SF Chronicle Columnist Slimes Waterboarding Victim in Bid to Stop Berkeley Resolution on Gitmo Detainees

How thoughtlessly do the apologists for America's gulag at Guantanamo defame those who have been seriously tortured!

San Francisco Chronicle/SF Gate columnist Debra Saunders has written a hit piece against activists in Berkeley who are seeking to pass a City Council resolution to resettle cleared Guantanamo detainees within the city limits of this college town for the University of California, the home of the Free Speech Movement, People's Park, and also known for other antiwar and progressive causes over the years. A vote on the resolution before the Berkeley City Council is scheduled for Tuesday night, February 15.

Last December, the City of Berkeley's Peace and Justice Commission passed a recommendation asking the Berkeley City Council to adopt the resolution, officially called "Resolution to Assist in the Safe Resettlement of Cleared Guantanamo Detainees." A full copy of the resolution is available here. Sponsors include No More Guantanamos; Code Pink Women for Peace, Golden Gate Chapter;  Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (UC Law School); Ecumenical Peace Institute; Legislative Committee, Tenants Assn., Strawberry Creek Lodge (senior citizens); and others.

The Water Torture of Djamel Ameziane

It's no surprise to discover that Saunders' column was picked up by a number of conservative outlets, especially as it retails the lie that the detainees are dangerous, or likely to "return" to terrorism if released. Besides uncritically accepting Department of Defense figures, she lies about what they actually say, and then tries to impugn the stories of the two Guantanamo detainees mentioned by the Berkeley commission, one of whom, Algerian Berber Djamel Ameziane, has the distinction of being the only Guantanamo prisoner to have suffered a form of waterboarding.

Petitioned by lawyers from Center for Constitutional Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, intervened on Ameziane's case in 2008 with the U.S. State Department to ask for guarantees of humane treatment for Ameziane.

From the petition before the Inter-American Commission, p. 24 (PDF):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.”

Ameziane left discrimination against his Berber ancestry and his Muslim faith, and the chaos of civil war in Algeria in the early 1990s, as a young man in his 20s to work in Vienna, where -- yes, Debra Saunders -- he was the highest-paid chef  at the well-known Italian restaurant Al Caminetto Trattoria. But Ameziane ultimately lost his work permit, due to anti-immigrant hysteria in Austria, and then went to Canada, where he spent five years waiting upon his claim for political asylum. Only after it was denied did Ameziane leave for Afghanistan in 2000, believing that the only place for him after all might be an Islamic country that ruled with Sharia law. After 9/11 and the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, he was arrested in a mosque and later turned over to the Americans, probably for bounty money.

Saunders quotes Thomas Joscelyn, right-wing columnist and senior fellow for the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, as writing that Ameziane must have been a jihadist, because he was caught in a lodging supposedly owned by Abu Zubaydah, and that "to 'gain admittance to a Taliban guesthouse, recruits need a certified Taliban or al Qaeda member to vouch for their commitment' to jihad." Except, Zubaydah was never a member of the Taliban or al Qaeda, and the guesthouse was not associated with them either. But what do such little facts matter to these conservative hirelings for the torturers?

In fact, not only were the others captured at this "safe house" later released or cleared by the Americans, but two different Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearings for Ameziane found that "while in Afghanistan, the detainee did not receive any military or terrorist training and did not see any fighting." Nor was any evidence of any terrorist or military activities ever produced.  "Has Ameziane been cleared by U.S. authorities? Not that I can find," writes Saunders. Perhaps she never read the Reuters headline: Obama team clears 75 at Guantanamo for release. Nor is she likely aware that the Anglican Diocese of Montreal has said they would sponsor his settlement in Canada.

Russian Prisoner Already Welcomed by Massachusetts Towns

Saunders also attacks the other Guantanamo detainee mentioned by the Berkeley commission as a possible candidate for resettlement, Ravil Mingazov, a former Russian ballet dancer, who was conscripted into the Russian army and performed for two years in the Army's ballet troupe. A convert to Islam, he found himself subjected to discrimination in Russia, had his house ransacked by the KGB (according to a report by Andy Worthington), and like Ameziane and many others left for what they thought of as an Islamic refuge in pre-9/11 Afghanistan.

