Liberal "Hero" Jon Stewart Cozies Up to War Criminal Myers

As even a commenter at The Daily Show's website put it, Jon Stewart's interview tonight with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush, General Richard Myers, was "one of the most fawning, sycophantic interviews I have ever seen Jon Stewart do."

There is no transcript or link to the interview yet. It's too fresh. From my memory, the interview began with Stewart lauding the sacrifice of U.S. troops, and it also ended the same way. A few days after electrifying much of the blogosphere with a critical interview with MSNBC CNBC financial host Jim Cramer, Stewart showed how he can cower when faced with someone with real power, and not a small-time media crony like Cramer.

General Myers was promoted to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs only two weeks before 9/11, after having served as vice chair under President Clinton. As a loyal military man under the evil Bush/Cheney regime, he helped organize the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq that produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and a million or more refugees, all under the guise of a bogus search for supposed weapons of mass destruction.

But that's not all. As Mark Benjamin reported in Salon.com last summer, General Myers was singled out by witnesses for Senator Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee investigation of how torture occurred under Department of Defense sponsorship. Prior to this investigation, faced with Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals, Myers pleaded being out of touch, claiming he had failed to read the military report on the investigation into Abu Ghraib. Later, Myers hoodwinked author Phillipe Sands, who in his book Torture Team, told Myers' tale how he had been hoodwinked by a cabal within the Bush administration, who fooled him into thinking the torture by DoD was actually the application of techniques allowed by the Army Field Manual, and therefore consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. (See this April 2008 article in the UK Guardian.)

But Myers' narrative broke down under the documentary evidence unearthed by the SASC and the testimony of key witnesses at a 2008 hearing of Levin's Armed Services committee. The "plans" under consideration in the quoted selection below concerns a set of "Counter-Resistance Strategy techniques", which were initially discussed at a meeting of military psychologists, high-level Guantanamo officials, and representatives of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in October 2002, the minutes for which I reproduced at this site some weeks ago. The "techniques" included clear abusive and torture techniques, including hooding, nudity, light/auditory deprivation, "wet towel treatments" (waterboarding), isolation, stress positions, 20 hour interrogations, and other horrifying ways to break down an individual.

From Mark Benjamin's fascinating account at Salon.com (emphases added):

According to written correspondence that came to light during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, various military leaders balked at the plans in a series of memos produced during the first week of November 2002. In addition to the criticisms raised by the Army, the Air Force leadership cited "serious concerns regarding the legality" of the list of proposed techniques. The Navy also called for further legal review, and the Marine Corps stated that the techniques "arguably violate federal law."

Because of these concerns, Myers' legal counsel, Rear Adm. Jane Dalton, began a fresh evaluation of the legality of the interrogation tactics. "My recollection is that all four of the [military services] suggested that there needed to be further legal and policy review," Dalton testified. The legal review, she told the committee, would have included further input from the military services and provided for a full airing of their concerns.

But such an analysis threatened to undermine Rumsfeld's agenda -- and that's when Myers stepped in. Dalton testified that Myers ordered her to stop that review because of a request from Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. Haynes was spearheading Rumsfeld's efforts to set up a harsh-interrogation program at the Pentagon. "The best of my recollection as to how this occurred is that the chairman called me aside and indicated to me that Mr. Haynes did not want this broad-based review to take place," Dalton testified. "When I learned that Mr. Haynes did not want that broad-based legal and policy review to take place, then I stood down from the plans."

Dalton said Myers was aware that the military services believed the interrogation techniques might be against the law. "It is my recollection that he was aware of these concerns and that I made him aware of those concerns," she said.

This is war crimes material, and along with Myer's command of the atrocity that was the invasion of Iraq, he shall have to stand in the dock of justice someday, if there is to be accountability for these crimes. Benjamin noted this in his article:

"He is rarely referenced as one of the usual suspects," noted Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School who is following the continuing Senate investigation. "He did play a much more central role" than previously known, Turley said. "The minute the military lawyers expressed concern, they were shut down."

And what did these concerns look like?

On October 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander at Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) sent a memo to a colleague. He was uneasy about what he had read in the Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting Minutes. He told his colleague the comments of Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver and others at the meeting "looks like the kinds of stuff Congressional hearings are made of." The techniques "seem to stretch beyond the bounds of legal propriety."

Quotes from LTC Beaver regarding things that are not being reported give the appearance of impropriety.... Talk of "wet towel treatments" which results in the lymphatic gland reacting as if you are suffocating, would in my opinion; shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.

To return for a moment from the serious to the somewhat mundane, maybe Jon Stewart, who wants to portray himself as some kind of conscience for America, will want to think about history will look back at his shameless performance of fawning obsequiance before a genuine war criminal.

Perhaps Stewart didn't know this history. If not, he should have. That's what he has a staff for. Instead, he promoted Myers book, asking shyly at one point if anyone had spoken up in any administration meetings pre-war with Iraq and said it was "a bad idea." Myers' assertion that the war in Iraq was turning out positive passed without comment by the supposedly assertive and combative, if respectful, Stewart.

I never liked listening to the accolades given Jon Stewart, whose comedy I enjoy, over the Cramer episode, because I had seen him too often cave in before the most reactionary figures. And sure enough, he couldn't wait but a few days before proving me right.

Shame on you, Jon Stewart. And shame on America, which allows war criminals to go on fancy book tours while the people whose lives they destroyed remain in exile, crippled, or for those whose torture Myers cavalierly overlooked, in dark prison cells awaiting some kind of justice.

9/11 Commission Relied on Tortured Confessions

Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, the moniker for one of Daily Kos's most intrepid diarists, has written an article covering the revelations in Newsweek that much of the information in the report of the 9/11 commission was gathered from prisoners who were tortured. NBC news reported:

According to both current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials, the operatives cited by the Commission were subjected to the harshest of the CIA’s methods, the "enhanced interrogation techniques." The techniques included physical and mental abuse, exposure to extreme heat and cold, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

Even more startling, the 9/11 Commission's request for more information may have led to even more torture. Per PDNC's diary:

The 9/11 panel also did not publicly protest the interrogation methods even though there were public reports at the time that the prisoners were being tortured or subjected to "enhanced interrogation." Moreover, despite their suspicions and public news reports, the position of the commission staffers interviewed by NBC News was that interrogation techniques were "not in our mandate."

Finally, the commission "demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions." Newsweek reports that it is a "distinct possibility" that prisoners were subjected to torture in order to answer the questions posed by the 9/11 Commission. Commission members wanted to have direct access to the prisoners to ask questions, but the Whitehouse refused, so questions were passed onto the CIA.

What did the commission members make of all this at the time, these paragons of political virtue, who included Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Tim Roemer, Bob Kerrey and others, and as executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, an old colleague of Condoleezza Rice, and also an NSC member and director of the Aspen Strategy Group? According to the NBC "deep background" article:

9/11 Commission staffers say they "guessed" but did not know for certain that harsh techniques had been used, and they were concerned that the techniques had affected the operatives’ credibility. At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being "tortured."

Major Questions on 9/11

As PDNC points out, Newsweek can't help put notice that the "troubling implications for the credibility of the commission’s final report". No kidding.

The very term, "9/11", can still rouse a great deal of emotion and fear. The idea that much of what we thought we knew about 9/11 is based on torture "evidence"/testimony is about as horrifying as anything I can think of.

Truly the use of torture has spread like a poison and infected everything this country does or claims to stand for. It has invaded the very notion of truth and sullied it beyond recognition.

Moreover, this kind of news will give new credence to those who have seen 9/11 as some kind of government conspiracy. While I am no such conspiracist on this issue, there are certainly strange doings around the 9/11 events.

One such unanswered aspect of the affair appeared in respected journalist James Bamford's recent book on the NSA post-9/11, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

In the first chapter of the book, Bamford reports how Tom Wilshire, a high-level CIA deputy chief at Counter-Terrorism Center, spiked a report on the travel of a known associate of a terror center in Yemen to New York City. From Bamford's book (pp. 19-21 -- emphases added):

Doug Miller, one of three FBI employees at Alec Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed. A possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by bin Laden's ops center, was on his way to a secret al-Qaeda meeting [in Kuala Lampur] and would soon be heading for America's largest city. At 9:20 a.m. [roughly Dec. 1999], started pecking out a message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters, who could then put [Khalid al] Mihdhar on a watch list to bar him from entry.

