New Report: NCIS Hid Medical Evidence About Guantanamo Suicides

The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile "suicides" at Guantanamo nearly eight years ago concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of a later government investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by "likely asphyxiation" from "obstruction" of the airway. Moreover this SMO found a prisoner he examined and pronounced dead had "cotton clothing material in [his] mouth and upper pharynx." (See pgs. 5-7 of this PDF to view the SMO's original findings.)

The finding is consistent with other accounts, and with the theory the three prisoners died from a torture procedure known as "dryboarding," as researcher Almerindo Ojeda described in an 2011 story at Truthout.

Yet, unaccountably, the SMO was never formally interviewed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which had the Department of Defense mandate to investigate the supposed suicides. Furthermore, the SMO's account was not included in the NCIS final report. This new finding is one of a number of such discoveries detailed in a new investigatory report published last month by The Center for Policy and Research (CPR) at Seton Hall University School of Law.

Thus far, their report has been totally ignored by the press.

Other findings in CPR's new report either ignored or overlooked in previous investigations include the fact that guards who searched the deceased's rooms only hours prior to their deaths did "not discover anything that a detainee could hang himself with.... in the manner of the rumors" of their death by hanging.

CPR's report, "Uncovering the Cover-ups: Death in Camp Delta," was supervised by Seton Hall law professor (and attorney for some Guantanamo detainees) Mark Denbeaux, and co-written by Charles Church, Ryan K. Gallagher, Adam Kirchner and Joshua Wirtshafter. Joseph Hickman, who was at Guantanamo at the time of the deaths, and who figured so prominently in Scott Horton’s January 2010 Harper’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides," acted as lead investigator. A full PDF download of the paper is available at this link.

This article will summarize CPR's findings, but it is highly recommended that readers study the entire report.

Newly Uncovered Documents

Last month, Scott Horton wrote an article at Harpers Magazine, "The Guantanamo 'Suicides," Revisited," which reproduced and annotated a document that had been suppressed in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) release of documents concerning their investigation into three purported suicides at Guantanamo on June 10, 2006. The document, part of a group of documents associated with a separate Staff Judge Advocate investigation of the deaths, had sat unexamined on a DoD FOIA website for literally years, until both Seton Hall and Scott Horton brought it to the public's attention. The original can be found on pgs. 15-17 of this PDF.

The explosive document -- a sworn statement by Master of Arms Denny called to attend to the suicides that evening -- states a number of facts from a witness on the scene that directly contradicts the story promulgated by Guantanamo officials and the NCIS report into the deaths. (Denny was named by Horton, but not described by name in the CPR report.) Horton and CPR describe Denny's account in some detail, including the fact attempts to revive a still living "suicide" were not made for some time, and that cloth wrapped tightly around his neck was not removed.

Government authorities contend the three prisoners died in an act of simultaneous suicide by hanging, an act JTF Guantanamo Commander Harry Harris described only one day after the deaths as "asymmetrical warfare." It is this version of what happened that has been accepted by a wide section of the press. Horton's article surmises that the prisoners may have died at Guantanamo's "Camp No," also known as "Penny Lane," thought to be a special CIA black site at Guantanamo used to coerce prisoners, including through torture, to turn informants for the U.S. government.

CPR's report goes much farther than Horton's article in documenting exactly how the government pulled this document -- Exhibit 25 of the NCIS report -- and replaced it with random pages from elsewhere in the group of documents gathered in the course of the investigation. Detailed in Appendix D of the report, the work is an impressive piece of forensic research.

This deliberate suppression of information contrary to the government's story should be a matter of public outrage and congressional investigation, but the CPR report also shows how the Obama administration's Justice Department deliberately misled congressional queries about the report in the wake of the 2010 Harpers report and earlier Seton Hall CPR investigation and report, "Death in Camp Delta" (PDF).

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear at present, Horton's recent article, which drew upon work done by Seton Hall's (CPR), did not include reference to to a number of other new findings and documents CPR uncovered in their ongoing analysis of the Guantanamo deaths (including the SMO report). The documents describe how important evidence contradicting the official narrative were withheld from the NCIS report. Furthermore, when congressional representatives went to the Department of Justice to ask for an investigation, they were lied to about how long the investigation had taken, and whether or not there was evidence that showed something other than death by hanging.

According to the CPR Executive Summary, besides the findings discussed above, the new report concludes:

• Contrary to standard investigative protocol, NCIS never authenticated “suspected suicide notes.”

• Contrary to standard suspected suicide protocol, NCIS never investigated the behavior, state of mind, or emotional condition of the dead men during the minutes, hours, days, and weeks before they died.

• NCIS failed to investigate multiple irregularities in protocol, among them: tampering with the contents of cells where the men were reported to have died, as well as more than fifty discrete events so irregular that they had no specific designation in the log book, and that were so secret that their details were redacted which occurred for hours before the alleged crime scene was secured and investigated by NCIS....

• Contrary to extensive protocol, the Camp Commander ordered the cessation of video recording of the events.

Cover-up or "Conspiracy building"?

The most compelling evidence of a cover-up consists of contemporaneous reports that all three prisoners were found with socks or other cloth material shoved deep into their throats. It was this account of the deaths that Guantanamo authorities moved quickly to cover-up and replace with a story that the detainees had hanged themselves.

According to Horton's 2010 article, the Joint Detention Group Commander, Michael Bumgarner, gathered camp personnel hours after the deaths and told them "you all know" the prisoners had died from swallowing rags and choking to death, but the press would be told something different: the prisoners had died by hanging themselves.

In May 2011, Alex Koppelman, then writing for Adweek, but currently the News Editor for The Guardian/US, wrote an influential article criticizing Scott Horton for "conspiracy building." He decried the story about Baumgarner's speech about "rags" -- because Bumgarner denied to him having ever made it. Koppelman's account was later cited in a government legal brief used to counter a lawsuit by the relatives of two of the Guantanamo "suicides." I deconstructed Koppelman's account in a series of articles that examined his arguments in detail.

But the new evidence in Horton's article and the Seton Hall report demonstrates conclusively that multiple witnesses on the scene, including the Senior Medical Officer, found cloth material inside the deceased's mouths and throats. This was no "conspiracy building": the evidence was covered up.

Among many telling details in the new documents, Master of Arms Denny's account of how one detainee, ISN 093, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, was found alive even two hours after he supposedly hanged himself. Denny witnessed cloth matching a ligature placed around Zahrain's throat being wrapped around his hands:

I observed a Corpsman wrapping an altered detainee sheet... around the detainee’s right wrist. The other side of the material was bound to the detainee’s left wrist with approximately a foot of cloth in between. The cloth was not on the detainees [sic] wrists when the Camp 1 guards removed the handcuffs a few minutes earlier.

The fact all the "suicides" had their hands bound was supposed to be evidence of collaboration in the "asymmetrical warfare" that was simultaneous suicide. But Denny's account shows the "evidence" was being fabricated after the supposed suicides themselves.

The Seton Hall report deserves wide exposure and Congress must undertake its own investigation, as it's evident that DOJ and the Obama administration have no intention of looking further into what happened. But according to Seton Hall's Executive Director for Communications, Janet LeMonnier, attempts to get attention from multiple attempts at media outreach have garnered "very little interest," and CPR personnel are frustrated at the lack of response.

Even so, Mark Denbeaux told me in a phone interview that Seton Hall's investigations are going forward, and another report with even more new revelations is due out early next year.

Cross-posted from FDL/The Dissenter

The Real Roots of the CIA's Rendition and Black Sites Program

Originally posted at Truthout on February 17, 2010, but the article by H.P. Albarelli and Jeff Kaye is worth reposting now with all the controversy over the release of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Rendition program. Whatever the public gets from any putative release -- and the CIA is fully in charge of deciding what gets censored and what doesn't from the Executive Summary portion that is section supposedly up for declassification review -- we can be sure that we will only get a "limited hangout" about what the CIA really did... and does.

The article below has been lightly edited to allow for some changes in events in the past four years, and a link has been added to document the CIA material on the "Kelly case."