Mingazov has already been sponsored for settlement in resolutions similar to that up for vote in Berkeley, specifically in the Massachusetts towns of Amherst and Leverett. The Guantanamo prisoner, the last Russian to be held in the U.S. torture prison in Cuba, was granted his habeas corpus petition last Spring. In his opinion (PDF), Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. noted that the only real "evidence" supplied by the government was Minagzov's stay overnight at Issa House, owned by Abu Zubaydah. But the government could not prove that the house was associated with al Qaeda, Kennedy wrote. Nor could the government prove for the purposes of even a habeas hearing that Mingazov had ever been at a training or terrorist camp, or involved with the Taliban or al Qeada. He was a classic case of the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Court simply will not conclude that a one-night stay at Abu Zubaydah's house, where Mingazov was unable to communicate with most if not all other occupants, from which he was sent away shortly after his arrival, and which goes in no way to show that Mingazov was part of Al Qaeda's command structure, meets the standard for lawful detention.

Mingazov was tortured under U.S. confinement at Bagram, where he "'endured harsh conditions and suffered physical ... abuse,' in particular being "severely beaten, slammed into the ground, hung by [his] arms for extended periods of time, and deprived of food and sleep.'" But, according to Saunders, Mingazov has not been "cleared" for release, despite Judge Kennedy's decision.

It is eerie how much both of these cases rely on supposed links to "high-value" prisoner Abu Zubaydah, who the Bush Administration pushed early on as an al Qaeda mastermind, author of the "Manchester" resistance manual, leader of his own terrorist forces, etc., and who was famously tortured in CIA prisons, waterboarded an admitted 83 times. These claims about Zubaydah's significance, which were quietly dropped in recent years, have been revived in recent months in some court rulings and even in the Center for Public Integrity's Pearl Project report (see pg. 54).

Statistics and Damned Lies

Perhaps the most egregious lie Saunders spreads was born from the fertile minds of the right, spinning the 2010 "Summary of the Reengagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," put out by the Director of National Intelligence last year. Saunders says the report confirms that "the Director of National Intelligence reported in December that 25 percent of released Gitmo detainees have been confirmed or suspected of engaging in terrorism." Actually, the report says that "the Intelligence Community assesses that 81 (13.5 percent) are confirmed and 69 (11.5 percent) are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer."

Saunders leaves out the part about "insurgent activities," because to the right-wing, anyone who would oppose with arms the United States, even if the U.S. invaded their country, must be a terrorist. In this, they are assisted by the current administration, who continues to view the "war on terror" with the same point of view of their Bush/Cheney predecessors.

Not only does Saunders not mention that the confirmed number of even this dubious figure is actually 13 or 14 percent, but she hides the fact that the "suspected" figure is questionable itself, as it relies on “[p]lausible but unverified or single-source reporting” (emphasis added). In a press release following the Pentagon’s latest release on “recidivism” figures for former Guantanamo detainees, Center for Constitutional Rights commented, the government “persists in using the language of ‘re-engagement’ to describe individuals, despite the fact that the majority of them should never have been detained in the first place and were known early on by the government to be innocent. It is not possible to return to the battlefield if you were never there in the first place.” Furthermore, “the latest report only summarizes its figures without actually naming any alleged recidivists or including any information that would enable meaningful scrutiny.”

Saunders also quotes Joscelyn as saying that the prisoners who have received transfers or releases from Guantanamo are hardly cleared of terrorist stigma. "They didn't find any innocent goat herders," Joscelyn said. But this totally contradicts statements by former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, who wrote in a guest post at The Washington Note in March 2009 about "the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there." Wilkerson said that "several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." The reason they didn't, Wilkerson concluded, was because they feared looking bad, and endangering the "war on terror" campaign.