But inexplicably, the message -- known as a Central Intelligence Report (CIR) -- was spiked by his CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station. At about 4:00 p.m., one of the CIA analysts assigned to the station, a twenty-nine year old woman, typed a note onto it: "pls hold off on CIR for now per Tom Wilshire." Without Wilshire's approval, Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally. He had done everything by the book....

Miller then told his FBI colleague Mark Rossini what happened. Rossini had spent many years working on terrorism cases in the bureau, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, and had been assigned to Alec Station for several years. he was both perplexed and outraged that the CIA would forbid the bureau's notification on a matter so important. "Doug came to me and said, 'What the fuck?'" said Rossini, who took the matter up with Wilshire's deputy.... "So the next day I went to her and said, 'What's with Doug's cable. You've got to tell the bureau about this.' She put her hand on her hip and said, 'Look, the next attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia -- it's not the FBI's jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to know about it, we'll let them know. But the next bin Laden attack's going to happen in Southeast Asia.'" It made no sense to Rossini. The potential terrorists were coming to the U.S. -- not to Southeast Asia. Neither Rossini nor Miller was questioned by the 9/11 Commission.

"They refused to tell us because they didn't want the FBI... muddying up their operation," said one of the FBI agents assigned to the station....

Having forbidden Miller and Rossini from notifying their headquarters about Mihdhar's planned travel to the U.S., the CIA then proceed to lose Mihdhar and Hamzmi when they took off for a brief visit to Bangkok, en route to the U.S....

On January 14, the chief of Alec Station told senior officals that the search for Khalid al-Mihdhar and the others was still going strong. In fact, it had been over for days. The next day, the FBI agent Doug Miller sent an e-mail to Tom Wilshire asking what happened to his CIR to FBI headquarters warning of Mihdhar's plans to travel to the U.S. "Is this a no-go or should I remake it in some way?" he asked. He never received a response.

At almost the same moment, Mihdhar and Hazmi's plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport.

Mihdhar and Hazmi died along with everybody else after they helped hijack American Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Will someone please stop asking for torture information and goddamn ask Tom Wilshire what the hell he was doing suppressing the CIR on Mihdhar. Someone also might want to investigate the coincidental loss of the tail of the two suspected terrorists after they left Kuala Lumpur.

I'm sure this doesn't represent the sum total of unanswered questions about 9/11. The diarist's own article raises a new one: who ordered or approved the use of tortured information in the investigation? They should be headed to jail, and pronto.

Looked at from another angle, the news reported above could have concerned any damn government report. If a government uses tortured evidence for military and intelligence purposes, that's evil, and bad enough (and illegal, and should be prosecuted).

But when torture is used by civil commissions as a basis of investigation, then the entire nation has jumped the shark, and we are in waters so deadly and deep, I don't know how we all don't drown.

Leaked! International Red Cross Report on CIA Torture

Mark Danner has scooped the NY Times, the Washington Post and other papers by publishing in the current New York Review of Books an essay quoting long excerpts of a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on "high-value" prisoners held in CIA black site prisons. The interviews took prior to their release in late 2006, and the report itself is dated February 2007, and likely was sent originally to then CIA Acting General Counsel, John Rizzo.

The prisoners interviewed by ICRC personnel included Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Walid Bin Attash, and twelve others, all of whom, the ICRC concluded, were submitted to torture. From the report's conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Mark Danner, who obviously has seen the entire 43 page report, calls the report "a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page." He reproduces a portion of its chilling Table of Contents. This is no bedtime reading:

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

As one follows the narratives of the various prisoners, Danner notes that one can see the construction of the CIA-Bush torture program unfold in all its brutalizing variety before one's eyes. Even, as caught Emptywheel's eye in her reading of Danner's article, prisoner Abu Zubaydah can notice that the torturers are experimenting on the type and effects of various torture methods upon him. From Zubaydah's narrative (emphasis added):

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds.... I don't know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted....

A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me.... I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before....

This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times....

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor....

I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.

Indeed, as Danner points out, there were changes to the interrogation-torture procedures. Since all the prisoners were kept isolated and out of contact with each other, the overall similarity of the treatment appears valid, and the differences and changes accurate. Danner reports:

Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the "long-time sitting" -— the weeks shackled to a chair—that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.

Nudity, on the other hand, is a constant in the ICRC report, as are permanent shackling, the "cold cell," and the unceasing loud music or noise. Sometimes there is twenty-four-hour light, sometimes constant darkness. Beatings, also, and smashing against the walls seem to be favored procedures; often, the interrogators wear gloves.

In later interrogations new techniques emerge, of which "long-time standing" and the use of cold water are notable....

A clear method emerges from these accounts, based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, and repeated beatings and "smashings"—though from this basic model one can see the method evolve, from forced sitting to forced standing, for example, and acquire new elements, like immersion in cold water.

Danner makes the connections which I and others have made between these techniques and the study of torture and "brainwashing" undertaken by the CIA and the military over 50 years ago, which culminated in the codification of such procedures in the CIA counterintelligence interrogation KUBARK manual of the early 1960s.

The NY Review article also confirms the ABC news report of approximately a year ago that reported how each variation and application of the torture techniques was vetted by the White House:

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers "briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council's Principals Committee," including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who "then signed off on the [interrogation] plan." At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a "golden shield" from the Justice Department -— the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous "torture memorandum," written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002... Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees —- "whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning" -- in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed." At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

The Danner article, if one hasn't noticed yet, is must reading. He leaves nary a stone unturned: the complicity of some Congressional Democrats, the disaster which was the cover-up inspired Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the lies told by Bush and other administration officials to hide the truth of what was being done.

But, Danner also notes that, strangely, and for anyone who cared to read, there has been plenty of notice of what was happening in the "dark" crevices of U.S. foreign policy, even back to those dismal early months in 2002, when the torture gulag was fired up. "'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities" reads one headline from a Washington Post article from December 26, 2002.

Danner fails to make mention of the codification of many of these CIA procedures in the current version of the Army Field Manual (isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation), nor is there any discussion of the use of drugs on prisoners, which has surfaced in other prisoners' narratives of their incarceration. But what Danner does capture is the sense of psychic numbing that occurs as one reads over and over of how the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" was used on this prisoner and that prisoner, as one become inured to the brutality.

After a long discussion about the relative intelligence "value" of torture, Danner settles into a discussion about what we must do now. He certainly understands that there is a very important need to educate the public about what must be done. He is a little less certain that prosecutions should or can take place, but can see how hobbled the Obama administration is by this legacy, and how, despite Obama's wish to not look back and move forward, "he and his Department of Justice will be haunted by what his predecessor did."

Many officials of human rights organizations, who have fought long and valiantly to bring attention and law to bear on these issues, strongly reject any proposal that includes widespread grants of immunity. They urge investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration officials. The choices are complicated and painful. From what we know, officials acted with the legal sanction of the US government and under orders from the highest political authority, the elected president of the United States. Political decisions, made by elected officials, led to these crimes. But political opinion, within the government and increasingly, as time passed, without, to some extent allowed those crimes to persist. If there is a need for prosecution there is also a vital need for education. Only a credible investigation into what was done and what information was gained can begin to alter the political calculus around torture by replacing the public's attachment to the ticking bomb with an understanding of what torture is and what is gained, and lost, when the United States reverts to it.

I am one of those voices who speak loudly for prosecutions. But the more I read and understand, I see that the issue goes much farther than simply torture qua torture, or whether there should be a Truth Commission or prosecutions.

The corruption of government and the inability of the governmental ruling classes to interrupt or terminate the program of state-sanctioned torture, or stop the black propaganda fed, and well-plotted campaign to go to war in Iraq, or take command of an economic bubble and unregulated set of bogus financial schemes until they ballooned out of control and sought to bankrupt the entire country, this corruption and moral-political bankruptcy implicates immensely wide swaths of the government and ruling classes.

We are in a very tight spot, historically speaking. It is true that a significant section of civil society, located primarily among some human rights and civil liberties organizations, but with some links as well even into layers of the military (particularly military attorneys), are seeking some kind of change, some way in which a system of accountability can be secured. But they are laboring under the collective weight of a political system that cannot even look at itself in the mirror. Danner notes Obama and Holder's play to keep some of this information secure under "state secrets privilege" by the Executive Branch. The very leaking of the ICRC document shows what he thinks of that.

I don't have any simple answers. I know that we must only try and move towards the light. Our compass must be the dictates of justice and mercy, and also truth. We wish to build a better world. We know there are those who have... well, different ideas. We must be able to combat ignorance, and be smart ourselves. Learn from the past, prepare for the future. We must not flinch from what we need to do. We cannot go backwards. The world is already slipping backwards at an alarming rate. The ICRC report itself is documentary proof of that.

