New Evidence on CIA Medical Torture: Injection "to the Bone" on Former Black Site Prisoner Majid Khan

Quite recently, U.S. authorities allowed the declassification of notes from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) attorney Wells Dixon that described what his client, high-value detainee Majid Khan, told him about his torture at the hands of the CIA. Khan, a Pakistan citizen, is currently at Guantanamo, and awaits trial by military commission.

Dixon has described the hideous torture of his client, which comes on the heels of revelations in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of their report on the CIA's torture program.

According to a June 2 Reuters report, Dixon described from interview notes with Khan, CIA use of solitary confinement; sexual abuse, including frequent touching of "private parts"; threats of physical harm; being hung naked from a pole for days; so-called "rectal feeding" (a form of anal rape); denial of food; water immersion and waterboarding, among other atrocities.

According to a CCR press release on Khan's torture, CIA doctors onsite were among the "worst torturers." Both Reuters and CCR have noted how doctors would check Khan's condition, ignore his appeals for help, and send him back into extreme forms of torture.

In a June 10 phone interview with Wells Dixon, Khan's attorney revealed there was more unreported material left out of the Reuters and CCR reports. In particular, Dixon revealed that Khan told him he was "also injected with a needle to the bone, and screamed in pain, then lost consciousness."

According to my research, an injection that just happens to hit a bone does not usually cause great pain. But an injection that enters the bone can. The latter is called an intraosseous or IO injection, and is used to quickly infuse drugs, particularly in instances where a person's life is at stake. It is usual medical procedure to insert lidocaine, a pain reliever, with or prior to injection because of the great pain associated with IO injections. Certain kinds of drugs can also cause great pain upon injection.

Did the CIA have medical need to make an IO injection, and withhold lidocaine or other pain reliever? Did CIA use the IO injection specifically to cause pain? Was a drug injected into Khan that specifically, or as side effect, caused great pain, in order to further torture him?

We don't know exactly what the CIA did with this, or any other injection, but the evidence of such forms of medical torture cannot be denied, despite recent attempts by the CIA to minimize allegations of such medical torture, such as the use of drugs in interrogation. In fact, a recent FOIA release from CIA obtained by Jason Leopold at VICE News showed that the CIA used blood thinners to prolong certain forms of torture.

It has not been easy to obtain this information. As Dixon noted in a June 22 op-ed at Al Jazeera, "The CIA has long tried to bury evidence of its crimes. When we filed a legal case challenging Majid's detention after his arrival at Guantanamo, the government prevented us from meeting with him for a year so that we would not learn about his torture."

UN Special Rapporteurs' "Letter of Allegation" to U.S. on Medical Torture and Experimentation

A new article by Adam Goldman at the Washington Post revealed that hundreds of photos from the CIA black sites exist. The fact they may be evidence at any future military commissions trial is currently being determined, as military prosecutors review the photos, which are said to include pictures of naked detainees, CIA personnel, and "photographs of confinement boxes where detainees such as Abu Zubaydah... were forced into for hours."

But it seems highly unlikely the public will see these photos, and we will have to rely on detainee testimony, and other various attempts by journalists, domestic and international bodies and organizations to pry out the information from the U.S. government. Along those lines, CCR has called for the full Senate CIA torture report and the Panetta Review to be released. A letter initiated by ACLU and signed by approximately 100 national and international rights groups on the need to ensure accountability for the U.S. CIA Torture Program was delivered to the most recent session of the UN Human Rights Council.

In another attempt to gain more information and some degree of accountability on CIA torture, last January 15 two UN Special Rapporteurs wrote a letter to U.S. officials. In the wake of the revelations in the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of their report on the CIA's torture program, the rapporteurs, Dainius Puras (Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health) and Juan E. Méndez (Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) asked the U.S. to respond to charges that doctors and other medical personnel were involved in torture and experimentation on detainees held by the CIA.

The letter was made public in relation to a periodic report submitted to the Human Rights Council earlier this year. (See this webpage, and then page 40 at document linked at A/HRC/29/50, "Communications report of Special Procedures.")

The UN officials also expressed "concern at the reported lack of investigation into these allegations."

Puras and Méndez  asked U.S. officials to respond to these charges and "explain how the role of health professionals in the CIA interrogation program is compatible with international human rights standards, including those ratified by the United States of America."

CIA health professionals played a central role in the CIA interrogation programme to an extent not understood or seen before. These health professionals designed, directed and profited from the CIA interrogation program; intentionally inflicted harm on detainees; enabled the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers to treat the interrogation practices as safe, legal and effective; engaged in potential human subjects research to provide legal cover for torture; monitored detainee torture and calibrated levels of pain; evaluated and treated detainees for purposes of torture; conditioned medical care on cooperation with interrogators; and failed to document physical and/or psychological evidence of torture.

The role and conduct of these health professionals, which included psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians assistants, would not only imply a gross violation of medical and professional ethics but also violations of domestic and international law given the seriousness of the crime of torture, which is subject to universal jurisdiction.

Puras and Méndez also asked the U.S. to "provide details, and where available the results, of any investigation, medical examination, judicial or other inquiries carried out in relation to this case. If no inquiries have taken place, or if they have been inconclusive, please explain why."