Saunders concludes her article, with the strange assertion that "in a new act of fiction, Berzerkeley plays make-believe by pretending that two Gitmo detainees should be dating your cousin." While presumably a response to a quote by Berkeley Peace and Justice commissioner Rita Maran earlier in the article, the use of this turn of phrase, so similar to historically racist forms of expression, to the effect that one would not want one of your relatives to date one of those people (Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, etc.), is not coincidental. The fear-mongering against the Guantanamo detainees has always carried a racist edge to it.

The resolution up before the Berkeley City Council to advocate resettlement of two cleared Guantanamo prisoners is agenda item 18 on the Council's agenda Tuesday night. The resolution also asks Congress to reverse its position and agree to the release of cleared detainees into the United States. It also predicates any resettlement in Berkeley upon a rescission of the Congressional ban on domestic detainee resettlement.

Update, 2/16/11: According to news accounts, the Berkeley City Council rejected the resolution to resettle detainees from Guantanamo. There were four votes “for,” one “against,” and four abstentions. The resolution needed five votes to pass. Unfortunately, the fate of this resolution speaks volumes about the political situation in the United States today.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

Andy Worthington Kicks Off "Guantánamo Habeas Week"

Andy Worthington, who has conscientiously and effectively documented the fates of hundreds of prisoners held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo (see his book The Guantanamo Files), has posted a "Habeas Corpus Scorecard" at his website.

Surely it is a scandal that the government has been shown not to have a reason to hold 34 of the 47 Guantánamo cases brought before Federal judges with habeas petitions. In other words, the courts have refused to accept the U.S. government's claim that these people are dangerous, the "worst of the worst," in almost three-quarters of the cases that have come before them. As Worthington describes it, the explanation for this incredible statistic lies in the flimsiness of the cases. And even more:

Primarily, the judges have exposed that the government has been relying, to an extraordinary extent, on confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries.

This week, Worthington plans to dedicate his postings to covering these 47 cases decided to date, in what he calls "Guantánamo Habeas Week". His first entry in the series considers the case of Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail, a Yemeni who was captured (or sold to U.S. forces) in Afghanistan in 2001. He was either 19 or 22 at the time (as his age is uncertain). There is plausible evidence, from his testimony and witnesses, that Ismail, a small-time jihadist at best (despite claims from the government that he was "Emir" of the Bagram front), was tortured at Guantanamo. Despite that, his habeas petition was denied by Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. of the U.S. District Court, Washington, DC. His unclassified opinion in the case has not yet been released.

Worthington writes of the plight of prisoners like Ismail:

If anything, Ismail — and other prisoners who have lost their habeas petitions, like Ghaleb al-Bihani, who served as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban — should have been held as prisoners of war and protected from ill-treatment according to the Geneva Conventions. On this basis, they could be held until the end of hostilities, and we would now be arguing about whether it is conceivable that an invasion to overthrow the Taliban, which began eight and a half years ago, and which met its immediate aims, leading to the fall of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government and the election of Hamid Karzai as the Afghan President, is legitimately part of a “War on Terror” that might last forever, and that, as a result, even the most minor players in that initial conflict can be detained indefinitely.

As it stands, however, Yasin Ismail — a man who, by all accounts, never took up arms against anyone — remains imprisoned in Guantánamo on an apparently legal basis, and those of us who regard his continued detention as an overreaction, to put it mildly, must also reflect on the fact that, far from being treated humanely for the last eight years, he has been subjected to physical abuse and sexual humiliation for no justifiable reason, but that this is considered irrelevant to the case against him.

This kind of injustice is even more galling in the light, as Worthington points out, of revelations in a sworn statement by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, that the vast majority of the prisoners at Guantanamo were not dangerous at all. In fact, they were never even properly vetted, but sucked up by U.S. forces for political reasons, and neither Bush, nor Cheney, nor Rumsfeld cared a whit about the innocence of any of these people. Wilkerson says former Vice President Cheney, for instance, "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them."

From Mr. Wilkerson's filing (PDF):

With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all. I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting. There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan....

It was clear to me that, as I learned about how the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners had been detained, the initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer. It was also becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military. If there were any evidence, the chain protecting it had been completely ignored.

