Submitting Evidence to the Spanish Court on U.S. Torture Plans

Scott Horton has reported that "Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo." The others targeted are John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Doug Feith and William Haynes.

I wrote a series on the issue of grounds for prosecution not too long ago. Now I'd like to help the Spanish prosecutors by supplying some basic evidence, courtesy of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on "the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody", released late last year.

The rationale for the prosecution is established international law, the same sort of law that led to Spain charging August Pinochet for war crimes, led by the same Spanish judge that referred the Bush crew for possible prosecution, Baltasar Garzon.

Setting the Stage

As one reads the following, please keep in mind that there are many current controversies concerning memos written by Bush's Office of Legal Counsel that were meant to legitimize "aggressive" interrogation techniques and treatment of "war on terror" prisoners. Tomorrow, in fact, is the deadline set by a U.S. court for the release of some of these memos still kept secret, including one dated August 1, 2002 by Jay Bybee (or ghost-written by John Yoo and/or David Addington) giving legal approval to a host of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, including reportedly waterboarding.

The evidence I supply here predates that portion of the timeline. Whether or not Obama releases these memos, there is plenty of evidence to proceed with prosecutions. Jason Leopold reported at The Public Record last Saturday that the Department of Justice told the judge in the ACLU suit to "release documents related to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA in 2005" that they would only give information on videotapes going back to August 2002. But, as Leopold explains, the FBI Inspector General already documented FBI agent reports of "near torture" interrogations of prisoner Abu Zubaydah as far back as May 2002.

And now, of course, we also have the release of a previously secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting torture by the CIA.

But all that in good time, for now I want to discuss Department of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency collaboration with the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in plotting "exploitation" practices to be used by U.S. interrogators that would draw upon the torture training model of JPRA's SERE program. SERE is administratively part of Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) for the Department of Defense.

The timeline for this begins as early as December 2001, before, as the SASC report makes clear, Bush's presidential order, based on an opinion by Alberto Gonzales made as early as January 9, 2002, which "closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees." The pre-January 2002 timeline is crucial, as it stands outside, i.e., is prior to, all governmental attempts to cover their intent to torture, and to break international laws and treaties to which the government was signatory.

I humbly suggest that those with means forward what follows to the Spanish prosecutors, once the final announcement of warrants issued is made. The fact that we are still waiting, and the day has passed in Spain, and no warrants have been issued, speaks to the probable amount of strong political pressure from the U.S. exerted on Spain at this time. (For more details on how the struggle for prosecutions is playing out in the United States, including the role of Democratic Senators Feinstein and Rockefeller insisted that CIA torture suspects like Stephen Kappes, #2 at CIA now, were kept on in the Obama-Panetta reign, the better to stifle possible prosecutions of CIA officials -- such shutdown of prosecutions got a push from CIA Director, former Clinton staffer Leon Panetta last week -- see Glenn Greenwald's recent article.)

In what follows, I concentrate on a period at the very beginning of the Bush torture program's existence, as it came into being.

The Evidence

I have added in bold emphases where I felt appropriate, to guide the reader to the essential points. But I strongly recommend that those interested read not only the full quote herein, but the entire report.

(U) On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. While the President’s order stated that, as “a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,” the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

(U) In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

(U) JPRA is the DoD agency that oversees military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. During the resistance phase of SERE training, U.S. military personnel are exposed to physical and psychological pressures (SERE techniques) designed to simulate conditions to which they might be subject if taken prisoner by enemies that did not abide by the Geneva Conventions. As one JPRA instructor explained, SERE training is “based on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the last 50 years.” The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy’s SERE school, it included waterboarding.

(U) Typically, those who play the part of interrogators in SERE school neither are trained interrogators nor are they qualified to be. These role players are not trained to obtain reliable intelligence information from detainees. Their job is to train our personnel to resist providing reliable information to our enemies. As the Deputy Commander for the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), JPRA’s higher headquarters, put it: “the expertise of JPRA lies in training personnel how to respond and resist interrogations – not in how to conduct interrogations.” Given JPRA’s role and expertise, the request from the DoD General Counsel’s office was unusual. In fact, the Committee is not aware of any similar request prior to December 2001. But while it may have been the first, that was not the last time that a senior government official contacted JPRA for advice on using SERE methods offensively. In fact, the call from the DoD General Counsel’s office marked just the beginning of JPRA’s support of U.S. government interrogation efforts.