The Special Rapporteurs gave the U.S. 60 days to reply.

State Department Kicks the Can on UN Charges

Last week I asked the State Department about the UN letter and whether the U.S. had replied. On June 24, a State Department official told me, "Our exchanges with mandate holders, such as the Special Rapporteurs, are private correspondence. We expect the mandate holders to treat these exchanges as such, and we do the same on our part."

The State Department didn't mention -- and likely does not want people to know -- that the communications are actually posted online a year after the initial communications take place. See this example of an October 2013 statement by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture on the situation of detainees held at Guantanamo, and its link at bottom to the actual communication, or "letter of allegation" to the U.S., originally sent to U.S. authorities on November 2012.

Or maybe the State Department doesn't want the public to know that many communications from the U.S. to these "letters of allegation" and "urgent appeals" from UN human rights officials go unanswered. Indeed, in the past 4 years, according to one U.N. document, 95 such communications were sent by UN officials to the United States, but the U.S. only replied to 56 of them. (Hat-tip to Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program, for this stat.)

Perhaps nothing portrays the weakness at present of international human rights mechanisms as the degree to which UN member states ignore these "special procedures" or communications from UN officials on human rights matters. Indeed, this is a large-scale problem. In a 2005 report summarizing statistics on these "letters of allegation" and "urgent letters" from different UN Special Rapporteurs, the overall government response rate from 137 member countries was only 46%. (The U.S. rate described above is 59%. Examples of recent non-responses by the U.S. to urgent appeals and letters of allegation from UN officials can be examined here.)

Feinstein Hiding Information on CIA Medical Experimentation

It's not only State Department officials who are reticent to engage dialogue on torture. The Senate Select Committee has determinedly stated they will not release their full report on CIA torture. As explained below, medical experimentation by the CIA is presumably included in the classified portions. Over 90% of the report remains classified.

I remembered that back in 2010, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that in response to a revelatory report by Physicians for Human Rights on the question of CIA experimentation on detainees she would issue further comment on the matters discussed in the PHR report after the SSCI's report was done.

"The findings of the new report from Physicians for Human Rights will be considered in our review," Feinstein said, "and I will have further comment on this when the report is completed.”

A few days ago, Feinstein's press secretary Tom Mentzer replied to my query about Feinstein's 2010 promise, "The study’s executive summary includes details about CIA medical and psychological personnel involved in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Any additional information included in the full report is classified. The committee did closely examine the Physicians for Human Rights report, and the senator commented on the more recent APA report here."

Mentzer's link is to an April 30, 2015 statement by Sen. Feinstein in relation to allegations of links between the American Psychological Association and the CIA torture program.

Feinstein's statement said she was "troubled" by the allegations. "I understand an independent review has been commissioned by the APA and look forward to reviewing its conclusions," she wrote. "This is a stark reminder that torture can corrode every institution it touches, including medical and psychological professions.”

I wrote back to Mentzer to ask whether Sen. Feinstein was aware of links I've made between Chicago attorney David H. Hoffman leading the supposed "independent review... commissioned by the APA" and CIA figures George Tenet and Kenneth J. Levitt, and Rand Corporation figure Newton Minow. Tenet was CIA director when the "enhanced interrogation" and "extraordinary rendition" programs were initiated.

Mentzer did not respond to my query. (An Illinois psychologist has recently written calling for the resignation of Hoffman for conflict of interest in the APA matter.)

Feinstein's reply to my recent query, to the point that "any additional information in the full report" on CIA experimentation on detainees is "classified," constitutes a cover-up of possible grave war crimes. At the very least, PHR should demand that Feinstein release all materials in the Committee's possession that bear on medical torture and human experimentation by the CIA.

As I told Mentzer in my request to Sen. Feinstein, "the issue of experimentation arises in the Executive Summary in the context of an interchange between OMS personnel and the CIA Inspector General on the feasibility of doing research on the 'effectiveness' of the CIA techniques. The PHR report, however, was concerned with specific data requested and transmitted regarding the operations of the techniques themselves, including measuring oxygen levels in waterboarding victims, and adjusting temperatures in detention settings for maximum discomfort."

It is likely that CIA experimentation went well beyond this, including new ways to measure physiological correlates of supposed deception, as well as physiological markers of being overwhelmed by the various torture techniques applied.

If, as Mentzer/Feinstein now maintain, the SSCI did take up PHR's charges of medical experimentation, the SSCI is not revealing what they found, and has no recommendations about what to do about it.

Sadly, the authors of the 2010 PHR report on CIA experimentation tried to steer public outrage into a complaint made to the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But OHRP referred the complaints back to the CIA, as such is their policy. 

The authors of the PHR report knew this was OHRP policy to begin with, but led their supporters down the dead end of OHRP "protections." In personal correspondence, one of the report authors told me they knew the appeal to OHRP was a "long shot," but that "PHR lawyers went through law journals and found evidence that OHRP could be interpreted as having jurisdiction, though the situation was ambiguous." (Because this was personal correspondence, I am not using the person's name.)