So it comes as no surprise that the majority of the habeas cases have been granted by the courts. Yet still, many of these prisoners formally freed remain in Guantanamo, and others, unable to obtain a lawyer, or too depressed or ignorant to defend themselves, remain in the limbo of indefinite detention, while the Obama administration debates how to keep some of them in prison for the rest of their lives, feeding the Cheneyesque lie that these people are the worst criminals on the planet.

If some of them are criminals, then let that be decided in a court of law. Hundreds of thousands have died over the decades to make that principle stand. Let us not unceremoniously bury it because of fear-mongering.

I applaud Andy Worthington's work in telling us these prisoners' stories, and hope readers will follow his new series, and show him support. I hope readers will also look carefully at his excellent analysis behind issues such as the resuscitated military commissions, the trials of the terrorist suspects, and the continuing obeisance to the deeply flawed Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed after 9/11.

I also applaud those other news sources who are keeping track of the habeas decisions, such as The Washington Independent, Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Miami Herald. They're all worth looking at.

Sunday Torture Weekly "Round-up"

Also posted at Daily Kos

The Sunday Weekly Torture "Round-up" is intended to be a new regular feature at Daily Kos, capturing stories on the ongoing torture scandal, especially those that might otherwise escape notice. At the same time, we will strive to present an overview of important new developments in the drive to hold the U.S. government responsible for its war crimes, in addition to covering stories concerning torture from other countries, as time and space permit. (Alas, the U.S. has no monopoly on this hideous practice.)

The editors for the WTR are myself, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, and Meteor Blades and we will rotate each week. Interesting or important news or tips concerning torture or civil liberties issues bearing upon it can be emailed to any of these individuals.

There were many new developments this week: the CIA announced it would withhold a list describing 1000s of documents related to the destruction of videotapes depicting torture; an ex-Bush administration official told of administration indifference to evidence of innocence for the great bulk of "enemy combatants"; a major lawsuit against Pentagon contractors accused of torture was allowed to proceed; a "released" Guantanamo hunger striker was refused more humane prison conditions, and more.

Cheney, Wilkerson, Obama and the Fake Scandal over Gitmo Prisoner Releases

Dick Cheney has been running around the country trying to spread his particular style of panic and fear in the wake of reports that released Guantanamo prisoners will swell the ranks of terrorists who will then strike at America. Andy Worthington refutes these lies in "The Stories of Six Prisoners Who Were Released from Guantanamo" and this story at Huffington Post.

As has been covered extensively elsewhere (and at Daily Kos), Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, has revealed that most of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocents, and moreover, shockingly, that the Bush Administration knew this from the get-go, belying Cheney's fabrications about the "worst of the worst." Here's Wilkerson from The Washington Note article earlier this week:

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

And yet days after this revelation, we get this kind of crap from the current administration, as reported by Associated Press, via the Miami Herald:

Obama says in a broadcast interview [on 60 Minutes tonight] that some of the people released from the prison camps in southeast in Cuba have rejoined terrorist groups. He also says U.S. officials have not always been effective in determining which prisoners will be a danger once they are let go.

If you think I'm too harsh on Obama, read the Sunday editorial in today's New York Times (H/T Stephen Soldz):

we did not expect that Mr. Obama, who addressed these issues with such clarity during his campaign, would be sending such confused and mixed signals from the White House. Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas.

Meanwhile, today's UK Guardian is reporting that despite Obama's comments above, his administration will change previous U.S. policy and allow some former Guantanamo prisoners to be resettled in the United States:

The White House is set to reverse a key Bush administration policy by allowing some of the 240 remaining Guantánamo Bay inmates to be resettled on American soil.

The US is pushing for Europe to take a share of released inmates, but the Obama administration is reconciled to taking some of them, even though there will be noisy resistance from individual states....

The cases of the 240 inmates are being reviewed by a team of experienced US prosecutors to determine whether there is a basis for criminal charges. It remains unresolved what to do if there is a substantial "third category" of detainees who are deemed to pose a security threat, but against whom there is insufficient evidence to file criminal charges either because evidence was obtained under torture or because it is in the form of classified intelligence.

