Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges

Originally posted at Truthout

Four Ohio residents filed court papers last week seeking to compel the Ohio State Psychology Board to investigate Dr. Larry James, a retired Army colonel and former chief psychologist for the intelligence command at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, who oversaw the brutal torture of detainees, including children.

The motion was filed by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas on behalf of the four residents, which includes a psychologist, a veteran, a minister and a long-time mental health advocate.

Earlier this year, the psychology board had dismissed a complaint first filed by the same Ohio residents last July, stating, "It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter."

The original complaint, filed with the Ohio Board of Psychology, was supported by over a thousand pages of documentation, including reports from the US military, the Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and statements from survivors and witnesses. But the board did not provide a rationale as to why it was unable to probe the allegations leveled against James.

James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), which was made up of psychologists and other mental health professionals who assisted interrogators at the prison facility during the first half of 2003. From 2004 to 2006, he served as chief of psychology at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, and in 2007 he returned to Guantanamo. He retired in 2008.

James is currently dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was licensed to practice psychology in Ohio in 2008.

According to the complaint, during James' tenure at Guantanamo, "boys and men were systematically abused" and were subjected to "rape and death threats" and torture techniques such as "forced nudity; sleep deprivation; extreme isolation; short-shackling into stress positions; and physical assault."

Moreover, the complaint states that James supervised the forceful and arbitrary detention of three Afghan boys, "transported thousands of miles away from their families and denied them access to counsel."

James did not return an email request for comment.

In their verified complaint filed with the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, seeking a writ to compel the Ohio Board of Psychology "to proceed to 'formal action' against Dr. Larry C. James," the complainants quote an affidavit by former American Psychological Association (APA) Practice Directorate Chief, Dr. Bryant Welch, that the allegations in the complaint, "if true, represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered."

IHRC's earlier complaint (PDF link) was damning.

He was accused of numerous instances of professional misconduct and violations of the law, including failure to protect his clients from harm, exploitation of those with whom he worked, failure to protect detainees' confidentiality and failure "to represent honestly his own conduct, experience and the results of his services."

Indeed, in "Fixing Hell," a book James published in 2008 about his experiences at Guantanamo and at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, he claimed that he was "righting the wrongs" at both prisons and that there "have been no incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay by either an interrogator or psychologist reported since my arrival in Cuba in January 2003."

Ironically, in his book, James wrote of at least two incidents of such abuse during his 2003 tenure, which as the IHRC complaint explains, he failed to report to proper authorities.

A fair amount of James' narrative about his time at Guantanamo concerns his actions after his commander, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, put him in charge of three young teenage prisoners, all younger than age 16 and one perhaps as young as 12 years old, in February 2003. James was in charge of rendering the boys from Bagram, Afghanistan, where they were then held, arranging their Guantanamo housing and attending and supervising their interrogations. James wrote that the boys were "very traumatized" upon arrival at Guantanamo. While he presents his treatment of these children as a "case study" for his "softer" style of interrogation - "exactly the kind of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation" - a closer, more nuanced look presents a very different picture.

"Teenage Terrorists"

The story of these young detainees had previously been documented in news reports and is also retold in the IHRC complaint, which redacts the boys' personal information, something James failed to do in his book.

While James doesn't mention the fact in his book, there were at least a dozen underage, minor children or teenagers held at Guantanamo. US authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have allegedly held thousands of other juveniles. The IHRC complaint refers to torture and abuse suffered by two of the Guantanamo minors, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, during the period James was chief psychologist. These teens, as well as all the others but the three held at Camp Iguana, the special camp built to hold them at the Guantanamo base, were kept with the adult prisoners at Camp Delta and other sites at the prison.

According to James, when he arrived at Bagram to pick up his new prisoners, he found them looking "not only terrified but also disheveled and lost." Nevertheless, he believed them to be "far from innocent," "teenage terrorists." "These juveniles were not sweet kids," James wrote.

Yet, he also found that the trauma they endured was very real. James wrote that the boys were "victims of rape, illiterate, one certainly had PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]"; they were, according to James, "the most fragile - psychologically, medically and academically - children I had ever met."

James glosses over in his book the circumstances of the 20-hour flight from Bagram that brought the children to Guantanamo. But news reports published after the children were released in January 2004 provides more detail about their time held by US forces in Afghanistan and their subsequent transport to Guantanamo.

In his book, James states that all three children "had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against US forces in Afghanistan." But James failed to provide any evidence to support such an assertion, which is contrary to reports the boys made themselves. According to a report published a Guardian UK article, two of the boys were caught while US forces were "looking for a local commander, Mansoor Rahman Saiful, who had fought against the Taliban for years, but joined the radical Islamists when America attacked Afghanistan."

Naqibullah, age 13, "a local imam's son, said he stumbled into the raid while cycling from a friend's house," and was interrogated daily about his knowledge of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

"I told them, 'I don't know these people and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father's authority.'" After two weeks, Naqibullah said, he was asked whether he had any objection to being taken to "another place."

"I said, 'What can I do? You will take me wherever you want to.'" That night, bound, blindfolded and fitted into orange overalls, he was loaded on to a cargo plane and flown non-stop to Cuba. Naqibullah's first 10 days in Guantanamo were the worst of his life, he said.

According to a March 2004 story by The New York Times, another child prisoner, Asadullah, age 12 or 13, believed to be the youngest of the prisoners, said he was interrogated daily for several months while held in Afghanistan. The beatings he endured in the first five days of his captivity still bothered him when he arrived in Guantanamo.

As with Naqibullah, the third child prisoner, Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, told a foreign journalist, as reported in The Washington Post in February 2004, that he had been arrested because a friend with whom he was looking for work was supposedly identified as a Taliban. He spent a month and a half at Bagram before being "warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo."

Agha was subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positions during his time at Bagram in an effort to get him to make a confession.

"It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up," he said. "When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn't bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more."

Agha's story of his rendition is similar to that of Naqibullah. He was "put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head."

"It was hard to breathe," he said.

Supervising the transport back to Guantanamo on the large C-17 transport plane, complete with medical team, military police and Air Force Special Forces shooters, was Col. Larry James. The former chief psychologist never states whether he reported the treatment received by these child prisoners at Bagram to any authority.

"I Prayed to God, I Asked, 'Where Is My Son?'"

While James and the Guantanamo authorities apparently did try to make the boys' treatment much improved over that of prisoners in the rest of the camp, including at least eight or nine other teens held at roughly the same time, the young prisoners were not entirely grateful.

According to the Guardian report, "The boys played football every day and sometimes basketball and volleyball with their guards." But Asadullah told his interviewer, "I was very sad because I missed my family so much.... I was always asking, 'When can I go home? What day? What month?' They said, 'You'll go home soon,' but they never said when."

According to a February 2004 story in the UK Telegraph, Ismail Agha (who is reported as 15 in this article) said, "At first I was unhappy ... For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer."