Let us move forward.

Update, roughly 11 pm, PDT:

The Washington Post has just put up their article covering the story. It has a nice tidbit for those who like to track down thing or speculate about who leaked the ICRC report, and why? (H/T http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2009/3/15/212138/793/254#c254ericlwis0)

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group's strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

The New York Times has posted a shortened version of the Mark Danner article on their Op-Ed page. (Double H/T to out of left field and to Stephen Soldz)

Speaking of Stephen Soldz, his remarks about the actions of military and CIA psychologists in the torture, made at a listserv for anti-torture psychologists, are worth repeating here (I've added the link within):

We must remember that the techniques detailed in these documents were designed by psychologists. These psychologists were present at the APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception. APA [American Psychological Association] has never explained why these torturers were invited or what they said or what was said to them. Nor have the APA leaders who invited and participated with these torturers expressed any remorse that they may have aided their torture. Rather, they tried to hide the attendance at this conference, even claimed to have "misplaced" it. And they have tried to change the subject to whether or not these torturers were "APA members", as if its fine to aid torturers if they aren't members.

Accountability for US torture MUST include accountability for those who aided the torturers, including those in the APA leadership who contributed. Continued silence is not acceptable. The truth must come out. We must pressure any Truth Commission or other accountability process to explore the role of the APA, other psychologists, and other health professionals, in the US torture program.

Well put, Stephen. And many thanks to all those for helping push the Daily Kos version of this blog posting, with its important anti-torture news and commentary to the top of the recommended list there. I won't be happy, though, until the issue is pushed to the top of the nation's agenda, and a history-making review and prosecution of these crimes begins.

Short Shots in Anti-Torture Wars

With little time to post for the next few days, I wanted to give my readers a few juicy morsels to chew over.

There's Emptywheel's analysis at Firedoglake of the new Department of Justice brief, re the withdrawal of the “Enemy Combatant” definition for Guantanamo "detainees". Most are lauding it as some great victory. But it's yet another Obama cosmetic miracle: looks like progress on the outside, but is plain old ugly Bush on the inside. From EW's article:

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces. [my emphasis]

The President has the authority ... the President determines ... the President has the authority.

You see, it's still the same unitary power, stripped of the baggage of Bush's vocabulary. And even as they abandon Bush's vocabulary, they progressively expand the reach of that authority to include just about all those whom Bush already determined were enemy combatants, no matter how nebulous that person's ties to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doing its best to derail the lawsuit by Rasul et al. against Donald Rumsfeld and former Bush administration officials for "torture; prolonged arbitrary detention; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; cruel and unusual punishment; denial of liberties without due process, and preventing the exercise and expression of their religious beliefs." None of these victims were ever charged with a crime.

Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent reports (H/T to Stephen Soldz):

Dismissed at the urging of the Bush administration, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the case was sent back to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington for reconsideration, because the Supreme Court had ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions. It wasn’t clear what effect that ruling might have on the Rasul case.

Although some civil rights lawyers had hoped the Obama administration would change the government’s position — or at least try to settle this case, which is at the very least an embarrassment to the United States – the former prisoners had no such luck. Today, the Justice Department filed a brief arguing, as it did in Padilla’s case against Yoo, that government officials are not liable for torture, abuse, denial of due process or religious rights, because the right of Guantanamo prisoners not to suffer those abuses at the hands of the U.S. government was not clearly established at the time.

That would seem to contradict previous statements by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that torture (including waterboarding) and other abuses are clearly illegal, now and always, and that the president can’t simply override that prohibition.

And meanwhile, on the homefront, you'd never know it because the silence is so deafening, but the ACLU released a major study on the effects of the Patriot Act. Their press release states:

“Reclaiming Patriotism” reveals that in the years since its passage, the Patriot Act has paved the way for the expansion of government-sponsored surveillance including the gutting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and a recent revamping of the Attorney General Guidelines to allow law enforcement to conduct physical surveillance without suspicion. Indeed, over the last eight years, numerous expansions of executive authority have worked in tandem to infringe upon our rights. Only by understanding the larger picture of the combined effects of Patriot Act, the amendments to FISA, the guidelines for physical surveillance and other expansions of power can Congress make an informed, consistent and principled decision about whether and how to amend all of these very powerful surveillance tools.

You can go read the report at this link.

Finally, the other day I reported on the attempt by former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray's to speak before a hearing of the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad. JCHR shunted aside the request more than once. I'm still not sure he actually spoke, but his website posted today this article, Trying Again to Stop Torture: My Formal Statement for the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Here's the conclusion from Murray, fighting the fight against state-sanctioned torture from Great Britain:

Conclusions

1. All CIA intelligence is received by the UK. MI6 has seen the fruits of every CIA waterboarding session and rendition torture. Very many will have been passed on to ministers and senior officials.

2. Ministers decided the principle of the universality of the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement was more important than any aversion to torture. We could not refuse this material from the CIA without compromising the basic agreement.

3. Ministers did know they were receiving intelligence from torture. There was a definite, internally promulgated and legally cleared policy to receive intelligence from torture, directed in person by Jack Straw.

4. The format of intelligence reports contains a deliberate double blind; by excluding the name of the detainee from the final report, Ministers can state they have never knowingly seen intelligence from torture.

5. The government’s public lines that we do not condone, endorse, encourage or instigate torture, even that we condemn it and work against it, do not answer the key question:

“Are we prepared on a regular basis to receive intelligence from torture?”

That question is capable of a one word answer. The true answer is yes. The government refuses to give a straight answer.

A Farce in the Making? New Task Force on Interrogations and Detention

According to the New York Times, Obama administration Attorney General Eric holder announced today he would appoint a new "special envoy" on Guantanamo, former assistant secretary of state for European affairs in the Bush Administration, Daniel Fried.

Also on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named two government lawyers with national security experience as staff directors of task forces set up by President Obama to analyze detention issues.

J. Douglas Wilson, a senior federal prosecutor in California, is to lead an analysis of guidelines for interrogation and transfer of detainees to other countries. Brad Wiegmann, a senior Justice Department national security lawyer, is to help lead a task force charged with recommending the legal rules for detention of future terrorism suspects.

These men are not exactly household names, although Fried has had some notoriety over the years, having to act as apologist for Bush policies to the Europeans. Here's a bit about how he operated from a Craig Murray blog posting from May 2006, US officials give weight to reports of CIA kidnappings in Europe:

"More than one source in the CIA...told us that between 30 and 50 people have been transported by extraordinary rendition," Italian Socialist MEP and committee rapporteur Giovanni Claudio Fava told reporters in Strasbourg.

According to Mr Fava, the information MEPs received when meeting with the US state department's top legal advisor, John Bellinger, assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried, members of the US Congress, lawyers and NGO representatives had been "patchy and inconsistent."

One of these MEPs (members of the European Parliament), Roger Helmer, wrote in February 2006 about his encounter with Fried on the question of extraordinary renditions and use of European countries for CIA secret flights:

Appeals for senior US officials to explain their government’s actions to the parliament are unlikely to pass first base. Asked last week whether the US was going to comply with MEP demands, assistant secretary for European affairs Daniel Fried avoided the question with the usual Washington mantra. “America was committed to protecting people against terrorism and would do so according to existing legal conditions and values,” he said. The administration was already talking to “thoughtful Europeans.” But does that mean MEPs?

Who is going to look deeper into the qualifications of Mr. Fried to take on this post? Why was he picked. A reporter for the Washington Post asked Mr. Fried directly about the rendition issue at a "press roundtable", November 2005 in Berlin. What he got back was classic Bush double-talk and obfuscation. Listen to Holder's new Guantanamo "special envoy" talk around the rendition issue:

Question: Ambassador Fried, my name's Craig Whitlock, with the Washington Post here in Berlin. I want to follow up on some of your comments about terrorism. As you may know, there has been an increasing level of discomfort as of late in Europe with some of the tactics and methods the United States has used in the war on terrorism. There's a German prosecutor who's been investigating the alleged rendition of a German citizen from the Balkans to Afghanistan. A few days ago, Italian prosecutors from Milan filed extradition requests for 22 CIA operatives involved in kidnapping in (inaudible), and in the last couple of weeks there have been a number of (inaudible) in Europe, including the Council of Europe, who have said they're going to investigate reports of the CIA operating secret jails for terrorism suspects in eastern Europe. What sort of response have you been hearing from your European allies in regards to the U.S. methods like these in the war on terrorism? Are you hearing a lot of complaints, and is this affecting relations in terms of security methods and tactics in the war on terrorism?