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On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally released a "seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed's torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were criticized by the British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed's torture places the implementation of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA's secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed "black sites" by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950's with the CIA's Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency's own files. This is the so-called "Lyle O. Kelly case." The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents.

An Early Example of Torture and Rendition: "The Kelly Case"

In late January 1952, Morse Allen, a CIA Security Office official, was summoned to the office of his superior, security deputy chief Robert L. Bannerman, where he met with another agency official to discuss what Bannerman initially introduced as "the Kelly case." Wrote Allen, in a subsequent memorandum for his files, the official "explained in substance the Kelly case as follows: "Kelly, (whose real name is Dimitrov), is a 29-year-old Bulgarian and was the head of a small political party based in Greece and ostentively [sic] working for Bulgarian independence." The official described Dimitrov [whose first name was Dimitre] to Allen as "being young, ambitious, bright ... a sort of a 'man-on-a-horse' type but a typical Balkan politician."

The official continued explaining to Allen that months earlier CIA field operatives discovered that Dimitrov was seriously considering becoming a double agent for the French Intelligence Service. "Accordingly," states the memo, "a plot was rigged in which [Dimitrov] was told he was going to be assassinated and as a protective he was placed in custody of the Greek Police." Successfully duped, Dimitrov was then thrown into prison. There he was subjected to interrogation and torture, and he witnessed the brutal torture of other persons the CIA had induced authorities to imprison. Greek intelligence and law enforcement agencies were especially barbaric in their methods. Highly respected Operation Gladio historian Daniele Ganser describes the treatment of prisoners: "Their toes and fingernails were torn out. Their feet were beaten with sticks, until the skin came off and their bones were broken. Sharp objects were shoved into their vaginas. Filthy rags, often soaked in urine, and sometimes excrement, were pushed down their throats to throttle them, tubes were inserted into their anus and water driven in under very high pressure, and electro shocks were applied to their heads."

According to Allen's memo, after holding Dimitrov for six months the Greek authorities decided he was no more than "a nuisance" and they told the CIA "to take him back." Because the agency was unable to dispose of Dimitrov in Greece, the memo states, the CIA flew him to a secret interrogation center at Fort Clayton in Panama. In the 1950's, Fort Clayton, along with nearby sister installations Forts Amador and Gulick, the initial homes of the Army's notorious School of the Americas, served as a secret prison and interrogation centers for double agents and others kidnapped and spirited out of Europe and other locations. Beginning in 1951, Fort Amador, and reportedly Fort Gulick, were extensively used by the Army and the CIA as a secret experimental site for developing behavior modification techniques and a wide range of drugs, including "truth drugs," mescaline, LSD and heroin. Former CIA officials have also long claimed that Forts Clayton and Amador in the 1950's hosted a number of secret Army assassination teams that operated throughout North and South America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

There in Panama, Dimitrov was again aggressively interrogated, and then confined as "a psychopathic patient" to a high-security hospital ward at Fort Clayton. Allen's memo makes a point of stating: "[Dimitrov] is not a psychopathic personality."

[The original Truthout article did not link to any documents on Artichoke or the "Kelly case." But these documents are fully available at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, though you may have to create an account there to see the actual documents. See this link for a list of the documents.]

The Artichoke Treatment

This remarkable summary brought the official to the purpose of his meeting with CIA security official Morse Allen. After months of confinement in Panama, Dimitrov had become a serious problem for the agency and the military officials holding him in the hospital. Dimitrov had become increasingly angry and bitter about his treatment and he was insisting that he be released immediately. Dimitrov, through his strong intellect and observation powers, was also witnessing a great deal of Project Artichoke activity and on occasion would engage military and agency officials in unauthorized conversations. The official explained to Allen that the CIA could release Dimitrov to the custody of a friend of his in Venezuela, but was prone not to because Dimitrov was now judged to have become extremely hostile toward the CIA. "Hence," explained the official, "[CIA] is considering an 'Artichoke' approach to [Dimitrov] to see if it would be possible to re-orient [Dimitrov] favorably toward us."

Wrote Allen in his subsequent summary memorandum: "This [Artichoke] operation, which will necessarily involve the use of drugs is being considered by OPC with a possibility that Dr. Ecke and Mike Gladych will carry out the operation presumably at the military hospital in Panama. Also involved in this would be a Bulgarian interpreter who is a consultant to this Agency since neither Ecke nor Gladych speak Bulgarian." Allen noted in his memo that security chief Bannerman "pointed out" that this type of operation could "only be carried out" with his or his superior's (security chief Sheffield Edwards) authorization, and "that under no circumstances whatsoever, could anyone but an authorized M.D. administer drugs to any subject of this Agency of any type." (The "Dr. Ecke" mentioned above was Dr. Robert S. Ecke of Brooklyn, New York, and Eliot, Maine, where he died in 2001. "Mike Gladych," according to former CIA officials, was a decorated wartime pilot who after the war became "deeply involved in black market trafficking in Europe and the US," and then in the early 1950's was recruited to join a "newly composed Artichoke Team operating out of Washington, DC.")

Allen also wrote that Bannerman was concerned that the military hospital at Fort Clayton may not approve of or permit an Artichoke operation to be conducted on the ward within which Dimitrov was being held, thus necessitating the movement of Dimitrov to another location in Panama. Lastly, Bannerman stated to the official and Allen that "[the CIA's Office of] Security [through its Artichoke Committee] would have to be cognizant" of the operation, and may even want to "run the operation themselves since this type of work is one which Security handles for the Agency. Here it is interesting to note that among the many members of the agency's Artichoke Committee in 1952 was Dr. Frank Olson, who would about a year later be murdered in New York City.

Morse Allen concluded his memo: "While the [Artichoke] technique that Ecke and Gladych are considering for use in this case is not known to the writer [Allen], the writer believes the approach will be made through the standard narco-hypnosis technique. Re-conditioning and re-orientating an individual in such a matter, in the opinion of the writer, cannot be accomplished easily and will require a great deal of time.... It is also believed that with our present knowledge, we would have no absolute guarantee that the subject in this case would maintain a positive friendly attitude toward us even though there is apparently a successful response to the treatment. The writer did not suggest to [Bannerman and the CIA official] that perhaps a total amnesia could be created by a series of electro shocks, but merely indicated that amnesia under drug treatments was not certain." Interesting also is that Allen noted in his memo, about thirty days prior to his meeting, an official in the CIA's Technical Services Division, Walter Driscoll, discussed "the Kelly case" with him. No details of that discussion were provided.

About a month later, according to former CIA officials, after Artichoke Committee approval to subject Dimitrov to Artichoke techniques, a high-ranking CIA official objected to treating Dimitrov in such a manner. That objection delayed application of the techniques for about "three weeks." In March 1952, according to the same former officials, Dimitrov was "successfully given the Artichoke treatment in Panama for a period of about five weeks."

In late 1956, the CIA brought Dimitrov, at his request, to the United States. Apparently, the Agency felt comfortable enough with Dimitrov's diminished hostility and anger to agree to bring him to America from Athens, where he had returned for undetermined reasons. CIA files state, "The Agency made no further operation use of Dimitrov after he came to the United States, however, former CIA officials dispute this and relate that Dimitrov was "used on occasion for sensitive jobs."

This, however, was not the end of Dimitre Dimitrov's story.

After being relocated to the United States, Dimitrov either remained bitter or resumed his bitterness toward the CIA. In June 1960, he contacted the CIA's Domestic Contact Division and requested financial assistance for himself and additional covert support and assistance for activities against Bulgaria. In 1961, he contacted an editor at Parade, a Sunday newspaper magazine then with reported strong ties to the CIA, with the intention of telling his story. A Parade editor contacted the CIA and was informed, according to CIA documents, that Dimitrov was "an imposter" who was "disreputable, unreliable, and full of wild stories about the CIA."

