Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

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Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 13, 2014 10:03 am

Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms
Judge Demanded Official Justification for Keeping Photos Secret
by Jason Ditz, December 12, 2014

Image
The 540-page summary of CIA torture practices may just be the first in a growing collection of releases detailing US misdeeds over the past decade, as a deadline imposed by a federal judge on keeping some 2,100 photos secret fast approaches.

The Bush and Obama Administrations kept the photos secret for many years, and the judge gave the Justice Department until this evening, December 12, to offer individual rationales for why each of these photos were to be secret.

Judge Hellerstein complained the administrations declarations that the photos put national security in danger were overbroad, and wanted specific details on each. The judge is expected to rule individually and start ordering photos released in late January.

The photos include additional abuse photos from Abu Ghraib, from other sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world. The last declaration related to their release came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who in 2012 claimed every single one of them a vital national security secret. It was this ruling that sparked the ACLU lawsuit and eventually the judge’s involvement.



Image
The CIA director John Brennan pauses while speaking about a senate committee report on the use of torture by his agency, at the CIA headquarters in Virginia on December 11, 2014. Larry Downing / Reuters
Torture photos add to pressure on US administration
Taimur Khan

December 12, 2014 Updated: December 12, 2014 11:51 PM

New York // After a wave of anger over brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA, US officials face another backlash if a federal judge orders the release of decade-old photos reportedly showing the torture, including rape, of detainees at US military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2004, both the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations have used various legal means to withhold as many as 2,100 images that are potentially more explosive than the original Abu Ghraib photos.

Mr Obama argued in 2009 that their disclosure would “inflame anti-American opinion ... put our troops in greater danger” and “have a chilling effect on future investigations” of abuse.

But in October, a federal judge in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union gave the justice department until next Friday to give a photo-by-photo rationale justifying their suppression. At the earliest, Judge Alvin Hellerstein will not decide on whether some or all of the redacted images are to be released publicly until January 20, when he will meet again with both sides.

At least parts of the US administration’s rationale will probably remain sealed from the public.

The decade-long saga of the photos comes to a head just as a scathing declassified summary of a report by Democrats on the senate intelligence committee provided new details about the CIA’s torture of suspected Al Qaeda militants detained between 2001 and 2007 and reignited calls for accountability and even prosecution of Bush-era officials. The report said nearly a quarter of those arrested were cases of mistaken identity or bad intelligence. Thirty-nine of the 119 detainees in the “rendition, detention and interrogation” programme were subjected to what the CIA calls “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Former CIA officials and its current director, John Brennan, have said that the years after 2001 required extraordinary measures, and that only a small number of interrogators exceeded the expanded legal bounds of detainee treatment permitted by the justice department after the September 11 attacks. No CIA or Bush administration official has faced punishment for the treatment of the CIA detainees, and a separate investigation into similar abuses by military personnel at US bases has seen only a handful of low-ranking soldiers prosecuted.

But the unreleased photos were taken from at least seven US military bases under the command of different officers during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of detainees were held, and proponents of their disclosure say they show that the abuse by military personnel was also a result of official policy.

Soldiers tried for the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said they were following orders from commanding officers, and one soldier who testified in 2005 said a CIA officer ordered him to “soften up” detainees.

“These photos we’re told show mistreatment from facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, not just Abu Ghraib, and I think they would once and for all prove that mistreatment at the hands of the military was widespread, not isolated,” said Alex Abdo, an ACLU attorney working on the lawsuit. “If we want to ensure that these abuses never reoccur then having some form of accountability is necessary.”

Mr Obama issued an executive action in 2009 outlawing the interrogation methods, but that can be reversed by a future president if legislation is not passed banning the methods. Mr Brennan, speaking on the senate committee report on Thursday, said that while the interrogation methods ware not being used any longer, “I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.”

The photos would be even more powerful than the words in the senate report, Mr Abdo said. “They would make clear more than anything could the nature of the misconduct that took place.”

The photos are reported to depict, among other abuses, the rape of a female detainee by a US soldier and the rape of an Iraqi boy by an army translator. In 2009, the US officer who led the investigation into abuse at Abu Ghraib, Major General Antonio Taguba, told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the unreleased photos “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency”.

In 2009, congress passed a law allowing the administration to keep the photos secret if the secretary of defence gave a certification, valid for three years, that their release would harm Americans. The last certification was made by the then defence secretary Leon Panetta in 2012.

But in August, Judge Hellerstein decided that a single justification for withholding all the photos – which he has seen – was insufficient, and that for the photos to remain secret until 2015, the government must prove for each individual photo how its release of would endanger national security. The justification must be grounded in the “snapshot” of 2012, when the last certification was made, but should take into account developments since then, the judge said.

With 1,600 US troops back in Iraq after a complete withdrawal in 2011, the government’s argument that the images could endanger lives might hold more weight. But opponents say the fact that detainees were tortured has been well known and Al Qaeda and ISIL militants are already highly motivated to kill Americans, especially as the US targets them with bombs in Iraq and Syria.