Ambassador Fried: I have not heard a great deal from my European colleagues. I'm aware of course of the press reports. I'm not going to discuss the allegations either way. It is true that these issues are debated in Europe; they are debated in the United States. The recent terrorist bombings in Amman, Jordan -- the suicide bombings of the hotels -- remind us, as if we needed reminding, of the kind of terrorist enemy we face. I suppose I'm glad I live in a country where these issues are debated. We act, the United States acts, and will act, consistent with the law and with international norms. These are difficult issues; it is a difficult enemy we're fighting. I wish that we didn't face an enemy that obeys no rules, but we do have rules to obey and we will obey them.

The Usual Suspects - Wiegmann and Wilson

I certainly never heard of these two career attorneys. I did a little preliminary investigation, and they seem like highly suspect characters to put in charge of a task force to investigate detention and interrogation issues for the government, and the viability of the current Army Field Manual as a guideline for interrogations.

According to AFP:

The Attorney General appointed J. Douglas Wilson, currently the chief of the National Security Unit in the US Attorney’s Office for the northern district of California to lead a task force that will review US policies on interrogation and the transfer of detainees.

Wilson’s team will review whether the “Army Field Manual interrogation guidelines … provide an appropriate means of acquiring the intelligence to protect the nation, and whether different or additional interrogation guidance is necessary,” the US Justice Department said.

It will also examine US policy on rendition—the transfer of individuals to other nations for interrogation—and will establish rules ensuring policies “comply with domestic and international legal obligations … and that individuals do not face torture or inhumane treatment.”

Brad Wiegmann, a deputy chief of staff in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, was appointed to lead a review of US detention policies, together with a representative of the Department of Defense.

Looking up Brad Wiegmann, I found few references on the net. Here he shows up as an attorney for the Department of Defense, circa 1998 in a deposition, as part of “Filegate” (a Judicial Watch file).

Then, at this link, we find Mr. Wiegmann listed as a recipient of an email in a long list of emails linked to the missing memos on torture and detention policy, a list of which is at Pro Publica. I'm not sure how the emails relate to the missing memos, as they were found by googling Wiegmann, but the file name links them to the missing memos story. Perhaps I can find out more from the Pro Publica people in the next few days.

In any case, in the list of emails I discovered online, Brad Wiegmann is listed as NSC (National Security Council), and most likely is listed in about seven other emails, as someone in the OLC loop with the other attorneys discussing the Geneva Conventions, the Convention on Torture, interrogation issues, etc.

The 5/28/04 memo is the only one with listed with the name “Brad Wiegmann”, the others all say “John B. Wiegmann”, who is also listed as NSC. It’s possible that John B. Wiegmann and Brad Wiegmann are two different people. John Wiegmann currently seems to work at Dept of State.

The 5/28/04 memo was sent to “Brad Wiegmann (NSC), A Erdmann (NSC), Carl J. Tierney (DOD), Brad Clark (OSD) [Office of the Secretary of Defense?]” from C. Kevin Marshall (OLC), and cc’d to “Jack Goldsmith, Howard Nielson (all OLC)”. The memo is described as “E-mail among OLC, NSC, and OSD with draft OLC analysis re: Geneva Conventions”.

I don’t know C. Kevin Marshall, the author of the memo Wiegmann received, except to say he’s a Federalist Society member. He also shows up in the recent Bradbury memo as a cite for the reasoning against the right of the President to suspend treaties.

Googling J. Douglas Wilson, I came across this statement “given to DOJ Inspector General investigators in 2002 by a DOJ Prosecutor named John De Pue, a 25 year veteran of DOJ”. The situation involved concerned the interrogation of "American Taliban", John Walker Lindh, who had been interrogated without an attorney, even after he asked for one. I'd note that he was also tortured. De Pue asked Daily Kos's own Jesselyn Radack, then at Department of Justice's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office whether information from Lindh would be accepted in court if gotten without an attorney present. Radack replied it would not, but they went ahead with the interrogation anyway.

The following quote then comes from a follow-up investigation on the Lindh affair. From De Pue:

… the Chief of the Appellate Section emailed me expressing the view that any such interview would not be subject to suppression. She subsequently emailed me a memorandum J. Douglas Wilson, formerly of the Appellate Section and presently the Criminal Chief of the San Francisco US Attorney’s Office … concluding that the sole remedy for a “McDade” violation was to discipline the responsible attorney and that suppression of any resulting statement was unwarranted.”

This latter quote is important because it shows Wilson arguing that even if a defendant's right to counsel is violated, no "suppression of any resulting statement" should occur. Given the long period in which Guantanamo and other U.S.-held prisoners in the "war on terror" were held and tortured without recourse to an attorney, one of the major issues involved in any future prosecutions of these individuals will concern the admissibility of evidence. One can argue that Wilson was only doing the bidding of his bosses, but under the circumstances of the terrible Bush years, it seems like a weak argument to me.

J. Douglas Wilson also co-wrote National Security Investigations and Prosecutions, which costs $194, so I'm not likely to buy it very soon.

This treatise presents the law governing, and related to, national security investigations (NSIs). An NSI is an investigation conducted by the United States government to acquire information about foreign threats to the national security, e.g., international terrorism. National security law is often inaccessible, and can be particularly hard to follow when divorced from the context of historical tradition, governmental structures, and operational reality in which it functions. This treatise explores the full background of NSIs, both from a pre-911 and a post-911 perspective, providing a powerful tool for any attorney handling a case involving a national security investigation or prosecution.

The book is co-written with David Kris. Here’s some interesting facts about Wilson's co-author (I'm looking for anything I can find to help me understand who these men are that Holder has appointed, so please forgive the detour):

David S. Kris was the Assistant Deputy Attorney General for national security issues in the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) from 2000 to 2003. He had worked his way up through the DOJ. He is now a counsel, Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, and Senior Vice President at Time Warner.

Kris had been a high-ranking DOJ lawyer in the Bush administration for several years, and had appeared before Congress to advocate for the administration’s positions regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the USA PATRIOT Act. He had furthermore previously appeared before Congress in his personal capacity, after leaving the DOJ, to continue advocating for the government to have enhanced flexibility under FISA and the PATRIOT Act. This background caused his strong criticism of the administration’s legal claims to be considered particularly notable.

Finally, here’s an interesting case that Wilson lost as U.S. Attorney, when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit threw out an interrogation after finding that the defendant was denied his Sixth Amendment right to counsel…. Interesting.

U.S. v Harrison, 213 F.3d 1206, (9th Circuit, 2000)

I’m smelling a big fat rat. Two rats (three if you include Holder, four if you include Obama). When you consider the strange bias that affected Senator Leahy's selections for testimony about a possible Truth Commission on Bush-era crimes on torture, and also the adamant stand the DoJ has taken on protecting state secrets at the expense of the right of tortured individuals to sue the government for damages, then you can only come to one conclusion.

The United States government is planning to do all it can to cover-up the crimes of the Bush Administration. It must find a way to blow off steam related to societal outrage over the torture, the unnecessary and deadly wars, the attacks on civil liberties. I expect we will hear more reports from the government like the whitewash report on current conditions at Guantanamo given by Admiral Walsh last month.

This will be a bitter truth for many to swallow. Just because you are popular doesn't mean such popularity can carry you forever if you advocate or protect an unjustifiable policy, as LBJ did on Vietnam. If Obama persists in protecting the torturers from any accountability, and even worse, maintains portions of the old Bush torture program, then he may yet face the political fate of LBJ in terms of loss of popularity, and possibly electoral opposition. But all that is years away, and what matters now is that we do not accept half-hearted or tainted efforts to investigate torture, but turn up the pressure for real investigations and prosecutions.

Obama and Holder should shelve their plans to appoint the tainted Fried and the obscure but suspicious Wiegmann and Wilson. A special prosecutor should be appointed and a blue ribbon panel with members of human rights groups, academia, labor, and the press to work alongside government officials in a real democratic review of the illegal detention and interrogation policies undertaken by this government.

Now that would be democracy in action. That would be... Change!

Torturers Told Binyam: "“We’re going to change your brain"

David Rose at the British paper The Mail got the scoop that was former Guanatanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed's "world exclusive" post-release interview. Entitled "How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions", the article presents a brief biography of Mr. Mohamed's troubled life, including the experience of racial prejudice in the United States (Binyam is Ethiopian-born), abandonment by his father, and later the adoption of his mother's religion, Islam.

