Torture News: Anti-Gitmo Protesters Acquitted; RCMP Investigating U.S. Officials on Arar Rendition

The Washington Examiner is reporting that Judge Russell Canan of the D.C. Superior Court has dropped all charges against 27 (some reports say 24) defendants arrested at the U.S. Capitol on January 21 in a demonstration called by Witness Against Torture. The protesters were demonstrating peacefully on the steps of the Capitol, dressed as Guantanamo prisoners in orange jump suits, and with banners reading “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” calling for President Barack Obama to shut down Guantanamo prison. Police say they refused to disperse as ordered.

Inside the Capitol Rotunda, at the location where deceased presidents lie in state, fourteen activists were arrested performing a memorial service for three men who died at Guantanamo in 2006. Initially reported as suicides, the deaths may have been — as recent evidence suggests — the result of the men being tortured to death (see Scott Horton, “Murders at Guantanamo, March 2010, Harpers).

One of the protesters was contacted by cell phone after the judgment for acquittal, according to a story at MassLive.com:

[Patricia] Wieland, contacted by cell phone outside the court house, called the ruling a major victory because it upheld the First Amendment, namely the protections for freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful assembly.

“We did exactly what the First Amendment tells us to do,” she said. “We actually exercised the First Amendment and won.”

SCOTUS Stiffs Arar Complaint, While RCMP Investigating U.S./Syrian Officials in Arar Rendition

According to a press release by Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the U.S. Supreme Court "decided today not to hear the [CCR] case on behalf of Canadian citizen Maher Arar against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured. I discussed last November the en banc decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where the court made it clear that victims of extraordinary rendition, i.e., kidnapping and being sent to be tortured, as Arar was, right from JFK Airport in New York City. (File this in the "it could be you" department.)

Glenn Greenwald castigated the Supreme Court’s decision in his column today, "The U.S. wins the right to abduct innocent people with impunity":

The Canadians, who cooperated with the U.S. in Arar’s abduction, conducted a sweeping investigation of what happened, and then publicly "issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured," and made clear he had done absolutely nothing wrong. Then, Canada’s Prime Minister personally and publicly apologized to Arar, and announced that Canada would compensate him with a payment of $ 8.5 million.

But what has the U.S. done. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Really worse than nothing, as the Obama administration actively sought to prevent Arar’s suit, including filing a brief arguing against the Supreme Court taking up the Second Circuit ruling. Furthermore, the U.S. has refused to allow Arar into the United States, even though it admits he never did anything wrong. The only reason for this is to keep his story from being heard.

Meanwhile, according to CCR, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating U.S. officials involved in the rendition of Mr. Arar.

According to Mr. Arar and his attorneys, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has been conducting a criminal investigation into U.S. as well as Syrian officials for their role in his rendition to torture.

To their knowledge, this is the first time the existence of the RCMP’s criminal investigation of U.S officials has been made public. Mr. Arar has met with the RCMP in conjunction with the investigation.

Said CCR Senior Attorney Maria LaHood, “The U.S. should be conducting its own criminal investigation of the officials responsible for sending an innocent man to Syria for a year to be interrogated under torture, not covering for them. Again, the Canadians are doing the right thing by criminally investigating not only Syrian officials, but officials from the U.S. as well. The Obama administration should look to the Canadian example and do what’s right – apologize to Maher and hold his torturers accountable.”

It’s a good thing (for certain people) that the United States is quite large, because as this country sinks into the status of an international pariah, intent on protecting its torturers, if not the right to torture prisoners it considers outside the pale of national and international law, U.S. officials involved in these crimes against humanity will soon find they cannot go to even Canada, as they would fear arrest and prosecution.

Other Links

Those more interested in Maher Arar’s case should check out this CCR link.

Those, like myself, who could not attend the Culture Project’s "Blueprint for Accountability" shindig at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYU, on June 7, with Valerie Plame, Ron Suskind, Jeremy Scahill, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Vince Warren and others, can now watch the unchaptered video of the event online here.

