The Alyona Show Interviews The Dissenter's Jeff Kaye on DoD Water Torture

Also posted at FDL/The Dissenter

I was pleased to be asked to appear on the successful RT news program The Alyona Show earlier today. The interview was offered as a follow-up to an investigatory article published at Truthout last week, which showed that all protestations by Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. government authorities aside, the U.S. military did engage in torture remarkably similar to waterboarding, if not waterboarding itself. An accompanying article was also posted here at The Dissenter.

Alyona Minkovski is one of a handful of broadcasters who have been following the torture scandal and the ongoing US wars abroad, bringing on experts with a point of view seldom or never heard on other mainstream news programs. Keith Olbermann also did a segment on August 4 for Current TV, with commentary by Jeremy Scahill, on my investigation into DoD water torture, remarking that  "our understanding of our history of torture by this country has just been advanced by this story."

My investigation, based on multiple detainee accounts, news reports, doctor review of selected Guantanamo medical records, testimony before a Congressional committee, and Department of Justice and Department of Defense investigations, revealed that a number of detainees at different DoD sites, including Guantanamo, were held down and had streams of water from a hose directed for minutes at a time between their mouth and nose. Other detainees had their heads stuffed into toilets or buckets of water. The Truthout article also detailed instances in which military officials -- and in one case, former Vice President Dick Cheney himself -- requested or directed that waterboarding take place.

More Rumsfeld Lies About Whether He "Approved" Waterboarding or Not

Donald Rumsfeld claims that he rejected the use of waterboarding when it was suggested to him in a memo in late 2002, writing in his recent memoir, "When military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay sent up their chain of command a request to use waterboarding in late 2002, I rejected it."

But the truth is DoD's legal counsel, William Haynes, recommended in a memo in November 2002 a number of coercive interrogation techniques, noting that waterboarding "may be legally available", though he advised against its use, as well as a few other highly coercive torture techniques "at this time." Rumsfeld signed off on the memo. He did not reject Haynes' characterization that waterboarding "may be legally available." Yet Rumsfeld must have been aware that numerous legal experts within DoD itself and its various service branches had serious doubts about its legality.

Given that the US public has been told to accept the narrative that waterboarding was restricted to the CIA, and to only (!) three victims of CIA torture, I've decided to continue with this investigation with the aim of correcting this faulty narrative. As I wrote in my Dissenter piece, "the use of water torture and waterboarding or quasi-waterboarding can only represent a pattern of such kinds of torture, which has been kept out of the public eye through a combination of secrecy, and artfully framing the issue around a definition of waterboarding that is meant to exclude examination of the full use of such water-drowning torture."

Meanwhile, since I wrote the original Truthout story, I've found at least four more cases of DoD "water treatment" or "water torture," which involved the submersion of DoD prisoners into water, or the forced choking of detainees with application of water. I'll be posting more on this in an upcoming article. But I should note that even formal, CIA-style waterboarding may have also taken place.

In an interview with The Talking Dog in May 2007, one of the attorneys for the Guantanamo detainees, Brent Mickum, who also represents Abu Zubaydah, explained what he heard about waterboarding at Guantanamo:

After my recent C-Span appearance, someone called me and spoke to me at length, telling me (without giving his name) that he was a guard at the GTMO camps. He told me that he and other guards were instructed to brutalize prisoners. He confirmed that water-boarding, which he called “drown-proofing” took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.

In the video accompanying this post, I explain to Alyona why the US government has played around with the semantics of what is waterboarding, why this issue has not been investigated officially, and why it is Congress has refused to act on this information, even when it was formally presented before them. -- I should add that it was a pleasure to be interviewed by someone as well-informed and also passionate about the issue as Alyona clearly was.

Keith Olbermann Covers My Investigation into DoD Waterboard-style Torture (video)

Broadcast August 4, 2011, with additional comment by Jeremy Scahill

Scott Horton Drops the Bomb on Gitmo: Massive Cover-up of Murder Exposed

When it comes to the torture scandal, I agree with Andrew Sullivan: there's not been as big a story on the lies and crimes committed under the U.S. torture program since the Abu Ghraib photos were released. This story has no pictures, but the details are in and of themselves gruesome in the extreme.

Andy Worthington, who knows more about the Guantanamo prisoners than any other journalist, wrote of Scott Horton's bombshell article in Harper's Magazine:

Despite studying Guantánamo on a full-time basis for nearly four years, this is one of the most chilling accounts of the prison that I have ever read, and one which should not only lead to an independent inquiry, but also to calls to press ahead with the closure of Guantánamo — and the repatriation of as many prisoners as possible — without further delay.

Horton's story, The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle, is dense, and full of amazing facts about the deaths of three Guantanamo prisoners, officially by "suicide." The article is a veritable prosecutor's brief accusing the U.S. government, under both the Bush and Obama administration, of criminal cover-up of these deaths, which were, it seems more and more likely, murder.

We will be absorbing the various facts revealed in this article for weeks or months to come, and it is my fervent hope that tremendous heat will be put on to have an independent investigation. As Sullivan notes, no one in the government can be trusted to investigate this case. It will take a Blue Ribbon panel, or a tribunal, or at the very least an independent prosecutor with power of subpoena.

I'm going to post a bit of Horton's article (I believe "fair use"), but you have to read the entire thing. Really. (I haven't even included any quotes from Horton's compelling story about how the Obama administration jacked around the whistleblowers, then dropped the investigation. After reading Horton, take a look at Keith Olbermann's interview with him on the Jan. 18 edition of Countdown.

Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred....

The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, “This place does not exist,” and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers—many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America—had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.