But the article's most sensational sections describe his torture by Pakistani, Moroccan, and U.S. officials, who all the while were in collaboration with British intelligence services, who not only were feeding them questions, but also withholding exculpatory evidence as well. The torture was horrendous:

Documents obtained by this newspaper - which were disclosed to Mohamed through a court case he filed in America - show that months after he was taken to Morocco aboard an illegal 'extraordinary rendition' flight by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, MI5 twice gave the CIA details of questions they wanted his interrogators to put to him, together with dossiers of photographs.

At the time, in November 2002, Mohamed was being subject to intense, regular beatings and sessions in which his chief Moroccan torturer, a man he knew as Marwan, slashed his chest and genitals with a scalpel....

... Mohamed also described how he was interrogated by an MI5 officer in Pakistan in May 2002, before his rendition to Morocco....

He said the officer knew he had already been tortured numerous times after his capture the previous month, with methods that included days of sleep deprivation, a mock execution and being beaten while being hung by his wrists for hours on end.

He said this torture in Pakistan made him confess to a plan that was never more than fantasy - to build a 'dirty' radioactive bomb.

Over and over, the article presents evidence of U.S. and British collaboration in the interrogation and torture of Binyam Mohamed. Telegrams are sent back and forth, lines of inquiry are proposed, a "case conference" is held between U.S. and British intelligence at MI5 HQ in London.

The full extent of the collaboration and the torture are partly obscured by the fact that the British High Court reluctantly (and with public protest) have acceded to the demands of the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to withhold the publication of secret documentation of Mr. Mohamed's torture -- documents already seen by Mohamed's attorneys, but not the public -- because it would supposedly harm U.S.-British intelligence cooperation.

The Mail article states that Miliband lied about whether or not the Obama administration is threatening the British over revealing these secrets, as the Bush administation had. Thus, it is unclear to what extent the Obama administration is cooperating in the British suppression of the documents. The Obama administration is on record as telling BBC that it is grateful that the British are committed to state secrecy. On the other hand, a letter detailing the contents of the redacted documents sent by Mohamed's attorney to President Obama was itself mysteriously redacted. One thing is clear: we don't yet have the full story here.

In the Dark Prison: Brainwashing & Confessions

The worst part of Mohamed's captivity, by his own account, is the five months he spent at the "dark prison" the CIA ran at an undisclosed location near Kabul, Afghanistan. The Obama administration has by executive order closed all CIA prisons except those "used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." One wonders if five months can be considered "short-term" or "transitory"? Given the torture evidence by Mr. Mohamed, this question is especially apposite.

From Binyam Mohamed's description of the "dark prison":

Kabul's dark prison was just that: a place where inmates spent their days and weeks in total blackness....

'The toilet in the cell was a bucket. Without light, you either find the bucket or you go on your bed,' Mohamed says.

'There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day....

'While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled....

'The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn't stand straight nor sit.

'I couldn't sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.

'You got a shower once a week, with your arms chained above you, stripped naked, in the dark, with someone else washing you.

'The water was salty and afterwards you felt dirtier than when you went in. It wasn't a shower for washing: it was for humiliation.'

In Kabul, Mohamed says the food was also contaminated, and he often suffered from sickness and diarrhoea....

'The floor was made of cement dust. Whatever movement you made, the air would be full of cement and I started getting breathing problems.

' My bed was a thin mattress on the floor, surrounded by that dust.'

And what was all this torture for? According to Mr. Mohamed, it was during his stay at the Dark Prison that U.S. interrogators went beyond inducing confessions. They wanted him to finger other individuals, and use him to testify in the military commissions trials they were planning. Later, when Mohamed arrived in Guantanamo in September 2004, interrogators got worried Binyam would testify he only "confessed" or gave information because he was tortured, and tried to conduct "clean" interrogations, so they could say the testimony was uncoerced. They demanded he give his confession "freely". After Obama was elected president and announced Guantanamo would close, Mohamed says his treatment became more brutal.

The entire Mail article goes into much, much more detail, and makes important reading for those trying to understand what kinds of crimes the U.S. and UK governments have committed when they undertook the torturing of individuals in their custody. Andy Worthington has also written an excellent summary and review of Binyam's interview, and furthermore, writes from the standpoint of one who has followed both Mr. Mohamed's case, and that of a myriad of other Guantanamo prisoners for years now.

Andy Worthington's article makes abundantly clear that the torture of prisoners like Binyam Mohamed was not about, or at least not solely about, the collection of information. It was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an earlier interview with Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith:

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”

This emphasis on brainwashing -- for that is the popular terminology for such an assault on the psyche of a prisoner -- is a key component of the kind of psychological torture that was researched by both the United Kingdom and the United States in the years following World War II. It highlighted the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, stress positions, manipulation of the environment, of food, the use of humiliation and both sensory deprivation and sensory overload upon the prisoner. The idea was to overwhelm the nervous system and make a human being collapse without a blow being made, without scars, without evidence usable in court.

Much to the chagrin of some in the government, I suppose, the Moroccans had some ideas of their own regarding torture, and it included the use of razor blades. According to the Mail account, there are plenty of pictures of Mr. Mohamed's scarred penis in his files. That may be bad news for somebody, if anyone's head is ever going to fall over this monstrosity of a treatment.

Prosecute Those Who Ordered and Operated the Torture Program

But the real criminals sat or still sit in the highest chairs of government. The political will to hold them to account is crippled by the need to save the integrity of the system in the eyes of a scared and cynical populace -- scared by a collapsing economy, and cynical because they too have lost all faith in the integrity of their leaders, and are placing all their hopes now in the charismatic Barack Obama. For his part, Obama has indicated he will be more socially progressive than his predecessor -- he just eliminated the anti-science blockade of funds on stem cell research that Bush had used to hamstring such projects.

But Obama has also indicated that he will go so far on torture and national security reform and no farther. He has no intention of significantly reforming the CIA. He plans to leave a substantial remnant force of up to 50,000 troops or "advisers" in Iraq after a U.S. "withdrawal"... two or more years from now. He is escalating U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and has taken actions to make prisoners in that theater of operations even less available to review of conditions by any U.S. court than were the prisoners in Guantanamo. All the while, he maintains that the Army Field Manual, with its reliance on isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and fear, along with loose controls on stress positions and drugging of prisoners, is the "gold standard" of U.S. interrogation of "illegal enemy combatants."

The Binyam Mohamed case is one that wakes people up, at least it has in Great Britain. (See Glenn Greenwald's story comparing the U.S. to British coverage of the case.) But damn if I don't know what it will take to unfreeze U.S. society on this topic. Torture remains a little understood and embarrassing subject in U.S. circles. It's dimly recognized that if the lid were totally taken off, much of the establishment leadership in the U.S. would be revealed as culpable, or at least compromised. Hence, mainstream opinion makers are attempting to keep whatever scandals within "reasonable" limits.

Politics can be strange sometimes. The mainstream opinion makers are usually pretty good at what they do, especially the left-wing versions of them. But they don't often have to deal with such incendiary material, and a dedicated coterie of attorneys, bloggers, journalists, and even some politicians and military officers, who don't want to see this issue die before accountability takes place.

Let Craig Murray Tell Parliament What He Knows of UK Torture Involvement

Uncle $cam left this as a comment in a recent post, but I thought it worthy of an upgrade to a full posting:

Your Help Needed - Reveal Torture to Stop It

A lot of you know who who Craig Murray is. At the moment he has an appeal on his site - he's asking people to email the UK's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to ask that he be heard next Tuesday, on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad. The executive is putting pressure on the committee to exclude him.

In Craig's words:

---
I need everybody to send an email to: jchr@parliament.uk to urge that I should be allowed to give evidence. Just a one-liner would be fine. If you are able to add some comment on the import of my evidence, or indicate that you have heard me speak or read my work, that may help. Please copy your email to craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk.

Please also pass on this plea to anyone you can and urge them to act. Help from other bloggers in posting this appeal would be much appreciated.
---
Briefly, his background is that he was UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan. The government there was (still is) torturing people and giving intelligence thus obtained to the CIA, which sent it to MI6 and the Foreign Office. Craig sent a series of telegrams to the FO objecting to this policy. The policy ended up being approved by Jack Straw and Craig was fired.

Send an email - even if the only effect is to embarrass that fucker Straw, it's at least that.