The full text of the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) complaint to the federal Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) is now online, offering the opportunity to sign on to complaint itself. The official petition draws upon findings by PHR that the CIA experimented on detainees in its custody, based upon the following evidence of wrongdoing detailed in declassified government documents. See PHR’s full investigatory report here.

PHR’s filing has been joined by other major human rights and civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Watch, International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

ACLU reminds us that June is "Torture Awareness Month," and is using the occasion to publicize many of the torture documents it painstakingly won via hard-fought FOIA lawsuits. Now, if they would only sign on to PHR’s OHRP complaint. Hey, ACLU, what’s up with that?

Update: An ACLU kindly wrote to remind me that ACLU has been supportive of PHR's report on Bush-era human experiments on torture, citing this article, as well as support for the PHR/New York Civil Liberties Union push for passage of New York State anti-torture bills.

Originally posted at The Seminal/FDL

APA Scrubs Web Pages Linking It to CIA Torture Workshops

Originally posted at Firedoglake/The Seminal

Like a modern-day Ministry of Truth, the American Psychological Association (APA) has scrubbed the webpage describing "deception scenarios" workshops that were part of a conference it conducted with the CIA and Rand Corporation on July 17-18, 2003. In addition, the APA erased the link to the page, and even all mention of its existence, from another story at its July 2003 Science Policy Insider News website that briefly described the conference.

In May 2007, in an article at Daily Kos, I noted that the workshops were describing "new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees." Quoting from the APA’s description (and note, the link is to an archived version of the webpage; emphasis is added):

• How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware?
• How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?
• What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?….
• What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?

In August 2007, in a landmark article at Vanity Fair, journalist Katherine Eban revealed that SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were participants at the APA/CIA/Rand affair. Mitchell and Jessen have since been linked with the implementation of the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation techniques" in 2001-2002.

Just last November, in an article at Firedoglake, I recalled the issue of the 2003 conference and asked Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture “Workshop”? I wrote at that time:

The APA and CIA have a very long history of working together on interrogation techniques, in particular on sensory deprivation and use of drugs like LSD and mescaline in interrogations, and other methods of breaking down the mind and the body of prisoners.

Use of drugs to influence interrogations, in addition to sensory deprivation, distortion and overload or bombardment were signal techniques in a decades-long interrogation research program that came to be known by its most famous moniker, MKULTRA (although these torture techniques were studied and tested by the CIA even earlier, in its 1950s projects Bluebird and Artichoke). Such techniques were codified by the early 1960s in a CIA Counterinsurgency Interrogation Manual, also known by its codename, KUBARK.

The story on the APA/CIA/Rand workshop received a good deal of dissemination on the Internet, and one can imagine that the description of the abusive techniques explored there were an embarrassment to the honchos of the APA, who strive to maintain an organizational aura of liberalism and scientific respectability, while at the same time selling its wares to the Defense Department and intelligence agencies in promoting the "war on terror" and "homeland security."

The URL for the former webpage — www.apa.org/ppo/issues/deceptscenarios.html — now brings up a message that "the page is not available." A search of the APA site and a Google search does not retrieve a link to the original page, which can now be accessed, thankfully, only through a web archive search engine.

The same is true for the webpage for the APA’s July 2003 "Spin" newsletter, which has a story entitled "APA Works with CIA and RAND to Hold Science of Deception Workshop". Listed at the end of the story is a link telling readers to "View the thematic scenarios from the workshop." (See archived version.) The old URL — www.apa.org/ppo/spin/703.html– brings up another "page not available" message. However, the bulk of the webpage now resides at a new address — www.apa.org/about/gr/science/spin/2003/07/also-issue.aspx — with the former link now missing from the story.