Another example of the kinds of information being kept from the public was revealed recently by Jason Leopold at VICE News, who released a letter from former Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who was himself a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to the CIA complaining about their refusal to show him "four written passages — located in an unknown document that may still be classified — related to the agency's destruction of interrogation videotapes."

Did this information ever surface in the classified SSCI report? We don't know. Just as we don't know what the U.S. will say to UN Special Rapporteurs about charges of medical torture and illegal experimentation, or if they even bother to respond. (Actually, we will know that, but not for another six months or so.)

For now, all we have -- and it is hideous enough -- are the cries from the torture chamber itself, as witnessed and reported by the detainees' attorneys. Will such cries be loud enough to stir real action and change?

Crossposted at Firedoglake

"Confess or be ready to die": UN Report Pummels US Ally Afghanistan on Torture

The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on "Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan" (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and unable to provide security for its citizens, Afghan security forces in the National Security Directorate (NDS) have been charged by UNAMA with "systematically" torturing "detainees for the purpose of obtaining confessions and information" at a number of provincial facilities.

The report alleges that fully 46 percent of prisoners held by security forces, and approximately one-third held by Afghan national police (ANP), are tortured. Furthermore, "[n]early all detainees tortured by NDS officials reported the abuse took place during interrogations and was aimed at obtaining a confession or information." Until last month, the U.S. routinely turned prisoners over to Afghan security forces, while NATO stopped turning over prisoners to a number of different Afghan facilities last July.

Controversies over allied forces releasing prisoners to Afghan security, where they reliably knew they would be tortured, have simmered for years now. As Marcy Wheeler highlighted in an article on the UN report today, according to UNAMA, "The US has not yet put in place a monitoring programme to track detainees it hands over to Afghan authorities."

Turning prisoners over to forces or governments that are known to commit gross human rights violations, such as torture or murder of detainees, is a violation of international law, and of the US-signed Convention Against Torture treaty.

Torture of Children

Ten percent of the prisoners examined were minors. Nearly two-thirds of the children held by the NDS and ANP (62 percent) were tortured.

UNAMA's report was statistically derived from a random sampling. Issues of possible falsification of torture evidence is addressed in the report, and the evidence was found to be credible. (Actually, the Executive Summary says the allegations have not been judged on their credibility. But the Methodology section of the report states, "In a number of cases, UNAMA interviewers observed injuries, marks and scars that appeared to be consistent with torture and ill‐treatment or bandages and medical treatment for such injuries as well as instruments of torture described by detainees such as rubber hoses." The report adds that "UNAMA rigorously analysed patterns of allegations in the aggregate and at specific facilities which permitted conclusions to be drawn about abusive practices at specific facilities and suggested fabricated accounts were uncommon..."

UNAMA statisticians calculated the margin of error for the different samples they used ranged from approximately 5 to 9 percent.

Torture for Confessions

A major conclusion from the report is that much of the torture was specifically aimed at obtaining confessions from prisoners during torture. UNAMA notes, "Confessions are rarely examined at trial and rarely challenged by the judge or defence counsel as having been coerced." Hence, there's very little to constrict government prosecutors in using torture to get their confessions, and confessions are "[i]n most cases... the sole form of evidence or corroboration submitted to courts to support prosecutions." There are few procedural safeguards for defendant prisoners, and what few there are are routinely ignored.

The following is testimony from one prisoner cited specifically in the report, Detainee 371 at Kandahar, interviewed last May:

After two days [in a National Directorate of Security (NDS) facility in Kandahar] they transferred me to NDS headquarters [in Kandahar]. I spent one night on their veranda. On the following day, an official called me to their interrogation room. He asked if I knew the name of his office. I said it was “Khad” [Dari term for the former NDS]. “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here,” he said. He kept insisting that I confess for the first two days. I did not confess. After two days he tied my hands on my back and start beating me with an electric wire. He also used his hands to beat me. He used his hands to beat me on my back and used electric wire to beat me on my legs and hands. I did not confess even though he was beating me very hard. During the night on the same day, another official came and interrogated me. He said “Confess or be ready to die. I will kill you.” I asked him to bring evidence against me instead of threatening to kill me. He again brought the electric wire and beat me hard on my hands. The interrogation and beating lasted for three to four hours in the night. The NDS officials abused me two more times. They asked me if I knew any Taliban commander in Kandahar. I said I did not know. During the last interrogation, they forced me to sign a paper. I did not know what they had written. They did not allow me to read it.

According to the report, forms of torture included "routine blindfolding and hooding [i.e., sensory deprivation] and denial of access to medical care," in addition to "suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains or other devices attached to the wall, ceiling, iron bars or other fixtures for lengthy periods) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks and most frequently on the soles of the feet. Electric shock, twisting and wrenching of detainees’ genitals, stress positions including forced standing, removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse..."

Alibiing the Afghan Government

Strangely, after describing the "systematic" use of torture by Afghan security and police forces, UNAMA declares the Afghan government innocent of use of torture as government policy. The report cites the fact that the NDS cooperated with the investigation, concluding "the use of torture is not a de facto institutional policy directed or ordered by the highest levels of NDS leadership or the Government. This together with the fact that NDS cooperated with UNAMA’s detention observation programme suggests that reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS."