From the site publishing the appeal, Mr. Murray further states his case:

The evidence I am trying to give the parliamentary committee is this:

I wish to offer myself as a witness before the Joint Commission on Human Rights on the subject of the UK government's policy on intelligence cooperation with torture abroad.

I appeared as a witness in person before both the European Parliament and European Council's enquiries into extraordinary rendition. My evidence was described by the European Council's Rapporteur, Senator Dick Marty, as "Compelling and valuable".

The key points I wish to make are these:

- I was British Ambassador in Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.

- I learned and confirmed that I was regularly seeing intelligence from detainees in the Uzbek torture chambers, sent me by the CIA via MI6.

- British Ministers and officials were seeing the same torture material.

- In October/November 2002 and January/February 2003 I sent two Top Secret telegrams to London specifically on the subject of our receipt of intelligence gained under torture. I argued this was illegal, immoral and impractical. The telegrams were specifically marked for the Secretary of State.

- I was formally summoned back to the FCO for a meeting held on 7 or 8 March 2003 specifically and solely on the subject of intelligence gained under torture. Present were Linda Duffield, Director Wider Europe, FCO, Sir Michael Wood, Chief Legal Adviser, FCO, and Matthew Kydd, Head of Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, FCO.

- This meeting was minuted. I have seen the record, which is classified Top Secret and was sent to Jack Straw. On the top copy are extensive hand-written marginalia giving Jack Straw's views.

- I was told at this meeting that it is not illegal for us to obtain intelligence gained by torture, provided that we did not do the torture ourselves. I was told that it had been decided that as a matter of War on Terror policy we should now obtain intelligence from torture, following discussion between Jack Straw and Richard Dearlove. I was told that we could not exclude receipt of specific material from the CIA without driving a coach and horses through the universality principle of the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement, which would be detrimental to UK interests.

- Sir Michael Wood's legal advice that it was not illegal to receive intelligence got by torture was sent on to me in Tashkent (copy attached).
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Wood.pdf- On 22 July 2004

I sent one further telegram on intelligence got by torture, with a lower classification, following FCO communications on the subject. Copy attached.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Telegram.pdf
It was my final communication before being dismissed as Ambassador.

In conclusion, I can testify that beyond any doubt the British government has for at least six years a considered but secret policy of cooperation with torture abroad. This policy legally cleared by government legal advisers and approved by Jack Straw as Secretary of State.

Craig Murray
2 March 2009

Like other whistleblowers, Craig Murray put his career and livelihood, if not his life, on the line. He deserves an email of support.

Truth Commission or Prosecutions of Bush Officials?

In both the UK and the USA, the fight against government secrecy, which is used to cover-up crimes by which the state commits aggressive war, torture, and other acts against the civil rights and liberties of their own and foreign citizenry, is being conducted at a high pitch. With the demise of the hated Bush regime, those who pushed the US state to the brink of out and out dictatorship are intent on keeping their reputations and power intact, and their bodies out of jail.

Today, in chat rooms, on phone calls, on email listservs and over cocktails and bedroom pillows, a debate is going on about what to do to ensure the terror apparatus of the Bush years is fully disassembled, and the perpetrators exposed and held accountable. Should their be a truth commission? Should there be prosecutions? Should we look forward and not backward (as if we will know where we are going if we don't know where we have come from)?

As I wrote in yesterday's posting:

I recommend my readers go to CCR's webpage on Prosecutions and Accountability and follow the action steps there. They include a letter that can be signed to Sen. Leahy:

We are also calling upon Sen. Patrick Leahy, who... [held] a hearing on March 4 of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss a “truth commission” to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, to support prosecutions for those government officials who violated the law. Sign a letter to Sen. Leahy and the Judiciary Committee calling for them to support prosecutions, and to oppose any immunity for the architects of these torture programs.

Birth of a Whitewash: Who Testified at Leahy Commission Torture Hearings?

There has been plenty of controversy on the issue of conducting a Congressional or independent investigation into the interrogations policy and torture activities of the Bush administration over the last seven or eight years.

One of the primary worries by those who oppose a "truth and reconciliation"-style investigation is that it would preempt possible prosecutions, or at worst, be a cover-up of some of the worst crimes involved. Those who favor such an investigation believe that is only with a broad investigation will all the information really be unearthed.

The hearing today by the Senate Judiciary Committee -- "Getting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry" -- chaired by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), was called to explore options for investigating past torture and counter-terrorism policy. The committee called six witnesses, some for, some against such an investigation. But a close look at the backgrounds and affiliations of even most of the pro-investigation witnesses should give us deep pause, and ask what kind of commission are we being set up for?

The witnesses included some out and out conservatives, or individuals dubious about the investigatory process -- men like David B. Rivkin, Jr., who opposes the investigation, and supported most of Bush's program, such as suspension of Geneva rights for "enemy combatants", and Jeremy Rabkin, who wrote, After Guantanamo: The War Over the Geneva Convention" in a collection of essays edited by cold warrior ex-CIA chief R. James Woolsey.

The other four witnesses were a mixed bag. They appeared to believe the Bush administration had gone way overboard after 9/11, at least when it came to treatment of prisoners. Three of the four witnesses have background that make them dubious reporters, and argue, as well, that they may have another agenda they wish to advance. These three -- Thomas Pickering, Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (Ret.), and John J. Farmer, Jr. -- all have either gone on the record with far-right views on the "war on terror", or have associations with actions by the government that themselves are associated with torture.

Let me provide what evidence I have collected in a relatively short period of time. It is not definitive, but I think enough to give serious pause to consider just how this most important discussion is proceeding at the congressional level.

Our Man in El Salvador: Death Squads, Rigged Elections, and Iran/Contra

Thomas Pickering has a history as a reliable agent for murderous U.S. foreign policy. This is from an op-ed at the Council of Foreign Relations (all emphases in this posting are added, unless otherwise noted):

Thomas Pickering, who was ambassador to El Salvador from 1983 to 1985, says that, while it was U.S. policy to publicly denounce the death squads, their “kind of tactics [were] tacitly supported by the U.S. government, even though [they] were freelance.” Other analysts are more blunt. “We did back the guys who went after the bad guys,” says Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985. “And [we] defined ‘bad guys’ pretty broadly.” According to William Leo Grande, a professor at American University and the author of a major study of the conflict, Washington knew that the intelligence it passed to the Salvadoran government eventually made its way to the paramilitaries. “We did support the guys who organized them,” he says, “so it’s a little precious to deny that we supported the death squads themselves.”

Pickering also got caught up in a dispute between mob political cliques in the U.S. and El Salvador, when Sen. Jesse Helms, who was aligned with his protege the torturer Roberto D’Aubuisson and his ARENA party, spilled the means on a CIA election manipulation to put their man, Jose Napoleon Duarte in as president, during a raging civil war with tens of thousands targeted by death squads and torturers.

As a result, enraged D’Aubuisson supporters plotted to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Mr. Helms sent a letter to these partisans that said:

Ambassador Pickering has been the leader of the death squads against democracy. Mr. Pickering has used his diplomatic capacity to strangle liberty during the night.

Senator Helms was censured by the Senate for conducting his own foreign policy. Luckily, Ambassador Pickering escaped murder.

Thomas Pickering started his career working in the intelligence field. “Between 1959 and 1961, Ambassador Pickering served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department…” (State Dept bio)

Note that in a 1988 New York Times article, Pickering was fingered as one of the Iran-Contra enablers, passing along appeals for weapons from the Contras to Oliver North, and never reporting it, despite the fact such assistance was supposedly illegal at the time. Pickering was then ambassador to El Salvador, and up to his ears in death squads, CIA electoral manipulations, and a counter-insurgency bombing campaign that killed thousands and made refugees of many thousands more.

Pickering and his ilk are not men to be trusted. They are brought in here for one reason only: they are “fixers”, like the guys the mob brings in to clean up the mess after the hit’s been done. Nell, whose initial comment at Emptywheel's live blogging diary at Firedoglake spurred this entry of mine, put it this way:

Leahy has lined up respected establishment operatives (aka reliable tools of imperial foreign policy) to push for a commission of inquiry. I actually agree with most of Pickering’s testimony, especially about leaving the door open for prosecution and therefore being very sparing with grants of limited immunity.

But Pickering’s presence, particularly as he appeared today to represent the outermost limit of opinion among this crop of witnesses, signals to me as strongly as anything can that this commission will play the same role as “plucky reformer” Napoleon Duarte’s “fragile democracy” played in El Salvador during Amb. Pickering’s stint there: a crowd-pleasing facade created to hide the continuation of the same poisonous policy.