While the scrubbing of the page describing truth drugs and sensory overload could be attributed to some normal archiving decision, or the victim of a web do-over (and APA does appear to have redesigned their site), the excision of the text and link to the site on the referring page cannot be an accident.

What is APA up to?

Recently, APA has made some noises about finally respecting the decision of its membership in a September 2008 referendum that decisively repudiated "the APA leadership’s long-standing policy encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations and other activities in military and CIA detention facilities that have repeatedly been found to violate international law and the Constitution." The referendum voted to prohibit psychologist participation in settings where human rights violations take place. This policy took dead aim against use of psychologists in the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (or BSCTs) used at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

To date, however, the referendum has had no effect, although the Public Interest Task Force for the APA recently has told APA members involved in passage of the referendum that it is gathering information on offending sites in order to implement the new policy, over a year and a half since the vote on the referendum took place. I will hope, though I have little trust, that APA will take the necessary steps.

But APA has a history of bad faith on such issues. Recently, they rewrote a problematic section of their ethical code, dubbed the Nuremberg loophole by some, which allowed psychologists to violate their ethical rules if done to comply with "law, regulations, or other governing legal authority." As Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) described it, "The new language restores the 1992 version of the code, which prohibits use of the standard ‘to justify or defend violating human rights.’"

But PHR also noted:

Section 1.02 was inserted into the APA ethics code in August 2002, and was used by both the APA and the Bush Administration to allow the participation of psychologists in the "enhanced interrogation" program, in which detainees were systematically abused and tortured under the supervision of health professionals. PHR is calling for the APA to also reform section 8.05 of the 2002 ethics code, which allows research on human subjects without their consent if such research comports with law or regulations.

Section 8.05 allows psychologists to dispense with the use of informed consent in research experiments where "permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations." The use of informed consent guarantees the voluntary participation of human subjects in research done upon them, and is considered a bedrock of ethical research.

The gyrations of the APA remind one of the razzle-dazzle misdirection of the Obama administration, which trumpets "transparency," but recently told the Supreme Court to turn down Maher Arar’s appeal of his rendition-torture lawsuit. In addition, President Obama’s own secret black site prisons have now been revealed, over a year since Obama made a big deal out of closing down the CIA black sites. When it comes to hiding the crime of torture, the U.S. government and its contracting agencies have made a fetish out of secrecy, and the promise of an end to torture after the hideous Bush/Cheney years is revealed to be a chimera.

[Since its original posting, the story was picked up by Scott Horton at Harper's.

Fight for Justice for Maher Arar

I'm forwarding to my readers an important message from Center for Constitutional Rights regarding the Maher Arar case. I highly encourage readers to write to Attorney General Holder, as explained below:

Dear CCR Supporter:

Many of you have closely followed Maher Arar's case since it was filed 5 years ago. Today, in the hopes of finally seeing justice, we are petitioning the United States Supreme Court to hear Mr. Arar's extraordinary rendition case and we urgently need you to take action.

In 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK airport while on his way home to Canada from abroad. He was interrogated, detained in the U.S. for 2 weeks, denied his right to go to court and then secretly rendered to Syria where he was tortured and held in a grave-like underground cell for over ten months. He was never charged with a crime. You can learn more about Mr. Arar's case on our website.

In a disturbing decision last November, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed CCR's civil case Arar v. Ashcroft in a 7-4 decision. In a strongly worded dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, "I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today's majority decision will be viewed with dismay." We are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review Maher Arar's case and allow him his day in court. No one should ever be rendered to torture and those who have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government are entitled to redress.

You can help CCR fight for justice for Maher Arar. Tell Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending the Bush administration's wrongs and urge him to:

• Acknowledge the wrong done to Maher Arar in a public apology;
• Remove Maher Arar from the US Terror Watch List;
• Appoint outside special counsel to investigate and prosecute crimes relating to Maher Arar's rendition;
• Remedy the harm done to Maher Arar; and
• Ensure that the US does not send anyone to torture or arbitrary detention.