ACLU on Mohammed Jawad (Post-Gitmo), Also Appendix M

The following is taken from ACLU's Blog of Rights, a site that should be on everyone's daily stop of websites:

Life after Gitmo

Today, the Los Angeles Times reports on the struggle of former Guantánamo detainee Mohammed Jawad to readjust to freedom after spending roughly a third of his life in detention. In August, as a result of the ACLU’s habeas corpus petition on behalf of Jawad, he was finally released and sent home to Afghanistan after six-and-a-half-years in U.S. custody.

While in U.S. custody, Jawad, one of the youngest prisoners held at Guantánamo, was held in solitary confinement and subjected to the infamous “frequent flyer” sleep deprivation program. He attempted suicide in December 2003 by repeatedly slamming his head against his cell wall. Two judges — first his military commission judge, then a federal judge — ruled that evidence gleaned through Jawad’s torture and coercion was inadmissible.

The LA Times story sheds light on the difficulties of adjusting to life after Guantánamo:

[Jawad]…suffers from frequent headaches, he says, and often rests during the day. Prison memories haunt him, something doctors warn may never end. He worries about those left behind, his de facto family. He’s out and they’re not, and that’s a source of guilt. Though the Obama administration has said it will close Guantánamo, hundreds of detainees remain there and at Bagram.

He asks a reporter to tell President Obama, the United Nations, someone, to help them. “People there are sick,” he says. “They should be treated. They should be freed.”

As his anger rises, his uncle tells him not to think about the lost years.

But it spills out. He talks about having his hands bound behind his back and being forced to eat like a dog, being kicked, beaten and pepper-sprayed and subjected to excessive heat, loud noise, solitary confinement.

After a year, Guantánamo records show, Jawad tried to commit suicide by banging his head against his cell wall repeatedly.

“I was tortured and faced many problems,” he says. “They also play with your mind.”

In spite of this, Jawad has hope for the future. The article states that Jawad wants to be a doctor and “[h]e wants to resume his education, he says, even if it means sitting with 13-year-olds at tiny desks.” Jawad goes on to state, “That’s my dream… I don’t know if it’s possible. But that’s my dream.”

The story also quotes one of Jawad’s military lawyers, Eric Montalvo, as saying, “We need to do more than just dump him on the corner with a bus ticket after seven years and say, ‘Have a nice day.’”

Promptly and justly handling the cases of remaining prisoners is one part of the Guantánamo challenge. Honestly confronting the crimes committed in America’s name at the notorious prison camp is another. Americans deserve to know who authorized, condoned and encouraged the abuse and torture of detainees like Jawad; let Attorney General Eric Holder know that you stand with the ACLU and support a thorough investigation of torture crimes.

In other ACLU-related news, check out this article at truthout, "Obama Urged to Fully Comply with Anti-torture Treaty":

The fifteenth anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media here.

But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty."

For example, the organisation said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.

The Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CAT) is the most comprehensive international human rights treaty dealing exclusively with the issues of torture and abuse. It came into effect in 1987, and has been ratified by 146 countries....

After taking office, President Barack Obama issued an executive order prohibiting torture. But under an appendix to the 2006 revised U.S. Army Field Manual - the most recent edition - practices considered incompatible with CAT and international law are still allowed. These include force-feeding, psychological torture, sleep and sensory deprivation.

And under Appendix M to the AFM, detainees can be "separated" or held in isolation from other detainees for 30 days, or longer with authorisation, and allowed only four hours of continuous sleep per night over 30 days, which can be prolonged upon approval.

Bravo to the ACLU for all their great work, and a special thanks from this activist, who has made opposition to use of the current Army Field Manual as a template for interrogation, for reasons noted by the ACLU and amplified in articles of my own, a central component of my anti-torture writing.

Important Items: Jawad Freed, CIA IG Report Released

Time constraints for me have meant I have not been able to comment on the following important news items. But I want to place the links here for the sake of my readers.

First up, some good news. Mohammed Jawad was finally released, without charges, to his home in Afghanistan. Jawad was captured as a teen and tortured by U.S. military agents at Bagram and Guantanamo.

Mohammed Jawad, whose confession to throwing a hand grenade that wounded two U.S. soldiers in 2002 was rejected as coerced by torture, was helicoptered into Kabul from Bagram Air Base and taken to the office of the Afghan attorney general....

Another of Jawad's defense attorneys, Air Force Reserve Maj. David Frakt, credited Montalvo's decision to travel to Afghanistan with ensuring that Jawad was freed and not imprisoned again.

"When Major Montalvo [another of Jawad's military attorneys] arrived this morning, he went straight to the Attorney General’s Office and learned that Jawad was being transported to an Afghan prison. Major Montalvo intervened and persuaded the AG to divert Jawad directly to the AG's office," Frakt said in a statement. "Jawad had a happy reunion with Eric, then Jawad's family was summoned and they all convened in the AG's office for a tearful and joyous reunion.

"Were it not for the presence of a member of the Jawad defense team, things might have gone very differently," Frakt said.

Jawad's journey home began last October, when a U.S. military judge in Guantanamo ruled that Afghan police had threatened to kill both Jawad and his family during his interrogation.

Meanwhile, on the same day as it released its Task Force recommendations on interrogation and detention, the government coughed up the CIA Office of Inspector General 2004 report on CIA abusive interrogations, courtesy of an ACLU FOIA suit. Marcy Wheeler has an interesting working thread on its contents, and Glenn Greenwald an excellent post on its import for the country. Wheeler also has posted links to other important documents just obtained by the ACLU as well, in what was one massive document dump. The IG report has some significant redactions, unfortunately, but still much to read there.

One of the most important revelations of the IG report, in my estimation, was the revelation that it was the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS) that vetted the legality of the torture "techniques," and along with the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) proposed "certain more coercive physical techniques" for use in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.

OTS was renamed from the Technical Services Staff or Division (TSS/TSD), which was the division within the CIA involved with making assassination devices, and also was the center for the CIA's mind control program, MKULTRA.

More to come later...

"So Ordered": U.S. to Release Mohammed Jawad After Six Years False Imprisonment

The judge's order reads as follows (emphasis in original):

ORDERED that Mohammed Jawad’s petition for writ of habeas corpus is GRANTED.

Jason Leopold reports at The Public Record the latest developments in the long struggle to obtain freedom for the Guantanamo prisoner who was captured and imprisoned at age 12 after a military engagement destroyed his home, and he was accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. forces (no one was killed).

U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle granted Mohammed Jawad his habeas corpus writ and ordered the Obama administration to submit the necessary information to Congress by Aug. 6, and begin the process of releasing Jawad from custody.

“After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home,” Judge Huvelle told Justice Department lawyers during a court hearing Thursday. “Enough has been imposed on this young man to date.”

The government has wobbled back and forth as regards its intent to still file criminal charges and attempt to prosecute Mr. Jawad. But the "new" evidence presented against Jawad last week, in an effort to obstruct Mohammed's habeas release, didn't turn out to be so new after all.