This is a surprising assertion, and of course, the international press has highlighted this supposed reassurance about the Afghan government in its coverage of the report's conclusions. The cooperation of the NDS appears to have been equivocal at best. For one thing, as the report concedes, the NDS refused to allow UNAMA to visit its national counter-terrorism facility in Kabul, or interview prisoners there. Known as Department 90, it is where "high-value" prisoners are held. Information on Department 90 prisoners was gathered from those held elsewhere who previously had been held at the NDS Kabul facility.

Twenty-six of 28 prisoners who were determined to have been held at Department 90 were tortured, leading to a near 100 percent probability of being tortured there. One prisoner told UNAMA investigators, "When they took me to [Department] 90, I did not know where I had been taken. . . After two days, I learned that I was in 90 from my cellmates. There is so much beating at 90 that people call it Hell." Five of the six children interviewed who had been held at Department 90 were tortured.

The Afghan government has long promised they would clean up their act regarding abuse of prisoners, and US agencies have covered up for them in the past. A 2006 RAND study, prepared for George Soros's Open Society Institute, that torture and extrajudicial killings were in decline by Afghan authorities, and that US assistance had "somewhat improved" human rights practices by Afghan police. (RAND has a very stringent warning about quoting its material, or even providing links, but here's the link the New York Times gave in its article on the UNAMA report.)

One can only conclude that the US government has been more than supportive of the torture policies within Afghanistan, only withdrawing funds when it was politically expedient to do so. Most of the stories on the UNAMA report have noted UNAMA's mention of the so-called "Leahy law." According to UNAMA, "legal provisions in the US Foreign Appropriations Act and Defence Appropriations Act prohibit the US from providing funding, weapons or training to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross human rights violations, unless the Secretary of State determines the concerned government is taking effective remedial measures" (emphasis added).

None of the press results and analysis thus far has noted this escape from accountability clause, wherein the Secretary of State can decide a foreign government -- say, Afghanistan -- which has committed "gross human rights violations," is sincerely doing the best it can to address the issue. Indeed, parts of the UNAMA report appear to be written to allow just such an interpretation by the Obama/Clinton-led State Department.

So while the Americans and their allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have as of last month, "in response to the findings in this report, "stopped transferring detainees to certain installations as a precautionary measure," the report also notes that a return to the previous transfer policy "would presumably require the US to resume transfer of detainees only when the Government of Afghanistan implements appropriate remedial measures that include bringing to justice NDS and ANP officials responsible for torture and ill‐treatment."

But this doesn't speak to the funding or arming of the Afghan security and police forces. Indeed, by indicating that portions of the government, including the NDS, are sympathetic and trying to change the abuse/torture situation, it would appear that ammunition is being provided to Secretary Clinton to conclude that a good faith effort is being made, and bypass the provisions of the Leahy Law. This would seem to be the point in concluding the torture is not "institutional," and that "reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS."

But anyone reading this report could hardly come to this politically convenient conclusion. In fact, senior NDS officials admitted "they have investigated only two claims of torture in recent years, neither of which led to charges being pursued against the accused NDS official." Nor would NDS officials "provide UNAMA with any information on any other disciplinary or criminal action against NDS officials for torture and abuse." This doesn't sound like desired elements for reform to me.

Ten years after US and foreign forces invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime, all the while jockeying for alliances among various warlord forces, has not improved the human rights situation in Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban and the various warlords cannot be counted upon to provide such improvement either. But there is one big difference. The Taliban are not foreign invaders. While such foreign invaders occupy the country, killing civilians and giving political and military support to a torture regime, no progress from within Afghanistan can take place.

Originally posted at FDL's The Dissenter

US Response Muted on Acquittal of UAE Royal Shown Torturing on Tape

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The typically restrained Obama State Department couldn't raise itself to strenuously protest the most outrageous miscarriage of justice in quite a while. United Arab Emirates royal family member, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's Crown Prince, was caught on tape brutally torturing and attempting to murder a man he thought had cheated him on a business deal. The tape surfaced last year, but the crime occurred in 2004.



According to an ABC report last year:

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails....

Nabulsi says the video tapes were recorded by his brother, on orders from the Sheikh who liked to watch the torture sessions later in his royal palace.

The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man's mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim.

Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly.

Now, a UAE court has acquitted Sheikh Issa for the torture of Mohammed Shah Poor, which ended when the brother of UAE's President and Abu Dhabi emir, Sheikh Khalifa, drove his SUV over and over the prostate body of Mr. Shah Poor, who subsequently spent many months in the hospital. Most people who have watched the savage attack were amazed Shah Poor survived at all.

"The court acquitted Sheikh Issa after establishing he was not responsible," for the torture, lawyer Habib al-Mulla said on Sunday.

"The court accepted our defence that the Sheikh was under the influence of drugs [medicine] that left him unaware of his actions," al-Mulla said.