Click here to write to Attorney General Holder. Thank you for standing with us in the ongoing fight against torture and impunity.

Yours truly,

Annette Dickerson
Director of Education and Outreach

Arar Decision Cripples Torture Rendition Suits

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The Toronto Globe and Mail succinctly summed up the November 2 decision to dismiss the Maher Arar case, delivered en banc by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit:

Victims of extraordinary rendition have no recourse to sue Washington for torture suffered overseas, appellate court rules

"No recourse." Americans should ponder the meaning of this decision, which explicitly places state interests above individual rights, even when such rights include not being sent to a country that will torture that individual. That such torture was done at the behest of the U.S. government, with written questions given to the torturers, only exacerbates the issue.

Maher Arar was a Syrian-born Canadian who was seized by U.S. authorities at Kennedy International Airport (following upon a bogus RCMP tip), held for thirteen days, and then, with U.S. connivance, and despite the fact Canada said it would accept Mr. Arar, rendered via a CIA jet to Syria for interrogation and torture. He was released in 2003, and the Canadian government, which ascertained Mr. Arar had no connections with terrorism, apologized and forked over a multi-million dollar settlement.

Mr. Arar has tried to find justice in the U.S. courts, and released the following statement after the Second Circuit decision:

“After seven years of pain and hard struggle it was my hope that the court system would listen to my plea and act as an independent body from the executive branch. Unfortunately, this recent decision and decisions taken on other similar cases, prove that the court system in the United States has become more or less a tool that the executive branch can easily manipulate through unfounded allegations and fear mongering. If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law.”

Air Force Doctor Gets Medal for Serving on Rendition Torture Flights

Originally posted at Firedoglake

Maxwell-Gunther Dispatch.com, the web news site for personnel and interested partisans of Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reported on September 17 that Col. (Dr.) James W. Walter has been awarded the Air Medal "for his meritorious service on delicate assignments providing medical care to enemy detainees."

From January 2007 to 2009 as the senior detainee movement flight surgeon, he provided 106 combat hours of support to the 14 Joint Task Force Detainee Movement Operations missions in the C-17A. His service included travel into 15 different countries, some of them in an active enemy fire zone.

The article goes into great detail about "self-professed military brat" Walter's career as a NASA space shuttle launch and recovery physician, and says nothing more about the service for which he was awarded a medal. That's because the military's rendition program is highly secret. Stephen Grey in his 2006 book, Ghost Plane, noted the existence of the military's rendition program, and proclaimed it was larger than the CIA's. But Grey's research concentrated on the CIA's program. The Pentagon's rendition program received its first major outing in the pages of the New York Times only in August 2008:

WASHINGTON - The United States military has secretly handed over more than 200 militants to the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries, nearly all in the past two years, as part of an effort to reduce the burden of detaining and interrogating foreign fighters captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to American military officials.

The system is similar in some ways to the rendition program used by the Central Intelligence Agency since the Sept. 11 attacks to secretly transfer people suspected of being militants back to their home countries to be jailed and questioned.

And tortured? The United States supposedly seeks "assurances" that the prisoners will not be tortured when sent back to countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Obama Backpedals on Torture, Renditions, State Secrecy

The Los Angeles Times had an article over the weekend by Greg Miller, describing the decision by the Obama administration to maintain, in some form, the secret rendition program of the CIA. The program began under the Clinton administration, and was accelerated President Bush. Full details of the program are classified.

In legal terms, extraordinary rendition is the "extrajudicial transfer of a person from one State to another." But for most of us, rendition remains a fancy term for kidnapping, and involves snatching suspected "terrorists" off the streets, or from airports, as in the case of innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar, snatched out of JFK airport, and secretly flown to Syria. Maher spent over ten months in a "grave-like" cell, and was beaten and tortured into making a false confession.

Miller notes, in his article:

Despite concern about rendition, Obama's prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the "transitory" technique.