But this week, in a three-page declaration, Maj. Eric Montalvo, a Marine Judge Advocate assigned to the Office of Military Commissions who has represented Jawad since last August, said the new evidence the government claims it obtained in February was shared with him and others on Jawad’s defense team in May and that it is not “new and based upon our investigation none of it is credible or reliable.”

It's worth remembering that the Jawad case was a lightning rod for internal protest against the trumped-up and abusive Military Commissions system the Bush administration put into place after 9/11. The military prosecutor in the case, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, "resigned because he said the evidence against Jawad was obtained through torture and there were no eyewitnesses to support claims that Jawad threw the grenade."

The torture began at the hands of U.S. and Afghan forces from the very beginning. It started with brutality and beatings, and ended with young Mr. Jawad submitted to the refined psychological tortures of Guantanamo: isolation, sleep deprivation, etc. In the end, Jawad attempted suicide. When a Gitmo Behavioral Science Consultant Team member, Army psychologist Lt. Col. Diane Zierhoffer, was called to testify last August at Jawad's military tribunal hearing, she took the fifth for her part in clearing Jawad for harsh interrogation and treatment.

Mohammed Jawad's case was unique for a number of reasons not usually mentioned:

· Mohammad Jawad was the only person charged under the Military Commissions Act (MCA) who was not been charged with terrorism, nor material support for terrorism, or even with conspiracy.

· Unique among those charged under the MCA, Mohammad Jawad was the only person not even alleged to have any affiliation with al Qaida or the Taliban

· No one died in the attack allegedly perpetrated by Mohammad Jawad.

As previously reported by McClatchy News, Mr. Jawad's release is going to be complicated by the provisions of an amendment the cowardly U.S. Congress stuck onto the recent Defense Appropriations Bill. But all lindications are that Jawad is going home to Afghanistan before the end of August. But his private hell will not end there, as the sufferings he endured will haunt him for a long, long time, if not the rest of his life.

As I wrote to the Convening Authority at Guantanamo, Judge Susan Crawford, last September:

This case has particular interest for me, as in my professional role as a licensed psychologist, I have worked with victims of torture from multiple countries around the world, both as a psychotherapist, and in a forensic role. I have been certified as an expert witness in the immigration court of the Department of Homeland Security....

As a psychologist myself, I was horrified to read that young Jawad endured multiple episodes of 30-day isolation upon the "recommendation of a psychologist with Guantánamo’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) who suggested that he was feigning homesickness and depression as a technique to resist interrogations." Even after Mr. Jawad reportedly made a suicide attempt in December 2003, he was subjected to Guantanamo's "frequent flyer" program, which, according to a Washington Post article I read last month, consisted of moving Jawad and other prisoners "repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation."

Judge Ellen Huvelle appears to also be concerned with Mr. Jawad's condition, and what follows is the remainder of her order for his release:

FURTHER ORDERED that on or before August 6, 2009, respondents shall submit to the Congress the information required under Section 14103(e) of the Supplemental Appropriations Act, Pub. L. No. 111-32, 123 Stat. 1859 (2009). It is

FURTHER ORDERED that beginning on August 21, 2009, when 15 days following the submission of the aforesaid information to the Congress have passed, respondents shall promptly release petitioner Jawad from detention at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay and transfer him to the custody of the receiving government. It is

FURTHER ORDERED that petitioner Jawad shall be treated humanely consistent with respondents’ legitimate security and operational concerns. It is

FURTHER ORDERED that on or before August 24, 2009, respondents shall file a status report regarding petitioner Jawad’s transfer.

SO ORDERED.

Pelosi and the Democrats could show they had an ounce of humanity and vote a special dispensation for Mr. Jawad, allowing his release to happen as quickly as possible, bypassing the recently implemented legislation of a mandatory waiting period.

Congresswoman Pelosi, do you have the humanity and the guts to do this? Do we really have to extend this innocent young man's imprisonment another three weeks?

UPDATE: If anyone wants to read the best analysis of where the Jawad case is now, and the twists and turns that brought it to this point, you really must read Andy Worthington's latest article, As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat.

It would not be an exaggeration to state that, if the Justice Department and the Defense Department decide to proceed with a criminal prosecution, it will demonstrate not only that they have, collectively, taken leave of their senses, but also that no one in a position of responsibility — President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder or defense secretary Robert Gates — has either the courage or the awareness to step in to prevent a clear message being sent out to the world that, far from addressing the excesses of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the Obama administration is, instead, pursuing exactly the kind of cruel, unjust and incompetent policies that would bring a smile to the lips of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

To understand the significance of the decision facing the government, it is important to understand that the case against Jawad was always tenuous, as I reported in October 2007, when he was first put forward for a trial by Military Commission (the “terror trials” introduced by Dick Cheney in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal), and that it unraveled spectacularly last September, when the prosecutor in his proposed trial, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned.

Stating that he had once been a “true believer,” but had ended up feeling “truly deceived,” Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained, as I described it in an article two months ago, that he had come to regard the Commissions as “a dysfunctional system, which, both through accident and design, prevented the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense, thereby ensuring that no fair trial was possible.” He also “described how evidence proving that Jawad was a juvenile at the time of his capture, that he was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged before the attack, and that two other men had confessed to the crime, had been deliberately suppressed.”

If a shred of credibility remained in the case, this dissolved in October and November, when, on two separate occasions, Jawad’s military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, ruled that the crux of the government’s case against Jawad — two “confessions” made on the day of his capture, the first in Afghan custody, and the second, just hours later, in US custody — were inadmissible because they had been obtained through treatment that constituted torture.

Torture News Roundup: Farewell (for awhile) (updated)

Originally posted at Daily Kos, the "farewell" relates to the decision to place on hiatus the "Torture News Roundup" series that I, Meteor Blades, and Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse had written on alternate weeks over at Daily Kos since earlier this year. I am not saying "farewell" to writing or blogging.

This is not a GBCW (good bye cruel world) diary. TNR is simply going on hiatus, though not without this one final foray into the news of the week. Meteor Blades, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, and myself, feel that the initial purpose for these TNR diaries -- to bring torture to the fore as a major issue on this site -- has been achieved. There have been and continue to be diaries almost every day on one or other aspect of the latest news about the U.S. government's use of torture, and the fight for accountability for such crimes, whether by prosecutions, a "truth commission" investigation, or both.

We will continue writing our own diaries on torture topics, as the need arises (and sadly, the need is still acute). We appreciate all the support our work has had from a myriad of Daily Kos readers, and one couldn't ask for a better and more motivated audience. When appropriate, it's very likely TNR will return, when the need for such a format is again apparent.

This diary will look at the latest release of previously classified docs on torture at Guantanamo, at the delay in release of the CIA Inspector General's report on CIA torture, on developments in the UK over their own torture scandal, and more. [The update is a BBC video on Bagram, H/T Vyan -- see below.]

ACLU Gets Release of New Documents

Defense Department Releases Previously Secret Torture Documents
Written by Jason Leopold

The Department of Defense released redacted documents Thursday related to abuse and torture of detainees held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas prisons.

The 12 documents were released as part of the American Civil Liberties Union's long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the government.

