</b><br />
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A failure to document key entries into the DIMS computer database during the crucial period surrounding a detainee's death also occurred during the hours surrounding the September 2012 death of another detainee, Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif, who, like Al Hanashi, also died in the BHU at Guantánamo. A <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/adnan-farhan-abd-latif/">special Army investigation</a>, called an AR 15-6 report, cited the failure to make entries into the DIMS record at the time of Latif's death as a violation of camp standard operating procedures.<br />
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The Army report said, " ... the lack of entries did make it difficult after the fact to re-create the immediate events leading up to the point that the guards found [Latif] unresponsive."<br />
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Was there a pattern to suppress information from Guantánamo's computer surveillance and database system in instances of detainees' deaths?<br />
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DIMS is a facility-wide computer logging system used by guards and other Guantánamo personnel to keep copious and detailed notes on every prisoner at the Cuba-based facility. Turning off DIMS entries was a serious violation of Guantánamo procedures. The 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) manual, <a href="https://file.wikileaks.org/file/gitmo-sop-2003-2004.html">released by Wikileaks</a>, has detailed instructions for what should be recorded on DIMS.<br />
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Guantánamo authorities watched over detainee behavior very closely. Literally anything of interest was supposed to be recorded in DIMS. The SOP states, "There is always significant activity occurring on a block. There should be no DIMS SIGACT [significant activities] sheet filled out with 'Nothing to report.'"<br />
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The manual notes, "How the detainee reacted, observation by other detainees, and other potentially relevant observations will be annotated in DIMS."<br />
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"Relevant observations" of detainee behavior to be recorded include requests for copies of the Koran; refusals to let their cell be searched; refusal of a meal; visits by non-block personnel; and anything deemed a "significant activity."<br />
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A list of "significant activities" include banging on the cell, "showing reverence to another detainee," displays of "extreme emotion," requesting an interpreter, and harming oneself, among others. The SOP notes, "All data entries via DIMS must be specific and complete."<br />
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The system goes back to the early years of the Guantánamo prison. According to a <a href="http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=25866">February 17, 2005, statement</a> by then-commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo, Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the DIMS system "allows us to keep track of nearly every aspect of a detainee's daily life."<br />
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The Army report on Latif's death explained, "DIMS is the primary tool used to track day-to-day information about detainees, and is made up of electronic entries regarding each detainee." Army investigators looking into the Latif case relied on the veracity of DIMS entries as more reliable than eyewitness memories.<br />
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Army investigators had much the same to say regarding the DIMS system in an <a href="http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/Detainee_Related/DicksteinGTMO_SJA_DeathInvestigation.pdf">AR 15-6 report</a> on possible Camp Delta SOP violations in the wake of the three Guantánamo "suicides" in 2006.<br />
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In late August 2006, the Army's AR 15-6 report was completed. Its section on DIMS was as follows:<br />
<blockquote>
The Detainee Information Management System (DIMS) is the primary system for Camp Delta guards to record everything related to detainee and events that occur in the blocks, as well as the primary system employed by the JDG staff in performance of staff duties....<br />
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At the cell block level, guards enter log entries into DIMS at the beginning of each shift, and throughout the shift. These entries are reviewed by Platoon Leaders, Sergeants of the Guard, Block NCOs, and sometimes the FGIW officer, before and during the watch. Because DIMS entries are mandatory, continually updated, and thorough, they provide a significant source of information to the events that occurred on 9 June 2006. (<i>See pages SJA 37-39, and SJA 83 in the Army report.</i>)</blockquote>
In a <a href="http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/Detainee_Related/DicksteinGTMO_SJA_DeathInvestigation2.pdf">June 22, 2006, NCIS Investigative Action report</a> on the detainee deaths earlier that month -- a "Review of Standard Operation Procedures for Camp Delta, JTF-GTMO" -- the NCIS reporting agent explained that DIMS was "used to annotate everything related to a Detainee.... Items to be recorded in DIMS are 'Meal refusals, conversations, behavioral problems, leadership, prayer leadership, teaching, preaching, rule breaking, coordination with other detainees, movements, requests, everything.'" (<i>See page SJA 237 of Army report.</i>)<br />
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The computer database also contained important documents by the guard force (the Joint Detention Group), including a "Daily Block NCO checklist, Random Headcount reports, and Significant Activity Sheets."<br />
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<b>Falsified Computer Data in Earlier "Suicide" Cases</b><br />
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The old computer-related adage -- "garbage in, garbage out" -- is worth considering as well when it comes to DIMS entries. So, for instance, and crucially, according to the Army AR 15-6 report on the 2006 "suicides," investigators found that the 2350 (or 11:50 pm) random headcount of detainees the night of the 2006 "suicides" had been "falsely reported" by "an unknown member of the Alpha Block guard team." Such headcounts, recorded in DIMS, "required immediate visual confirmation of detainee [two or three words redacted] in each cell."<br />
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According to the Army's investigation, "no guard remembers performing the 2350 headcount." Yet, the report was there in DIMS.<br />
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This is a crucial finding of falsification of evidence contemporaneous to events in the 2006 detainee deaths. It should have been a red flag. But Army investigators minimized the fact that someone was lying about the headcount of cellblock prisoners, three of whom would soon be found dead. Instead, they found the falsification of the cellblock census (which is what a random headcount is) to be "insignificant." Their reasoning? Medical teams had concluded the bodies were already dead an hour before the 2350 headcount was made.<br />
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Army authorities never asked why the headcount was falsified, or explained how they knew it was.<br />
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In fact, the falsified headcount is not "insignificant" at all if one concludes the detainees did not die the way the government said they did. That was the conclusion of former Guantánamo guard Joseph Hickman, who maintains in <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/23/guantanamo-bay-suicides-299432.html">public press accounts</a> and in his own book, that the detainees were brought back dead or nearly dead from a black site from within Guantánamo.<br />
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The problems with DIMS that surfaced in the 2006 "suicides" are worth remembering as we turn back to the situation surrounding the death of Al Hanashi.<br />
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<b>The Investigation Into Who Shut Down DIMS</b><br />
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The <a href="http://law.shu.edu/ProgramsCenters/PublicIntGovServ/policyresearch/upload/gtmo_death_camp_delta.pdf">DIMS database documented</a> the "Who, What, When, Where, Why and How" of what went on in Guantánamo's cell blocks and detainee hospital, and could have provided a contemporaneous timeline of events immediately following the discovery of Al Hanashi's body, free from the vagaries of memory or dissembling.<br />
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The shutdown of the detainee database was no small event. The situation surrounding DIMS was so sensitive that no one I approached would speak to me on the record about it.<br />
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An NCIS interim report, dated as early as two days after Al Hanashi died, described the shutdown of DIMS at the time of Hanashi's death: "The chronology of events surrounding the death of V/Al Hanashi were not logged into the DIMS system allegedly due to an NCIS agent requesting no additional logging take place." (<i>"V/Al Hanashi," a term used throughout NCIS reports, stands for Victim Al Hanashi.</i>) Without the DIMS records, there is no way to test the timeline or the veracity of the observations of guards or medical personnel.<br />
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The order to halt all logging on the Guantánamo computer database apparently came once Al Hanashi was found unresponsive in his cell and before he was pronounced dead. The individual who made the request was "undetermined."<br />