More of the Usual Suspects: Gunn

Vice Admiral (ret.) Lee Gunn is presented to the committee as President of the American Security Project. He also is president of their Institute of Public Research at CNA Corporation, a federally funded research and development center in Washington, D.C. [CNA stands for Center for Naval Analyses, as I discovered elsewhere; it doesn't say so at their website.] IPR-CNA works on nice and reform-like programs, though a large part of IPR's work is consultation on "homeland security operations and strategic policy development." That would include papers done under Gunn's division, such as "SMART Policing":

As part of the recent paradigm shift towards counter-terrorism, police are adopting intelligence led policing strategies (sometimes referred to as “information-led policing”) which have sought to use information analysis and intelligence more strategically to guide leadership decision making and law enforcement operations. And more recently, police departments in the higher risk urban areas have also begun to make more extensive use of electronic surveillance....

Many jurisdictions are already employing some SMART policing approaches, such as the use of new technologies for more efficient data collection and display, information sharing, and data analysis. SMART policing programs can be grown in law enforcement agencies across the country through a comprehensive, federally-driven, national technical assistance program.

This kind of "policing", highlighted by pervasive use of cameras, ethnic profiling, data mining, attacks upon the Fourth Amendment, and "Electronic surveillance technologies that employ software capable of identifying behavioral anomalies," among other police state techniques.

But Gunn's association with CNA bespeaks even more troubling associations. Down the hall from IPR, so to speak, at CNA’s Stability and Development Program, part of CNA Strategic Studies, we find some interesting connections with major counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Carter Malkasian, formerly assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) as an advisor on counterinsurgency, directs the Stability and Development Program, which focuses on counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and post-conflict reconstruction. The team provides objective, analytic perspectives—grounded in an understanding of actual operations—to support decision-makers charged with planning and conducting security and development operations.

The range of issues includes: insurgency and counterinsurgency, ethnic conflict, development of indigenous forces, economic development of war-torn states, “Phase IV” reconstruction efforts, and the establishment of political institutions.

The team most recently spent time on the ground in Afghanistan advising Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

What are PRTs?

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are “non-kinetic” operations carried out jointly by small number of lightly armed military personnel and civilian staff from the diplomatic community and development agencies to promote governance, security and reconstruction throughout the post-9.11 Afghanistan and Iraq. PRTs can be characterized in two ways: one as a miniature of multidimensional peacekeeping operations or “peacekeeping-lite,”and the other as an extended civil-military operation center (CMOC) or “super-CMOC.”

And the PRTs have some questionable activities, beyond humanitarian work:

The PRTs have critics in the international aid community. A recent analysis from the think tank Overseas Development Institute, said “In Afghanistan, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were perceived as blurring the lines between humanitarian and military action.”

Amnesty International ran across some shady operations conducted by some of the PRTs that involved torture:

Amnesty International is concerned that ISAF troops from New Zealand operating in Afghanistan and particularly the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) could be involved in transferring detainees to Afghan security forces.

While New Zealand was not one of those countries surveyed in the AI report, NZ is a participant in the ISAF and has a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan.... “The NZ PRT (107 personnel as of October 2007) Bamyan is tasked with maintaining security in Bamyan Province. It does this by conducting frequent presence patrols throughout the province.”, [sic] may apprehend and transfer detainees,” says Amnesty International Spokesperson Gary Reese.

In March this year, Amnesty International raised our concerns to Hon Phil Goff, Minister of Defence, that the 50-70 detainees handed over to U.S. forces by the NZ SAS could be subject to torture at Guantanamo Bay or other secret detention centres in a third country (through the US practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’).

What happens to those transferred from PRTs operating in Afghanistan to Afghan security forces? They are almost certainly tortured.

Scores of NDS detainees, some arrested arbitrarily and detained incommunicado, that is without access to defence lawyers, families, courts or other outside bodies, have been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including being whipped, exposed to extreme cold, deprived of food and shocked with electrical probes.

Saying all this does not mean that Vice Adm. Gunn is somehow personally involved in torture. But his connection with an agency that is directly involved in activities advising military activities that themselves have been associated with torture makes him a dubious witness, to be sure. At least someone on the Judiciary Committee should have asked him about such links. No one did.

In any case, what we are witnessing is a corralling of all establishment criticism of the interrogations torture, and other crimes of the Bush administration by individuals highly invested in maintaining the legitimacy of U.S. military policy as a whole, including its pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is precisely these operations that involved the mass round-up of prisoners, thousands of whom were and many still remain imprisoned, and an untold number tortured.

More of the Usual Suspects: Farmer

The last of today's witnesses to be examined here is John Farmer, Jr.

Why is this guy testifying? Because he knew how to keep criticism of Giuliani toned down at the 9/11 commission? What’s his view on imprisoning “terrorists”? Does anyone remember his op-ed in the New York Times last year? In the name of reform of how “terrorists” have been treated by the criminal courts, and understanding how the Bushistas twisted criminal law into something unlawful, Farmer doesn’t propose an end to that only. No, he wants to create a new system of preventive detention!

A closer look at the Padilla case and other terrorism prosecutions reveals, to the contrary, that the continued reliance on our criminal justice system as the main domestic weapon in the struggle against terrorism fails on two counts: it threatens not only to leave our nation unprotected but also to corrupt the foundations of the criminal law itself.

The use of the criminal law in terrorist cases has never been an easy fit. After all, the primary purpose of counterterrorism is the prevention of future acts, while the criminal law has developed primarily to punish conduct that has already occurred. The question raised by the Padilla trial is whether a case about an attack that never actually happened can be tried in the criminal courts without transforming the nature of that system itself.

The answer is no. In order to make the criminal justice system an effective weapon, we have already started extending the reach of criminal statutes to conduct that has never before been punishable as a crime….

It is time to stop pretending that the criminal justice system is a viable primary option for preventing terrorism. The Bush administration should propose and Congress should pass legislation allowing for preventive detention in future terrorism cases like that of Mr. Padilla. It is the best way to ensure both the integrity of our criminal law and the safety of our nation.

Rivkin, Rabkin, Pickering, Nunn, and Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Besides Schwarz, who works with the distinguished legal civil liberties-oriented Brennan Center for Justice, this was a stacked list of witnesses, with the majority supporters of the "war on terror" and "homeland security" schemes that are anti-democratic. In the case of Pickering, we have some implicated in collaboration with those who committed exactly the same types of crimes the commission is supposed to address. What a farce! I cannot think of words of base calumny strong enough.

If this is the direction this commission is headed, then it should be boycotted. While I can support the direction an organization like Physicians for Human Rights wants to take such a torture investigation (see their letter to Sen. Leahy, PDF, from earlier today), I think that establishment human rights organization and liberals in general underestimate the entrenched nature of the powers who allowed torture to take place, and have great investment in maintaining the inviolability of the right of the state to use coercive force.

My case study for this -- and it's starting to look less like a cause, than now, sadly, a case study -- is the indifference with which the political elite treated the exposure of the Army Field Manual as riddled with abusive interrogation techniques, amounting to torture. Outside of a handful of blogs and commentators, and a few human rights organizations, including PHR and Center for Constitutional Rights, the issue has gone dead in the water. No one in Congress seems interested. They'd much rather listen to Thomas Pickering, or even David Rivkin.

I recommend my readers go to CCR's webpage on Prosecutions and Accountability and follow the action steps there. They include a letter that can be signed to Sen. Leahy:

We are also calling upon Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is holding a hearing on March 4 of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss a “truth commission” to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, to support prosecutions for those government officials who violated the law. Sign a letter to Sen. Leahy and the Judiciary Committee calling for them to support prosecutions, and to oppose any immunity for the architects of these torture programs.

From DoJ to CIA: Wiretapping, Torture, Stonewalling & Obstruction of Justice

Two stories from today's news highlight the hubris of the U.S. executive branch as regards its assumed right to conduct unrestrained surveillance of its citizens, and engage in torture in violation of all laws.

Both Emptywheel at Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com have done a stellar job tracking the Cheneyesque descent (H/T EW) of the Obama Justice Department when it comes to the question of executive privilege over classified material, especially when it comes to the courts. We already have witnessed the spectacle of the U.S. pressuring a British court on the suppression of documents in the Binyam Mohamed case.

As the Guardian reports it, "UK officials provided the CIA with information used in Mohamed's interrogation in Morocco, where he says he was tortured." For all the frenzied attempt to hide secrets, demands for an investigation grow in Britain.