Et tu, Obama?

According to Times Online today, "hundreds of terrorist suspects have been abducted and transferred to prisons in countries with questionable human rights records such as Egypt, Morocco or Jordan." The European parliament and human rights groups around the world have condemned the rendition policy. But according to an anonymous administration official:

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools. You still have to go after the bad guys,” said the official. “It is controversial in some circles. But if done within certain parameters, it is acceptable.”

But another anonymous "senior CIA official" dryly noted:

"Once you turn them over to another service, you lose control."

The Bush administration always maintained, too, that it took the requisite precautions regarding sending prisoners to states that torture. It had to do this, of course, to keep up any pretense to following the law. According to a Congressional Research Service report in October 2007:

The U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), and its domestic implementing legislation (the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998) impose the primary legal restrictions on the transfer of persons to countries where they would face torture. Both CAT and U.S. implementing legislation generally prohibit the rendition of persons to countries in most cases where they would more likely than not be tortured, though there are arguably limited exceptions to this prohibition. The State Department has taken the position that CAT’s provisions concerning the transfer of persons do not apply extraterritorially, though as a matter of policy the United States does not transfer persons in its custody to countries where they would face torture (U.S. regulations and statutes implementing CAT, however, arguably limit the extraterritorial transfer of individuals nonetheless). Under U.S. regulations implementing CAT, a person may be transferred to a country that provides credible assurances that the rendered person will not be tortured. Neither CAT nor implementing legislation prohibits the rendition of persons to countries where they would be subject to harsh interrogation techniques not rising to the level of torture. Besides CAT, additional obligations may be imposed upon U.S. rendition practice via the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act (as amended by the Military Commissions Act (P.L. 109-366)), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

For more on the illegality of extraordinary rendition by the tenets of international law, see this excellent briefing paper by an "All-Party" UK Parliamentary Group, published a little over three years ago, Torture by proxy: International law applicable to ‘Extraordinary Renditions.'

Despite the protests and controversies that attended Bush's use of rendition, in his article, Miller notes the relative silence of human rights groups. As in the case of the campaign to gain acceptance for the abuse-laden Army Field Manual, some human rights agencies are eager to braintrust the Obama administration on this:

"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time."

Malinowski said he had urged the Obama administration to stipulate that prisoners could be transferred only to countries where they would be guaranteed a public hearing in an official court. "Producing a prisoner before a real court is a key safeguard against torture, abuse and disappearance," Malinowski said.

Miller goes on to note that Obama's executive order on interrogations, which also made the Army Field Manual the new "single standard" of U.S. interrogation, included the formation of a task force to re-examine policy in this area, and as regards renditions, "to make sure that they 'do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture' or otherwise circumvent human-rights laws and treaties."

While this last point is a branch onto which those hoping for Obama to really dismantle all U.S. torture policies, cling, the statements attributed to current administration officials are not promising. And then there is the unasked question: do you really trust the CIA to police itself on this? The task force called to assess interrogation policy over the next six months, has no human rights or congressional members at all, and is stacked with the leadership of military and intelligence agencies, while headed by Attorney General Eric Holder.

"State Secrets" and Torture

Meanwhile, as a recent article by Suzanne Ito at the ACLU's Blog of Rights explains that the Obama administration's vaunted promise of transparency in government and opposition to torture gets it first real test in court later this month, when oral arguments are scheduled in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. As explained by Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent:

Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. involves five victims of CIA rendition, or “torture by proxy,” as it’s also known. Abducted abroad, the men were flown by the CIA to cooperating countries whose agents interrogated them under torture. Because federal officials are usually immune from lawsuits, the men later sued the private aviation data company, Jeppesen — a subsidiary of Boeing, one of the largest federal defense contractors — that knowingly provided the flight plans and other assistance necessary for the CIA to carry out its clandestine operations.