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By November 2, 2009, five months after his death, Al Hanashi's case had progressed to initial review by a "Death Review Panel" convened at NCIS's Southeast Field Office in Mayport, Florida. The panel determined "additional investigative leads should be conducted." Besides further documentation from the autopsy and the death scene, the panel tasked investigators to "contact NCIS Special Agent [redacted] and clarify her actions during her initial response to V/Al Hanashi's death and the utilization of the detainee's Information Management System Database (DIMS)."<br />
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On January 8, 2010, another "Investigative Action" memo reported on two telephonic interviews with a female NCIS agent at the scene of Al Hanashi's death, presumably the same Special Agent mentioned by the Death Review Panel.<br />
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This agent told the investigating NCIS agent "she did not instruct any JTF GTMO personnel to cease making entries into the DIMS pertaining to V/Al Hanashi." Furthermore, investigators said the agent told them "she would not have issued such an order even if she had the authority to do so citing her efforts to encourage documentation."<br />
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This same agent added she didn't know of any other NCIS agent who would have given such an order.<br />
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Interestingly, there were members of other agencies present at the time. According to the female NCIS agent, when she arrived at the death scene along with another NCIS agent, there were two agents of the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and an FBI Special Agent "already present at the BHU."<br />
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The female agent making the telephonic statement to NCIS added that she "doubted that any of the aforementioned personnel would have issues [sic] such a directive."<br />
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<b>Who Made the Last DIMS Entry?</b><br />
<br />
Despite all the missing information, in the first weeks of the investigation, NCIS determined via witness interviews of guard and medical staff, as well as "death scene processing," that the investigation had "failed to identify any suspicious circumstances surrounding V/Al Hanashi's death."<br />
<br />
Despite the claims of no suspicious circumstances, the mystery over who turned off DIMS entries was never cleared up, even after months, and even years of further investigation.<br />
<br />
NCIS investigation reports stated, "None of the aforementioned NCIS Special Agents that processed the death scene and/or initiated investigative actions pertaining to captioned investigation claimed that they instructed any JTF GTMO personnel to cease making entries into DIMS of V/Al Hanashi on 01/02 JUN09. In addition, all the aforementioned NCIS Special Agents advised that they would not have given such an instruction."<br />
<br />
And yet, someone gave the instruction.<br />
<br />
One person at Guantánamo, whose name was redacted in the FOIA release, was asked to provide the name of the person who made the last DIMS entry for Al Hanashi. This person told the NCIS investigator "he would have to send the request through his chain of command."<br />
<br />
Why NCIS thought this individual might know who the last person was to make a DIMS entry for Al Hanashi has not been explained, but the NCIS Agent investigating the matter did tell this person to contact NCIS "if he had difficulty obtaining the requested information."<br />
<br />
The FOIA record does not show that any name was ever obtained or reported back to NCIS. There is no record of this request up the chain of command ever being further discussed or acted upon.<br />
<br />
<i>Author's Note: All NCIS investigation documents into the death of Al Hanashi, and other government documents referenced in this article are available online at <a href="http://www.guantanamotruth.com/">GuantánamoTruth.com</a>. The material in this article was adapted from the book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cover-up-Guantanamo-Investigation-Suicides-Mohammed-ebook/dp/B01LWTOWRI">Cover-up at Guantánamo: The NCIS Investigation into the "Suicides" of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri</a>.</i>Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-85816383190059990602017-01-29T20:57:00.000-08:002017-02-04T12:31:12.773-08:00Trump Reveals Details of His CIA Torture Program: Isolation, Sleep Deprivation, Shackling, and Slow StarvationAccording to the <a href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-draft-of-the-executive-order-on-cia-black-sites/2288/">leaked draft version</a> of President Trump's Executive Order, "Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants," Trump's interrogation policy will resurrect a version of the CIA's torture program, such as it existed in July 2007. [See <i>Update</i> at end of posting.] That was when Steven Bradbury wrote an <a href="https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/886296/download">Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] memo to John Rizzo</a>, who was then Acting General Counsel at the CIA.<br />
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Trump's draft order rescinds two Executive Orders former President Obama issued in the first weeks of his first term. Section 1 of Trump's order reads:<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Revocation of Executive Orders.</i> Executive Orders 13491 and 13492 of January 22, 2009, are revoked, and Executive Order 13440 is reinstated to the extent permitted by law.</blockquote>
Besides formally shutting down the CIA's torture and detention program, and (supposedly) close Guantanamo, Obama's action also withdrew all the OLC memos on interrogation/torture drawn up during the Bush administration.<br />
<br />
Bush's <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-2007-07-30/pdf/WCPD-2007-07-30-Pg1000.pdf" target="_blank">Executive Order 13440</a>, "Interpretation of the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 as Applied to a Program of Detention and Interrogation Operated by the Central Intelligence Agency," was issued the same day as a new OLC memo that clarified the legalities as the Bush Administration wanted them to be to prosecute the CIA's interrogation and detention program, which had been under attack from various quarters at that time. EO 13440, where Bush signed off on the supposed compliance of the CIA's program with Common Article 3 protections in the Geneva Conventions, was meant to go with Bradbury's memo. It was a two-fer.<br />
<br />
Trump's order would withdraw Obama's own rescissions of the Bush-era CIA torture memos and replace them with Bradley's July 2007 memo. But none of the press accounts have explained what that means concretely. That's a shame, because the 2007 version of the CIA's torture program is very likely what we are going to see under a Trump-era CIA and national security interrogations in general.<br />
<br />
The 2007 Bradbury memo gives approval to six "techniques" for the CIA to use in its interrogation of "enemy combatants" who have been denied protections as "prisoners of war" under the Geneva Conventions.<br />
<br />
Similarly, even today, prisoners interrogated under the current Army Field Manual, approved by Obama and the US Congress, must adhere to Prisoner of War protections except those the administration deems unprotected or unprivileged. Those detainees are subject to further measures under the Field Manual's Appendix M.<br />
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The Appendix M techniques rely on sleep deprivation and solitary confinement or isolation, among other techniques, including the use sensory deprivation by means of goggles that obscure vision. As we shall see, these techniques are drawn from the more intense versions in the 2007 memo.<br />
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<b>"Conditions of Confinement"</b><br />
<br />
Both Trump's resurrection of the old OLC-CIA memo and today's Appendix M depend upon the use of isolation and sleep deprivation. For Bradbury, isolation and solitary confinement were relegated to "conditions of confinement." These conditions were promulgated in the CIA's black site prisons, under the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/newly-released-documents-confirm-bureau-of-prisons-visit-to-cia-torture-site-in-afghanistan/">advice and consult of the US Bureau of Prisons</a>, and -- incredibly -- with the knowledge of Congressional leadership, <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2014/12/17/ssci-confirms-staff-visited-cias-salt-pit-prison-in-2003-no-records-of-visit-kept-at-cia-request/">at least that of the Senate Intelligence committee</a>.<br />
<br />
Bradbury noted in his 2007 memo that he had no need to justify the issues raised in an <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/legacy/2010/08/05/memo-rizzo2006.pdf">OLC memo on the subject, "Application of the Detainee Treatment Act to Conditions of Confinement at Central Intelligence Agency Detention Facilities,"</a> which he authored in August 2006. The use of isolation and other "conditions of confinement" noted below were taken for granted in the 2007 memo, and we too need to shoehorn them into our understanding of the burgeoning Trump torture program.<br />
<br />
The other CIA "conditions of confinement" included blocking the vision of prisoners with some type of opaque material; forced shaving; the use of constant white noise and constant day-night illumination, as well as the practice of leg shackling in the cell.<br />
<br />
Given these cruel and inhuman, if not tortuous conditions in and of themselves, the 2007 memo approved six special "techniques," among them slow starvation and "extended sleep deprivation," which amounted to keeping prisoners awake in forced standing positions for up to 4 days straight.<br />
<br />
<b>Slow Starvation and Extended Sleep Deprivation</b><br />
<br />