If anyone were ever under the influence of drugs, it's the UAE emirate court. The acquittal has been condemned by human rights groups. The co-chairman of the House Human Rights Commission, Rep. James McGovern (D-MA),  said the verdict "would be a joke if the crime wasn't so terrible." Meanwhile, the men who filmed the torture and smuggled it out of the country were sentenced in absentia to several years in prison. One of the men, Bassam Nabulsi, of Houston, Texas, and "a former business associate of Sheikh Issa," is suing his former partner in a Houston court, alleging he was tortured by UAE police when he wouldn't turn the video over to them.

As for the United States, State Department spokeperson P.J. Crowley couldn't have been more, uh, measured, that is, cold-blooded in his response, assuring the world that the U.S. would "monitor" the situation:

We would welcome a careful review of the judge's decision and an assessment of all available legal options to ensure that the demands of justice are fully met in this case, and we will continue to closely monitor it.

UAE: "America's Largest Military Customer"

As an article at The Majlis points out, the United Arab Emirates is "a strategic ally in the region, America's largest military customer." There's also an important nuclear energy agreement, begun under the Bush Administration, that has been in the works between the UAE and the U.S. Who would want to spoil such an important alliance just because the Royal Family likes to indulge in some barbaric behavior, like rape, mayhem, and torture, once in awhile?

Just as it did in Kosovo, Somalia, and Lebanon, the UAE have sent "peacekeepers" to Afghanistan to aid the U.S.-led coalition there.  According to a report this January in The National,  last year "the UAE became the largest foreign purchaser of US defence equipment with sales of $7.9bn, ahead of Afghanistan ($5.4bn), Saudi Arabia ($3.3bn) and Taiwan ($3.2bn)." Further, President Obama and the U.S. Congress recently approved a nuclear energy deal between GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and the UAE government worth $40 billion, despite, according to World Nuclear News, "recent reports of alleged human rights abuses" (italics added).

There was also the irony that the same day Sheikh Issa got off on the torture rap, the UAE Ministry of Defense and the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis opened its Middle East Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (MEISR) conference  in Abu Dhabi. The Director of Operations and Training from the UAE Ministry of Defense took the opportunity to prattle on about the "non-linear" nature of the battlefield and how  "the enemy can be anywhere across the national borders of any country." Of course, that will necessitate buying a lot of state-of-the-art technology.

The conference was a star-studded affair, if you drool over the national security set. The Commander of U.S. Air Force Central Command was there.  So was Rear Admiral Jean Goursaud, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the French Defense Ministry. Even the head of Italian Military Intelligence got to tout the Italians' unique contributions to the Intellience/Surveillance/Reconnaissance world. Meanwhile, "John Brooks, President, Northrop Grumman International chaired the first session."

The U.S. military and industrial alliances can't be made to bother themselves with Sheikh Issa's self-made how-to tape on torture and mayhem, nor the fact that their erstwhile allies can get away with horrific crimes. Should justice stand in the way of the billions of dollars in profits to be made? I only ask one thing: Watch the tapes, and consider how far down you, as a citizen of the United States, really wish this country to fall.

The ABC report and video of the torture can be found here. It's very brutal, so beware. Al Jazeera has also posted a video selection from the 45 minute torture tape.

Leaving this country in the hands of the people running it is turning out to be a very awful thing, not just for the people of the world, but for the people of this country. How many "terrorists" will crimes and injustices such as those documented in the tapes and in the stories on Issa's acquittal create? How many Americans now will die because the U.S. government wanted to play footsie and fill its war chest with the likes of the UAE Royal Family? How many others have been and will be tortured in the UAE, or by other U.S. allied governments, like Egypt, or Afghanistan itself?

We need change we can truly believe in. When it comes to this government's tolerance of torture by its allies, little has changed from the days of Bush and Cheney. As an aside, for those of us wondering what might have happened if we could get our hands on the videotapes of the CIA torture interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and others, apparently destroyed by CIA officials, this story makes me wonder if having those tapes would really make a difference. That's how powerful the forces that push torture have become.

The Foreign Press, Salon.com, & the Army Field Manual

On September 7, 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons showed up at a State Department foreign press briefing on the then-new DoD Directive 2310.10E (on its detainee program) and the also then brand-new Army Field Manual on interrogations. Only the day before, Kimmons and Stimson had held a news briefing for U.S. reporters at the Department of Defense on the same subjects, which I covered in a recent article at AlterNet.

While few bloggers paid attention to the September 6 DoD briefing (except one noted reporter, as I'll note later), most likely that was because President Bush had one of his infrequent news conferences the same day, and this one was a blockbuster. Bush acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA prison network. He also announced he was ordering the transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other "high-value detainees" to Guantánamo Bay to be put on trial.

As the Guardian UK described it:

Mr Bush's disclosure was intended to put pressure on the US Congress to support draft legislation put forward by the White House yesterday for a system of military tribunals for the Guantánamo detainees.

The US supreme court struck down the military tribunals established by the administration for the 450 inmates at Guantánamo last June, ruling that they had no basis in US law and violated the Geneva Convention [Hamdan v. Rumsfeld].