In a 90-minute interview on CBS tonight, Obama struck back at the former vice-president Dick Cheney over his charge that the new Guantánamo policy was putting US security at risk. The president said his predecessor's policy of indefinite detention was unsustainable and had generated anti-US sentiment without making the country safer.

Despite the change in policy, there was this ominous portent for the future:

The Obama administration is still contemplating the option of military courts martial, reconstituting the Bush-era military commissions or even instituting some new form of preventive detention.

The dance being done by current and former administration officials over the abominable crimes conducted at Guantanamo and elsewhere are dizzying in their vertiginous lurchings from mea culpas to lies to attempts at "reform."

Saudi Gitmo Prisoner, Cleared for Release, But Refused Transfer from Maximum Security Detention, Remains on Hunger Strike

Andy Worthington brings the case of Guantanamo hunger striker Ahmed Zuhair to our attention in a posting last Friday. (If this link isn't working, try this one.) Zuhair, a father of ten children, was arrested in Pakistan, and ultimately was sent to Guantanamo, accused of associations with Al Qaeda. He has been accused of being involved with the bombing of the USS Cole, and of the murder of an American in Bosnia in 1994 or 1995, among other supposed crimes or dubious connections (see Wikipedia link).

Yet the U.S. government decided in an Administrative Review Board hearing last December 23 that he was cleared for release from Guantanamo. Worthington notes that "he was not informed until February 10, and his lawyers were not told until February 16," noting:

This rather makes a mockery of the Guantánamo authorities’ complaints about the “threat” he poses, and the allegations, still cited in news reports, that “US authorities allege that he trained with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and was a member of an Islamic fighting group in Bosnia in the mid-1990s,” but above all it confirms — as if any confirmation were required — that, in the isolated world of Guantánamo, what counts against the majority of the prisoners is not the supposed rationale for their detention in the first place, which is often nothing more than a distant memory, but their behavior in detention.

Zuhair has been identified as having "history of disciplinary infractions", no doubt associated with his hunger strike, which began in June 2005. On March 18 of this year, the government refused a deal with Zuhair whereby he would end his years-long hunger strike if he were moved from the high-security Camp 6, where prisoners endure "the isolation of a prison block modeled on a maximum security prison for convicted criminals on the US mainland," to the lesser regimen of Camp 4. The government says it's afraid of the precedent such a move might make. This is in spite of the fact that Zuhair has been cleared for release!

So his hunger strike continues, and the record of the Obama administration releasing any of the many innocent men held at Guantanamo in the two months Obama has been in charge remains at a pitiful... one! (That one release was Binyam Mohamed.) According to his attorney, on his last visit to Mr. Zuhair:

... he weighed no more than 100 pounds, and “also appeared to be ill, vomiting repeatedly during meetings” at the prison. “Mr. Zuhair lifted his orange shirt and showed me his chest,” Kassem explained. “It was skeletal.“ He added, “Mr. Zuhair’s legs looked like bones with skin wrapped tight around them.”

Andy Worthington concludes, "While this reflects badly on the prison authorities, I believe it also reflects badly on the Obama administration."

CACI International Loses Bid to Spike Torture Lawsuit

According to a CNN report:

U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee rejected claims by defense contractor CACI that the company was immune from accountability over claims of physical abuse, war crimes and civil conspiracy.

Reports of torture and humiliation by soldiers and civilian contractors against Iraqi detainees created a political, diplomatic and public relations nightmare for the Bush administration in the months and years after the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Four Iraqi detainees have sued in U.S. federal courts, alleging contract interrogators assigned to the Baghdad Central Prison — known as Abu Ghraib — subjected them to beatings and mental abuse, then destroyed documents and video evidence and later misled officials about what was happening inside the facility.

Center for Constitutional Rights has been following the case and providing part of the legal representation to plaintiffs. From their information page on the case:

The suit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and federal question jurisdiction, brings claims arising from violations of U.S. and international law including torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; war crimes; assault and battery; sexual assault and battery; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent hiring and supervision; and negligent infliction of emotional distress. There are also civil conspiracy and aiding and abetting counts attached to most of these charges. Through this action, Plaintiffs seek compensatory and punitive damages.