The six "techniques" were as follows: 1) "Dietary manipulation," which means limiting caloric intake to "at least" 1000 calories per day, an amount that would result in slow starvation and malnutrition; and 2) "Extended sleep deprivation," which means up to 96 hours of enforced sleep deprivation, with up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation per month (maybe more if the CIA Director were to ask), and effected via use of shackles, extended standing (despite risk of dangerous edema), and the wearing of "under-garments" (really diapers), to shame the prisoner who cannot hold in urine or feces for up to four days straight.<br />
<br />
The other four "techniques" were drawn from the military's torture survival course (known as SERE), and included 3) "Facial hold"; 4) "Attention grasp"; 5) "Abdominal slap"; and 6) "Insult or Facial slap." All of these SERE techniques are meant to demonstrate power over the person interrogated, and to enhance the humiliation and terror of the prisoner.<br />
<br />
Taken together, there's no question that this 2007 version of the "enhanced interrogation" program, even though lacking use of the waterboard and confinement boxes, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at the least, and more likely torture as a normative description.<br />
<br />
The use of "dietary manipulation" deserves some further consideration. "Semi-starvation" was listed as a variable of "induced debilitation" in Albert Biderman's "chart of coercion", also known as "Biderman's Principles", which was taught to interrogators at Guantanamo by instructors from the Navy SERE program Dec. 2002, according to the <a href="http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/download/inquiry-into-the-treatment-of-detainees-in-us-custody">Senate Armed Services Committee 2008 report on Detainee Abuse</a> (p. 22 - link is a large PDF).<br />
<br />
"Semi-starvation" is a form of inducing debility in a prisoner. <a href="http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-documents-show-us-torture-was.html#.WI7GILYrKqB">According to Dr. Josef Brozek</a>, of "the famous Minnesota Starvation Study," who gave a talk on the subject to CIA-linked scientists back in a 1950s symposium, explained:<br />
<blockquote>
"A situation in which food would be offered on certain occasions and would be withdrawn on other occasions would constitute a more intensive psychological stress than food restriction alone. It would result in severe frustration, and would more readily break a man's moral fiber. By combining such a treatment with other forms of deprivation and insult, one could expect eventually to induce a "breakdown" in the majority of human beings." </blockquote>
I have campaigned long and hard against the use of Appendix M and other techniques within the Army Field Manual's main section, especially the techniques "Fear Up," "Futility," "Ego Down," and "Mutt and Jeff." But the proposed Trump interrogation program -- incorporating a more intense and inhumane form of sleep deprivation, forms of sensory deprivation, physical abuse inherent in the "slaps," and the use of shackling and starvation -- is a giant step in the <i>wrong</i> direction.<br />
<br />
Nothing describes the reactionary nature of a society more than its use of torture. The US has not rid itself of this evil, and even worse, it has collaborated with allies around the world to perpetuate it, even while formally, it has signed treaties that eschew the crime.<br />
<br />
According to news accounts, the Trump administration claims current members of the White House staff did not produce the new draft Executive Order, nor has Trump signed it... yet. Given the strident right-wing course of this administration, I don't think this draft EO is a trial balloon.<br />
<br />
The 2007 Bradbury memo derived its authorities, as it explained, from President Bush's September 17, 2001 <i>Memorandum of Notification </i>(MON), which gave the CIA authorization to run a detention program. That 2001 MON has never been rescinded, and no doubt Trump's attorneys will lean on it, and any new OLC memos considered necessary to firm up the implementation of the new torture program.<br />
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I believe the 2007 version of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program will be what the new Trump torture program will look like. What is described above is a first peek. I'm sure we'll hear and know more as time goes on.<br />
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<b><i>Update</i>: Wait! Trump pulls back</b><br />
<br />
A February 4 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/politics/black-site-prisons-cia-terrorist.html" target="_blank">New York Times article</a> by Charlie Savage reports that the Trump Administration has pulled back on portions of the draft interrogation memo discussed above. In particular, Trump appears to have pulled back on the full revocation of the Bush-era OLC memos, has dismissed a study of reopening the CIA black sites, and withdrawn any reliance on the 2007 Bradbury memo, which would allow for the "extensive sleep deprivation," solitary confinement, and other forms of abuse detailed above. Even so, the revised draft is supposed to contain language that would keep Guantanamo open.<br />
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The revised draft itself has not been released, so we'll have to wait to see what Trump actually intends. At the least, it sounds like he wishes to keep Guantanamo open, and accelerate interrogations, which would of course include Appendix M interrogations.<br />
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The Savage article says nothing about a provision to review the Army Field Manual. I wouldn't be surprised if an earlier suggestion from the Bush years -- to add a secret portion to the manual -- is recycled.<br />
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But even as is, as the UN committee that monitors the international treaty on torture made clear, the US interrogation program under the Army Field Manual provisions still contains cruel, inhumane, and degrading techniques, some of which rise to the level of torture (the UN singled out sensory deprivation actions that can cause psychosis). This remains true even if the press and the "liberal" bloggers don't care to report or comment on it!<br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-30825789872199924682017-01-19T18:23:00.000-08:002018-02-09T15:47:59.709-08:00U.S. Court Rules Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners Have No Right to Be ReleasedI'm very worried this story will be swamped by other news.<br />
<br />
Below is a press release put out today by the international human rights organization, Reprieve. It concerns an outrageous ruling by Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia. The ruling stated that long-time Guantanamo prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser cannot be released from Guantanamo, even though a government board said he could, and even though the only reason given is bureaucratic red tape.<br />
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The situation for 56-year-old Moroccan Abdul Latif is dire, because while President Obama has been able to release dozens of detainees from Guantanamo in his final weeks in office, the incoming president, Donald Trump, whose inauguration is imminent, has said he wants to keep Guantanamo open, and has criticized Obama for the recent prisoner releases.<br />
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According to Reprieve's <a href="http://www.reprieve.org/guantanamo-bay/abdul-latif-nasser/">website</a>, Abdul Latif was "sold for a bounty to the US military in 2002." His original habeas petition for release from detention dates back to April 2005. Can the wheels of justice grind any slower?<br />
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According to <a href="http://www.reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/gov.uscourts.dcd_.null_.null_.0-1.pdf">Kollar-Kotelly's court ruling</a>, last July the Guantanamo Periodic Review Board (PRB), established by President Obama to assess whether or not prisoners at Guantanamo merited ongoing incarceration, “determined that continued law of war detention of [Petitioner] is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” <br />
<br />
But Abdul Latif's home country, Morocco, was slow in giving the security assurances the U.S. wanted prior to release. <i>Those assurances were made</i>, however, via diplomatic note on December 28, 2016. But Congress requires <i>a 30-day notice prior to release</i>, and that 30-day notice will not be up by the time Trump becomes President. Tough luck for Abdul Latif, says the judge.<br />
<blockquote>
Because Morocco’s response came "less than 30 days before the Secretary of Defense would leave office, the Secretary of Defense did not make a final decision regarding the transfer, including whether the requirements of § 1034 of the 2016 NDAA were satisfied and the transfer was in the national security and policy interests of the United States, as he elected to leave that decision to his successor. Resp’ts’ Resp. at 6–7."</blockquote>
That "successor" is likely to be Marine Gen. James Mattis, who is <a href="http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/01/27/mattis-calls-on-congress-to-halt-guantanamo-prisoner-releases/">on record</a> as opposing any further Guantanamo releases. Because of red tape, Abdul Latif, who the PRB, a board composed of six agencies — the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — cleared for release, may be sealed up as in a tomb in what will now be Trump's Guantanamo.<br />
<br />
Even worse, it seems, is what Reprieve calls the "advisory" only aspect of the PRB ruling: "The Executive authority enacting the PRB review process unequivocally states that the PRB’s findings '[do] not address the legality of any detainee’s law of war detention.' Exec. Order No. 13,567 § 8 (2011)" To Judge Kollar-Kotelly, Abdul Latif cannot demonstrate any "invasion of a legally protected interest" in his continued indefinite detention. Maybe this makes some legal sense, but damn if anyone else will find reason in it.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, January 18, Reprieve attorneys "filed emergency litigation on Abdul Latif’s behalf, asking the court to relieve the Obama Administration of the burden of the 30-day Congressional notice requirement. This would allow the Administration to release him to Morocco, his home, before President-elect Trump took office."<br />