About ten years after the JFK assassination, Dimitrov, operating sometimes under the aliases Lyle Kelly, James Adams, General Dimitre Dimitrov and Donald A. Donaldson, informed a number of people that he had information about who ordered the murder of JFK and who had committed the act. Reportedly, he had encountered the assassins while he had been imprisoned in Panama. He also told several people that he knew about military snipers who had murdered Martin Luther King. In 1977, Dimitrov actually met with US Sen. Frank Church, head of a Senate Committee investigating the CIA, and President Gerald Ford to share his information. Dimitrov said after the meeting that Ford had asked him to keep the information confidential until he could verify a number of facts. Immediately following the March 29, 1977, death of Lee Harvey Oswald's friend George de Mohrenschildt, Dimitrov became extremely frightened and contacted a reporter with a foreign television station who either mistakenly, or intentionally, revealed Dimitrov's name publicly on American television. Not long after this, Dimitrov disappeared in Europe where he had fled. He has never been seen or heard from since. Former CIA officials say privately, "Dimitrov was murdered" and "His body will never be found."

A 1977 memorandum written, before Dimitrov's disappearance, by an attorney in the CIA's General Counsel's Office, A. R. Cinquegrana, states: "[It appears] to me that the nature of the Agency's treatment of Dimitrov might be something which should be brought to the attention of appropriate officials both within and outside the Agency. The fact that he is still active and is making allegations connected with the Kennedy assassination may add yet another dimension to this story."

Binyam Mohamed's Torture

Dimtrov's story takes on added significance when one considers the latest stories of the unraveling torture conspiracy and operations conducted by the American CIA and Department of Defense, in conjunction with their British allied organizations, and a host of other governments, including Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland and numerous others. After a series of exposures during the 1970's, many assumed the worst excesses of the Cold War torture research program, and its implementation in programs such as the CIA's Operation Phoenix in Vietnam were a fixture of the past. However, subsequent revelations, e.g. the appearance of a US-sponsored torture manual for use in Latin America in the 1980's, including documentation of torture by US forces in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, demonstrate that a direct line exists between the torture and rendition programs of the past and the practices of the present day. Recently, articles have detailed how the 2006 rewrite of the Army Field Manual allowed for use of ongoing isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, induction of fear and the use of drugs that cause temporary derangement of the senses.

The Binyam Mohamed story is unfortunately not unique, but it does demonstrate that the implementation of a SERE-derived experimental torture program began months before it was given legal cover by the memos written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee. Other stories, for instance of "War on Terror" captives being drugged and tortured, have been related by the prisoners themselves, by their attorneys, and by US and international rights agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose report on the torture of CIA "high-value detainees" was leaked to Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books.

While Binyam in many ways had a very different personal background than Dimitrov, like the Bulgarian political leader, he was rendered to a US foreign ally for torture. He was drugged. He was considered unreliable and a "disposal" problem for US leaders, who kept secret the actual treatment they endured. Both were victims of a torture program run by the CIA. Both were sent from their foreign torturer back to US custody, where they endured intense psychological torture.

Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, where his torture, as evidenced by the latest UK court release, was supervised by US agents. This torture was akin to the treatment meted out to Abu Zubaydah. Binyam was subsequently sent to Morocco in July 2002, where he was hideously tortured for 18 months, including a period where multiple scalpel cuts were made to his penis, and a hot stinging fluid poured on the wounds in an attempt to get him to confess to a false "dirty bomb" plot. (The US only dropped the bombing claims in October 2008.) At one point, a British informer was used to try to "turn" Mohamed into an informant for the US or Britain, just as the Artichoke treatment was used to "re-orient" Dimitrov in a pro-US direction. Mohamed also indicated that he had been drugged repeatedly.

In January 2004, Binyam Mohamed was flown to a CIA "black" site in Afghanistan, the infamous "Dark Prison." Mohamed is one of five plaintiffs in an ACLU suit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., which ran the aircraft for the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. According to an ACLU account:

In US custody, Mohamed was fed meals of raw rice, beans and bread sparingly and irregularly. He was kept in almost complete darkness for 23 hours a day and made to stay awake for days at a time by loud music and other frightening and irritating recordings, including the sounds of "ghost laughter," thunder, aircraft taking off and the screams of women and children. 

Interrogations took place on almost a daily basis. As part of the interrogation process, he was shown pictures of Afghanis and Pakistanis and was interrogated about the story behind each picture. Although Mohamed knew none of the persons pictured, he would invent stories about them so as to avoid further torture. In May 2004, Mohamed was allowed outside for five minutes. It was the first time he had seen the sun in two years.

Amazingly, this was not the end of Mohamed's ordeal. From the Dark Prison he was sent to Bagram prison, and then later to Guantanamo. In August 2007, the British government petitioned the US for release of their subject. Eighteen months later, and after being subjected to more abuse at Guantanamo, he was finally able to leave US custody and return to Britain.

[The ACLU's suit against Jeppesen was ultimately dismissed. In May 2011, the Supreme Court turned down an ACLU request to hear the suit.]

The Use of Drugs in Torture by the United States

The allegations of drugging by Mohamed and other prisoners are redolent of the use of hallucinogenic and other powerful mind-altering drugs by the US in its Artichoke, MK-ULTRA and other programs. A recent account, by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post, described some of these allegations of drugging of "detainees." The Post article subsequently led to an ongoing DoD Inspector General investigation into Possible Use of Mind Altering Substances by DoD Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror (D2007-DINT01-0092.005) "to determine if DoD personnel conducted, facilitated, or otherwise supported interrogations of detainees and /or prisoners using the threat or administration of mind altering drugs." According to his attorney's filings in the Jose Padilla case, Padilla, who was also originally implicated in the "dirty bomb" so-called plot with Binyam Mohamed, was forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in South Carolina.

[The DoD IG report on drugging of prisoners was finally released in July 2012, thanks to a FOIA request I had filed. The report takes up some of the charges listed here, but only in a partial and misleading fashion. For a complete analysis, see the article by Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye at this link.]

Another former Guantanamo prisoner, Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian Muslim released in 2005, has consistently told his tale of being subjected to electroshock, beatings and drugging while in US custody.

The CIA has been accused of involvement in continuing interrogation experimentation upon prisoners. The recent release of the previously censored summary of Mohamed's treatment in Pakistan notes that "The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed." As Stephen Soldz notes in an article on the British court revelations, "Why were these effects being 'carefully observed' unless to determine their effectiveness in order to see whether they should be inflicted upon others? That is, the observations were designed to generate knowledge that could be generalized to other prisoners. The seeking of "generalizable knowledge" is the official definition of "research," raising the question of whether the CIA conducted illegal research upon Binyan Mohamed." The role of doctors, psychologists and other medical professionals in the CIA/DoD torture program has been condemned by a number of individuals in their respective fields, and by organizations such as Center for Constitutional Rights and Physicians for Human Rights.

Most recently, in an important article by Scott Horton at Harpers, the reexamination of the evidence in the supposed 2006 suicides of three prisoners at Guantanamo pointed to the possibility that the prisoners were killed in a previously unknown black site prison on the Guantanamo base - "Camp No" - run by the CIA or Joint Special Operations Command. This raises the question of why they were taken off site at all. One prisoner, 22-year-old Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, had needle marks on both of his arms. The marks were notably not documented in the US military's autopsy report.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The tale of Dmitri Dimitrov documents the existence of a US-run torture and rendition program decades before the post-9/11 scandals of the Bush administration. Both the CIA and the Department of Defense have been implicated in both the research and implementation of torture for much of post-World War II US history. And yet, aside from the famous Church and Pike Congressional investigations of the 1970's, and the hearings and report from the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2008-09 on detainee abuse, the perpetrators of these crimes have gone unpunished. The current administration of President Barack Obama has clearly stated that it had little appetite to "look backwards" and seek accountability for the abuses of the past. Yet these abuses are never really "past," as the suffering of the victims and their families continues into the present. Additionally, the practice of torture, or use of "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of prisoners has not ended, and the same generals, colonels, admirals and intelligence agency bureaucrats and politicians who have been linked to past programs are free to research or implement ongoing abuse of prisoners and experimentation.