In the case of one prisoner:

Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid was detained from 2003 until 2005, during which he was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib “hard site” for about three months. While detained there, CACI and its co-conspirators tortured Mr. Rashid by placing him in stress positions for extended periods of time, humiliating him, depriving him of oxygen, food, and water, shooting him in the head with a taser gun, and by beating him so severely that he suffered from broken limbs and vision loss. Mr. Rashid was forcibly subjected to sexual acts by a female as he was cuffed and shackled to cell bars. He was also forced to witness the rape of a female prisoner.

Among the heinous acts to which the four Plaintiffs were subjected at the hands of the defendant and certain government co-conspirators were: electric shocks; repeated brutal beatings; sleep deprivation; sensory deprivation; forced nudity; stress positions; sexual assault; mock executions; humiliation; hooding; isolated detention; and prolonged hanging from the limbs.

All of the plaintiffs are innocent Iraqis who were ultimately released without ever being charged with a crime. They all continue to suffer from physical and mental injuries caused by the torture and other abuse.

In a related story, TheDay.com is reporting:

Thousands of Iraqis held without charge by the United States on suspicion of links to insurgents or militants are being freed by this summer because of little or no evidence against them.

CIA Withholds List of over 3,000 Torture Tapes Documents from Public Release

Last Friday, the ACLU revealed that it "has a list of roughly 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency." Only two days earlier, the ACLU had formally asked Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor "to investigate the authorization to use torture at CIA secret prisons," following Mark Danner's article at the New York Review of Books detailing a leaked ICRC report on torture of CIA prisoners.

(The accompanying picture above is an actual sketch by a U.S. MP Reserve Sargeant of how Dilawar was tortured at Bagram prison.)

According to a report on the CIA documents list by Jason Leopold:

The number of documents – but not their contents – was mentioned Friday in a Justice Department letter from Lev Dassin, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Dassin told Judge Hellerstein that unredacted versions of the materials would be available for only him to review "in-camera" on March 26. The CIA also refused to provide the ACLU with a list of individuals who watched the videotapes prior to their destruction because that information "is either classified or otherwise protected by statute."

The number of relevant documents – "roughly 3,000," according to the letter – adds weight to the belief that CIA interrogators were in frequent communication with headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and with senior Bush administration officials who were monitoring the harsh techniques used and approving them one by one or even in combination.

And there was this interesting speculation by Emptywheel at Firedoglake:

Take a look at this list of FOIA exemptions, and you'll see why that may be rather interesting. For example, trade secrets might protect the identities of contractors who had viewed or retained the torture tapes. There's the physical safety exemption that they earlier cited in regards to their destruction of the tapes--but if they invoked this exemption, it might reveal that they're worried about the identities of non-CIA employees being released. There are law enforcement exemptions they might invoke if DOJ had reviewed these torture tapes in 2004 in response to a criminal referral by CIA's Inspector General.

Or the truly interesting possibility--that CIA might claim some identities are exempt from FOIA because they are presidential records more generally exempt from FOIA, which would come into play if someone at the White House had watched the torture tapes.

Rise in Torture Allegations Against Mexican Army

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times carried a report on a sharp increase in allegations of human rights abuses by the Mexican Army, as the Mexican government steps up its campaign against drug traffickers throughout the country.

The allegations include illegal searches, arrests without cause, rape, sexual abuse and torture, eight Mexican and international rights groups said in a report prepared for presentation to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington.

In 28 cases, the report said, the alleged violations resulted in death.

The groups said the number of complaints to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission jumped to 1,230 last year, from 182 in 2006. Calderon launched his anti-crime offensive in December 2006, and assigned the army a leading role....

More than 7,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the last 15 months, according to government and media estimates.

Darius Rejali on Long History of CIA Torture Abuse

The winner of the 2007 Human Rights Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association for his massive study, Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali, has a new article at AlterNet detailing some of the history behind recent revelations of U.S. torture.

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.