<br />
<b>Emergency Plea to President Obama</b><br />
<br />
But the court said today that the PRB ruling was only "advisory. Reprieve has written <a href="http://www.reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/2017_01_19_Abdul-Latif-Nasser-Letter-to-President-Obama.pdf">an emergency letter</a> today to President Obama asking him to release Abdul Latif immediately. <br />
<blockquote>
We have just learned that Abdul Latif's freedom will be denied by government red tape — a result that is as pointless as it is cruel. He was due to be released before you left office, but as the final days of your administration rushed by, we learned he would be left behind....<br />
<br />
We learned yesterday that the transfer process has simply been too slow. The Moroccan government just took too long to respond to the United States' resettlement request....<br />
<br />
We implore you now to use your enormous power to help a man whose fate is entirely in your hands. A man who your State Department promised to return to his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews in Morocco. We implore you to withdraw opposition to our motion today, and instruct your Defense Department to transfer Abdullatif home to Morocco immediately — a home that affirmatively requests his return. This is a result that all parties seek — Abdul Latif, the United States Government, and the Moroccan Government. Bureaucracy will steal yet more years of our client’s life unless you act now. <br />
<br />
Abdul Latif has a stable, loving family eagerly awaiting his return, as noted by the Periodic Review Board, and he will have the ongoing support of Reprieve's Life After Guantánamo program. There is no sense in the United States holding him even a day longer. We beg that you do not leave him stranded in Guantánamo Bay.</blockquote>
Imagine being one week shy of liberty, and then being trapped in a torture hell for life! <br />
<br />
<b>Reprieve Press Release</b><br />
<blockquote>
An American court has today ruled that men cleared for release in Guantánamo Bay have no legal right to leave the prison - despite winning in the only viable release mechanism they have. <br />
<br />
In declining to enable the emergency release of cleared prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser, the DC federal court insisted that Abdul Latif had no right to be released because a win at the Periodic Review Board is merely 'advisory'. This leaves prisoners at Guantánamo stranded: with no charge, no trial and no viable, enforceable path to release. <br />
<br />
Abdul Latif, a 51 year-old Moroccan, was unanimously cleared by the Periodic Review Board for transfer home to Morocco on July 11. He remains imprisoned simply because the government's transfer process has been too slow. There is no evidence that the Obama Administration did anything to hurry the process along.<br />
<br />
With no release in sight and fearing the worst, Abdul Latif filed emergency litigation last Friday. As part of this litigation, the US government admitted that bureaucratic slowness was the only reason he had not been returned home.<br />
<br />
Abdul Latif now faces indefinite detention at the mercy of the Trump Administration.<br />
<br />
Reprieve attorney Shelby Sullivan-Bennis said: "It is distressing that we cannot rely on our courts to enforce basic justice and common sense. Everyone wants Abdul Latif to go home—the US government, the Moroccan government, and his family. The government admits that his detention is “no longer necessary,” but will keep him simply because the change in administration has halted their plans—a devastating conclusion for Abdul Latif."<br />
<br />
The court's ruling <a href="http://www.reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/gov.uscourts.dcd_.null_.null_.0-1.pdf">is here</a>. More information about Abdul Latif‘s case and emergency litigation is available on the Reprieve US website, <a href="http://www.reprieve.org/guantanamo-bay/abdul-latif-nasser/">here</a>.</blockquote>
Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-60704257490021459312017-01-02T12:00:00.000-08:002017-01-11T09:55:01.460-08:00New DoD Document Claims Implausible Suicide Pact in Deaths of Gitmo Detainees Adnan Latif & Mohammad Al HanashiOn November 21, 2016, the U.S. military's Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) released a "Force Protection Report" and two high priority emails sent to Guantanamo's guard force commander, Colonel John V. Bogdan, concerning the suicide threat of Adnan Farhan Abd Latif, who died in the early morning hours the day following the report and the emails. <br />
<br />
Bogdan was in charge of JTF-GTMO's Joint Detention Group and was the Guantanamo official who recommended Latif be sent to a punishment cell in the island prison's Camp Delta, where he purportedly died of an overdose the next day. Latif also was suffering from pneumonia, according to the official Army Regulation 15-6 investigation into the “facts and circumstances” surrounding the September 8, 2012 death of Latif, a young brain-damaged detainee from Yemen, so it's strange that Bogdan got a medical release to send Latif to the punishment cell from the Behavioral Health Unit where he'd been held for severe mental illness and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.<br />
<br />
The small release of FOIA documents was in response to a request I made a little over three years ago. The full set of documents are posted at <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/adnan-farhan-abd-latif/">GuantanamoTruth.com</a> (or alternatively, <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3249274-FOIA-Bogdan-High-Priority-Email.html">here</a>).<br />
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<br />
<b>Intelligence Units Informed About Detainee's Suicidality</b><br />
<br />
While still heavily redacted, the FOIA release shows that information about what was thought at the time as a possibly imminent suicide attempt by Latif was shared with Guantanamo's intelligence unit at the "WFC" (Warning and Fusion Cell) and the "HOC" (HUMINT Operations Cell), which provided technical support to intelligence operations at the camp. <br />
<br />
Ever since the early days at Guantanamo, intelligence and guard units worked in close collaboration together, but what intelligence value Latif supposedly held is unknown. So far as I know, this new information is the first instance of Guantanamo's WFC and HOC units being reported as associated at all with Guantanamo's internal response to suicidal prisoners.<br />
<br />
Even more intriguing, the Force Protection report included a "Collectors Comment" that claimed Latif "was tasked to commit suicide with YSM-078 in June 2009." YSM-078 was Mohammed Al Hanashi, who the "collector" dryly notes "did commit suicide." The supposed suicides of Al Hanashi and Latif, and also the 2007 death of Abdul Rahman Al Amri in a high-security cell, are examined in detail, based on the FOIA release of numerous NCIS and military documents in my book, <a href="http://a.co/evcCx5f">Cover-up at Guantanamo</a>.<br />
<br />
Despite the claim Latif was "tasked" to kill himself, there is no indication in any other record released thus far, or anywhere in DoD's declassified AR 15-6 report on his death, that Latif was supposed to commit suicide with Al Hanashi in 2009, or told to die with the latter, who also was from Yemen. As the NCIS FOIA documents on Al Hanashi's death are quite extensive, it is clear that Al Hanashi did not die according to any plan on a particular date, but had been severely depressed and suicidal for months, if not years. In my reading of the documents, his final act of suicide was either facilitated by Guantanamo personnel, or he was killed and it was made to look like suicide, with the reason for such killing unknown. <br />
<br />
<b>A Suicide "Conspiracy"?</b><br />
<br />
It is worth noting that Behavioral Health Unit personnel were evidently <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2165370/ncis-hanashi-investigation-pt-7.pdf">told</a> "through various JTF meetings" that Al Hanashi himself was on a "directed suicide list." According to testimony from camp health personnel, Al Hanashi thought he was supposed to die with the three detainees who all supposedly committed suicide (or were killed) in 2006, but this was understood as something he felt guilty about. <br />
<br />
Camp authorities back in 2006 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11gitmo.html">characterized</a> the three deaths at that time as a joint suicide, an act of "asymmetric warfare," or alternately as "a 'mystical' belief at Guantánamo that three detainees must die at the camp for all the detainees to be released." (On the latter theory, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2006/dec/08/nation/na-gitmoculture8">see also here</a>.) <br />
<br />
The testimony of one Guantanamo guard, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/23/guantanamo-bay-suicides-299432.html">Joseph Hickman</a>, present in 2006 (who later went on to research what took place), and the work of a raft of researchers, including <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-guantanamo-suicides/">Scott Horton at Harper's magazine</a>, and <a href="http://law.shu.edu/ProgramsCenters/PublicIntGovServ/policyresearch/upload/gtmo_death_camp_delta.pdf">Seton Hall Law School professor Mark Denbeaux and a number of his students</a>, have poked significant holes in the Pentagon's story. <br />
<br />
A University of California at Davis professor, Almerindo Ojeda, found the deaths were suspiciously similar to the torture of another U.S. prisoner who had endured something called "<a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4511:death-in-guantanamo-suicide-or-dryboarding">dryboarding</a>." Even more, an alternative narrative emerged wherein the detainees were subjected to experiments, probably on interrogation or torture, possibly on the use of mefloquine as a torture agent, and died with the deaths then staged to look as suicides.<br />
<br />