The argument that disclosures would put Americans at risk was questioned after the release of the senate report. “Terrorists might use the report’s re-identification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now,” Senator John McCain, a torture victim and rare Republican supporter of the report, said on Tuesday.

Critics also argue that a full accounting of the abusive practices would show that the US is serious about its pledge not to use them again, and that keeping them from the public would undermine such claims and allow terrorists to effectively prevent government transparency on its legacy of torture. “The logic that the evidence of misconduct is too powerful to release to the American public has it exactly backwards,” Mr Abdo said.

While the US judiciary has generally sided with Washington on national security issues, by demanding a more detailed justification, Judge Hellerstein — who has been presiding over the lawsuit since 2004 — may prove to be increasingly impatient with the government’s argument. He previously recommended redacted versions of the images that could be released, which the government accepted before blocking them.

National security legal experts say the release of the senate committee’s report summary, which has not yet triggered violent protests or attacks against US troops, could make it more difficult for the government to justify withholding the photos.

“I think they have a harder road to argue that there is a security problem that’s going to be there,” said Benjamin Davis, associate professor of law at the University of Toledo law school.

If the judge does rule to release the photos, the justice department lawyers will immediately appeal, Mr Davis said, and the case could reach the supreme court.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 25, 2014 12:29 pm

Pentagon Uses ISIS as Excuse to Keep Prisoner Abuse Photos Secret
Spurns Judge's Order for Photo-by-Photo Reasoning
by Jason Ditz, December 23, 2014

In the case related to the secrecy of 2,100 photos of prisoner abuse by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon flat out ignored the judge’s order to provide legal justifications on a case-by-case basis for the decade-old lawsuit.

Instead, the Pentagon is insisting that ISIS could conceivably use the photos to “incite” against the US, and that the photos “could be used to increase anti-American sentiment.”

The judge hasn’t responded to the filing, but since the Pentagon did the exact opposite of what he ordered them to do, providing a blanket excuse instead of individualized justifications, it’s hard to imagine he’ll react positively.

The ACLU has sought the release of the photos since 2004, and has been resisted by Presidents Bush and Obama. Congress made a law supporting their secrecy in 2009, but Judge Hellerstein said it couldn’t be used on such a large scale.




Pentagon cites ISIL threat for withholding prisoner abuse photos
Taimur Khan

December 24, 2014 Updated: December 24, 2014 12:14 AM

NEW YORK // The Pentagon has said it is not releasing decade-old photos showing abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq because they could be used by ISIL to incite “lone wolf” attacks in the west and endanger US military personnel.

Making the photos public “would facilitate the enemy’s ability to conduct information operations and could be used to increase anti-American sentiment,” the Pentagon said in a filing submitted to a federal court in Manhattan last Friday.

The more than 2,100 photo were taken at several US bases following the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and reportedly depict, among other abuses, the rape of women and a minor boy.

George W Bush’s administration blocked the release of the photos in 2004, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have used a variety of legal means to keep them hidden.

A law passed in 2009 allows the photos to be withheld for three years if the secretary of defence certifies that their release would harm Americans.

The last certification was made in 2012 by the then defence secretary Leon Panetta.

But in October, Alvin Hellerstein, the federal judge hearing the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2004, ordered the Pentagon to give a photo-by-photo rationale for keeping the images secret.

The Pentagon court filing, however, did not offer an individualised justification. Instead, Rear Admiral Sinclair Harris, vice director of operations for the joint staff at the Pentagon, said he “reviewed a representative sample of the photographs” and concluded that their release “in part or whole” would endanger US military personnel.

Rear Adm Harris said the danger had been heightened because of the deployment of about 3,000 US forces back to Iraq by late January to help a patchwork of Iraqi forces fight ISIL. The extremist group, in response, has called on supporters to attack “US personnel and interests both abroad and within … the United States”, he said.

In particular, the images would fuel ISIL’s slick online propaganda that Rear Adm Harris said had inspired a number of thwarted plots in the UK and Australia, as well as recent attacks in Canada that killed service members.

“The photographs are susceptible to use as propaganda to incite a public reaction and could be used as recruiting material to attract new members,” he said in the court filing, citing recent postings to militant online forums and quoting at length an article by a former detainee in Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language online magazine.

Transparency advocates argue that the abuse of detainees a decade ago is already well known and documented, and that ISIL and its supporters need little additional motivation to try and attack US targets.

They pointed to the release this month of the scathing redacted summary of a senate report on the CIA’s torture of suspected militants, which failed to draw a strong reaction in Arab and Muslim countries.

Critics also say that blocking the photos due to threats of violence gives the militants undue influence in the domestic debate about US government transparency on the torture and widespread abuse of detainees between 2001 and 2009.