Dejali covers grisly, sadistic techniques now documented in use by the CIA within recent years, including the "ice-water cure," "the cold cell," "water-boarding," "standing cells," "High-cuffing," and more. Here's Dejali on "Sweatboxes and coubarils":

Abu Zubaydah says, "Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow.... The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 feet 6 inches] in height." The large box, which Abu Zubaydah says he was held in for up to two hours, is a classic sweatbox. Sweatboxes are old, and they came into modern torture from traditional Asian penal practices. If you've seen Bridge on the River Kwai, you know the Japanese used them in POW camps in World War II. They are still common in East Asia. The Chinese used them during the Korean War, and Chinese prisoners today relate accounts of squeeze cells (xiaohao, literally "small number"), dark cells (heiwu), and extremely hot or cold cells. In Vietnam, they are dubbed variously "dark cells," "tiger cages," or "connex boxes," which are metal and heat up rapidly in the tropical sun.

Abu Zubaydah was also placed into the smaller box, in which he was forced to crouch for hours, until "the stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful." This smaller type of box was once called a coubaril. Coubarils often bent the body in an uncomfortable position. They were standard in French penal colonies in New Guinea in the 19th century, where some prisoners were held in them for 16 days at a stretch.

Both kinds of boxes entered American prison and military practice in the 19th century. They were a standard part of naval discipline, and the word sweatbox comes from the Civil War era. In the 1970s, prisoners described sweatboxes in South Vietnam, Iran (tabout, or "coffin"), Israel, and Turkey ("tortoise cell"). In the last three decades, prisoners have reported the use of sweatboxes in Brazil (cofrinho), Honduras (cajones), and Paraguay (guardia). And after 2002, Iraqi prisoners held in U.S. detention centers describe "cells so small that they could neither stand nor lie down," as well as a box known as "the coffin" at the U.S. detention center at Qaim near Syria.

Other News

Al-Marri is Held Without Bail Pending Trial

UN Launches Probe of Secret Detention Sites

New pressure in Uighurs’ cases

Islamabad High Court Calls for Repatriation of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and Investigation into Her Missing Children

BREAKING -- Newsweek reports that release is imminent of three of the secret Bush administration OLC memos:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were “ugly” and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a “truth commission” on torture.

Note this, from the same article:

"I now know we were not fully and completely briefed on the CIA program," Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told NEWSWEEK. A U.S. official disputed the charge, claiming that members of Congress received more than 30 briefings over the life of the CIA program and that Congressional intel panels had seen the Red Cross report.

Other Resources

Torture Documents released under Freedom of Information Act

Law professor David Luban's classic essay, "Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb"

I close this first installment with a quote from the preeminent American poet, Walt Whitman:

Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
Whatever appears, whatever does not appear,
     we are beautiful or
sinful in ourselves only.

(O Mother--O Sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy'd us,
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

This week's WTR was put together with the assistance of Patriot Daily News Clearninghouse. Thanks, PDNC!

CIA Director Panetta Skewered: "Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose"

Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, and an intelligence agency veteran, has written a withering review at The Public Record of the first months of Leon Panetta's tenure as Director of the CIA.

According to Goodman, Panetta compares to two previous poor managers of the CIA, Porter Goss and George Tenet. Panetta "ignored the Senate’s own investigation of CIA intelligence on Iraq that documented the misuse of intelligence... [while] guaranteeing to the Senate intelligence committee that he would make no leadership changes at the CIA, even though he was taking charge of a political culture that has been dominated by the cover-up of key intelligence failures."

As a result, Panetta has left in place the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, who was a leading figure in the operations directorate when the program of extraordinary renditions went into full swing; the introduction of the use of torture and abuse even before a memorandum from the Department of Justice sanctioned such measures; and the establishment of the secret prisons or “black sites” that the CIA used to conduct so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

If President Obama and Leon Panetta were serious about stopping torture and abuse as well as extraordinary renditions that led to torture and abuse in third world countries, then why would they not adjust the chain of command to remove those high-ranking individuals responsible for these measure?