The pressure of the Bush administration to get a military commissions process in place, to replace the one thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, resulted later that year in Congressional passage of the Military Commissions Act. As described by the ACLU, this infamous legislation, passed with the support of the vast majority of the GOP and certain key Democrats, eliminated "the constitutional due process right of habeas corpus for detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere." It also:

...[gave] any president the power to declare — on his or her own — who is an enemy combatant, decide who should be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime and define what is — and what is not — torture and abuse.

With so much going on at Bush's news conference, who would notice the goings on at DoD, with the decidedly less glamorous Kimmons and Stimson? But one reporter did notice the confluence of events that day. In an article for Salon.com, journalist Mark Benjamin, who had been covering the torture beat for awhile, noted the "mixed messages on torture" emanating from the White House and DoD. While Bush was defending "tough interrogation tactics" and "black site" secret prisons, the DoD spokesmen were lauding the new Army Field Manual as "designed to fit squarely within the protections of the Geneva Conventions." Benjamin quoted Kimmons approvingly, describing the AFM as "humane" and in accord with the views of "conventional senior generals."

Benjamin failed to notice, or report, that the bulk of the Q&A session with reporters at that news conference concentrated on serious questions about whether the Army Field Manual allowed abuse itself, particularly in its Appendix M, which describes an omnibus "technique" called "Separation." Appendix M allows the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and various forms of sensory deprivation on prisoners, mostly to be used with other AFM "approaches," like "Fear Up," "Ego Down," and "Futility."


The reporters grilled Kimmons and Stimson on the AFM and its use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. But you wouldn't know that from Benjamin, the alternative and progressive reporter, whose coverage of the event was as obtuse as that of the mainstream press. (See here or here for the full story of that news conference.)

The Foreign Press Have Their Say

The same day Salon.com was publishing Benjamin's article, and the mainstream press was assessing Bush's news conference, Stimson and Kimmons traipsed over to the State Department to give their briefing to the foreign press on 2310.10E and the Army Field Manual. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway, Legal Adviser to the Appointing Authority, Office of Military Commissions, and Sandra Hodgkinson, State Department Deputy Director, Office of War Crimes Issues.

During the State Dept. news conference, Reymer Luever, from the German newspaper Suddeutche Zeitung, tried to nail down Lt. Gen. Kimmons on the use of the "Separation" technique and the applicability of Geneva Common Article Three. As we will see, skepticism from the press was met with double-talk, and a misrepresentation of the situation of "unlawful enemy combatants" and Geneva protections (bold emphasis added):

QUESTION: Thank you very much General Kimmons. You mentioned the 19 interrogation techniques and the 19 interrogation technique [S]eparation. You mentioned that this isn't covered by -- or is an exception from the Geneva Convention. Are there other exceptions from the Convention, the new manual?

LTG KIMMONS: Well, I take issue with you that it's an exception from the Convention. It's the wording in the Geneva -- the third Geneva Convention that causes us to place separation as a restricted technique and not to employ against prisoners of war or lawful combatants. It is the wording and the requirements of Geneva and the definition within Geneva of what is a lawful enemy combatant, what is a prisoner of war. And clearly al-Qaida and the Taliban and the people we are dealing with now in large portions, you know, of the battlefield do not fit the standard established in Geneva for prison of war or other types of lawful enemy combatants. And therefore, according to Geneva, those type of enemy combatants are not -- are just like spies and saboteurs in the older days. And traditionally are not entitled to the same protections under Geneva.

"Like spies and saboteurs"? Where did Kimmons come up with that? The reference is to the Fourth Geneva Convention on "Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War." Of course, no one from DoD wants to refer to this GC, because they would have to admit that such prisoners had rights even beyond those in Common Article 3, which protect against violence, "cruel treatment and torture." For instance, there's Article 31:

No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions does not explicitly forbid coercion. Kimmons is correct that the POW Geneva convention has a higher standard, forbidding all forms of coercion upon a POW. Unfortunately, the GCs don't define what they mean by "coercion." But the CIA's 1963 Kubark interrogation manual does.

Jennifer Elsen, in an an essay on the "Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques Under the Geneva Conventions," in The Treatment of Prisoners (ed. R.D. McPhee, 2006, Nova Science Publishers), pointed out that the CIA distinguished between coercive and non-coercive interrogations. Coercive interrogations were those "designed to induce regression," producing a loss of general cognitive capacities, including the ability to deal with complex situations, or the ability to "cope with repeated frustrations." The tools of the coercive interrogator include the induction of fatigue, pain, sleep loss, anxiety, fear, and the "deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods."

According to the Civilian convention, for which any prisoner, "including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause," which definition being part of Common Article 3 the U.S. government accepts for those captured in their "war on terror," spies and saboteurs have "forfeited rights of communication." Does this mean one can lock them up and throw away the key? The Civilian convention goes on:

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity, and in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

"Full rights and privileges of a protected person"... that doesn't sound like one could be subject to coercive interrogation, does it?

Let's go back to the briefing, and pick up just where we left off. Kimmons, asked if there exceptions to Geneva in the AFM, had noted that unlawful enemy combatants were "not entitled to the same protections under Geneva" as prisoners of war. But in his very next sentence, Kimmons continued, in an entirely different, and confusing vein:

As a matter of law here in the United States, we are going to provide the same single standard for humane treatment to all categories of detainees, both lawful and unlawful combatants.