The Exhibits

The one document produced from the December 2001 contact -- a fax cover sheet from the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), sent from "Lt. Col. Dan Baumgartner" to "Mr. Richard Shiffrin," who worked for Haynes's in Rumsfeld's DoD General Council office -- introduces a theme of aggressive courting by JPRA/SERE personnel to take on the interrogations/exploitation task. We only have the fax cover sheet at present. I have been informed that the full document is not available as it concerns a different governmental entity, one that did not sign off on declassification, as yet. Perhaps when the full unredacted SASC report is released, supposedly very soon now, we will be able to add another exhibit.

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

"Mr. Shiffrin refers to Mr. Richard Shiffrin, who worked for William Haynes's in Donald Rumsfeld's DoD General Council office. Mr. Haynes is reportedly one of the officials the Spanish prosecutors intend to indict. Lt. Col. Dan Baumgartner was then head of JPRA.

In June 2008, Dan Baumgartner also gave testimony under oath to the Senate committee regarding the Dec. 2001 approach by DoD. From his testimony:

My recollection of my first communication with OGC relative to techniques was with Mr. Richard Shiffrin in July 2002. However, during my two interviews with Committee staff members last year I was shown documents that indicated I had some communication with Mr. Shiffrin related to this matter in approximately December 2001. Although I do not specifically recall Mr. Shiffrin’s request to the JPRA for information in late 2001, my previous interviews with Committee staff members and review of documents connected with Mr. Shiffrin’s December 2001 request have confirmed to me the JPRA, at that time, provided Mr. Shiffrin information related to this Committee’s inquiry. From what I reviewed last year with Committee staff members, the information involved the exploitation process and historical information on captivity and lessons learned.

The theme of JPRA promoting SERE expertise surfaces in Iraq a little less than two years after the first DoD approach. A September 9, 2003 email from Col. Randy Moulton, Commander of JPRA to Col. Mike Okita and a redacted addressee (could this be Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who, coming from his command in Guantanamo, on September 9 was just concluding his evaluation of interrogation procedures in Iraq) again makes the same point about JPRA "expertise".

There is a strong synergy between the fundamentals of both missions (resistance training and interrogation). Both rely heavily on environmental conditions, captivity psychology, and situation dominance and control. While I think this probably lies within DHS responsibility lines, recent history (to include discussions with DHS, USSOCOM, CIA) shows that no DoD entity has a firm grasp on any comprehensive approach to strategic debriefing/interrogation. Our subject matter experts (and certain Service SERE psychologist) have the most knowledge and depth within DoD on the captivity environment and exploitation.

I would remind my readers here that SERE exploitation famously includes the use of physical assault, stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, and other forms of physical and psychological torture.

Other Evidence: Re John Walker Lindh

Finally, I would like to suggest that there is at least one other piece of evidence related to this early use of torture and/or planning for torture. This concerns the report by Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department attorney in 2001, tasked as a legal ethics advisor in DoJ's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, with advising on the procedures surrounding the interrogation of the captured American John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan.

Radack wrote in 2007:

According to a secret document I obtained in June 2004, an Army intelligence officer "advised that before interviewing Lindh, instructions came from higher headquarters for him to coordinate with JSOTF [the Joint Special Operations Task Force] JAG officer. He was told . . . he could collect on anything criminal that was volunteered."

But Higher Headquarters told the intelligence office more than that. Rumsfeld's office told him not to handle Lindh with kid gloves. In a stunning revelation, the documents states: "The Admiral told him that the Secretary of Defense's counsel had authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted." These instructions to get tough wth Lindh, contained in the document I have, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush Administration was willing to push the envelope on how far it could go to extract information from suspected terrorists.

Unfortunately, Ms. Radack does not supply the date for this document, or to whom it was addressed by the Army Intelligence officer in question. I'm sure that the Spanish court could obtain this document in full, if it so desired.

Concluding Remarks

Truly the evidence is massive for government malfeasance and crimes against humanity in the planning and use of torture and other cruel, inhumane, and degrading procedures against detainees held by both the Department of Defense and the CIA in the past eight years. Moreover, as documented by both myself and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a program that maintains illegal interrogation methods persists within current U.S. procedures, primarily, though not limited to, the use of techniques like isolation, partial sensory deprivation, and sleep deprivation, in Appendix M of the current Army Field Manual.

I congratulate the Spanish prosecutors in advance for taking on this crucial litigation, if in fact the warrants are finally issued. The U.S. is also bound by both domestic and international law to take up prosecutions, and it is a serious dereliction of law and duty of the highest order that this has not already occurred.