The ACLU filed suit on behalf of this group of victims in May 2007, but the Bush administration quickly swooped in, waving the flag of the state secrets privilege. Insisting that the very subject of the lawsuit – the CIA’s rendition program – is itself a state secret, the Justice Department convinced the federal court in California, where Jeppesen is based, to dismiss the case on the grounds that it would harm national security....

In fact, by the time this lawsuit was filed, the CIA’s rendition of suspected terrorists to foreign countries to be tortured had become an international scandal. Foreign countries such as Egypt, Switzerland, the UK and others that had cooperated with the CIA had been forced to investigate; those investigations had corroborated many of the allegations that are the subject of the case pending against Jeppesen.

Still, the U.S. government, now under President Obama, continues to insist in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that “[t]he sensitivity of the information at issue in this litigation, and the serious harms that would result from its disclosure, compel the Government to assert the state secrets privilege.” The Obama administration has not filed any new briefs or amendments in the case.

Eviatar contacted the Obama administration, asking if it intended to file any new briefs, or change their position on "state secrets," and they declined to comment. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 9 in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a somewhat similar case ACLU in 2006 on behalf of rendition victim Khaled El-Masri, citing the "privileged" nature of the entire case, and the Supreme Court upheld the dimissal last year.

For those who are hoping that Obama's promises of change around torture will be more than partial (he's shut down CIA prisons and practices of "enhanced" CIA torture), the time is growing short. Support for CIA renditions; support for use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation, among other cruel, inhumane and degrading techniques in the Army Field Manual; support for "state secrets" privileges in order to stop victims of torture from getting their day in court; support for CIA secret prisons, if used for prisoners in "facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis."

Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the British human rights group, Reprieve, was trying to be gracious to Obama when he was quoted in Times Online today:

“Western liberals are totally deluded at the moment. Like George Bush, who declared ‘mission accomplished’ on Iraq six years ago, they need to realise that the job is far from done. I believe that Obama’s heart is in the right place but he is surrounded by people in the US intelligence and military who don’t want either themselves or their policies subjected to too much scrutiny.”

Smith is right. It's up to us to make this administration, and a Congress usually subordinate to intelligence and military needs, do the right thing. That means, dear reader, it's up to you, and what are you doing about it. You could start with supporting (and that means $$$) the ACLU, Reprieve, Physicians for Human Rights, Center for Constitutional Rights, and any other human rights or legal group fighting to stop torture. Just make sure that they really are. In human rights groups, as elsewhere, caveat emptor: make sure they oppose the Army Field Manual's torture-approving Appendix M, and make sure they oppose the criminal policy of extraordinary renditions, and call for total adherence to the Convention Against Torture and all other U.S. and international laws against torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners.

Update:Scott Horton's column is cited by my many critics [at the Daily Kos posting of this essay] because he notes what I supposedly fail to -- the qualitative difference between plain old rendition, and extraordinary rendition. Gee, how did I get so confused? Perhaps I followed the analysis in the Congressional Research Service report for Congress, Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on Torture, who sets out the following definitions:

Persons suspected of criminal or terrorist activity may be transferred from one State (i.e., country) to another for arrest, detention, and/or interrogation. Commonly, this is done through extradition, by which one State surrenders a person within its jurisdiction to a requesting State via a formal legal process, typically established by treaty. Far less often, such transfers are effectuated through a process known as “extraordinary rendition” or “irregular rendition.” These terms have often been used to refer to the extrajudicial transfer of a person from one State to another. In this report, “rendition” refers to extraordinary or irregular renditions unless otherwise specified.

Although the particularities regarding the usage of extraordinary renditions and the legal authority behind such renditions are not publicly available, various U.S. officials have acknowledged the practice’s existence. Recently, there has been some controversy as to the usage of renditions by the United States, particularly with regard to the alleged transfer of suspected terrorists to countries known to employ harsh interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture, purportedly with the knowledge or acquiescence of the United States.