The work of Horton, Denbeaux, Hickman, et al., was met by a <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/1381:deconstructing-the-campaign-to-malign-awardwinning-article-on-guantanamo-suicides">firestorm of criticism</a> calling the charges baseless "conspiracy." Hence, it is no small irony to consider that internally, camp officials told those responsible for the care of suicidal prisoners that there was a conspiracy about to have detainees kill themselves upon the "tasking" of someone or some entity.<br />
<br />
Was there really a "directed suicide list"? Were the three "suicides" from 2006 and the deaths of Al Hanashi in 2009 and Latif in 2012 all linked? That appears to be what Guantanamo personnel were told inside the camp. But there's no backup documentation, and the existing evidence for the deaths of all of these prisoners shows no coordination or adherence to any suicide pact. So why would anyone be told otherwise? Also, while DoD officials said the 2006 suicides were part of some pact, they have not publicly said the same about Al Hanashi or Latif.<br />
<br />
As could be expected, these new revelations leave us with plenty of questions. What was the role of intelligence in the deaths of these individuals? What was the purpose of contending internally there was a "directed suicide list" but not publicly refer to this in the deaths of two detainees? <br />
<br />
All of this leads to the overarching question: what really happened inside Guantanamo? It is sad testimony that when it comes to deaths at that facility, we still don't know the full truth.Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-50933291422150089582016-11-27T10:52:00.001-08:002016-12-04T21:05:29.911-08:00CIA Withholds Key MKULTRA Document Because It Reveals WMD ConceptsLast summer I made a request for a mandatory declassification review, or MDR, of the CIA's 1957 Inspector General report on the "Operations of TSD." TSD is the acronym for the Technical Services Division of the CIA, which was a component of the Agency that fashioned and produced technological apparatus for the clandestine service -- sort of like "Q" in the James Bond movies. The CIA recently <a href="https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/press-release-2011/ots-celebrates-60-yrs.html" target="_blank">celebrated the 60th anniversary</a> of this division.<br />
<br />
A few weeks ago, I received the <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/mdr-for-full-text-of-1957-cia-ig-report-operations-of-tsd-27746/#file-108044">CIA's official rejection</a> of my request. They would not release any portion of the decades old inspector general report -- even though pages from it had been previously declassified and long posted online -- because, in part, it purportedly contained information about "the identity of a confidential human source or a human intelligence source; or... key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction"!<br />
<br />
How we (and I use "we" as I am a member of the public, and my request was made on behalf of the public) got to this place, and the realization that CIA has been involved by their own account in the construction of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), is the subject of this posting.<br />
<br />
I was motivated to pursue the declassification of this material due to revelations in government documents that the CIA's torture program under Bush and Cheney was in part <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/12/18/torture-mitchelljessenmkultra.html">created with the help of the Office of Technical Services (OTS), which is the modern incarnation of the old TSD.</a> (For awhile, the name had also been the Technical Services Staff.) This chilled me, as I also knew that OTS/TSD was the component within CIA that fashioned its infamous MKULTRA mind-control research. MKULTRA was only one of the programs that was involved with such research, which also included the creation of assassination and disabling devices, behavioral studies of various sorts, research on the effects of drugs, hypnosis, and more. The program had various names over the years, including MKNAOMI, MKSEARCH, MKDELTA, MKOFTEN, MKCHICKWIT, and Project Artichoke, and had <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2014/12/11/ssci-report-reveals-cia-torture-program-originated-in-same-department-as-mkultra/">direct applications to interrogations</a>. <br />
<br />
There were a lot of dirty operations associated with MKULTRA operations, including experimentation upon unwitting subjects, and even the deaths of some victims. Operations were conducted overseas and domestically at home. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra">Wikipedia page on the subject</a> is not a bad place to start, if you aren't familiar with this subject.<br />
<br />
The mainstream and blogging press, as well as human rights circles, were uninterested in pursuing the OTS/TSD link to the CIA's torture program, content to follow the identification of two CIA contract psychologists from the military's SERE program who were linked to construction, promotion and operations of the post-9/11 CIA torture (or "enhanced interrogation") program. I, however, felt the link worth pursuing, and in an effort to better understand the role of TSD in MKULTRA, I asked for the declassification of CIA's own early inspector general report on the program.<br />
<br />
Mandatory declassification requests are not the same as FOIA requests. They are subject to different deadlines and bureaucratic rules. The exemptions to departmental or agency declassifications are derived from Presidential Executive Order (EO). The current such EO governing such exemptions for MDRs is <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-classified-national-security-information">Executive Order 13526</a>, "Classified National Security Information," released by President Obama on December 29, 2009. (No doubt a new President Trump will release his own EO on this in months to come, and that EO will supplant Obama's version, just as Obama's replaced that of earlier presidents.)<br />
<br />
The CIA raised two objections to my declassification request. The first had to do with supposed threats to reveal human intelligence sources and/or "key design concepts" of WMD. The second objection was even more problematic, from the standpoint of making an appeal. It was based on EO language that states that even when governmental materials are more than 50 years old, they can be withheld by an agency head for whatever reason that person deems necessary! In other words, at least when it comes to requests for declassification based on EO laws, information can be denied for decades basically upon agency head say so.<br />
<br />
The denial based on the presence of supposed "key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction" was startling to say the least. For one thing, it demonstrates how plastic the legal concepts of WMD are, and how they can be stretched to accommodate propaganda or in some cases legal or political actions. On the other hand, when it comes to MKULTRA, it reminds us that the CIA was for decades involved in the construction and deployment of some very dangerous materials and concepts. The fact that the parts of the agency involved in that are still involved in interrogation policy and research should give all of us pause. So should the fact that no persons were ever held accountable for the crimes committed under MKULTRA, nor for the admitted destruction of thousands of government documents related to that program. Despite the program's notoriety, there never were any indictments or, so far as we know, governmental accountability.<br />
<br />
The mainstream press, the human rights community, and academia have done a disservice to the public (with <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/aclu-obtained-emails-prove-federal-bureau-prisons-covered-its-visit-cias-torture" target="_blank">some</a> <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/gul-rahman-death-at-cia-black-site-prison-cobalt" target="_blank">rare</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/alimwatkins/documents-raise-disturbing-questions-about-detainee-abuse-un" target="_blank">exceptions</a>) in not reporting fully, nor evidently even pursuing, stories that would probe deeper into the U.S. torture scandal. I understand part of the problem: the U.S. government is still trying to hide material that is decades old, as this latest CIA declassification denial makes clear. But, especially when it comes to the press, it is their job to pursue such information for the greater good of the society. It was with such a principle in mind that I am still seeking exposure of government misdeeds in this area. See for instance how my MDR of the CIA's <a href="http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/">KUBARK interrogation manual</a> produced <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/apr/08/cia-declassifies-additional-portions-kubark-interr/">new information</a> about the government's historic use of rendition and torture.<br />
<br />
Below is the full text of my appeal letter to CIA. It can also be found, with associated materials, <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/mdr-for-full-text-of-1957-cia-ig-report-operations-of-tsd-27746/">at the Muckrock website</a>.<br />
<blockquote>
November 27, 2016<br />
<br />
Michael Lavergne<br />
Information and Privacy Coordinator<br />
Central Intelligence Agency<br />
Washington, DC 20505<br />
<br />
Re: Reference No. EOM-2016-01415<br />
<br />
Dear Mr. Lavergne,<br />
<br />
This is a formal request for appeal of the decision made in regards to my mandatory declassification review (MDR) request (number referenced above) for the 1957 CIA Inspector General Report on “Operations of TSD” (hereafter IG REPORT). In a letter dated November 1, 2016, you wrote, “We completed a thorough search of our records and located material responsive to your request. We have determined that the material must remain classified on the basis of sections 3.3(h)(1) and 3.3(h)(2) of the [Executive] Order [13526] and cannot be released in sanitized form.” I thank you for your prompt response.<br />
<br />