I hope either Spanish, or other, including U.S. prosecutors, take up the evidence I have presented here as telling documentation of U.S. official plans to subvert the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, if not the U.S. War Crimes Act, and to have done so prior to the issuance of any executive office legal opinions that would have made it supposedly legitimate (an assertion to any legitimacy I also believe to be without merit).

U.S. readers of this should flood the DoJ offices with demands to initiate prosecutions forthwith. The rule of law is at stake. If the highest officials in the land can break the most serious laws with impunity, then there is no rule of law. There is only tyranny.

PHR: US Silent About Destruction of Mass Graves in Afghanistan

From a 12/11/08 story by Tom Lasseter at McClatchy Newspapers on the destruction of evidence of war crimes by a major U.S. ally in Afghanistan:

DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum's men dumped around 2000 corpses into mass graves. Someone came by with bulldozers earlier this year and moved many of these corpses to some other site unknown, leaving "gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert" where once mass graves had been. Lasseter continues:

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum's alleged war crimes.

Why the silence? Lasseter says there is speculation that Dostum, an ally of the U.S., who worked with Special Forces and the CIA during the time of the prisoner killings, is getting a "free pass" from Washington. U.S. government sources plead ignorance, while some at the UN admit they've turned to look the other way. A UN spokesperson explained:

"It's a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones."

Physicians for Human Rights' International Forensic examined the site for the UN in 2002. No one has directly implicated U.S. forces in the original deaths, but Special Forces units were certainly operating in the area. From the 2002 Newsweek article, "The Death Convoy of Afghanistan":

Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving at Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team, in combat gear, at the prison doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. According to Pelton, a swashbuckling freelancer who specializes in writing about dangerous places, Special Forces soldiers were mainly concerned about security at the prison. At the same time the containers of dead were arriving, many truckloads of living prisoners were also streaming in: On the evening of Dec. 1, for instance, a container arrived bearing the 86 survivors from Qala Jangi. One of them was John Walker Lindh. It was the 595 team's medic, Bill, who first treated Lindh. Pelton believed at the time, and still does, that the dead from container trucks numbered "40-some odd" and were mostly people who died of wounds suffered in the siege of Konduz. "When I was with 595, we went over this time and again," says Pelton. "What happened is that these people basically died because they were wounded." A senior Defense Department official, speaking to NEWSWEEK on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease.

PHR is asking NATO to use their forces to help Afghan forces in protecting the mass grave site, so that no more evidence is destroyed, and to assist U.S., UN, and Afghan investigators. They have a web page dedicated to the the Dasht-e-Leili War Crimes Investigation.

While I can't believe that NATO or U.S. forces will work strenuously to investigate war atrocities, especially as atrocities continue in the U.S.-backed military occupation of the country, and put zero faith in either NATO or the U.S.'s ability to conduct such an impartial investigation. One wonders if the silence of the actors who knew about these crimes, and of their cover-up, are not guilty as a result of war crimes themselves, i.e., covering up a war crime is a war crime.

While critical of PHR on this point, I can totally solidarize with their CEO Frank Donaghue's statement on the situation last Monday:

As PHR knows from our work in Bosnia, Rwanda, Central America and elsewhere, communities that have lost loved ones in mass killings — especially the mothers, siblings, and children of victims — have a right to the truth and to justice, including identification and return of remains. The demands of mothers and families demonstrating in the streets of Kabul over the last few days show that the Afghan people are demanding that those who have committed mass atrocities be held accountable. Peace and stability require truth and justice; it never pays to ignore mass graves and the atrocities associated with them.

An international investigatory commission, independent of any government, and staffed by human rights representatives and other trusted citizens, including what representatives from the victims' families, in all the countries involved, perhaps sponsored by the UN or the ICC, should be formed to prosecute these kinds of cases, as the governments involved are too compromised. In the meantime, the work of PHR's forensic department, and the organization as a whole, deserves your support.

More Cover-up? Senate Committee Renews Hearings on SERE Torture

There will be a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC] this Thursday, September 25, 9:30 AM in Room SD-106, Dirksen Senate Office Building. The meeting represents "Part II of the Committee's inquiry into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody." The full committee, in open hearing, will "receive testimony on the authorization of Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques for interrogations in Iraq."