In other words, all renditions are "extraordinary renditions." The use of the latter to render suspects to torture is what is at issue. But note, all renditions are extrajudicial, i.e., outside established law.

Horton, Sullivan and Greenwald can say whatever they like. The heat's on, and they don't want to be perceived as too far off the mainstream. But the truth is also the truth, no matter how bitter or inconvenient it may be.

Canadian Judge: U.S. Violated International Law in Khadr Case

A judge for a Federal Court in Canada has ruled, according to a CTV.ca report, that videotapes made of interviews with Omar Khadr at Guantanamo over four years ago must be released to Khadr's attorneys. It's believed that these videos show Khadr crying and begging Canadian officials to help him, in addition to making charges of torture, and showing these same officials physical marks said to stem from this torture.

The judge, Richard Mosley, said in his ruling that the videos "may tend to support the applicant's allegations". He also apparently stated that U.S. treatment of Omar Khadr -- a then-15-year-old teenager captured in Afghanistan during fighting back in 2002, who is accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. forces and killing one soldier -- violated international laws against torture. He also stated that the Canadian government was "implicated" in the maltreatment. Khadr, now 21 years old, remains imprisoned at the Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Last March, it was discovered that the U.S. government had been sitting on evidence that was exculpatory for Mr. Khadr. In his affidavit, Khadr describes abusive treatment by the American first at Baghram Air Force Base, and later at Guantanamo. He accused Canadian interrogators at Guantanamo of failing to stop the abuse, as they appeared single-minded in their determination to get him to implicate Canadian rendition torture victim, Maher Arar. Arar was a totally innocent man, kidnapped by U.S. forces from JFK airport in New York, flown to Syria and tortured there, until later released. A Canadian Commissioner of Inquiry later cleared Mr. Arar of all charges.

(H/T to Chaucounne at Daily Kos)

Short Takes: Obama, APA, & Omar Khadr

Arch-neocon William Kristol and the New York Times seem bent on shoving their racial swiftboating tactics down our throats. Kristol was forced to issue a partial retraction after writing a story that claimed Barack Obama lied when he said he wasn't present at a sermon by his pastor Jeremiah White that purportedly blamed "the 'arrogance' of the 'United States of White America' for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks." Kristol and the right-wing want to paint Obama as a racial extremist, or someone who cynically manipulates racist extremists, and this to frighten white Americans.

Of course, Obama was never at such a sermon. And frankly, it wouldn't have mattered if he were. Obama spoke his piece on the anger of black America the other day, in a well-received speech on the impact of racial divisions on the United States. While I think Wright's comments weren't "divisive" -- comments Obama felt he had to disavow -- nevertheless, he said they were understandable, given the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and other racial discrimination. And that's more than any other U.S. politician would give towards the validation of black rage, much of it, as Obama pointed out, directed impotently at misplaced or non-powerful targets, or turned inward.

+++++++++++++++

Noted bioethicist and physician, Steven Miles, comments favorably on my analysis of the APA's new resolution language concerning a ban on psychologist participation in torture in Bush's prison gulag abroad:

Valtin is correct. The February 22 APA statement entirely conforms to current US policy of lip service in public and war crimes in private.

Go read his entire comment.

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association continues to do the dirty work for the Department of Defense. In past week, APA has been lobbying heavily to change the language of California State Senator Ridley-Thomas's resolution calling for California health-care professionals, including psychologists, to not work in the anti-human rights sewer that is Guantanamo, and other such prisons where torture and prisoner abuse has occurred. APA apparently was successful in getting the language of the resolution changed. Instead of an outright ban in participation at torture sites, the resolution now calls for non-participation only in interrogations that involve torture or abusive treatment.

This sounds good, but in reality it is a significant weakening of the resolution, rendering it all but meaningless. For one thing, it leave health care workers, and psychologists, especially, who staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams or BSCTs at Guantanamo and elsewhere, working in sites that do not allow basic human rights, such as habeas corpus. It also, as a recent article by intelligence and ethics experts Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD and David DeBatto (U.S. Army Counterintelligence Operative - ret.), point out in a recent article:

Many institutional factors combine to defeat APA principles on interrogation in national security settings under the Bush Administration....