This country needs a clear and definite accounting of its past and present use of torture. Like a universal acid, torture breaks down the sinews of its victims, and in the process, the links between people and their government are transformed into the naked exercise of pure sadistic power of rulers over the ruled. The very purpose of civilization is atomized in the process. We need a full, open and thorough public investigation into the entire history of the torture program, with full power to subpoena, and to refer those who shall be held accountable for prosecution under the due process of law.

New York Times Decides Guantanamo Detainee Committed Suicide

Crossposted from MyFDL/Firedoglake

Jason Leopold continues to do superb reporting on the mysterious death last September of Guantanamo detainee Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. Earlier today (11/26), Leopold posted breaking news that a government autopsy report on Latif, not yet officially released, concludes that the 36-year-old prisoner died of suicide.

Leopold sourced the revelation to Yemeni government officials and "a US military investigator close to the case." The Department of Defense has not yet officially stated any cause of death for Latif, who was discovered inert in his cell at Guantanamo's Camp 5 on September 8.

Leopold wrote that a "spokesman for United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Joint Task Force-Guantanamo's (JTF-GTMO) higher command" told Truthout that DoD would "issue a statement as soon as [Yemen] accepts [Latif's] remains." Just two days after Latif's death, a Guantanamo spokesman told Associated Press, "There is no apparent cause [of death], natural or self-inflicted."

But none of this stopped the New York Times from stating in an editorial yesterday (11/25) calling for Guantanamo's closure that Latif had in fact committed suicide. Coming out of nowhere, such a statement was, frankly, bizarre.

Here's what the Times wrote, some 12 hours before Leopold even posted his story at Truthout, and with no published source anywhere definitively reporting Latif's cause of death as suicide (bold emphasis added):

In September, a member of this stranded group, a Yemeni citizen named Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, killed himself after a federal judge’s ruling ordering his release was unfairly overturned by an appellate court. It was the kind of price a nation pays when it creates prisons like Guantánamo, beyond the reach of law and decency, a tragic reminder of the stain on American justice.

Narratives R Us

There is a lot wrong about the claims in the NYT op-ed, as much as I might agree with the overall thrust of the editorial about shutting down Guantanamo. The Times editors may have thought the latest death of a prisoner at Guantanamo highlighted the crime of keeping Guantanamo open. And they are right about that, but their conclusion -- their narrative of Latif's death -- closes off inquiry into what actually occurred, and in doing that they are not acting as a watchdog upon possible government abuse.

First of all, there is no affirmative statement by the government that Latif's cause of death was suicide. In fact, as Leopold points out in his article, all the earlier statements from DoD led one to believe that suicide was not a cause of death. The only recent article to claim otherwise was by Leopold, and it was not published until many hours after the NYT made their claim.

Secondarily, not only does the New York Times supposedly know how Latif died, they also imply they know why he killed himself, i.e., he "killed himself after a federal judge’s ruling ordering his release was unfairly overturned by an appellate court."

Well, yes, he did die after the appellate court ruling -- nearly eleven months afterward, as the ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia came in October 2011. A subsequent appeal by Latif's attorneys to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected last June, also approximately three months before Latif died.

Since no one reads articles very carefully, and it is enough to spread a particular narrative in mainstream media sources to manufacture a version of Truth, the NYT does its readers a disservice by producing a bogus narrative of the death of Adnan Latif. According to the Times, Latif killed himself, and it was likely because his court case was overturned.

To be fair to the Times, there were stories in the press that speculated upon just such a scenario, as the Reprieve spokesperson in this Alternet article from last September appeared to do. In addition, the Swiss chapter of Amnesty International wrote about the Latif death on November 1, and indicated that the Guantanamo prisoner had died of suicide. ("Le suicide du détenu yéménite Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif en septembre 2012 nous rappelle la cruauté de ce régime de détention qui permet une détention illimitée et illégale.").

But statements by human rights groups are not the same as statements by the editorial board of the New York Times. One wonders what led them to assert that Latif had died from suicide, when no public source, indeed no story in their own paper had reported the same, until Truthout published Leopold's story nearly 12 hours later.

"Questions Remain"

Leopold's story is subheaded, "Questions Remain." Indeed they do.

The Truthout story draws upon eyewitness stories from a number of detainees as reported to human rights attorney David Remes. While Truthout withheld detainees' names to prevent possible retribution by Guantanamo authorities, former British resident Shaker Aamer gave permission for his name to be attached to his own statements about Latif's death.

Aamer, who is the subject of a major campaign to secure his release from the U.S. prison camp, told Remes that, among other things, Latif had been on hunger strike just before he died. He had been moved into Camp 5 only two days before he was found dead.

While readers should turn to Jason's article to read his complete story, it is worth noting the barebones of the revelations here, as it's unlikely you'll get them in the mainstream media any time soon.

According to Aamer and other detainees, Latif had gotten into an argument with guards in early August, after they failed to pass on a request from Latif about not getting his medications. Latif reportedly threw a rock at a guard tower and broke one of the spotlights.

Leopold's story explains what happened next:

The incident took place during Ramadan and resulted in dozens of soldiers being called into the rec area, some of who rolled up in Hummers, fired their weapons into the ground and threatened to kill Latif, according to several prisoners who were present.

"The guards came into Camp 5 with guns, and beat up the detainees," another prisoner recalled. "Other soldiers surrounded the camp. [The Officer in Charge] came and told detainees, 'You are extremists and I'm going to deal with you in a harsh way. You intend to kill our soldiers; we'll do the same thing to you.'"

While the New York Times pushes a narrative that links Latif's death to judicial decisions that happened many months before, I'd suggest that you don't have to be a fan of the mystery genre to know that if someone is threatened with being killed and then ends up dead in mysterious circumstances only a few weeks later, you've got something that needs investigation. But such investigation should not come from the same institution whose personnel made the death threats.

In fact, the seven alleged suicides at Guantanamo, and nine deaths overall since 2002, call out for an independent investigation. (I'd note that I also revealed evidence in a government document that there were earlier deaths of detainees at Guantanamo in early 2002. These, too, should be investigated.)

As reported in my Truthout story on two earlier Guantanamo "suicides," that of Abdul Rahman Al Amri in May 2007 and Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi in June 2009, like Latif both men died in Camp 5. The circumstances of their deaths were also strange. Al Amri was discovered with his hands tied behind his back. Al Hanashi's ligature (the means whereby he supposedly strangled himself) was never provided to autopsy doctors. It took years to get the autopsy reports on these prisoners, and the NCIS investigations have never been released.

In January, 2010, Scott Horton published a lengthy exposé at Harpers that seriously questioned the government's narrative about the deaths of three detainees on June 9, 2006. Like Al Amri, these detainees were also found with their hands tied behind their backs. They had cloth rags stuck down their throats in what UC Davis researcher Almerindo Ojeda has speculated could have been a form of "dryboarding." Yet the government still claims these deaths were suicide, and much of the mainstream media has defended the government's position.

The New York Times should be calling for an independent investigation into the death of Adnan Latif and the other supposed Guantanamo "suicides," and not constructing a dubious, unsourced narrative that discourages further inquiry.

RT TV Discusses IG Report Cover--up of Drugging of Detainees

RT TV had a segment on 9/26 that followed from my Truthout article earlier this month, New Revelations Suggest DoD Cover-Up Over Detainee Drugging Charges. They initially asked me to be interviewed, but I couldn't be available in time, and they instead turned to journalist and human rights attorney Scott Horton, who was quoted in the article.

The following is from RT's YouTube blurb for the video:

According to a recent report on Truth-out.org by Jeffrey Kaye (http://truth-out.org/news/item/11640-new-revelations-suggest-dod-cover-up-ove...), detainees at Gitmo were drugged by the Pentagon staff. The prison which has been open for nearly a decade, has many questioning the validity and legality of site and the torture techniques implemented there. Now it seems the US Department of Defense is attempting to cover up allegations of drugging prisoners at Gitmo. So why does Gitmo remain in open and what really goes on there? Scott Horton, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, joins us with his take on the legality of Gitmo and how it could be hurting the US in the long run.