My readers will remember that in the Part I of the SASC SERE-related hearings last June, Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner revealed in his prepared statement that Richard Shiffrin, a Deputy General Counsel in the Department of Defense, had approached him in his capacity as Chief of Staff, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), in December 2001. Mr. Shiffrin apparently asked the now-retired Baumgartner for information related to "exploitation" processes, and the effects of captivity upon prisoners.

For those unfamiliar with this controversy, and the cast of characters involved, JPRA is the umbrella organization with the Pentagon for dealing with captured military personnel. The SERE program -- standing for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape -- operates in all branches of the military to train soldiers how to withstand torture and abusive detention. The SERE program has been accused of sending psychologists to train special operations, prison psychologists and psychiatrists, military psychologists and god knows who else how to mistreat and even torture prisoners in order to gain information. Such techniques include "fear up harsh," forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory overload, and even waterboarding. This was made clear in a memo that accompanied the SERE Standard Operating Procedures manual at Guantanamo in 2002 (emphasis added):

The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at U.S. military SERE schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations. These tactics and techniques are used at SERE school to "break" SERE detainees. The same tactics and techniques can by used to break real detainees during interrogation operations.

Timelines and Smokescreens

The timeline regarding when Shiffrin contacted Baumgartner regarding information that could be used to abusively treat prisoners is crucial. Senator Carl Levin concentrated on a later contact between Shiffrin and JPRA, in late July 2002. The vast majority of the media followed suit. Even stalwart Mark Benjamin at Salon.com, who has reported so well on much of the torture controversy, followed Levin's emphasis when constructing his own "Timeline to Bush Government Torture."

But Baumgartner says that SASC staff convinced him with documentary proof that he talked to Shiffrin about these issues approximately eight months earlier!

This places DoD interest in possibly reverse-engineering of SERE techniques prior to the January 9 memo by John Yoo providing legal cover to Bush administration assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees held in the new war in Afghanistan. In addition, it predates the January 25 memo by Alberto Gonzales, then a presidential counsel, approving the Yoo argument, and stating that when it came to interrogation of enemy prisoners, the Geneva conventions' "strict limitations on questioning" such prisoners was now obsolete.

Why does this matter? Because if DoD, and by implication Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Rice, or whomever, were seeking guidance on torture before even their poorly-written and largely derided cover-your-ass memos were written, supposedly allowing torture or cruel, inhumane treatment of detainees, then DoD/Rumsfeld/Bush/et al. have no defense any more. They are war criminals in violation of both international and federal law. One would almost have to prosecute them, if the system is to have any credibility at all. Bush would have to be impeached.

But, the general response to these revelations has been... silence. When I was able to ask Senator Levin why the documents related to Baumgartner's Dec. 2001 discussions with Shiffrin were not made public, he replied (via Firedoglake "liveblog" discussion):

Lt. Col. Baumgartner did so testify at our hearing. However information relating to his discussions with Shiffrin remains classified. When our report is finalized we will press the DoD to declassify this matter.

I say these documents are too important to wait to ask nicely for declassification. They represent potential evidence of a serious felony and war crime.

This Thursday, the witnesses are Colonel Steven M. Kleinman, USAFR, the Former Director of Intelligence, JPRA; and Colonel John R. Moulton II, USAF (Ret.), former Commander, JPRA. These witnesses should be asked specifically about their knowledge of any and all contacts between DoD, the CIA, or the White House and JPRA or SERE regarding "exploitation" of detainees. They should be specifically asked about the December 2001 calls from Shiffrin.

The Lindh Connection

It seems very possible that the requests from Shiffrin in late 2001 were related to the interrogation of John Walker Lindh, a young American captured with Taliban forces in late November 2001. According to a June 2004 Los Angeles Times report, Lindh was interrogated for days, naked and tied to a stretcher, confined in a large metal container, and subjected to sleep and food deprivation. His wounds were not treated. Military intelligence officers were not freelancing Lindh's interrogation, however, but getting instructions, sometimes hourly, from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's office.

According to the LA Times report:

The instructions from Rumsfeld’s legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists....

The documents, read to The Times by two sources critical of how the government handled the Lindh case, show that after an Army intelligence officer began to question Lindh, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer that “the secretary of Defense’s counsel has authorized him to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted.”

The memos regarding Lindh and the Baumgartner Dec. 2001 documents all remain classified. Jesselyn Radack has said in her book, The Canary in the Coalmine, that she has a copy of the Lindh memo, but nothing has been made public yet.