That same legal requirement does not require us to afford additional privileges above and beyond that standard to unlawful combatants. And that's why separation is placed -- separated to it.

I'm sorry, could you repeat the second part of your question.

QUESTION: My question was are there other -- what I have called exceptions from the Convention in the field manual?

LTG KIMMONS: No. In accordance, as a matter of law, only those interrogation approach techniques that are listed in -- authorized by the Army Field Manual, this field manual, can be employed on any class of category of detainee across the Department of Defense.

The last statement makes no sense when compared with Kimmons remarks during his opening statement, remarks to which Mr. Luever alluded in his question above. For in that statement, Lt. Gen. Kimmons stated (bold emphasis added):

Separation meets the standard for humane treatment, but the Geneva Conventions, specifically the third Geneva Convention, affords prisoners of war, lawful enemy combatants, additional protections above and beyond the single humane standard to which they're entitled. It entitles them to pay, entitles them to send and receive mail and packages, and it also protects them from separation from other prisoners of war with whom they were captured without their expressed consent.

Unlawful combatants are not entitled to those additional protections and privileges above the humane standard. So Geneva -- the common third -- Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all categories of detainees' [there may be missing text in the transcript here] [S]eparation, however, is only authorized for use on a by-exception basis with unlawful enemy combatants.

Threading the eye of the needle, DoD means to say one thing one moment and another thing the next. What's clear is that they believe Separation is not a group of techniques that can be used on regular POWs, only "unlawful enemy combatants." But the privileges enumerated by the third Geneva Convention -- Kimmons lists pay, getting mail and packages -- does not include in its text, as Kimmons maintains, the right not to experience "separation," i.e., solitary confinement, sleep and perceptual deprivation, etc.

This can all get quite confusing, but seems to boil down to this. The Pentagon, and perhaps their CIA mentors, want to slice and dice the Geneva Conventions at their will, in order to allow the core program of coercive interrogation as laid down by the CIA's Kubark manual, using the Army Field Manual and Appendix M as their primary device. Because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, they want to hide or forbid all types of treatment that became notorious due to press exposure, and that includes the revelations around waterboarding. But the induction of regression, of a paradigm the CIA referred to as DDD (Dependency, Debility, Dread), is still at the core of the coercive techniques they intend to rescue for their use.

And because of the ignorance or indifference, or in some cases, collusion, of the press and politicians, it appears that they will get their way.

Tale of a Broken Link

I had wanted to go back and review the entire foreign press briefing again, but, as described below, the webpages for it were gone. I tried to use the handy Wayback Machine, but it apparently was never logged or entered there. [UPDATE: Edger at Docudharma has successfully negotiated the Wayback Machine when I apparently couldn't. The URL for the State Department briefing is here, via a cache of the page. The State Department webpages themselves are still gone, and I've left the old links in for documentary purposes. So please read the following keeping that in mind. Big H/T to Edger!]

[Update, 1/13/2014: The following paragraphs were written to describe my difficulties finding the press conference transcript. However, I have since found a copy of that in archives section of the State Department's website. I am leaving the following paragraphs as written because historically it is what was written, but the link to the transcript has been fixed in the story above. For reference, again, here is the link.]

As this story "goes to press," I discovered that the link to the transcript of the State Department/Kimmons/Stimson briefing for the foreign press, hosted at State Department servers, is now defunct. A search of the site brings up old links to the appropriate html file, but the file itself is gone. The file I used was titled thus (found only now through a Google cache, where it was listed along with other foreign press briefings):

--09/07/06 Department of Defense Directive on Detainee Operations, the Release of the Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collection and an Update on Military Commissions; Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs; Foreign Press Center Briefing; Washington, DC -- Official Transcript

I should note this does not appear to be a global deletion of State Department files by date, as a different State Department document, that is, yet another briefing to the foreign press earlier on the same date (9/7/06) as the Kimmons/Stimson briefing, this time with State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger, is available on State Department servers under the title "Press briefing on detainee issues and military commission legislation."

The difference between these two briefings? While the foreign press asked good hard questions during the Bellinger briefing, none concerned specifics about the Army Field Manual -- no embarrassing questions about "separation" or sensory deprivation.

Yet, I cannot conclude there is any grand conspiracy regarding any missing webpages, since, upon looking, there appear to be plenty of other missing or scrubbed files from the Bush years, through 2008. Is this routine house-cleaning, or something else? I honestly don't know. I only know that the transcript to the briefing was there a few months back, and I apologize to readers for quoting and reporting upon an event that one cannot now fact-check for accuracy.