New Revelations Suggest DoD Cover-Up Over Detainee Drugging Charges

Two new revelations, and a critical analysis of the recent Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG) report on the drugging of DoD-held detainees, reveals a cover-up of such drugging by the Pentagon and possibly other government agencies.

A recent attorney's affidavit charges that at least one Guantanamo detainee was involuntarily drugged before his plea hearing at the military commissions. In addition, a declassified Guantanamo medical standard operating procedure (SOP) describes how scopolamine was administered to all detainees rendered to the US Cuban-based prison. Scopolamine has a long history as a supposed "truth drug."

The IG report held that it could not find evidence that detainees were administered "mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogation of detainees." However, as reported in a July 2012 article at Truthout, which obtained the report by the Freedom of Information Act, the IG held that some detainees had been drugged with powerful antipsychotics and other medications that "could impair an individual's ability to provide accurate information."

Some of these detainees were interrogated even though they were "diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions, and being treated with psychoactive medications on an ongoing basis," the IG said.

The IG also concluded that some detainees had been involuntarily administered drugs as "chemical restraints ... used to control behavior or restrict the patient's freedom of movement." In addition, at least one prisoner, supposed "dirty bomber" José Padilla, held in isolation at a Navy brig in South Carolina, was tricked into believing he had been given a "truth drug."

But while the IG report was spurred by a June 2008 Washington Post article reporting a number of former detainees' complaints of drugging and a subsequent letter to the IG from three US senators, the IG report never interviewed any of the detainees mentioned in the Post story.

The IG interviewed only three detainees, all of whom were still held at Guantanamo. "We did not attempt to interview detainees who had been repatriated," the IG stated, which would include any of the detainees who had previously made public statements to the press that they had been forcibly drugged.

Drugs Placed in Detainees' Food

One of the detainees making such accusations was former Australian detainee David Hicks. Hicks detailed those charges in a book published last year, "Guantanamo: My Journey." The book is not for sale in the United States and the Australian government went to court to seize any profits Hicks could make from book sales in Australia.

In July 2012, the Australian government dropped its case against Hicks. Possibly this was because of revelations that could have come out in court over Hicks' torture in US custody.

One such document that had been prepared for by Hicks' defense team has been released. According to an affidavit by New York attorney Josh Dratel, who represented Hicks with military commission authorities, DoD "periodically sedated [Hicks] for non-therapeutic reasons."

A military prosecutor in Hicks' case confirmed one example of such drugging to Dratel in July 2007.

"David says the guards forced him to eat a meal which contained a sedative before you read him the charges," Dratel said he told the government prosecutor. To which the latter replied, "That was done to protect the officers reading the charges from any of the detainees' reactions."

Dratel's affidavit was first reported by Natalie O'Brien at the Sydney Morning Herald. Truthout has obtained a copy of Dratel's affidavit, which can be downloaded.

Human rights attorney and contributing editor to Harper's Magazine Scott Horton told Truthout, "The administration of drugs for non-medical purposes on prisoners held in wartime raises very serious issues under the Geneva Conventions - which establish a presumption that such use of drugs is generally unlawful and may rise to the level of a grave breach, or war crime - as well as other international agreements."

"The disclosure surrounding Hicks appears at first blush to be a criminal violation by US authorities," Horton said, "but it would be important to ascertain the reasons the US had for doing this before making any final judgment."

An Australian senator from South Australia has said that the new revelations backing Hicks' claims of forced drugging mean the government "can no longer put off" a formal inquiry into Australia's role in Hicks' incarceration and treatment by US authorities.

Scopolamine Patches for Rendition

While it has been assumed that some sort of medication was given to detainees who were subjected to the Bush-era program of extraordinary rendition, an October 2003 nursing SOP declassified a few years ago documented the use of scopolamine patches on all detainees rendered to Guantanamo.

The SOP describes the sequential steps of medical in-processing on all detainees. Only at step ten are nurses instructed to "remove the scopolamine behind each ear (used to prevent airsickness during transit)."

The stated rationale for the use of scopolamine - that is, for airsickness - is not repeated for other medical instructions in the SOP, including the administration of two other drugs during in-processing, mefloquine and Albendazole, raising questions as to why nurses had to be informed of the use of the scopolamine patches.

A separate SOP for "Out-processing Procedures" for detainees being flown out of Guantanamo Bay prison camp (revised July 2005) states, "A scopolamine patch will be placed on each detainee 4 hours before the flight" out of Cuba. There is no indication that any medical reasons might contravene this procedure.

The IG report on drugging of detainees never mentioned the use of scopolamine.

While DoD has studied scopolamine patches for motion sickness in military personnel, they are not the first-line medication used by DoD for this purpose. As far back as 1956, a military study complained that scopolamine: "gave the most distressing side effects of all the prophylactics used. For continued use, meclizine was the most satisfactory."

US Army psychiatrist, Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis (retired) confirmed military policy as regards medications for motion sickness.

“Military doctors recommended meclizine for motion sickness during my career & not scopolamine because of the side effects,” Xenakis told Truthout. “I have seen psychotic reactions to the drug," he said.
At times, the military has noted the effectiveness of scopolamine for some people in treating motion sickness. One NATO study described scopolamine's "high variability between subjects in both effectiveness and incidence of side effects." The side effects included lowered heart rate, blurred vision, impaired attention and alertness, and memory problems.

According to US Coast Guard instructions on "Antimotion Sickness Medications," the scopolamine patch is contraindicated in patients due to variability of effectiveness and associated medical precautions for some users. Scopolamine patches "should be used only after other methods of motion sickness control have proven unsatisfactory," the Coast Guard directive states.

The Coast Guard instruction, still in effect today, further states, "Uncommon but potentially severe side-effects [of scopolamine] include disorientation, hallucinations, and urinary retention."

Scopolamine has a very long history of consideration as a potential truth drug, going back over 80 years. Readers of 1960s military thrillers may remember discussion of the drug for interrogations in old Alistair MacLean novels.

According to a CIA account, the drug was ultimately rejected for use as a "truth drug." The reasons given for such rejection are interesting given the later use of the drug on "war on terror" detainees.

"Because of a number of undesirable side effects, scopolamine was shortly disqualified as a 'truth' drug," the 1961 CIA document states. "Among the most disabling of the side effects are hallucinations, disturbed perception, somnolence, and physiological phenomena such as headache, rapid heart, and blurred vision, which distract the subject from the central purpose of the interview. Furthermore, the physical action is long, far outlasting the psychological effects."

According to government documents, scopolamine was one of a number of drugs, including mescaline and LSD, which were investigated as part of a US Navy research program called Project Chatter. Chatter ran from 1947 until 1953 and "focused on the identification and testing of such drugs for use in interrogations and in the recruitment of agents."

Mefloquine as "Pharmacological Waterboarding"

The nursing SOP that mentioned scopolamine was first noted by Army public health physician Remington Nevin in an August 2012 article in a peer-reviewed medical journal examining DoD's purported medical rationale for another use of another drug, mefloquine.

The "empiric" use of mefloquine - an antimalarial drug that has long been controversial for its serious neurological and psychological side effects - on all incoming detainees at Guantanamo was the subject of a series of Truthout articles by Jason Leopold and this author.

Mefloquine has been connected to a number of serious side effects, including damage to the vestibular system, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, hallucinations, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores, and homicidal and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The drug was previously sold under the brand name Lariam.

Nevin told Truthout in December 2010 that the high dosage of mefloquine Guantanamo detainees were forced to take upon arriving at the prison facility was akin to "pharmacologic waterboarding."

In Nevin's article for the August 2012 edition of Tropical Medicine and International Health, he wrote, "the troubling possibility that the use of mefloquine at Guantánamo may have been motivated in part by knowledge of the drug's adverse effects ... points to a critical need for further investigation to resolve unanswered questions regarding the drug's potentially inappropriate use."

As in the case of scopolamine, the IG report never mentioned the use of mefloquine.