[Adding to the mystery, Ms. Radack's website promoting her book has gone off line or been purchased by someone else. Here's the cache of the page promoting her book; here's the current (broken) link. The book is not available or even listed at Amazon.com, either. This sudden disappearance comes only weeks after I ordered my own copy of Radack's book online at her website. Hmmm....]

I don't hold out much hope that anything but a sanitized version of the truth awaits us at September 24 hearings, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't put the heat on. But we'll have to have a better showing from the press than we have had thus far, if anything is to come from all this "investigation" but more cynicism and despair.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Radack on OIG/FBI Whitewash; Kurnaz on Life Inside Gitmo

Former Justice Department ethics advisor, Jesselyn Radack, who blew the whistle on illegal abuse in the case of John Walker Lindh back in the early days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, has a blistering article up at Daily Kos, castigating the Office of the Inspector General for its "demi-candor" whitewash on the FBI role in "war on terror" interrogations. U.S. citizen Lindh was beaten seriously, "duct-taped naked to a board, and had government officials posing with him for pictures." Radack explains:

In 2001, I told the Criminal Division, which was advising the FBI in Afghanistan, that Lindh could not be interrogated without his counsel. That was on a Friday. The Criminal Division called back on Monday and said that the FBI had interrogated him anyway. They wanted to know what to do. I advised that the interview would have to be sealed and used only for national security purposes or intelligence-gathering, not criminal prosecution. Again, my advice was ignored.

Three months later, I inadvertently learned of a discovery order, which had been deliberately concealed from me, for all Justice Department correspondence related to Lindh's interrogation. When I went to comply, my e-mails had been purged from the file. With the help of technical support, I recovered them from my computer, turned them over to my boss, took home a copy in case they "disappeared" again, and resigned.

As the criminal case barreled toward trial, the Justice Department continued to assert that Lindh was never represented by counsel and that his rights had been "carefully, scrupulously guarded." I did not believe the Justice Department would have the temerity to make public statements contradicted by its own court filings if my e-mails had indeed reached the court. So I blew the whistle, which unleashed a torrent of retaliation....

In 2002, my lawyer made it abundantly clear to the OIG that I took several steps to thwart efforts to conceal material regarding Lindh's interrogation from the court. In January 2003, Inspector General Glenn Fine, who issued the recent FBI report, told my attorney that the OIG had looked into my whistleblower allegations and was not going to pursue them. (OIG did not look too searchingly because it did not even bother to interview me, the complainant.) To add insult to injury, OIG turned my case over for criminal prosecution, which eventually closed with no charges ever being brought. But the Justice Department was not through with me yet. It put me on the "No-Fly List" and referred me to the state bars in which I'm licensed as an attorney, based on a secret report - by the OIG - to which I did not have access. [emphasis in original]

The Justice Department OIG is a limited hangout, i.e., an admission of some crimes, but a cover-up of the total barbaric scenario unfolding in Bush's torture prisons. For a heart-rending but comprehensive look at what these detainees have endured, I strongly recommend Murnat Kurnaz's memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.

A few excerpts from Kurnaz's book:

I looked around. This was truly nothing more than a ship's container with a door. The walls were reinforced by corrugated metal sheeting like the one in fairground stalls. Every surface -- the walls, the floor, the ceiling -- was covered with it. There was no mattress or wool blanket. A toilet and a sink were sunk into the floor. If I stared for too long at any one point of the metal sheeting I got dizzy....

The light went off. It was cold. The metal on the floor felt like ice.... I heard a rumbling. It was an air-conditioning unit mounted above the door. Icy air streamed in.... They've put me in a giant refrigerator.

After a while, I couldn't feel my hands or legs....

Sometimes I had to move to stop the cold, but I tried not to. I needed to save my energy since all I was given to eat was a piece of toast and a bit of apple, three times a day. but I had to move around sometimes, when it got colder.....

In late 2002, General Geoffrey Miller took over command of Guantanamo, and our situation dramatically worsened. The interrogations got more brutal, more frequent, and longer....

I was moved from one block to the next. The escort team would storm in, put me in chains, run with me through the corridors, push me to my knees, and leave me there. The whole procedure would be repeated an hour later.... I had to stand and kneel -- twenty-four hours a day....

In between transfers, I was interrogated... I estimated the sessions lasted up to fifteen hours.... I sat chained to my chair, or kneeling on the floor, and as soon as my eyelids drooped, soldiers would wake me with a couple of blows. (pp. 161-177)

Gov't Should Commute John Lindh Sentence

Earlier today, Jesselyn Radack asked, in a recommended diary, that Daily Kos readers "keep the heat up concerning the [John Walker] Lindh case, especially now that so many more people know (and can get the specifics from her book) and can start pushing the media on this."