A friend of Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from within the compound....

By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and at 7:00 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America’s open-air theater....

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes....

All the families requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a body.”

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For those who are interested, here's a link (PDF) to the Seton Hall law school investigation into the 2006 "suicides," an investigation that was key to breaking the story open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every interrogation conducted at Guantánamo was videotaped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Brother Is Here... Officially! NSA Spying on Everyone

Last October I briefly discussed an ABC interview with two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. ABC's Brian Ross reported that the NSA eavesdropped on "hundreds of Americans simply calling their families."

Tonight, former National Security Agency analyst, Russell Tice, was interviewed on the Keith Olbermann show. Tice revealed that the NSA spying has been far greater than revealed before. Essentially, NSA has been spying on everyone's computer traffic, phone calls, faxes, emails, etc. Furthermore, this spying was also targeted at specific domestic groups, including reporters.

This outrageous all-out assault on the Fourth Amendment and our civil liberties is a tremendous threat to all of us. We must demand an immediate end to this program, and investigation and prosecution of those who initiated and ran this illegal program. The ability to use this information to persecute political opponents is a dire threat to our country, and a knife in the heart of any pretense to democracy.

RiderOnTheStorm has a good, understandable technical breakdown of the details at a diary at Daily Kos:

Mr. Tice talked at some length about the difference between large-scale technical surveillance and more focused directed surveillance. If I've understood him correctly, then I think I can explain what he was talking about by using email as an example.

If you were interested in screening huge amounts of email, but didn't have the capacity to capture or store it all, you might decide to just content yourself with the metadata. Metadata is just "data about data". For instance, in the case of email, some interesting metadata might be: (a) what language it's in (b) the sender's address (c) the recipient's address (d) the length in bytes (e) the length in lines (f) what kinds of attachments, if any (g) what mail program was used to compose it (h) what the Subject line was, and so on.

This sort of metadata is relatively easy to extract and takes up a lot less room than the actual data: the metadata for an email message with 2M of photos attached might fit in 1K. (And this is the point where it should dawn on you that similar metadata exists for faxes, phone calls, and every other electronic form of communication.)

Metadata can be useful. Suppose you know that The Bad Guy always uses Eudora 1.1 to compose mail messages and always attaches photos that are 772x448 pixels in JPG format. If you've extracted the right metadata from billions of messages, you might be able to figure out that the 99.999% of them aren't what you're looking for by using that as a filter. If you're lucky, the only messages left will be the ones you want -- or the number will be small enough that brute force or maybe a simple search will get you what you want.

But metadata can be abused. It's possible to use the same collection to reconstruct
the salient details of every message sent by A. Or from A to B. Or which has a "Subject:" line containing the string "protest". And so on. It enables ad hoc fishing expeditions that are limited only by the scope of the collection, the kind of metadata extracted -- and the restraint of those conducting them, which I think we can safely characterize as "nonexistent".

If I understood Mr. Tice correctly, metadata collection was untargeted and pervasive.
They went for everything they could get. Which means if you sent a message to Aunt Mary with a photo of the dog on July 17, 2004, they acquired -- or at least tried to acquire -- the metadata for it.

Mr. Tice's further point was that high-level technical analysis like this was used to select specific targets for detailed analysis -- and in that detailed analysis, EVERYTHING was collected. Not just metadata: everything. Every phone call, every fax, every email, every instant message, everything. All captured and stored in a database...somewhere.

Implications?

This so much worse than what we knew at this time last year that I hardly know where to begin. Let me just recapitulate part of what Mr. Tice said: he stated that he'd been asked to identify particular groups so that they could be excluded from surveillance...but eventually he realized that this was an internal NSA cover story, and that those were precisely the groups being targeted. It took him a while to get around to naming one of those groups, but when he did...journalists. Reporters. The news media.

Here's a link to the MSNBC site that has the interview for online viewing.

Update (from the interview):

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

I'll end with this from mcjoan, also at Daily Kos:

The questions we had then are now tripled: Who was targeted and why? When did this program begin? What exactly was behind the NSA's efforts to enlist Qwest in warrantless wiretaps in February, 2001--months before 9/11, and what other telcos did they approach at that time, and to what purpose? That's just scratching the surface of questions that need to be asked, and it's about fucking time we get some answers. And that the FISA Amendment Act that legalized so many of these abuses, including bulk collection of data, be repealed.

Of Hair Shirts and Golf Balls

Keith Olberman has lit into George W. Bush for his callous, inane, and thoughtless remark that he has given up playing golf as a tribute to the sacrifice and death of soldiers he sent into war in the Middle East. Obviously, no sacrifice is too great for this morally-challenged criminal. This may be the most easily satirical mark in the history of all satire, as a multitude of columnists and editorialists have had a field day with Bush's expressions of faux-deep feelings. -- Anyway, here's Keith's take:

"Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
"Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans -- on our history.
"It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
Golf, Sir?
Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq?
Do you think these families, Mr. Bush - their lives blighted forever -- care about you playing golf?
Do you think, Sir, they care about you?
You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed.
Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you gave up golf?
Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.
Sir, to show your solidarity with them - you didn't even give up talking about Iraq - a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?
Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up... your
4,000 dead Americans and your response... was to stop playing golf!
Golf.
Not "gulf" - golf.

Keith Olberman on Mukasey, Daniel Levin & Waterboarding

Read this. Watch the video.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday, with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded....

MSNBC commentator goes on to call on Democratic Senators Feinstein and Schumer to recant their support for Bush lackey appointee, Michael Mukasey.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

And ultimately these men, these patriots, will defeat you and they will return this country to its righteous standards, and to its rightful owners, the people.