Limiting the Investigation

One reason scopolamine, mefloquine or even the drugs put in David Hicks' food were never mentioned by the DoD inspector general was that the investigation was carefully limited to the purported use of "mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogations."

The IG report states that its report was a response to "a tasking to the Inspector Generals of DoD and the Central Intelligence Agency from Senators Biden, Hagel and Levin." DoD's IG does not reproduce the April 24, 2008, letter from the senators, though an online version of the letter still extant at TPM Muckraker clearly describes the tasking precisely.

"We are deeply concerned about the allegations reported in the April 23rd Washington Post article entitled Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned regarding the alleged use of drugs on detainees to facilitate interrogations," the senators wrote. "They are the most recent in a series of allegations relating to the abuse and mistreatment of detainees in United States custody."

Pointing out as well that John Yoo, working for the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), had apparently approved of the legality of "the forced administration of mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogation," Sens. Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and Carl Levin wrote, "The allegations reported in the Washington Post article warrant a thorough investigation by the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency."

The letter twice mentions the use of drugs "to facilitate interrogations," but the 2008 Washington Post article, written by Joby Warrick, did not limit itself to the use of drugs during interrogations. Warrick explained, "Other detainees, in interviews or in statements provided by their attorneys, described pills and injections being forcibly administered for reasons that were not always clear to them."

But an analysis of government documents shows that the dichotomy between using drugs to facilitate interrogations and using drugs to shape the detention environment are not counterpoised.

In a "Background Paper on the CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques," sent to the OLC in December 2004, the CIA explained that detention conditions "may be a factor in interrogation."

The CIA document noted, "Detention conditions are not interrogation techniques, but they have an impact on the detainee undergoing interrogation."

The DoD's own 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures describe the detention environment to which incoming prisoners are to be exposed. New prisoners are to adhere to a "Behavioral Management Plan" for at least the first six weeks, whose purpose is to "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator."

While the 2003 SOP never mentions the use of drugs to "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization" of detainees, certainly the use of drugs such as scopolamine and mefloquine, among others, could help accomplish this purpose, and do so without technically being used to "facilitate interrogation." This would be one purpose, for instance, of Yoo's argument for the use of mind-altering drugs.

The DoD IG never mentions Yoo or his recommendation in their report. Nor do they mention that the current Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation allows for the use of drugs for interrogation-related purposes.

The AFM, revised in 2006, states that the only drugs forbidden for use are those "that may induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage." The earlier version of the AFM had prohibited drugs that caused "chemically induced psychosis," but this language was dropped in the new manual.

Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Truthout that no further changes have been made to the AFM since its last rewrite in 2006, meaning the changes in drugging prohibitions still stands.

CIA and Drugging of Detainees

The DoD IG report was clear it was not addressing charges of CIA drugging, which was to be investigated by the CIA Inspector General. Truthout has filed a FOIA request for the CIA IG report.

Claims of the CIA's use of drugs on detainees rendered to its secret black site prison and "enhanced interrogation" torture program have been the subject of foreign investigations, even as in the United States, the DOJ has closed the book, it claims, on prosecuting CIA crimes.

But the truth about what was done under the CIA's program has leaked out over the years. In terms of its use of drugs, at Harper's Horton reported in November 2010 that German prosecutors told him that torture victim Khaled El-Masri, himself a German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, had been given drugs by CIA jailers.

"By studying El-Masri's hair and skin samples," Horton wrote, German prosecutors "were able to confirm allegations that he was drugged and subjected to a bizarre starvation regimen."

The investigation into the illegal CIA kidnapping was shut down after a deputy US ambassador intervened with German Foreign and Justice ministry officials to register Washington's disapproval of any prosecution of its CIA torturers, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

"I expect this would have figured in the prosecution that the German prosecutors were preparing before the United States shut down the case through threats and political manipulation," Horton told Truthout.

Historically, the CIA had approved the use of drugs in interrogations and to influence detention conditions that bear upon interrogation. In a declassified interrogation manual from the early 1960s, the CIA explained that the function of using drugs, "is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation."

"Once this shift has been accomplished," the manual reads, "coercive techniques should be abandoned both for moral reasons and because they are unnecessary and even counter-productive" for interrogation purposes.

Special Operations Command and the IG Report

In an interesting aside to the IG report, a letter to the DoD Inspector General from Col. William Melendez, deputy director for intelligence, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) noted that USSOCOM "cannot agree or disagree with the report findings" because its forces involved in any interrogations in Iraq and Guantanamo were under authority of Central or Southern military commands (CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM, respectively). The letter was included in an appendix to the IG report itself.

According to Colonel Melendez, SOCOM "did not contribute to the completion" of the IG report, raising questions as to what degree Special Operations forces' interrogation practices were investigated by DoD's inspector general.

Speaking of the recent reports concerning the drugging of detainees, Horton told Truthout: "The new evidence points to the use of drugs for nonmedical purposes as a far broader practice, which is troubling. It is hard to imagine this practice being undertaken without high-level authorization, particularly because it is at least arguably illegal, and the medical personnel involved would not likely have risked their professional licenses without getting some formal assurances that they would be protected."

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted without permission. Original URL: http://truth-out.org/news/item/11640-new-revelations-suggest-dod-cover-up-over-detainee-drugging-charges

Harper's Magazine: "U.N. Official Presses Query into Gitmo Deaths"

reposted from Scott Horton's "No Comment" blog at Harper's

U.N. Official Presses Query into Gitmo Death
By Scott Horton

One month ago, Truthout’s Jeffrey Kaye published a review of autopsy reports released last year by the Department of Defense in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request concerning two unwitnessed prisoner deaths at Guantánamo that authorities had described as suicides. Now, Kaye reports that Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions, is “looking into” the deaths. Heyns is a South African law professor who teaches at American University in Washington and holds a fellowship at Oxford.

Kaye also asked Cyril Wecht, a renowned forensic pathologist, to review the autopsy report and its supporting documents. Wecht agreed that the autopsy results supported the conclusion of suicide, but he noted that the report failed to rule out the possibility of homicide. He also faulted the military for not providing the pathologist conducting the autopsy with the ligature used in the alleged suicides. “If this is what a respected forensic expert states,” Kaye told me, “then the government should listen and release the evidence held in their investigations and be open to independent investigations held by international forensic investigators.”

In his initial February 29 review of the autopsy reports for Abdul Rahman Al Amri, who died in May 2007, and Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, who died in June 2009, Kaye wrote:

[D]etails in the autopsy reports show that Al Amri was found dead by hanging with his hands tied behind his back, calling into question whether he had actually killed himself…

Al Hanashi was found wearing standard-issue detainee clothing, the undergarments from which he supposedly used to kill himself, and not the tear-proof suicide smock issued to detainees who are actively suicidal. It remains an open question if he [was] in fact under suicide watch, even though he had been repeatedly banging his head on prison walls, and had made five suicide attempts in the four weeks prior to his death.

Both Al Amri, who was housed in isolation at Guantanamo’s high-security Camp 5, and Al Hanashi, who was resident at the prison’s Behavioral Health Unit, were supposed to be under constant video surveillance, and according to camp officials, someone was supposed to be checking on them every three to five minutes.

Kaye noted that the reported deaths and autopsies are odd in a number of respects. First, the detention facility supposedly stopped using regular bed linens in February 2002, replacing them with “suicide watch” linens that could not be torn and used in such a manner. Second, the report claims that the linens were fashioned using a razor blade, but the Gitmo Standard Operating Procedure then in effect denied prisoners access to razor blades other than during shower periods, when their use was supervised. Kaye also focused on the fact that the autopsy failed to scrutinize the ligature purportedly used in the suicide.

According to the autopsy report on Al Hanashi, he had made five suicide attempts in the four weeks prior to his death, and was therefore under suicide watch, which entailed continuous monitoring. The report noted that his death was detected 25 minutes following the last check. Both Al Hanashi and a prior alleged suicide, Yasser Al Zahrani, had been held in northern Afghanistan at the time of the prison riot at Qali Jangi and the massacre at Dasht-i-Leili, and both could have figured as witnesses in an inquiry into those events.
I asked professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School, who has directed a series of studies on prisoner deaths at Guantánamo, what he thought of the latest developments. “Once again,” he replied, “a report of suicide, a questionable autopsy, and no investigation. It is deeply troublesome.”