Lindh's parents' hometown paper tells the story of their petition to George W. Bush to commute their son's sentence, in the wake of the David Hicks verdict.

Lindh, now 26, joined the Taliban in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 after converting to Islam and was captured there and turned over to the U.S. military in late 2001.

He was the first person to be charged in a U.S. court in the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Lindh, who grew up in Marin, was initially charged with 10 counts but in a plea bargain pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia in 2002 to two lesser counts of serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons while doing so. Under the agreement, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

What the Marin Independent Journal story doesn't mention is that Lindh, who never fought any American troops and was never convicted of a terrorism charge, was tortured by his U.S. captors.
From Radack's book:

Lindh was found barely alive, shot in the leg, and suffering from dehydration, hypothermia and frostbite. Although Lindh was seriously wounded, starving, freezing, and exhausted, U.S. soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed him naked, scrawled “shithead” across the blindfold, duct-taped him to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, threatened him with death, and posed with him for pictures. Parts of his ordeal were captured on videotape. Sound familiar?

At issue in the petition for commutation of the sentence is the issue of proportionality. Two other individuals were convicted on essentially the same charges -- and also treated with methods of torture and coercive interrogation -- David Hicks and Yaser Hamdi. Hicks received nine months in prison (on a 70-year suspended sentence). Hamdi renounced U.S. citizenship and was allowed to leave the country; he moved to Saudi Arabia.
From the Marin IJ article:

Brosnahan said the new petition has "updated information," but said he could not reveal the details.

Lindh is now being held in a maximum security prison in Florence, Colo., and is not allowed to communicate with the media. Brosnahan said Lindh is a "model prisoner" but said he could give no further information.

Lindh's mother, Marilyn Walker, said, "John has been in prison more than five years and it's time for him to come home."

The Justice Department, thus far, is said to have no comment.
President Bush should commute the sentence of John Walker Lindh.

David Hicks Silenced as Price for His Freedom (w/Update)

David Hicks, the Australian who was held by the U.S. as an "enemy combatant" for five years, pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain that exchanged a reduced nine month sentence for his agreements on silence on his case and an admission that he "has never been illegally treated", i.e. tortured. The case was "adjudicated" as the first of the secret trials to be held via military tribunal under the notorious Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Even the New York Times writer on the story found this "an extraordinary series of concessions." Describing the plea bargain, William Glaberson at the Times wrote:

It also included a promise not to pursue suits over the treatment he received while in detention and “not to communicate in any way with the media” for a year.

Extraordinary, surely, but very similar to the conditions of John Walker Lindh's conviction, which, according to Wikipedia, included:

... a gag order that would prevent him from making any public statements on the matter for the duration of his twenty-year sentence, and he would have to drop claims that he had been mistreated or tortured by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan and aboard two military ships during December 2001 and January 2002. In return, all the other charges would be dropped. [Note: That left two remaining charges, for which he received a 20 year sentence.]

For his part, Hicks was able to wrangle out a non-admission of his charges, confessing only that prosecutors seemed to have sufficient evidence to convict, not that he actually did any of the things the government alleged (aiding Al Queda, etc.)

The significance of the Hicks decision lies in the fact that the secrecy of the national security state and their torture apparatus merits primary emphasis in the dispostion of these "enemy combatant" cases.
I certainly don't blame Hicks for taking the deal. As Jesselyn Radack pointed out in a diary at Daily Kos, he (ultimately) gets his life back, albeit a shattered life that will be haunted by torture and forced recantation.

The last piece of torture inflicted upon Hicks is the insistence that he must cover up the truth of his treatment. If he were telling the truth that he weren't abused, why the gag order?

Bush, Gonzales, Gates, Rice, Cheney... these are the able successors to Stalin, Beria, Vishinsky, who bargained with each of their "enemy" accused to close their "confessions" with the following:

I deserve no mercy, I ask no mercy, I deserve to be shot as a mad Fascist dog.

UPDATE: (4/4/07)
Bhfrik over at Daily Kos has written a great diary breaking down a Washington Post piece on the political machinations behind the Hicks plea.

...the plea deal of Australian David Hicks was not based upon such rudimentary concerns as evidence or justice. It was a political solution handed down from on high after Australian Prime Minister John Howard had a word with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Check out bhfrik's diary or read the original Washington Post article.