In my initial request, filed on August 13, 2016, I asked for “the 1957 CIA Inspector General Report on ‘Operations of TSD,’ wherein ‘TSD’ stands for the CIA division, the Technical Services Division.” I believe the decision to withhold the report, concluding it “cannot be released in sanitized form,” to be incorrect for the reasons adumbrated below.<br />
<br />
<b>1) Previous declassification of sections of IG REPORT</b><br />
<br />
I noted in my initial request that a portion of IG REPORT had been declassified previously. CIA released a section of this report, specifically 8 pages long (numbered pages 199-206) in Folder 0000146167 of CIA's MKULTRA FOIA release made a number of years ago. This section of IG REPORT was posted online by the website Cryptome.org at URL: <a href="https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0001.htm">https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0001.htm</a> (accessed 13 August 2016). An alternate posting online is available online at <a href="http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/MKULTRA1/DOC_0000146167/DOC_0000146167.pdf">http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/MKULTRA1/DOC_0000146167/DOC_0000146167.pdf</a> (accessed November 25, 2016).<br />
<br />
<b>2) A History of Declassifications </b><br />
<br />
Besides the portion of IG REPORT identified above, there have been other declassifications associated with similar material. From the 1970s onwards, many declassified documents associated with both TSD and the MKULTRA program were declassified by CIA. A later IG report on the MKULTRA program, involving TSD operations, and dated July 26, 1963, was subject to declassification review per E.O. 12065, which was conducted on 17 June 17, 1981. This 1963 report is also available online at numerous websites. One such URL is <a href="https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm">https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm</a> (accessed November 25, 2016).<br />
<br />
In addition to IG reports, many other documents related to MKULTRA’s history and operations have been declassified over the years. This material has been the subject of numerous books, and, even going back some years, Congressional hearings. The website The Black Vault has posted a complete selection of these documents at the URL: <a href="http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-collection/">http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-collection/</a> (accessed November 25, 2016). <br />
<br />
<b>3) Applicable Law</b><br />
<br />
According to EO 13526, Section 3.5(c): “Agencies conducting a mandatory review for declassification shall declassify information that no longer meets the standards for classification under this order. They shall release this information unless withholding is otherwise authorized and warranted under applicable law.” <br />
<br />
It is my understanding of your decision that the applicable law precluding the release of IG REPORT, or any portion of that report, is that it “remain classified on the basis of sections 3.3(h)(1) and 3.3(h)(2)” of Executive Order 13526. <br />
<br />
The 3.3(h)(1) exemption, which is for documents over 50 years old, states that such exemption is reserved for documents that can “clearly and demonstrably be expected to reveal…. (A) the identity of a confidential human source or a human intelligence source; or (B) key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction.”<br />
<br />
Exemption 3.3(h)(2) is reserved for documents that constitute “extraordinary cases.” In such cases, an agency head “may, within 5 years of the onset of automatic declassification, propose to exempt additional specific information from declassification at 50 years.” Such claim of exemption from automatic declassification must be made according to the provisions of section 3.3(j) of the Executive Order, i.e., “[a]t least 1 year before information is subject to automatic declassification under this section…” <br />
<br />
The EO continues:<br />
“… an agency head or senior agency official shall notify the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, serving as Executive Secretary of the [Interagency Security Classification Appeals] Panel, of any specific information that the agency proposes to exempt from automatic declassification under paragraphs (b) and (h) of this section.<br />
<br />
“(1) The notification shall include:<br />
<br />
“(A) a detailed description of the information, either by reference to information in specific records or in the form of a declassification guide;<br />
<br />
“(B) an explanation of why the information should be exempt from automatic declassification and must remain classified for a longer period of time; and<br />
<br />
“(C) a specific date or a specific and independently verifiable event for automatic declassification of specific records that contain the information proposed for exemption.”<br />
<br />
The claim by CIA that IG REPORT cannot be released in toto, i.e., without sanitization, seems highly unlikely in regards to exemption 3.3(h)(1). Sections have already been released, as noted above, with no danger as to whether a “confidential human source or a human intelligence source” were in danger. A 1963 Inspector General report on the same general subject as IG REPORT also was released in more substantive form. Furthermore, it seems unlikely IG REPORT was substantively concerned with identification of human intelligence sources. <br />
<br />
Hence, the exemption for released material according to section 3.3(h)(1) of EO 13526 appears to concern “key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction.” Such weapons are defined in U.S. law (18 U.S. Code § 2332a) as any “destructive device” (defined a weapon with a bore diameter of larger than one-half inch propelled by an explosive or propellant, or any “explosive, incendiary, or poison gas [see 18 U.S. Code § 921]); any weapon that “designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors”; “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector”; or any weapon “designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life.”<br />
<br />
According to a July 26, 1963 memorandum to the then-director of the CIA from then-CIA Inspector General J.S. Earman, the MKULTRA program was concerned with, at least in part, “the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.” (See quote of the document at URL: <a href="https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm">https://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm</a> [accessed November 25, 2016]). Hence, the apparent role of CIA in the development of weapons of mass destruction appears to be the basis of withholding material from declassification and release some 59 years after the fact. <br />
<br />
But the EO language states that the exemption must be because the document would reveal “key design concepts” of such weapons of mass destruction. Given the arguments regarding prior declassifications made above, it seems that whatever exemption regarding “key design concepts” of WMD, or even identification of human intelligence sources, is segregable within IG REPORT, and there is no need to withhold that document in its totality.<br />
<br />
Exemption 3.3(h)(2) presents a greater difficulty for this appeal, as it does not give any reason for the agency head to claim the exemption. But whatever those reasons are, they must presented to Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (hereafter ISCAP), along with a description of what information is exempted, and a projected date of declassification. I request that such information be released if IG REPORT is not to be released.<br />
<br />
Further, I note that the language of Section 3.3(j) does not suggest the exemption of an entire document, and in fact argues against it. Section 3.3.(j)(1)(a) states the agency head must provide ISCAP “a detailed description of the information, either by reference to information in specific records or in the form of a declassification guide” to such information. This strongly suggests that only some portions of the document will be subject to exemption, not an entire document itself, especially one that is as long as an inspector general report, or one that has already had multiple pages previously declassified.<br />
<br />
<b>4) Public Interest</b><br />
<br />
Finally, I argue that the material requested by MDR in this case is in the public interest. Much of the information in IG REPORT is already publicly available. Furthermore, it seems likely that the passage of time has reduced any potential harm from such release.<br />
<br />
Nearly 40 years since the public revelations concerning the CIA’s MKULTRA and related programs, interest in this story remains high. Books published decades ago, such as John Marks’ “<i>The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences”</i> (W.W. Norton & Co.), and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s <i>“Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond”</i> (Grove Press), remain in print and therefore in demand. <br />
<br />
Newspaper and mainstream magazine articles continue to address the subject. As examples, see, for instance, “April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests,” by Kim Zetter, <i>Wired Magazine</i>, April 13, 2010 (URL: <a href="https://www.wired.com/2010/04/0413mk-ultra-authorized/">https://www.wired.com/2010/04/0413mk-ultra-authorized/</a> [accessed November 25, 2016]); “The CIA Can Do Mind Control: MK Ultra / College campuses, for starters / 1953-1973,” by Mark Jacobson, <i>New York Magazine</i>, November 17, 2013 (URL: <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/conspiracy-theories/cia-mind-control/">http://nymag.com/news/features/conspiracy-theories/cia-mind-control/</a> [accessed November 25, 2016]); “Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD,” by Troy Hooper, <i>SF Weekly</i>, March 14, 2012 (URL: <a href="http://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/operation-midnight-climax-how-the-cia-dosed-sf-citizens-with-lsd/Content?oid=2184385">http://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/operation-midnight-climax-how-the-cia-dosed-sf-citizens-with-lsd/Content?oid=2184385</a> [accessed November 25, 2016]); and “What Do You Do When Your Family Was the Victim of CIA Mind-Control Experiments?” by Rea McNamara, <i>VICE News</i>, April 15, 2016 (URL: <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/how-do-you-turn-a-family-history-of-cia-mind-control-experiments-into-art">http://www.vice.com/read/how-do-you-turn-a-family-history-of-cia-mind-control-experiments-into-art</a> [accessed November 25, 2016]).<br />