The Obama administration agreed to reprocess the documents, but it continues to withhold many key details related to the Defense Department's use of torture methods. In some documents, the Obama administration has withheld details that were previously disclosed by the Bush administration.

"These documents provide still more evidence of the widespread and systemic abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas locations," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. "They further underscore the need for a congressional select committee to examine the roots of the torture program as well as an independent prosecutor to investigate issues of criminal responsibility.

Miami Herald: Documents describe chaos of Gitmo's early months

By PAMELA HESS and NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Newly released Defense Department documents and memos about the first years of operation of the jail at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, portray a chaotic and sometimes violent operation that its own commanders described as dysfunctional....

Dunleavy said he was brought in to bring "a commonsense way on how to do business." He had experience with more than 3,000 interrogations going back 35 years.

Dunleavy said he was initially told that he would be reporting to U.S. Southern Command, but that quickly changed.

"I got my marching orders from the president of the United States," he said.

He also wrote, "The mission was to get intelligence to prevent another 9/11."

Pentagon Report Verified Detainee Torture
by Thomas R. Eddlam

Mohamedou Ould Slahi of Mauritana had allegedly recruited some of the 9/11 highjackers and apparently underwent some of the worst torture at Guantanamo up to the time that the documents were written. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally approved his interrogation regimen, according to commanding Major-General Mike Dunlavey. A Pentagon Criminal Investigative Division (CID) report explained the approved torture regimen: “The plan included isolation, interrogations for up to 20 hours, the use of various types of sound, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli (whereby Slahi would at times be placed in a silent 'white room'), removal of all comfort items, MRE-Only diet, forced grooming, and sleep adjustment....

After three months of sleep deprivation, isolation, and sensory deprivation nearly identical to the “brain-washing” techniques used by Chinese communists on American POWs during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, U.S. interrogators turned the torture up a notch. Slahi was told that “beatings and physical pain are not the worst thing in the world,” and that much was the truth.... interrogators told him that he should “use his imagination to think of the worst possible scenario he could end up in,” adding that “he will very soon disappear down a very dark hole” where “his very existence would become erased” and “no one will know what happened to him and, eventually, no one will care.” Then interrogators created an elaborate ruse that gave Slahi the impression he was being transferred from Guantanamo in a confusing, five-hour boat ride.

[Note: I have a different view of the claim that the North Korean/Chinese methods of torture and interrogation were meant to only achieve "false confessions." For those interested in this issue, please refer to my article "The Truth About False Confessions."]

The ACLU's Accountability Project garnered the support of a number of prominent bloggers last week, with stories by Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, and Daily Kos's drational, among others.

Tortured to Death: New Details On Detainee Abuse Prove Bush Officials Are (Literally) Getting Away With Murder
By Suzanne Ito

Today, several prominent bloggers are writing about detainees who died in U.S. custody, using documents released through the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. We’re not talking suicide, or death by "natural causes." No, this is death as a result of torture and abuse while in custody.

Torture and Britain

Binyam Mohamed launches legal fight to stop US destroying torture images

Former Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed has launched an urgent legal attempt to prevent the US courts from destroying crucial evidence that he says proves he was abused while being held at the detention camp, the Guardian has learned. The evidence is said to consist of a photograph of Mohamed, a British resident, taken after he was severely beaten by guards at the US navy base in Cuba.

The image, now held by the Pentagon, had been put on his cell door, he says....

In a sworn statement seen by the Guardian, Mohamed has appealed to the federal district court in Washington not to destroy the photograph, which neither he nor his lawyers have a copy of, and which is classified under US law....

The photograph will be destroyed within 30 days of his case being dismissed by the American courts – a decision on which is due to be taken by a judge imminently, Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed's British lawyer and director of Reprieve, the legal charity, said today....

Mohamed was seized and held in Pakistan in 2002 before being secretly renditioned to Morocco. He was subsequently flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantánamo. Mohamed says he knows of other photographs taken of him in Morocco and Afghanistan, but he has not seen them. "These pictures including photos of my genitals," he said. "Although the US authorities still apparently deny it and refuse even to admit that I was rendered to Morocco, I was horribly tortured there and had a razor blade taken to my genitals".

MI5 accused of bribe offer in Rangzieb Ahmed torture case

The Security Service MI5 is being accused of attempting to pervert the course of justice by offering a man inducements to drop his allegation that its officers colluded in his torture.

Rangzieb Ahmed had three of his fingernails ripped out after MI5 and Greater Manchester police (GMP) drew up a list of questions for officers from a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency who had detained him in Pakistan. He was later deported to the UK and jailed for terrorism offences. Ahmed says he was visited in prison by an MI5 officer and a police officer who offered to secure a reduction in his sentence or a payment of money to withdraw his torture complaints when his appeal against conviction is heard later this year.

And, in a story that should make every American sit up and take notice, there is this story out by The Guardian yesterday.

Inquiry agreed into alleged torture of Iraqis by UK soldiers (emphasis added)

An independent inquiry is to be held into allegations that British soldiers mutilated and murdered civilians in Iraq – and the government has been forced to admit that key documents had not been disclosed.

In a letter read out in court today, the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, said he "profoundly regrets" the failures to disclose relevant documents. Though he denied the allegations, he said he was now prepared to set up an inquiry under European human rights convention articles enshrining the right to life and prohibiting torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment.

The government made the concession after documents, which contradict claims made on oath by officials, were belatedly disclosed to the high court.

They reveal that ministers, possibly including Tony Blair, knew much more about the incident than they have admitted.

Delay in Release of CIA Inspector General Report on Torture Interrogations

Obama Administration Wants CIA Torture Report Withheld Until August 31 (includes copies of the letters by the Department of Justice and reply letter from Amrit Singh, staff attorney for the ACLU
article by Spencer Ackerman

Word’s coming now that the Obama administration is seeking to withhold the CIA’s 2004 inspector-general report on the implementation of its former “enhanced interrogation regime” until August 31. The ACLU, which had an agreement with the administration to declassify the report as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is going to challenge the administration’s efforts....

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”

Justice Dept. again delays release of CIA interrogations report

In a letter to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Justice officials said the 2004 Inspector General's report had to be considered in relationship to 318 other documents under court-ordered review.

The Battle over "Indefinite Detention"

White House Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention; Move Would Bypass Congress
By Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn,

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, has drafted an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate suspected terrorists indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said....

Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.

Administration officials said the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release....

Three months into the Justice Department's reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees can not be charged or released.

Obama uneasy over indefinite Guantánamo detentions

Obama Seems to Rule Out Executive Order on Indefinite Detentions

President Obama appeared to rule out issuing an executive order to establish indefinite detention Thursday, nearly a week after White House officials first acknowledged that it was an option.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Obama said that if he goes ahead with indefinite detentions for terrorism suspects that he would ask Congress to approve it by law.

"It is very important that the American people and Congress, in conjunction with my administration, come up with a structure that is not only legitimate in the eyes of our constitutional traditions, but also in the eyes of the international community," he said, according to the AP....