Another Perspective: Torture by Other Countries

Sometimes I wonder, as this is a blog dedicated to exposing and reforming the use of torture by the U.S. government, whether readers of this blog realize to what a great extent torture is practiced by countries other than the United States. The fact is that torture is practiced by many other countries. A websearch turns up the following from InformationPlease.com:

According to Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org), the use of torture was documented in the following countries in 2004 and 2005: China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

Amnesty International's Annual Report for 2008 lists many other countries where torture and other human rights violations occur on a not irregular basis. These include, among others, Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, Belarus, and Afghanistan (where "violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed with impunity by all parties, including Afghan and international security forces and insurgent groups," and where U.S. coalition forces continue to turn over prisoners to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, "despite allegations of torture and other ill-treatment by the NDS".)

One country worth examining in a bit more depth is Egypt, as it exemplifies the effects of an out of control use of torture upon the civil life of a society. A Human Rights Watch article in February 2005 reported:

Human Rights Watch interviewed several former detainees who provided credible accounts of torture they underwent at the hands of SSI [State Security Investigation service] interrogators. Others spoke of seeing fellow detainees who had been badly tortured, and hearing the screams of those being abused. Given that those most likely to have been tortured are among the hundreds if not thousands of persons still in detention, and that many of those released fear the possible consequences of meeting with independent human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch believes that torture and ill-treatment by the SSI has been widespread in connection with the investigations into the Taba attacks. [The Taba attacks concerned a terrible series of bombings of tourist areas, including the Taba Hilton hotel in near the Egyptian-Israeli border in October 2004.]

A HRW "briefing paper" a year earlier described the terrible cost torture had wrought upon Egyptian society:

Torture in Egypt is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. Security forces and the police routinely torture or ill-treat detainees, particularly during interrogation. In most cases, officials torture detainees to obtain information and coerce confessions, occasionally leading to death in custody. In some cases, officials use torture detainees to punish, intimidate, or humiliate. Police also detain and torture family members to obtain information or confessions from a relative, or to force a wanted relative to surrender.

While torture in Egypt has typically been used against political dissidents, in recent years it has become epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who find themselves in police custody as suspects or in connection with criminal investigations. The Egyptian authorities do not investigate the great majority of allegations of torture despite their obligation to do so under Egyptian and international law. In the few cases where officers have been prosecuted for torture or ill-treatment, charges were often inappropriately lenient and penalties inadequate. This lack of effective public accountability and transparency has led to a culture of impunity.

The other countries that practice torture are not always outside Western Europe. Great Britain scandalously tortured IRA prisoners at Long Kesh internment camp in the 1960s-1970s, utilizing techniques such as hooding, sensory deprivation, and isolation that are remarkably similar to those practiced by the United States, as revealed in recent exposes the past five years or so. In the early 1960s, the French were charged with hideous use of torture against Algerian "insurgents".

The U.S. State Department produces Reports on Human Rights of many countries around the world -- I often utilize these reports when doing research on U.S. asylum applicants for my work -- and despite some shortcomings, the State Department reports often document human rights violations, including torture, in many countries around the world. Furthermore, they document the tremendous legal and reporting difficulties experienced by workers of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] in those countries when they seek to expose or remedy these wrongs, including harassment, jailing, even disappearances of such workers.

It's important to note that despite its faults and its struggles the United States remains a country where, even if it is difficult to penetrate the mass media on this subject, journalists, bloggers, NGO organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, etc. do not experience this kind of heavy-handed governmental oppression, at least not as a normal occurrence. And then, too, despite the paucity of coverage in the U.S. press, as readers of this blog know, some important coverage does occur here, coverage that is essential in providing much of what we know about the fight against torture. Furthermore, it seems that within the military and even the intelligence agencies, there are those individuals who do not go along with the misuse of interrogation practices at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Alberto Mora is one such individual who comes to mind. Retired Major General Antonio Taguba is another.

Hence, it was an international embarrassment when some months back an internal training manual developed by the Canadian foreign affairs department labeled the United States as a country where foreigners risked torture, relying on reports of maltreatment in the U.S. prison at Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib, and "black site" prisons. The U.S. protested, and the Canadian government made moves to remove the U.S. from such a list.

The United States is also a major destination for torture victims seeking asylum from around the world. I know. I've worked personally with a fair number of these victims. While the U.S. has tightened the procedures for gaining asylum in the U.S., making them too restrictive, many thousands still find refuge in this country, sometimes from the very countries that remain U.S. allies, some of which have also been harshly criticized by the same State Department reports noted above. Making matters even stranger, many asylum refugees are torture victims fleeing the same countries to which the U.S. sent foreign prisoners in the "war on terror" via "extraordinary rendition", where they then experienced torture (such as Maher Ahar). The entire situation is so irrational, it almost seems invented by a madman trying to confuse any reasonable person into a state of insensibility.

The fight against torture is a world-wide struggle. One major outcome of that political fight was solidified with the production of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory. (The U.S. ratified the CAT with a number of reservations that unfortunately complicate the enforcement of the CAT when it concerns U.S. possible violations.)

As a statement on Worldwide Torture by Human Rights Watch puts it:

This is a critical time to insist on revelation of the full extent of torture and related abuses by U.S. authorities and to press for prosecution of those responsible. It is also a critical time to press other governments, many of which have been quick to condemn the U.S. for its actions at Abu Ghraib, to investigate and prosecute torture and mistreatment in their own holding cells, detention facilities, and prisons.