<br />
Finally, in regards to public interest, it cannot be denied that there are a great deal of bogus or wild conspiratorial claims made about the CIA’s MKULTRA and related programs. Release of such documents as IG REPORT helps mitigate wild speculations, and therefore is in the public interest. <br />
<br />
It is the contention of this appeal that due to prior releases and government investigations that the material discussed in IG REPORT does not constitute one of an unknown number of “extraordinary cases” that would require exemption from declassification. Even if the appeals panel finds that some material should be in fact exempt from release, I believe that all portions of IG REPORT that do not meet such exemption be released.<br />
<br />
Therefore, Mr. Lavergne, in mind of all the arguments made above, I am appealing to the Agency Release Panel, and sending such appeal to your care and attention. If you, or anyone at the Panel, have any questions, or believe discussion of this matter would be beneficial, please contact me directly at jeffkaye@xxxxx.xxx or at (415) xxx-xxxx.<br />
<br />
Thank you,<br />
Jeffrey Kaye, Ph.D.<br />
jeffkaye@sbcglobal.net</blockquote>
Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-86091720468114535912016-11-13T11:27:00.000-08:002018-10-15T14:08:10.775-07:00NYT Article on Psychiatric Care at Guantanamo Hides More Than It Reveals<div data-setdir="false" dir="ltr" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83259" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; padding: 0px;">
I suppose that The New York Times' recent article, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/world/guantanamo-bay-doctors-abuse.html" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83260" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantanamo</a>, will be welcomed by some as a reminder of the horror that is Guantanamo. While I cannot expect that others will find significant the same episodes in the wide-ranging torture scandal as I do, this article by Sheri Fink (assisted by others, including James Risen) does a disservice to the public by misrepresenting many facts about what actually happened. The article hides and misrepresents more than it claims to reveal. It is, in fact, a classic example of a <a href="http://www.americantorture.com/labels/Unit%20731.html" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83261" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">"limited hangout,"</a> something that The New York Times excels in producing.</div>
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The article gives us glowing photos of former Guantanamo mental health providers. It offers testimony from supposedly conflicted former doctors, psychologists, nurses and psych techs, without ever noting that retrospective testimony could be self-serving. Fink herself can't seem to make up her mind if these so-called conscientious medical professionals showed "willful blindness" to "abuse," or whether in fact "psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health teams... were often unaware of what happened." (I don't think anyone at Guantanamo was unaware of the torture going on, but they may have deliberately or unconsciously numbed themselves to it. No doubt <a href="https://news.vice.com/story/guantanamo-guards-have-high-rates-of-post-traumatic-stress-exclusive-documents-show" target="_blank">recent reports</a> of high levels of PTSD among guards assigned to Guantanamo is related to the exposure to widespread torture of detainees.)</div>
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Actual contemporaneous documentation of the attitudes of health care workers, or the subordination of medical decision making to military command authorities, was amply available to The New York Times, but they chose to ignore it. This omission amounts to a misrepresentation of the material, as the article promises in its very title to be an examination of psychiatric care at Guantanamo. Is the failure to provide such material because it would reflect very badly on the medical professionals there? The article suggests at times serious deficiencies in the behavior of medical personnel, only to pull its punches or offer up mea culpas.</div>
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The signal importance of mental health problems actually leading to suicide was mostly ignored by Fink and her collaborators. Not one concrete example of an actual suicide was given, though there exists copious public documentation (and though you'd think an article on psychiatric care would say more about suicides of detainees held in Guantanamo's psychiatric unit). </div>
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In a powerful example of such evidence, we have on public record the sworn statement of the Chief of Behavioral Health Services at the Guantanamo prison camp, given to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) in June 2009 as part of the investigation into the purported suicide of Mohammed Al Hanashi. Al Hanashi had come to the Chief the very day he was to die and complained about being tortured. The Chief told NCIS what happened from his perspective, which is damning enough. They had been talking about pending changes to rules to take place in the Behavioral Health Unit:</div>
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“[Al Hanashi] then said he felt was [sic] being tortured. This is a normal response to a verbal disagreement between staff and a detainee. In this case, to avoid an argument with [Al Hanashi] I walked away from him without a response. This is what I usually do when a detainee accuses staff of torture." [Kaye, Jeffrey (2016-09-10). "<i style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;">Cover-up at Guantanamo</i>"/<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LWTOWRI" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_85579" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LWTOWRI</a> (Kindle Locations 150-152). Kindle Edition. - See also June 4, 2009 “Statement” of the Chief of Behavioral Health Services for JTF GTMO. See Al Hanashi documents, Part 8, pp. 16-18, URL: <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/mohammed-salih-al-hanashi/" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83275" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">http://guantanamotruth.com/mohammed-salih-al-hanashi/</a>]</div>
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In what NCIS regarded as Al Hanashi's suicide note, Al Hanashi described his response, and his descent into suicidal despair: "... when the highest ranking officer in the camp came and talked to me while I was walking he informed me that this camp [the Behavioral Health Unit] will have the same rules as the others, and when I asked the help of the [Chief] psychologist who was present, he said the rules will apply on everybody then he left without saying anything more. Even the officer who was close to him was surprised by his inappropriate behavior as someone who is supposed to be in a humanitarian position. At that time I knew that the only solution is death before they transgress on our religion the way they do in the other camps.” In fact, Al Hanashi died only hours later, purportedly at his own hand. [Kindle Locations 145-148 in "<i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83279" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;">Cover-up at Guantanamo</i>"; also Al Hanashi documents, Part 2, pp. 2-3, URL: <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/mohammed-salih-al-hanashi/" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83280" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">http://guantanamotruth.com/mohammed-salih-al-hanashi/</a>]</div>
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None of this is even hinted at in Sheri Fink's article.</div>
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<b id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83287" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;">Falsehoods</b></div>
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But even if The Times had covered these issues, I'm not sure it would have balanced out the falsehoods in the article, including the assertion that medical records were not shared with interrogators after 2005, and that "abusive tactics" ended at Guantanamo in early 2009. Both assertions are false. Taking on the latter claim, whether one references the ongoing forced cell extractions at Guantanamo, the forced feedings, or the Appendix M interrogations (which the UN Committee on Torture <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2014/11/28/un-review-cites-torture-ill-treatment-in-u-s-army-field-manuals-appendix-m/" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83291" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">recently condemned</a>) -- not to mention the fact that indefinite detention is itself a form of torture (<a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/download/file/20219/irrc_857_2.pdf" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83292" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">according to the International Committee of the Red Cross</a>) -- it is irrefutable that "abusive tactics" continue at Guantanamo. Fink's article presents a fairy tale.</div>
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Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association now has recognized that it is impossible to conduct ethical psychological services in a place like Guantanamo and has <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/09/cover-policy.aspx" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83296" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">told the government</a> to pull all psychologists serving detainees clinically out of that setting. This was not mentioned in the article either, though James Risen, who has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/us/pentagon-curbs-use-of-psychologists-with-guantanamo-detainees.html?_r=0" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83297" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">written</a> on that story before, was a contributor to the Sheri Fink article. You'd think such information would be relevant in a news article reviewing psychiatric care at Guantanamo, but The New York Times saw fit to censor their own reporting.</div>