The possibility of carrying out such a policy through an executive order was widely criticized by civil rights groups last week, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Mohammed Jawad Case

Must Read from Bob Herbert - How Long Is Long Enough?
by teacherken

It begins like this

No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.

The penultimate paragraph

There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the Obama administration does not feel that he has suffered enough. Not only have administration lawyers opposed defense efforts to secure Jawad’s freedom, but they are using, as the primary basis for their opposition, the fruits of the confession that was obtained through torture and has already been deemed inadmissible — without merit, of no value.

Read the column.

Will Obama Now Defend Torture In Court?
by Andrew Sullivan

I wish I knew that the answer was categorically not. But we've learned the hard way that the Obama Department of Justice can defend things it doesn't allegedly believe in, using arguments from the far right of the Bush administration. Well, as Chris Good explains, we may soon find out:

According to U.S. court precedent, now that Jawad's lawyers have questioned his confessions as coerced, the burden now shifts to the Department of Justice to show that they weren't. The court will hear arguments about the statements at a hearing scheduled for August 5-6, according to Hafetz.

Torture Effects and Death by Torture

The Lingering Effects of Torture
Scientists assess the long-term effects of torture on the human mind
by Devin Powell, July 03, 2009 (emphasis added)

New research that tries to untangle the horrors suffered by torture survivors was recently presented at the 11th European Conference on Traumatic Stress in Oslo, Norway. Metin Basoglu, a psychiatrist at King’s College London, described the statistical techniques he used to single out the mental impacts of "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments" that range from threats and isolation to electric shocks and beatings on the feet.

His previous work suggested that the distinction between the harshness of "physical" torture and the mildness of "psychological" torture is a false one. When torture victims from the former Yugoslavia rated the distress caused by different forms of abuse on a scale from zero to four, those techniques that did not involve physical pain were just as distressing, or even slightly more so, than those that directly inflicted pain. "The threat or anticipation of pain may be worse than the pain itself," said Basoglu.

The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture (Glenn Greenwald)

When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (Andy Worthington)

How long it would have taken the US military to investigate the murders, if left to their own devices, is unknown. Instead, they issued a press release, announcing that a prisoner had died of a heart attack, and then refused to release any further information. Investigating further, the journalist Carlotta Gall (in another impressive story for the New York Times in March 2003) traced Dilawar’s family and was shown his death certificate, on which an army pathologist stated unequivocally that, although he had coronary artery disease, his heart failed because of “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities.” The extent of his injuries was later summed up by two coroners: one said that his legs had “basically been pulpified,” and the other said, “I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”

Gall’s article provoked an investigation into the murders, which, in 2005 and 2006, led to various minor punishments and reprimands for the soldiers involved, although at no point, as with the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, was anyone encouraged to look higher up the chain of command to explain why it was that such murderous treatment had become “standard operating procedure.”

By Yoo’s Own Analysis, Army Field Manual Allows Torture with Drugs (emphasis in original)

The use of drugs in interrogations by U.S. agencies is, unfortunately, nothing new, but it is illegal. In the rewrite of the Army Field Manual, supervised by Rumsfeld right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon changed the wording around the use of drugs in interrogations to prohibit "drugs that may induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage." Previously, the former AFM had prohibited "chemically induced psychosis." So, unless that psychosis causes "lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage" -- something that is not typical with the use of psychotropic, hallucinogenic, or so-called "truth" drugs, like sodium amytal -- it's presumably allowed in the current AFM.

ACLU Says Government Used False Confessions

ACLU to Argue Against Use of Evidence Obtained Through Torture in Federal Court

A Sliver of Good News
By emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)

I hate that I'm now clinging to scraps like this to make myself happier about President Obama's efforts to overturn torture, but this is an improvement over the Bush Administration. The acting head of OLC has determined that military commissions cannot use statements gotten through torture to convict detainees.

The Justice Department has determined that detainees tried by military commissions in the U.S. can claim at least some constitutional rights, particularly protection against the use of statements taken through coercive interrogations, officials said.

The conclusion, explained in a confidential memorandum whose contents were shared with The Wall Street Journal, could alter significantly the way the commissions operate -- and has created new divisions among the agencies responsible for overseeing the commissions.

More Torture News

[Added at 9pm, PDT: A link to this excellent diary by Vyan, Bagram AFB:America's OTHER Torture Chamber, and the video that went with it, a BBC report from approximately a week ago.]

Guantánamo detainee interview sites to remain

By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press

NEW YORK -- A prosecutor agreed Thursday that the government will not dismantle overseas locations where a former Guantánamo detainee claims he was interrogated by the CIA before he was brought to the United States for trial on terrorism charges.

The prosecutor, David Raskin, told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that the United States would preserve the locations for now even though it does not plan to use at trial any statements Ahmed Ghailani made while he was in the custody of any other government agencies.

Torture survivors testify at the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Commission hearing

WASHINGTON – Torture survivors and advocates implored Congress June 25 to investigate allegations of military torture of war prisoners, saying that the U.S. must be an example for other countries in respect for human rights.

The hearing, sponsored by Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., chair of the Congressional Human Rights Commission, was one of several programs held June 25-27 in observance of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition’s annual Torture Awareness Month.

The panel members declared that Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration must take concrete action in investigating and prosecuting torture in order to uphold accountability in the world.

“These are issues, not abstractions. ... We know that there is considerable value in precise information,” said Felice Gaer, head of the American Jewish Committee’s human rights institute.

But, Gaer added, simply gathering facts about abuse is not enough.

“Countries need to recognize these obligations and live up to these obligations,” she said.

Disbar the Torture Lawyers Now

Human Rights Groups Critique American Psychological Association's Recent Statement on Interrogations

This has been a painful time for the association and one that offers an opportunity to reflect and learn from our experiences over the last five years. APA will continue to speak forcefully in further communicating our policies against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to our members, the Obama administration, Congress, and the general public. (Board letter, June 18, 2009.)

Any meaningful approach to this issue must start by acknowledging the fact that psychologists were absolutely integral to our government's systematic program of torture. When the Bush administration decided to engage in torture, they turned to psychologists from the military's SERE [Survival, Evasion, resistance, and Escape] program for help in designing and implementing the torture tactics. This fact was first reported in 2005, within days of the release of the APA's PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] report and was officially acknowledged by the Defense Department in its Inspector General's Report, declassified in May 2007. Other psychologists monitored torture to calibrate how much abuse a detainee could tolerate without dying. Nonetheless, APA leaders continued, and still continue, to pretend that psychologists' participation in abuse was the behavior of rogue members of the profession.

Similarly, the APA Board still refuses to acknowledge the evidence of apparent collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse. This collusion was most notable in the creation of the military-dominated PENS task force. Only a policy that comes to terms with this APA collusion can begin to reduce the furor among APA members, psychologists, and the general public.

APA leadership has much work ahead to begin to repair the harm they have caused to the profession, the country, former and current detainees and their families.

Much thanks to Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse for help with links on this diary. And final thanks, again, to all Daily Kos readers. We hope you'll be here when we return. In the meantime, we are not really going away, and we hope you'll check in and read our regular diaries --

Because we're not going away.