The issues surrounding the autopsy reports from the Al Hanashi and Al Amri deaths are in some respects similar to those surrounding the three deaths that occurred on June 10, 2006. These questions do not disprove the U.S. government’s claims of suicide. But as U.N. rapporteur Philip Alston noted in a confidential communication about the 2006 deaths to the U.S. government:

When the State detains an individual, it is held to a heightened level of diligence in protecting that individual’s rights. As a consequence, when an individual dies in State custody, there is a presumption of State responsibility…

In order to overcome the presumption of State responsibility for a death in custody, there must be a “thorough, prompt and impartial investigation of all suspected cases of extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions, including cases where complaints by relatives or other reliable reports suggest unnatural death in the above circumstances.”

Serious questions remain about Guantánamo authorities’ claims that they have taken steps to address prisoner suicides since 2006. Rather than dispel these questions, the recent autopsy reports bear signs of errors and secrecy that actually multiply them. Was this just sloppy work, or was it a desire to cover up embarrassing or harmful facts associated with the deaths?

Rarely Seen Video of U.S.-style water torture in action

Former president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, commented on recent statements by two GOP presidential candidates who created a stir by defending waterboarding:

[Herman] Cain said, “I don't see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture and abuse. [Michelle] Bachman declared, “If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding. I think it was very effective. It gained information for our country.” And after the debate, Mitt Romney’s aides told CNN that he does not think waterboarding is torture.

Cohn notes at the end of her article, "Unfortunately, during his hearing to be confirmed as CIA director, David Petraeus told Congress there might be occasions in which we must return to “enhanced interrogation” to get information. Alarmingly, that comment signaled that the Obama administration may return to the use of torture and abuse." Petraeus was confirmed as the new CIA director last August on a 94-0 vote of the U.S. Senate.

Evidence of Torture in the Obama Administration

Despite President Obama's own comments criticizing Cain and Bachman's statements, Cohn points out that Obama's own nominated candidate for CIA director is willing to support waterboarding and the other torture techniques designated "enhanced interrogation" during the Bush/Cheney regime. But there's no "unfortunately" about it. The Obama administration does support torture, but it does so in the old-fashioned U.S. way, through official and/or plausible denial.

But anyone who looks at what the U.S. does, rather than what it says, will know that the torture never ended. Waterboarding may or may not have been ceased, but in the U.S. official Army Field Manual on interrogation, numerous commentators have found clear evidence of the use of torture, including use of debilitating isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, manipulation of phobias, use of drugs, and other "techniques." Some of these techniques, such as use of isolation and sleep deprivation are limited to supposed "illegal" combatants, such as those captured in the "war on terror," as discussed in the AFM's Appendix M (PDF).

The use of controlled suffocation, such as in the water torture used in the video below, was documented to be endemic across the field of Defense Department operations in a series of articles published at Truthout.org recently. Also published at Truthout was an analysis of the possible use of "dryboarding", another suffocation torture technique that may have been used by U.S. interrogators and implicated in the deaths of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006.

"Dryboarding"

The "dryboarding" hypothesis was developed by Almerindo Ojeda at the University of California at Davis’s Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas. Ojeda is also principal investigator for the Center’s Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He discovered that Ali Saleh Al-Marri, a purported Al Qaeda "sleeper" agent, who was held for years in solitary confinement at the Navy Brig in Charleston, North Carolina, like fellow domestic internee and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, had been tortured by having a sock shoved stuffed in his mouth and then having his lips taped shut with duct tape. Al-Marri almost suffocated.

Ojeda noted that all of the dead supposed suicides at Guantanamo had socks stuffed in their mouths or down their throats.

Scott Horton, who wrote an award-winning article on the Guantanamo "suicides," noted in a recent review of Ojeda's work that socks were not allowed for prisoners at Guantanamo. He added:

The “dryboarding” disclosures do not resolve the questions about the Guantánamo deaths, but they give rise to important new questions about interrogation practices that may also have been used at Guantánamo. They also further justify the call for a thorough and independent investigation of the three deaths and underscore the severe credibility issues with the government’s claims about “suicides.”

The investigation of the Guantanamo "suicides" by Horton and Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research (PDF) was the subject of a slur campaign in the media last May, with Horton's article in particular attacked by former Bush Administration officials. Then, strangely, Adweek writer Alex Koppelman and his former Salon.com collaborator Mark Benjamin, jumped in to defend Guantanamo Defense Department authorities' version of events.

Links to the Torturers

The following video was posted at both LiveLeak.com and You Tube, and provides "a glimpse of what went on during interrogations of [Afghan] insurgents by Jonathan Idema," who worked in conjunction with NATO forces in Afghanistan "counterterror" operations.

Idema is a controversial figure. He was arrested by Afghan authorities in July 2004 in Kabul, where according to a New York Times report, he had been holding eight men prisoner. Some of these men "said they were kicked and beaten, had scalding water poured on them, and had their heads repeatedly dunked in a bucket of water." Idema was pardoned by Afghan President Karzai in March 2007. He had claimed all along that he was working at the behest of U.S. authorities. The U.S. denied this, though admittedly he did work with international forces on counterterrorism operations.

In a well-documented examination of his career at Wikipedia, Idema's connections with U.S. Special Forces is dissected. Idema's various disgraces and problems with the military never kept him from working at various times with U.S. Special Forces, and interestingly, he has been connected to private contracting firms associated with the "war on terror," including Star America Aviation Company, Ltd. (SAAC).

One of the latter company's executives is retired Major General Jack Holbein, a former leading commander at U.S. Special Forces Command. SAAC is linked to a shell company, Isabeau Dakota, Inc., that listed Idema's father as president and sole officer, in that both are registered as corporations by the same individual, William L. London, who appears to be an attorney in Sanford, North Carolina. There is some evidence, given the connections noted in his Wikipedia entry, that Idema served as an off-the-record asset or operative of U.S. Special Forces.

Major General Holbein was listed in the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) report on detainee abuse (large PDF) as one of the recipients of the Defense Department's interrogation-torture proposal developed by James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen at Joint Personnel Services Agency (JPRA). Holbein was then Chief of Staff at U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), and JPRA was under command authority of JFCOM at that time. The implication of the SASC report is that Holbein and others helped send the torture proposal up the chain of command.

JFCOM was disbanded last August, "the first time a Defense Department combatant command has been dissolved" one news account explained. According to the article, by Hugh Lessig at The Daily Press:

The military is keeping the core mission of JFCOM: training the military to operate and fight together. But instead of maintaining a separate four-star command and all the overhead it entails, personnel will report directly to the Joint Staff.

The former JFCOM functions remaining in Hampton Roads include those related to joint training, developing new concepts and doctrine, experimentation and what the military calls "lessons learned."

A Tale of Two Videos

The video below is from As Sahab, a supposedly Al Qaeda linked media outlet, though reposted at LiveLink, and apparently was discovered in the raid on Idema's Afghanistan headquarters in Kabul in 2004. (Other As Sahab videos of torture have been aired by ABC news, and posted at You Tube.) Whether or not Idema was working directly for the Americans or not, the video provides a sickeningly vivid display of the kind of water torture during interrogation that has been documented previously as used by U.S. forces. (See here and here.)



The refusal by either the Obama administration or the U.S. Congress to hold torturers accountable, or to eliminate the torture embedded in the Army Field Manual, means that the torture program continues. It may be more hidden, but it operates nevertheless continuously. While the U.S. puts out propaganda about its "humane" treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere (see this story by Jason Leopold on the latest video issued in the U.S. propaganda effort), the real truth is hidden as much as possible.

The cozening of torturers, and the successful continuation in one form of the U.S. torture program has found its domestic analogue in the vicious state repression being unleashed upon the reform-minded protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, the attacks on peaceful protesters demonstrates as much as the history of the torture program that the U.S. government is not an entity to be bargained with, and that new political forms must arise to challenge the social and political status quo. Their first demand must be an end to state violence against peaceful protest.