In intelligence operations, information is passed to participants strictly on a “need to know” basis. Inasmuch as the February 2008 Modification prohibits psychologists from “knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques,” it is a simple matter to withhold morally relevant information from psychologists and to provide cover stories....

APA leadership knows what it's doing in sending lobbyists around the country, weakening any resolution, bill, or determined effort to stop the psychological presence at DoD and CIA torture sessions. This keeps the APA in the good graces of Pentagon and intelligence agency high echelon. It also destroys whatever claims APA has to being an organization that stands for anything progressive, or even represents the beneficent practice of psychology in America.

Representatives of Physicians for Social Responsibility / Los Angeles, who along with the American Friends Service Committee have worked with Ridley-Thomas on the resolution, assure me that there is still time to change the language of the resolution. But while that means the resolution can be made stronger, it can also be weakened even more. And there's no sign that APA will further ignore this legislative initiative in California, which if it passes would be a serious black-eye for the Pentagon and Bush's torture apologists.

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Meanwhile, in Guantanamo itself, Omar Khadr, now 21 years old, but 15 when Special Forces arrested him in Afghanistan, had his trial at the hands of the Pentagon's phony tribunal system postponed indefinitely by a judge, while the defense finally gets a chance to look at the "evidence" the government has against Khadr. Some of this evidence is exculpatory.

For instance, the U.S. has maintained that young Khadr was the only person left alive inside a house when a grenade was used to kill a U.S. Army Sargent. But now we know otherwise:

Last month, the testimony of a soldier identified only as "OC-1," accidentally released to the public, showed that another fighter was alive inside the Afghan compound where the 2002 firefight took place and a grenade was thrown at U.S. soldiers, killing one of them. Until last month's revelation, it had long been assumed that Mr. Khadr was the only person alive inside the compound, and so must have thrown the grenade. Mr. Khadr now faces multiple charges in connection to the incident, including murder.

The U.S. officer's diary, snippets of which were made public this week, confirms the OC-1 account that another fighter was alive....

"I remember looking over my right shoulder and seeing [edited out by government] just waste the guy who was still alive. He was shooting him with controlled pairs..." the officer writes, referring to bursts of gunfire.

The Globe and Mail article goes on to describe the political circumstance surrounding the decision to put Khadr on trial, while another article on the case at Adelaide Now details new charges concerning the treatment of Khadr in U.S. custody.

Omar Khadr was a minor for his first three years at Guantanamo. But after his arrest in July 2002, he was held at Bagram, Afghanistan, where he suffered the standard American abuse: hooding, threatened with dogs, water poured over him. But there were other threats:

"On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped," Khadr said in the document.

He said interrogators told him at one point that the Egyptians wound send "Soldier No. 9" to rape him....

"While my wounds were still healing, interrogators made me clean the floors on my hands and knees. They woke me up in the middle of the night after midnight and made me clean the floor with a brush and dry it with towels until dawn, carry heavy buckets of water," he said.

Later at Guantanamo, Khadr said an Afghan with a US flag on his pants threatened to send him back to Afghanistan unless he cooperated, telling him: "They like small boys in Afghanistan."

Omar said in his recently released affidavit that he said whatever he could think of to stop the brutal interrogations, in which he was shackled for hours at a time, and not allowed to use a bathroom, to the point he urinated on himself. Until a Canadian judge refused access to Khadr by Canadian intelligence officers, because conditions at Guantanamo failed to meet the criteria of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian interrogators failed to intervene to stop any abuse. They were there, in part, to try and get the teenage Khadr to implicate Canadian torture rendition victim Maher Arar, among others, proving that Bush's "war on terror" torture campaign is an international affair.