Updates on Hamdan, Jawad, & the Army Field Manual Controversy

While the drama over the assemblage of Obama's so-called "team of rivals" continues, pressed on by the near-total collapse of the U.S. economy, important developments occurred in two important cases that have been followed by this blog and countless others over the years.

Salim Hamdan, famously Osama bin Ladin's former driver, imprisoned at Guanatanamo for seven years, and the first to be tried by Bush's infamous military commissions, is due to be released at any moment and flown home to Yemen, a full month before the end of his prison sentence. It's believed he would finish the sentence in Yemeni custody. From the McClatchy report:

The apparent decision to send Hamdan back to Yemen resolves questions about whether the United States would release him after his sentence was completed. A six-member military jury convicted Hamdan, 40, of providing material support for terror in August, but handed prosecutors a defeat by sentencing him to 66 months in prison, with credit for time served.

Smintheus at NION has a typically ascerbic take on the Bush Administration's decision re Hamdan:

He's shipping Hamdan to Yemen and letting that government take the onus of releasing him when the sentence expires. The most important thing, as with the Uighurs, is that George Bush should not have to face up to his own defeat.

Likewise, Gary Norton, over at Daily Kos, comments:

What was Hamdan's big crime? He worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden for a while. Now let's put this crime in perspective. Hitler had a driver named Erich Kempka. Unlike Kempka who was a high ranking SS officer who worked for Hitler for over a decade, Hamdan worked for a couple of years for OBL making $200 a month. Hamdan was a gofer. Kempka was in charge of Hitler's motor pool and was part of his inner circle, to the point that he was one of the men chosen to be with Hitler at the end. Kempka was not charged with anything by the Nuremberg court and, in fact, was called a defense witness in the trial of Martin Bormann.

But Bush and the Pentagon have placed hundreds of innocent prisoners into indefinite detention, submitting an untold number to torture. And now, according to a press release from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

With less than 60 days left in the Bush presidency, the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, Col. Lawrence Morris, has threatened publicly to bring additional charges against detainees before the military commissions....

It is disgraceful that Col. Morris is attempting to preempt the results of the election by expanding the fiasco of the military commissions at the last minute. Any effort to expand the military commissions at this point is an attempt to further institutionalize these illegitimate tribunals and to prevent the next administration from acting quickly to put the military commissions to an end.

Write today to the Secretary of Defense, Reps. Conyers, Delahunt and Nadler, and Sens. Leahy and Durbin and call for an immediate end to any further charges before the military commissions.

Two Strikes Against Jawad's Gitmo Prosecutors

Meanwhile, last week the military commissions prosecutors in the case of Mohammed Jawad -- who was a teenager at the time of his capture in Afghanistan -- suffered what must be a fatal blow. In October, the judge in the case, Col. Stephen Henley, threw out Jawad's "confession" made to Afghan interrogators as tainted by torture. But Henley had not yet ruled on the applicability of another "confession," the one made to U.S. interrogators.

The Bush administration ardently argued for the inclusion of this "evidence," even as one of the chief prosecutors in Jawad's case resigned, citing government malfeasance.

Here's how David McFadden at AP summarized Hensley's new decision (as posted at the Washington Post website):

In Wednesday's ruling, Henley disqualified Jawad's second confession while in U.S. custody on Dec. 17 and 18, in part because the U.S. interrogator used techniques to maintain "the shock and fearful state" associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.

"The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused's first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S.," Henley wrote. "In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats."

Hensley's ruling came despite the fact that the Military Commissions Act, while supposedly forbidding torture evidence, allows "some statements obtained through "coercion"... at the discretion of a military judge."

A Battle Too Far? Recission of AFM's Notorious Appendix M

As the CCR plea makes clear, the machinery that is the torture state-within-a-state is unrelenting in its quest to use every means at its disposal to support the counterinsurgency and military campaigns of the United States. Hamdan's freedom, and the likely release of Jawad in the near future (or so one hopes), are momentary victories in the war against brutality and oppression, exemplified by the use of torture and inhumane abuse. There is much more to be done.

For example, the modern consensus, supported by Obama's team, and a myriad of others, including prominent human rights organizations and activists, is that all interrogations, including those of the CIA, should be held to the standards of the current Army Field Manual on interrogations. But the problem is that the AFM does allow torture and abusive treatment. As I wrote last February:

In fact, the reconstructed AFM maintained a core of coercive interrogation techniques that are central to the CIA-created KUBARK form of torture that relies on the induction of Debility, Dread and Dependency in prisoners, mainly through the use of isolation, sensory deprivation, and the inculcation of weakness and fear. The AFM keeps all three. It lies about banning sensory deprivation, but anyone who reads Appendix M of the AFM will see it all laid out for them: use of goggles and earmuffs for sensory deprivation purposes, restriction of sleep to four hours nightly max for 30 or more days, allowance of "fear up harsh," and isolation for 30 days or more. "Or more" means "as authorized."

I believe that the AFM, with its Appendix M, represents a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Human rights organizations and activists that have latched onto acceptance of the AFM, as proposed by Democrats, are in fact in danger of endorsing, albeit sometimes critically, a document that violates international law. They should pause to think about this.

New times admits of new tactics. The willingness to see the new AFM made some kind of sense when the current administration held supreme power (although I still disagreed with such an approach). But to maintain the same position now, with an incoming Democratic administration that at least on paper says it will eliminate torture, is to find oneself repositioned from the progressive to the retrograde.

Rescind Appendix M of the AFM. This must be part of any call upon Obama as he supposedly will seek to act to change torture policies in the first days of his administration.

Gitmo "Confession" Thrown Out, While CIA Wins Torture Secrecy Ruling

From the Miami Herald, 10/28/08:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- In a first, a military judge ruled on Tuesday that a Guantánamo detainee's confession was extracted through torture, and excluded it from the trial of a young Afghan detainee at the war court.

Afghan police threatened the family of teenager Mohammed Jawad while he was undergoing interrogation at a Kabul police station, said Army Col. Stephen Henley, the judge, in a three-page ruling.

Jawad, who was a teenager at the time of his capture in Afghanistan, has been fighting to have the charges against him dismissed. The recognition by the military court that death threats constitute torture, means his coerced confession cannot be used at his upcoming trial, due to start January 5, 2009.

According to attorney Jamil Dakwar, a military commissions observer for the American Civil Liberties Union, the judge's ruling rejects the "legal opinion by Bush administration lawyers that early on sought to soften the definition of torture by sanctioning threats to family members."

The Jawad case has highlighted the inherent unfairness of the military commissions process, established by Congress at the insistence of the Bush Administration. (For those interested, John McCain supported the Military Commissions bill, while Barack Obama opposed it.) Just a few weeks ago, the involvement of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) in the torture of Jawad at Gitmo was exposed. Last month, one of the Jawad's military prosecutors quit, charging the government with suppression of exculpatory evidence in Jawad's case.