An excellent question, if you assume the predicate of the question, i.e., that Obama and Panetta are actually serious about stopping torture. In fact, decisions to utilize the Bagram prison for individuals rendered from anywhere, without recourse to judicial review, and to defend the Rumsfeld torture machinery against any exposure, while granting the administration the same claims to executive power under the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Bush did, argues that the Panetta policy is consistent with Obama's new (old) national security policy.

The latest news concerns Panetta's announcement that he was appointing former U.S. senator Warren Rudman as a "Special Adviser" to the Senate Intelligence Committee's announced hearings on CIA "past practices in terrorist detention and interrogation."

Goodman has Rudman's number, too:

Panetta has established his own review group within the Agency but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group.

The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that is currently being investigated by the FBI. Members of NCS would have a great interest in making sure that the Senate committee did not receive the worst of the evidence in this investigation. By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the review group and the Senate intelligence committee, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the Senate intelligence committee in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Senator Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates.

The political maneuvering around the interrogations/torture/detentions issue is fierce. One could get whiplash from following all the twistings and turnings and gyrations of the actors involved. The latest participant is Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson's article at The Washington Note is titled "Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay."

"Some" is right. While the article has some interesting insights into the internecine struggles within the Bush administration over legitimating its policy decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and how they disregarded evidence from the beginning that the vast majority of the prisoners they were harvesting were totally innocent, the real purpose of the article is to paint Colin Powell as an innocent. Nay, even a closet rebel holding down the worst excesses of the Bush administration. It's a nice fairy tale.

The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one.

For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated.

This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney....

But their ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war, by their own pronouncements, had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, its not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.

Hmm... I don't seem to remember Colin Powell denouncing the "war on terror" rhetoric anytime back in 2004, or even 2008 (despite his endorsement of Barack Obama, who also uses "war on terror" rhetoric on occasion). And wasn't Powell one of the "principals" at National Security Council meetings held in the White House that, according to an ABC report last year, "discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency", and in particular the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002? And was not this fact recently verified in a secret ICRC report linked to Mark Danner who published excerpts in the New York Review of Books just earlier this week? And weren't the following all present at these Principals meetings where torture was approved: "Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft"?

Of course this is all true, and Wilkerson's piece is a clever mea culpa for Powell, Armitage, and secondarily Rice, who all may be feeling the cold breath of indictments breathing down their necks. Cheney, it seems, has taken a different tack, brazenly lashing out in various interviews about the rightness of his administration's policies, and the dangers (supposedly) of following Obama's leadership changes. (Armageddon? again? -- And where is Donald Rumsfeld these days, anyway, last seen watching Oliver Stone's movie "W"?)

The cover-up of U.S. government torture continues apace. The problem is that too much is known. They are counting now on whitewash fake exposes, faux investigations, and time to take people's minds off what really happened. They are hoping that public rage towards AIG bonuses will siphon off the outrage energy, leaving little left for any concerted push for prosecutions and real government reform.

Their strategy may yet work, but it's up to the American people to stand them down. It will take as much fervor as we have got. The opposition is formidable, but our dedication is, too. And I am counting on the bedrock moral goodness of the American people. It is there. Do not doubt it. And it has not yet spoken its final word.

Is Establishment Turning Against Bush Detainee Torture?

Daily Kos has an article by bejammin075 that quotes former Colin Powell Chief of Staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, as calling for impeachment investigations against Bush and Cheney. This may be remarkable in itself, but I found his rationale, as stated by Wilkerson in an interview with CNN, to be just as important. The man who part of the administration that built a phony case to go to war against Iraq, now says:

I would start my investigation into the detainee abuse issue, which constitutes, I think, a defilement of everything America stands for, and has done irreparable damage to our reputation, and thus to our power around the world. If that doesn't rate a 'high crime' definition, I don't know what does.

And I would also look closely at how we got into this war, particularly the cooking of the books in intelligence. [Emphasis is mine]

Wilkerson has been saying some pretty critical things about the Bush administration since he left some time ago, but the emphasis on detainee abuse, i.e., torture, is welcomed in any case. I wonder how many individuals within the administration or the establishment in general oppose Bush on this. What they don't tell us is how extended and expansive is the organizational reach of the agencies that research and implement this torture. Will they say the "C" word?