Benjamin Wittes Responds: "Happy to be a government proxy"

In an an arrogant riposte to an earlier posting of mine [at FDL's The Dissenter], Lawfare blogger and member of the Hoover Institute Task Force on National Security and the Law, Benjamin Wittes, proclaimed he is "Happy to be a government proxy."

Wittes' tongue may seem somewhat in cheek, but he really means it. "Government proxy" how? In my earlier article criticizing both Wittes and Adweek columnist Alex Koppelman for their poorly resourced and vituperative articles attacking Scott Horton's investigation of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, published by Harper's Magazine in January 2010. Department of Defense investigations had labeled all three deaths suicides.

Moreover, when both Koppelman and Wittes were cited in a footnote to a Department of Justice brief (PDF) defending numerous government officials against a lawsuit brought by parents of the dead detainees -- Koppelman and Wittes' stories were cited as examples of “numerous articles addressing serious flaws with the HARPER’S MAGAZINE story"-- I noted that the two authors "wittingly or not" had become "government proxies in the matter of the Guantanamo suicides controversy."

Wittes replied, sarcastically, "Wow, I'm Verklempt." He continued:

Turns out that DOJ, in a footnote in a brief before the D.C. Circuit, cited this post of mine from some time back – in which I expressed dismay that Scott Horton and Harpers had received a National Magazine award for a feature article devoted to the spurious suggestion that U.S. service personnel had tortured three Guantanamo detainees to death. The passing citation in the brief prompted this howl of rage from a new blogger over at Firedoglake named Jeff Kaye, who had earlier written a defense of the Harpers article....

Happy to be a government proxy on this one. Robert Loeb and Barbara Herwig, who filed the brief, hereby have my blessing to use any Lawfare post their hearts may desire in defending this suit. I’ll live with myself quite happily, thank you.

Wittes, who saved his strongest complaint for a typo of his name in the post, repeats the lie that Horton's article claimed the three Guantanamo detainees -- Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani -- were "tortured to death" by "U.S. service personnel." In fact, Horton never makes any such claim in the article. It is true that the Al-Zahrani's father is quoted in the article as asserting his son was tortured and killed, but that is very different than Horton coming to such a conclusion. Instead, Horton built a case, based upon contradictions in the government's investigations, eye-witness testimony, independent autopsy, and revelations concerning a CIA (or JSOC?) black site at Guantanamo, that the deaths were "possible homicides."

By claiming Horton implicated "service personnel" in torture or possible homicide, Wittes means to tar Horton with irresponsible attacks against rank-and-file U.S. servicemen and women who have sacrificed much to serve their country. If suspicion falls on anyone, it is on interrogators or agents for the CIA or JSOC. Since writing the story, Horton has been calling, as have the parents, for an independent investigation.

Wittes' portrayal of the DoJ citation of his work is strangely spurious as well. He says that the citation in the brief filed with the D.C. Circuit came from a "post of mine some time back." In fact, the post was dated May 23, 2011, the same day as Koppelman's Adweek screed. The brief, signed by government attorneys in DoJ's Civil Appellate Division, Robert Loeb and Barbara Herwig, as well as by Assistant Attorney General Tony West, was filed on July 13, a mere seven weeks after the Koppelman/Wittes articles. Perhaps we should allow for the subjectivity of time sense and grant Wittes his belief that his article had appeared "some time back" in relation to the government brief. My subjective sense of the affair is that it was quite contemporaneous.

I have very little patience for academic apologists for torture like Wittes. I suppose some, including Wittes himself, might take umbrage at such labels, but an apologist is what he is, no matter how even-handed and reasonable -- a man who supposedly takes no extreme positions -- he presents himself. Take, for instance, his defense of his friend William Haynes' approval of torture techniques at Guantanamo. In an article for The New Republic last year, Wittes defended Bush administration attorneys like Haynes, Jack Goldsmith, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, castigating “the vilification of government lawyers involved in the war on terror.”

Admittedly, Wittes said, Haynes was a friend of his "about whom I do not pretend to be neutral." But rather than forgo comment because of his personal connection (Jack Goldsmith, too, is a personal friend and a professional collaborator, having written articles with Wittes; Goldsmith also is one of two other major contributors, with Wittes, to the blog Lawfare), he defends Haynes's actions, and apologizes for torture.

Wittes in TNR:

Haynes’s long tenure at the Defense Department was a complicated affair. He made mistakes, mistakes I probably would have made too had I been in his shoes. He also behaved very admirably at important junctures.

The memo for which he has been pilloried is also the reason that the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody. [Djamel Ameziane might disagree with that assertion.] Haynes recommended approval of certain modestly coercive techniques—the use of which later spun out of control—but he drew the line at several highly-coercive techniques, waterboarding included. Though they might be legal, he wrote, the military was trained in a tradition of restraint and shouldn’t use them. In other words, he behaved exactly the way the Left often criticizes the CIA for not behaving; even in a crisis setting, he refused to let the criminal law define military interrogation policy. Why is that fact not even part of the conversation about him?

And what were the "certain modestly coercive techniques" Haynes approved? In a November 27, 2002 memo from Haynes to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Haynes approved all "Category I and II" "counter-resistance techniques" that had been requested by Major General Mike Dunleavy, Commander of Task Force 170, Guantanamo. He also approved one of the "Category III" techniques. But as Wittes notes, he did not approve some others, including a version of waterboarding, and the making of death threats.

The actual techniques, derived from SERE torture training conducted by DoD, were described by Dunleavy's staff intelligence director, Lieutenant Commander Jerald Phifer, in a memo that accompanied Dunleavy's request, and which Haynes approved, in large part.

What techniques did Haynes approve? From the Phifer memo, they included all these "Category II" techniques:

(1) The use of stress positions (like standing), for a maximum of four hours.

(2) The use of falsified documents or reports

(3) Use of the isolation facility for up to 30 days. Request must be made to through the OIC [Officer in Charge], Interrogation Section, to the Director, Joint Interrogation Group (JIG). Extensions beyond the initial 30 days must be approved by the Commanding General. For selected detainees, the OIC, Interrogation Section, will approve all contacts with the detainee, to include medical visits of a non-emergent nature.

(4) Interrogating the detainee in an environment other than the standard interrogation booth.

(5) Deprivation of light and auditory stimuli

(6) The detainee may also have a hood placed over his head during transportation and questioning. The hood should not restrict breathing in any way and the detainee should be under direct observation when hooded.

(7) The use of 20 hour interrogations.

(8) Removal of all comfort items (including religious items).

(9) Switching the detainee from hot rations to MREs.

(10) Removal of clothing.

(11) Forced grooming (shaving of facial hair, etc...)

(12) Using detainees individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.

According to Benjamin Wittes, these techniques are "modestly coercive." I wonder if Wittes himself were to be subjected to these, under conditions of indefinite detention, no less, he might not find himself truly "verklempt," or something far worse.

Famously, Donald Rumsfeld scribbled on the bottom of the Haynes memo, "However I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" In Wittes' world, I suppose Haynes is to be congratulated for holding stress positions to only four hours maximum at a time.

But then, I suppose for the Wittes, the intrepid scholar, this post of mine is just another "howl of rage from a new blogger over at Firedoglake." Referencing my notice of Wittes' peculiar sense of time above, I should note I've been writing at Firedoglake since April 2009, a year longer than "Lawfare" has been in business.

One last thing: Mr. Wittes, you cited favorably at your original post on Horton a May 17 blog post by Cully Stimson, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths. In Stimson's post, which you extensively quoted, Stimson claimed, "According to published reports, previously classified documents released by Wikileaks show that the suicides were indeed suicides, and were deliberate acts by the detainees." Could you or Mr. Stimson refer us to these "published reports" or "previously classified documents"? In the name of publishing the truth, and furthering your critique of the Horton article, I can't see why you'd ever refuse.

Cross-posted from The Dissenter/FDL