USA Today's blog, On Deadline, has published a selection from Col. Henley's ruling (the entire ruling can be accessed here):

The Accused now moves this Military Commission to suppress all statements he made to Afghan government authorities on December 17, 2002 because they were obtained by the use of torture, as that term is defined in the Military Commission Rules of Evidence (MCRE).

A statement obtained by the use of torture shall not be admitted into evidence. “Torture” includes statements obtained by use of death threats to the speaker or his family; the actual infliction of physical or mental injury is not required. Instead, the relevant inquiry is whether the threat was specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon another person within the interrogator’s custody or control. In this case, the Afghan government and police authorities told the Accused he and his family would be killed if he did not confess to throwing the grenade. The interrogators were armed. There is no evidence the threats were made in jest or intended as a joke. Given the Accused’s age and the then reputation of the Afghan police as corrupt and violent, the Commission specifically finds these threats credible.

Evidence that someone died or suffered severe injury is not required for the Commission to determine that the threat to kill the Accused and his family was intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. On this point, the Commission can not envision a situation where a credible threat to kill someone unless they confess would not satisfy the “act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering” requirement in the MCRE definition of torture.

While the torture threshold is admittedly high, it is met in this case.

While Jawad's attorneys have been able to thread the needle in Jawad's case, and get the MC judge to rule that he was tortured, even by the MCRE's narrow definition of torture, the use of coerced confessions and reliance on evidence produced by torture remains a fixture of the MCRE process. It's an embarrassment and a crime that it was ever a question whether death threats by interrogators constituted torture of a detainee.

Meanwhile, CIA Wins Torture Secrecy Ruling

Consider another court ruling just released: according to Wired, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court ruled that "the CIA can hide statements from imprisoned suspected terrorists that the agency tortured them in its set of secret prisons." The ruling states that judicial review of allegations of torture from prisoners such as Khalid Sheihk Muhammad would jeopardize national security. (Link to Lamberth's ruling -- For all of you FISA fans: Judge Lamberth is remembered as FISA's secret spy court from 1995 to 2002.)

From the Wired article:

"The Court, giving deference to the agency’s detailed, good-faith declaration, is disinclined to second-guess the agency in its area of expertise through in camera review," Lamberth wrote (.pdf), referring to a procedure where a judge looks at evidence in his chamber without showing it to the opposing side....

"Among the details that cannot be publicly released are the conditions of the detainees’ capture, the employment of alternative interrogation methods, and other operational details," the CIA's Wendy Hilton told the court in a sworn affidavit (.pdf). "Specifically, disclosure of such information is reasonably likely to degrade the CIA's ability to effectively question terrorist detainees and elicit information necessary to protect the American people."

The CIA also successfully argued that it needed to redact statements about what countries were involved in the program, saying that such allegations could destroy relationships with countries that helped with the CIA's controversial program of secretly kidnapping suspected terrorists and shuttling them to hidden prisons in Europe and Asia, where neither families nor the Red Cross knew of their detention.

Transcripts from each of the 14 detainee's Combatant Status Review Tribunals in Guantanamo Bay were provided to the ACLU and posted to the Pentagon's website in the summer of 2007. Six of those included some redactions.

While one can be happy that Mohammad Jawad, imprisoned over five years now, may be able with the current ruling to more effectively fight the bogus charges against him, Lambeth's ruling shows just how far we have to go in the fight against torture in this country.

Death of a "Dirty Bomb" Frame-up

Andy Worthington has an excellent article at AlterNet analyzing the recent decision by Bush's Justice Department to drop "dirty bomb" charges against British resident and Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, the so-called co-conspirator with Jose Padilla to construct and detonate a "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil.

For over three years, Binyam's lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, have been arguing that the allegations against Binyam were extracted through the use of torture -- in Morocco, where Binyam was tortured for 18 months, after being rendered by the CIA, and at the CIA's own "Dark Prison," near Kabul, where he was held for four or five months from January 2004, before his transfer to the U.S. military prison at Bagram airbase, and his eventual arrival at Guantánamo in September 2004.

U.S. authorities got Binyam to "confess" under torture that he had met with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Jose Padilla to discuss the "dirty bomb" plot. Except guess what? Abu Zubaydah and al-Libi were already in U.S. custody on the date of Binyam's "confessed" plot. The U.S. knew this, too, and continued to torture and prosecute Binyam. And now that the Justice Department has dropped its charges, the Department of Defense, which is conducting the notoriously unjust military tribunals at Guantanamo says it's still "reviewing" Binyam's case.

Mohamad was one of five Guantanamo detainees who had charges dropped against them. (They are not free, however, and the U.S. says there are other charges and further investigation and review to be undertaken.) In Binyam's case, it's widely suspected dropping certain charges were meant to forestall the release of documents proving torture and other mistreatment, and British High Court judges have been highly critical of U.S. conduct in the case. "Torturers do not readily hand over evidence of their conduct," the judges are quoted as saying.

The military tribunals are so unfair that one of its chief prosecutors, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, quit over the handling of evidence in the Mohammed Jawad case, and went public with his criticisms of the frame-up trials. He was the fourth prosecutor to resign from Bush's military kangaroo courts. A Los Angeles Times article on Vandeveld described the former prosecutor's actions:

Vandeveld's claims are particularly explosive.

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information -- material considered helpful to the defense.

Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he went from being a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived" by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it deprived "the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct."

Vandeveld is a hero for trying to expose what he called "the creeping rot of the commissions." The reaction from his military colleagues? While some have been supported, there was also "outrage and condemnation," and now this Army Reserve officer fears for his safety and that of his family.

But then this is the final act of a brazen coven of war criminals. George W. Bush announced the other day that he was not going to close Guantanamo -- in fact, he had never even considered it. Meanwhile, his Defense Department made it clear that if it was up to them, no one would ever be released from that facility. The U.S. government is trying to undo the sentence of Salim Hamdan, whose years at Guantanamo were to be counted in his final five year sentence, administered as part by one of the Pentagon's military commissions. While Hamdan should be freed in December, the government is appealing, hoping to keep Hamdan in prison at least another five years, and maybe forever.

“The length of the sentence is a matter of indifference to us,” Morris said. He said that if the jury still wants Hamdan released on Dec. 31, it could resentence him to however many days remained until then.

Marcion has covered the recent events in some depth over at Daily Kos, and his article there is worth reading. His summary makes some essential points:

And for anybody who thinks that the Guantanamo horror stories are the exception, and that after the detention center is closed under the next administration, or after these terror show trials end, that all will be back to normal, I have to say - this is normal. These publicized cases are merely shedding light on an inherently unfair and fixed system. Just as the Trotsky/Bukharin show trials revealed the truth about the entirety of the fixed Soviet justice system, these show trials reveal the same truth about the American system. Our prisons are filled with people whose only crime was attracting the attention of some cop cruising for an arrest. Once somebody is arrested, the prosecutors go to work trying to fix the case so as to get the maximum sentence possible, and the cops cooperate with providing the evidence or testimony that the prosecutor will need to get the conviction, by torturing their prisoner within the bounds of the law (i.e. no permanent bruising). The majority of jurors, being good Americans, are also convinced that justice equals longest sentence possible, and that cops never lie, but defendants always do. Any jurors that show any hesitation or moral qualms are kicked during voir dire. A prosecutor or cop who shows some qualms about pulling out all the stops sees their career come to a grinding halt quickly, while the guys who get convictions get promoted and eventually become judges.