Ministers yesterday came under increased pressure to set up an independent inquiry into the role of British security and intelligence agents in the US practice of rendering terror suspects to foreign prisons to be secretly and inhumanely interrogated.

Back in the U.S., it's a similar story. In the al-Haramain case, now in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco under Judge Vaughn Walker, an Islamic charity was targeted as "terrorist" and subjected to warrantless wiretapping... or was it that it was caught up in a data-mining sweep under illegal mass surveillance and a "terrorist" case built out of whole cloth? We can't be sure, and partly because the government won't release its documents, and al-Haramain's suit cannot go forward. It's even stranger when the primary document, a log of calls, was initially and mistakenly released to the plaintiffs, who returned it, and now can't get it back in order to pursue their case.

The Quest for Unlimited Executive Power Under Two Administrations

The position taken by the Department of Justice in the latest filing in the case is Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft-Gonzalez-kind outrageous, making preposterous assertions about executive power. Greenwald caught the situation perfectly:

The brief filed by Obama on Friday afternoon (.pdf) has to be read to believed. It is literally arguing that no court has the power to order that classified documents be used in a judicial proceeding; instead, it is the President -- and the President alone -- who possesses that decision-making power under Article II, and no court order is binding on the President to the extent it purports to direct that such information be made available for use in a judicial proceeding....

... after a few symbolic (and potentially important) decrees in the first week, which I praised at the time -- the Obama administration's approach to civil liberties, constitutional protections and the reining in of executive power abuses has been absolutely abysmal. None of this has anything to do with complaints that he hasn't yet done enough. It's the opposite: these are all affirmative, even extraordinary, actions undertaken by the Obama DOJ not merely to copy, but in the Al-Haramain case, virtually to surpass, the worst aspects of the Bush/Cheney/Addington use of extreme secrecy and assertions of unlimited executive power.

The twistings and turnings of the al-Haramain case are being reported and dissected in excruciatingly minute but important detail by Emptywheel and her cohort of experts over at FDL, and the reader is kindly directed there to hear the latest news, e.g., "On Friday, Obama's DOJ submitted four new declarations--presumably to correct the 'inaccurate' information provided in May 2006." What might that "inaccurate" information be? Head on over to EW at FDL and see what the cognoscenti think.

Did I say "Two"? I Meant "Ninety-Two".

In the other big news of the day, the ACLU revealed that the CIA now admits that it destroyed not two, as previously revealed, but 92 interrogation videotapes of "high-profile" prisoners in their custody. The revelation came as part of the ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the ACLU to obtain documents from the CIA. The case is in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.

The admission of greater destruction of evidence came in a letter today from the U.S. attorneys to Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Noting that John Durham's criminal investigation into "the destruction of certain videotaped interrogations of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency" is essentially over, and that the court will likely order an identifying list of destroyed records, with "summaries, transcripts, or memoranda" regarding these records "and any reconstruction of the records' contents," the government, agreeing to gather the appropriate materials, made the following comment:

In the meantime, the CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed.... Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed. This information is included in the CIA Office of Inspector General's Special Review Report, a redacted version of which was previously produced to the Plaintiffs. The CIA will unredact this information from the report and produce it to the Plaintiffs.

Finally, we note that certain of the information ... may be classified or statutorily protected from disclosure, such as the names of CIA employees who have reviewed the tapes.

The government also promised to identify and witnesses who have seen the tapes or had custody of them prior to their destruction.

One wonders why it took that long to make the admission, and we can suppose that Durham already knew something of the amount of destroyed material, as part of his investigation, and that the CIA is doing its best to organize a limited hangout of some sort. I note what the government notes, i.e., that "certain of the information ... may be classified or statutorily protected from disclosure." It remains to be seen how far they will go in hiding more of their crimes.

The Crime of Destruction of Evidence in its Historical Context

I think there are two places in which we have the CIA on record, in-house, so to speak, re taping coercive interrogations (torture). In the KUBARK manual, audio taping of interrogations is recommended, as helping with planning and ongoing interrogations. They had lots of uses for such recordings, as this snippet from KUBARK (CIA counterintellgence interrogation manual, 1961) indicates:

A session with the witness may be recorded. If the witness denounces the interrogatee there is no problem. If he does not, the interrogator makes an effort to draw him out about a hostile agent recently convicted in court or otherwise known to the witness. During the next interrogation session with the source, a part of the taped denunciation can be played back to him if necessary.

Much more recently, in the minutes to the 10/02/02 "counter-resistance strategy" meeting with LTC Beaver, other DoD personnel, and Dave Becker of DIA and CIA general counsel John Fredman, we get the following exchange:

Becker: Videotapes are subject to too much scrutiny in court. We don't want the LEA people in aggressive sessions anyway. [By "LEA," they mean "law enforcement agency", and most particularly, the FBI. - Valtin]

LTC Beaver: LEA choice not to participate in these types of interrogations is more ethical and moral as opposed to legal.

Fredman: The videotaping of even totally legal techniques will look "ugly".

Becker: (Agreed)

As many have noted, there are thousands of hours of videotape, and not only of CIA torture. There were likely lots of tapes made at Guantanamo, too (and many likely also destroyed).

The destruction of interrogation evidence was a primary consideration of these criminals from very early on, as evidenced by this story, now little remembered from last June:

The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.

The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.

Put this all together with the supposed "disarray" of Guantanamo files, and we have a massive cover-up of crimes of a magnitude we have yet to fathom. One thing is for sure, the amount of destroyed tapes and material is far more than even this limited hangout will attest.

The destruction of evidence -- in this case amounting to obstruction of justice -- is nothing new for the CIA. In the early 1970s, the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, along with the head of the CIA's Office Technical Services destroyed most of the agency's MKULTRA files, as then-CIA chief Admiral Stanfield Turner admitted to a Senate panel in 1977. MKULTRA was a massive mind control, "behavioral modification" program. It ran, officially, from 1953-1964, and included even "terminal" experiments with the use of drugs on unwitting subjects. The results of its various studies were incorporated into the CIA model of coercive interrogation, codified in its KUBARK counter-intelligence interrogation manual in the early 1960s. This manual was only declassified in the 1990s. The National Security Archive describes some of the relevant sections in that manual. Warning: those who read this may suffer vertiginous deja vu, thinking of various headlines and exposes in the past seven years:

Under the subheading, "Threats and Fears," the CIA authors note that "the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain." Under the subheading "Pain," the guidelines discuss the theories behind various thresholds of pain, and recommend that a subject's "resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself" such rather than by direct torture. The report suggests forcing the detainee to stand at attention for long periods of time. A section on sensory deprivations suggests imprisoning detainees in rooms without sensory stimuli of any kind, "in a cell which has no light," for example. "An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective," the KUBARK manual concludes.

Government Secrecy and the Struggle for a Free Society

Secrecy is almost always used to protect crimes from the public. It is shameful that an administration that prides itself on transparency -- indeed, Attorney General Holder released today the text of the missing Office of Legal Counsel memos from the post-9/11 era -- has, when it comes to torture and wiretapping, committed itself to such an abysmal recrudescence of Bush-era claims of executive supremacy.

It is not enough to ban waterboarding, as the government has now announced, when abusive techniques of interrogation, including sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation and manipulation of phobic fears is still part of the U.S. arsenal of interrogation techniques, as in the current Army Field Manual.

The CIA is almost an entirely different story. As a rogue element in government, recipient of untold billions of dollars and influence in far-reaching parts of government and society as a whole, it is ceased being, if it ever was, an agent of the democracy it claims to serve, and is instead one of the most dangerous, out-of-control elements inside government. One can only hope that the Durham investigation comes to the necessary conclusions, and that criminal prosecutions begin the restoration of law and order throughout the government.

What seems likely, though, is that the entrenched powers will fight a tooth-and-nail struggle against any restriction upon their freedom of action. Only a period of social struggle, such as occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, will provide the sufficient societal impetus and defense to fight back against these anti-democratic interests and the law-breakers that enable them. One way to begin this fight would be by supporting the call for prosecutions initiated by the National Lawyers Guild and a number of other prominent individuals and groups. If one cannot bring themselves to support that, then one must at a support the call for investigations coming from the Congressional offices of Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers.

Wiretapping, Torture, Stonewalling by government, and Obstruction of Justice by the agencies and players involved -- Watergate was not easy, and this will not be so either. But I feel the tide turning, and we must complete what the Vietnam and Watergate eras failed to achieve: a social revolution in how power is conducted in this country, and an end to militarism and imperialist foreign policy as the raison d'etre for U.S. power.