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As for the sharing of medical information with interrogators, the article describes the mistrust of detainees who knew their sensitive communications with mental health providers was being shared with the interrogators and used in their torture. Fink et al. claim this stopped in 2005, but in fact serious problems on this score continued even into Obama's term. According to a DoD Inspector General Review of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, "Inclusion of Detainee Mental Health Information in Intelligence Information Reports," issued May 4, 2010, "Present regulatory guidance authorizes health-care providers to share detainee medical information with interrogators, but does not provide specific guidance on how to do so. As a result execution of these policies at Guantanamo has been inconsistent, resulting in confusion for both health-care providers and interrogation elements." (<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130516064010/http://www.sigir.mil/files/quarterlyreports/July2010/App_G_-_July_2010.pdf#view=fit" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83301" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">See this link</a>, page G-5.)</div>
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In other words, sharing of mental health information with interrogators continued well into the Obama administration, and there's no reason to believe they ever changed, nor that detainees were ever wrong to be suspicious of such providers.</div>
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<b id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83308" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;">Suicides</b></div>
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There are at least two detainees who appear to have had their suicides facilitated by Guantanamo personnel: Mohammed al Hanashi and Adnan Latif. Four others were <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/15/did_gitmo_suicides_cover_up_murder" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_85922" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;" target="_blank">likely murdered or killed</a> as part of some experiment, the three detainees who died in 2006, and Abdul Rahman Al Amri, found in his cell dead hanging <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/6981:recently-released-autopsy-reports-heighten-guantanamo-suicides-mystery" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_86020" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;" target="_blank">with his hands tied behind his back</a> and his body tested afterwards for the presence of the psychiatrically disabling drug mefloquine.</div>
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According to my own research published in my book cited above, Guantanamo personnel are documented as interfering with the computer recording of events surrounding these suicides, entering false information about these events (according to DoD investigators), or even shutting down computer systems so no one would know what was going on (according to NCIS records). Fink's article obliquely refers to some "critics" questions about the "suicides," but pointedly leaves examination of these suicides out of her article about psychiatric conditions at Guantanamo. The Big Lie lives on.</div>
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An encyclopedic deconstruction of Fink's article would be something few readers probably would have the stamina to complete. Just consider the article's whitewashing of retired Navy Captain Albert Shimkus, who signed off on the abusive mefloquine protocol used at Guantanamo, which led to widespread <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/253:exclusive-controversial-drug-given-to-all-guantanamo-detainees-akin-to-pharmacologic-waterboarding" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1478974448090_83315" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: blue; cursor: text !important; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">"pharmacological waterboarding,"</a> according to one medical professional. Or consider the abusive use of <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/10248-exclusive-department-of-defense-declassifies-report-on-alleged-drugging-of-detainees" target="_blank">"chemical restraints"</a> on prisoners, part of the unrestrained use of drugs on prisoners at Guantanamo, the full story of which at Guantanamo or formerly <a href="https://shadowproof.com/2015/05/11/cia-investigation-minimizes-use-of-drugs-on-black-site-detainees/" target="_blank">at CIA black sites</a> is still not fully known.</div>
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It is infuriating to see an article put forth something meaning to do good -- and the article is not without some good points, such as its critique of the rotation system among Gitmo health care providers, or its examination of the manipulation of diagnoses to minimize the perception of damage caused to detainees -- while in actuality perpetuating untruths and misrepresentations, or even altering history. This is not reporting, it is the exercise of the "limited hangout," the offering of so-called new information such that the public believes it is really getting something important, while key information remains hidden or a different, less damaging story is put in its place.</div>
Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5048559001654820158.post-64855672537600683822016-09-11T15:42:00.000-07:002017-04-10T20:45:55.099-07:00Introducing my new ebook: "Cover-up at Guantanamo"Guantanamo has forged a place in the world’s consciousness as synonymous with torture. The world’s largest military force exerted its power over hundreds of prisoners held for years without rights or hope. Deep within the prison’s secretive recesses, over the years some of its prisoners met with death, most supposedly via suicide. But the circumstances of these deaths were shrouded in mystery and government censorship. Based upon newly released Freedom of Information Act documents, psychologist Jeffrey Kaye’s new book shows that earlier reports of cover-up in the case of three so-called suicides in 2006 extends to subsequent deaths in the Cuba-based U.S. interrogation and detention camp.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LWTOWRI" target="_blank">“Cover-up at Guantanamo”</a> is a riveting, in-depth examination of the deaths of two detainees, Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri, who died in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Using never-before-seen reports from government investigators, eyewitness testimony, and medical and autopsy records, including documents recently released by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the formal investigation into the deaths of these Guantanamo prisoners is revealed as rife with problems. Revealed also for the first time is the suicide note and “last testament” of Mohammed Al Hanashi, who tells us he wanted to end his life because of the treatment he received at Guantanamo, including in its special Behavioral Health Unit for mentally ill prisoners.<br />
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Among the explosive details revealed in this book is the fact government agents themselves, most likely from NCIS, the very agency charged with investigating the deaths, interfered with the gathering of evidence, ordering the shutdown of Guantanamo’s computer database of prison activities within minutes of one detainee’s death. Even worse, after the FOIA for this material was filed, the computer logs suddenly went missing! That is only the beginning of the story, as Kaye’s investigation shows material evidence was thrown out in the trash, prisoners who were intensely mentally ill were provided with material to kill themselves, and medical personnel turned their backs on detainee complaints of torture. The book also expands on the mysterious use of the antimalarial drug mefloquine for possible reasons of interrogation. <br />
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In addition, the book reviews details of the death of another detainee, Adnan Latif, and adds new revelations concerning the deaths of the three detainees who died in 2006. As we can see from other government documents, we likely do not know how many prisoners have even died at Guantanamo. What we learn from the stories in this book is that its contents are not about only one or two government cover-ups, but about the secretive way the Pentagon and intelligence agencies go about their business. Covering-up is not just a term describing an instance of government malfeasance or crime, but the main operational mode of a military and intelligence apparatus that is out of control.<br />
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This is a story that the mainstream press would not touch. Jeffrey Kaye spent over four years gathering the material for this book. It is a crucial document in the history of our times, a period when our country lost its way in the so-called “war on terror” and engaged in torture and the evils of indefinite detention. This is the story of how a few individuals were crushed under the coercive regime at Guantanamo, but the humanity of these individuals is rescued in the telling of the tragic but real stories of their deaths.<br />
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<b>All FOIA documents referenced in "Cover-up at Guantanamo" can be accessed freely online at <a href="http://guantanamotruth.com/">GuantanamoTruth.com</a>.</b><br />
<br />Valtinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07427976389098964420noreply@blogger.com0