The "justice" of Guantanamo has already come to America, along with the torture and the indefinite detention and obliteration of civil rights. As a follow-up, the reader could go read my recent posting, Battle Over Habeas -- Torture Inc. Comes to America.

New Details on BSCT-led Torture of Mohammed Jawad

Newsweek has a new article out giving more information on the role of a Guantanamo military psychologist working for the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) that interrogated "child prisoner" Mohammed Jawad. U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer refused to testify in Jawad's military tribunal hearing last August, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. (Jawad's case is currently on appeal before the Convening Authority at Guantanamo, and the prosecutor in the case has resigned, citing government misconduct in the case.)

Dan Ephron's article begins with a profile of APA presidential candidate Steven Reisner, who is running as an opponent of APA's interrogations policy.

If he wins, Reisner says he will use his authority to expose the precise role individual APA psychologists have played in the interrogations, not only at Guantánamo but at the CIA's "black" sites around the world. He says wrongdoers will be brought before an ethics board; like doctors and other caregivers, psychologists are bound by a do-no-harm principle. But for Reisner the main point is to air the details publicly, in a kind of truth-and-reconciliation process. "The discussions … need to have a public venue so that we can learn the lessons and not let it happen again," he says.

Later in the same article, Ephron cites the Jawad interrogation as an example of how BSCT psychologists really do their work.

"Based on the BSCT recommendation, Mr. Jawad was moved into isolation..."

The full assessment penned by the psychologist after the interrogation is redacted from the [Jawad] court filing. But NEWSWEEK discovered through two independent sources familiar with the report (who could not be named discussing sensitive material) that the psychologist not only eased interrogators' worries, but also encouraged them to continue to dial up the emotional pressure on Jawad: "He appears to be rather frightened, and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on the interrogator," according to an excerpt of the report read to NEWSWEEK. The psychologist recommended that Jawad be moved to a section of the prison where he would be the only Pashto speaker, and be moved again if he somehow began to socialize in his new block. The psychologist also suggested that interrogators emphasize to Jawad that his family appeared to have forgotten him: "Make him as uncomfortable as possible. Work him as hard as possible."

The psychologist's name can be gleaned from a court witness list, but multiple e-mails sent by NEWSWEEK asking for a reaction went unanswered. The court filing goes on to say that two weeks after the start of his isolation, Jawad gave his interrogators a detailed account of the events surrounding the grenade attack (that did not implicate himself). But his mental condition deteriorated further and in late December 2003 he tried to commit suicide. "If the goal was to break him, the psychologist succeeded," says Maj. David Frakt, Jawad's military defense attorney.

It is a sad but true reality that medical doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists have been used by the U.S. government (and governments of many other countries as well, I might add) to help government and military/intelligence agencies research, implement, and operate abusive programs of interrogation and torture. They have done this, more or less, since the end of World War II. It must end now.

The APA presidential election is being conducted by mail ballot right now. I urge all APA members to vote for Dr. Reisner!

Gitmo Prosecutor Quits, Cites Gov't Suppression of Evidence

The Guantanamo chief prosecutor in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the first child soldier to be tried as a "war criminal" in modern times, testified for the defense today in the case of -- Mohammed Jawad! Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld quit the prosecution (and the Office of Military Commissions) a few days ago, citing government misconduct and suppression of exculpatory evidence in the case. Apparently, the injustice and mistreatment of Jawad finally touched his humanity.

From AP's story by Mike Melia:

Dressed in Army camouflage fatigues, Vandeveld told the court that he reached a turning point when by happenstance he discovered key evidence among material scattered throughout the prosecutors' office.

Flipping through another case file, he saw for the first time a statement Jawad made to a military investigator probing prisoner abuse in Afghanistan — an episode that helped convert him from a "true believer to someone who felt truly deceived."

Vandeveld said he become gradually disillusioned and even developed sympathy for the defendant, who was captured as a teenager and allegedly subjected to beatings and sleep-deprivation.

"My views changed," said the once hard-charging prosecutor. "I am a father, and it's not an exercise in self-pity to ask oneself how you would feel if your own son was treated in this fashion."

Guantanamo's Chief Prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, is trying to limit the damage, labeling Vandeveld as disgruntled case. But this is not the first prosecutor to quit and call foul on the government, labeling Bush and the Pentagon's showcase military tribunals a farce. Vandeveld is the third such to resign, though he may be the first to then testify for the defense in a case he was prosecuting only days before.

According to an L.A. Times report, Vandeveld was working on a plea agreement for Jawad that would allow the young man to go free, but the government blocked the move. The Times also noted:

The Jawad case is one of several in which the Pentagon's former legal advisor to military commissions, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, has been banned from playing an oversight role because of charges that he lost his neutrality by withholding exculpatory information in recommending the charges.

You'd have to have the intelligence of a Sarah Palin supporter not to see that something very, very rotten is happening in Guantanamo. You have to wonder why, at this point, there hasn't been a mass resignation of government prosecutors over such malfeasance.

Meanwhile, Jawad's attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, is asking for dismissal of charges against Jawad, citing government misconduct, as well as the mistreatment Jawad suffered while under arrest and imprisonment, beginning in Afghanistan, and continuing at Guantanamo Naval Base prison. Maj. Frakt also recently initiated a letter writing and petition campaign on behalf of his client, hoping to convince the Conventing Authority at Guantanamo to drop the charges. The petition gathered hundreds of signatures from around the world.

If Jawad is released -- still a big If -- there are many more waiting to be tried in the "complete farce" that is the military commissions system. Maybe some of these prisoners are guilty of terrible crimes; maybe most of them are innocent. Who would know, as the government holds prisoners indefinitely, to render them hopeless, then uses torture to gain information, elicit confessions, and, finally, according to the sworn testimony of prosecutors from Guantanamo, hides evidence that might prove a defendant innocent?

And what of those left facing trial in this kangaroo court? According to an earlier AP story:

Jawad is one of about 20 detainees facing charges in the Pentagon's specially designed system for prosecuting alleged terrorists. Military prosecutors say they plan trials for about 80 of the 255 men held here on suspicion of links to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

All reasonable and patriotic Americans, all citizens of the world who despise injustice, must speak out for the dropping of charges against Mohammed Jawad, and call for the closing of Guantanamo and a halt to the crooked and discredited military tribunal system. Let the remaining prisoners make their cases through the U.S. court system, which should consider their cases with all deliberate speed.

It's not only politics at this point. It's just plain human decency.

Thank you, Lt. Col. Vandeveld, for taking the courageous path and telling the truth.

(H/T to possum over at Never In Our Names, who wrote his own excellent essay on this story.)