Without a public reckoning of what happened, and holding those responsible to account, they say, Mr Obama’s 2009 executive action ordering an end to brutal detention and interrogation practices could be undone by a future president, and further erode US credibility and fuel anger.

“Now is the time when greater transparency is needed, not continued obfuscation,” said Alex Abdo, a lawyer for ACLU.

The justification is “in tension with President Obama’s recent statement that Sony should not have given in to pressure from whoever hacked its system and that that amounts to a veto on our First Amendment rights”, said Mr Abdo.

“In the exact same way, we give in to a terrorist veto when we censor photographs of grave governmental misconduct based on how our enemies might use that evidence.”

The ACLU will file a response to the Pentagon justification on January 9. Judge Hellerstein will then meet with both parties on January 20, when he may issue a ruling.

“We don’t think their showing satisfies the standards set out by the court and that’s what we’ll be arguing,” Mr Abdo said.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby slimmouse » Thu Dec 25, 2014 12:35 pm

Thanks for that slad.

The very threat that one tentacle of the demiurge created is now being cited as an excuse for not revealing another tentacle.

This should surely be in the onion thread?

You have to laugh at these fuckers sometimes....a lot.
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby Searcher08 » Fri Dec 26, 2014 5:48 pm

slimmouse » Thu Dec 25, 2014 4:35 pm wrote:Thanks for that slad.

The very threat that one tentacle of the demiurge created is now being cited as an excuse for not revealing another tentacle.

This should surely be in the onion thread?

You have to laugh at these fuckers sometimes....a lot.


Double-facepalm material, isnt it? Their pretzel logic reminds me of the old Aussie video :sun:
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Dec 26, 2014 6:54 pm

Question for those following this more closely:

Is this is the stash that Seymour Hersh saw?
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 27, 2014 11:51 am

according to WSWS it is.....but the jury seems to be out if he has really seen all 2000 photos


http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tort-m29.html
The rape of Iraqi boys by US military personnel is corroborated by other evidence. Journalist Seymour Hersh, who played a critical role in breaking the Abu Ghraib story in 2004, has evidently seen all of the photos, and is aware of video footage depicting rape. He has not written publicly on their content, but a 2004 speech he gave to the ACLU indicates the sheer horror of the US military’s methods:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby elfismiles » Mon Dec 29, 2014 1:42 am

:wallhead: :starz: 10 years :wallhead: 10 years :starz: :wallhead:

seemslikeadream » 27 Dec 2014 15:51 wrote:according to WSWS it is.....but the jury seems to be out if he has really seen all 2000 photos

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tort-m29.html
The rape of Iraqi boys by US military personnel is corroborated by other evidence. Journalist Seymour Hersh, who played a critical role in breaking the Abu Ghraib story in 2004, has evidently seen all of the photos, and is aware of video footage depicting rape. He has not written publicly on their content, but a 2004 speech he gave to the ACLU indicates the sheer horror of the US military’s methods:
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby zangtang » Mon Dec 29, 2014 1:26 pm

rape by flourescent light tube is ringing a bell.................

i have no idea if there's any corroboration for that, but you know when the ring of truth sounds more like a slow, dull thud? .

if it went as far as snuff porn videos.....prolly going to have to waterboard Rumsfield for them.

Just imagine that !.................
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 19, 2017 8:49 am

US must release Abu Ghraib photos, judge says
Reuters REUTERS
18 JAN 2017 AT 16:44 ET

Image
The U.S. Department of Defense must release a cache of photos showing how Army personnel treated detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and other sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan said the release was proper because departing Defense Secretary Ash Carter failed to show why publishing the photos would endanger Americans deployed outside the United States.

Hellerstein’s decision is a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil and veterans rights groups whose lawsuit seeking the photos under the federal Freedom of Information Act began in 2004.

Photos depicting abuse at Abu Ghraib began to emerge in 2004, with some detainees claiming to have endured physical and sexual abuse, electric shocks and mock executions.

The number of photos sought in the lawsuit has not been disclosed but has been estimated at roughly 2,000, according to the Congressional Record and court papers.

“Those photos, representing a sad episode in our history, are a matter of great public interest and historical importance, which should not, in a democracy like ours, be shielded from public view,” said Lawrence Lustberg, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “The court has wisely reaffirmed our nation’s commitment to open government.”

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan, whose office defended Carter’s decision, declined to comment.

After Hellerstein in March 2015 ordered the release of additional photos, Carter allowed the release of 198 but kept the remainder under wraps, citing a review of a “representative sample” by four high-ranking generals.

In Wednesday’s decision, Hellerstein said the U.S. troop presence in Iraq had fallen to about 5,000 from more than 100,000 at the start of the Obama administration, and that those remaining now serve as advisers rather than in combat.

The judge said that while risks remained, including that portions of Iraq had been “overrun” by the Islamic State, he could not blindly accept withholding the remaining photos.

“I take seriously the level of deference owed to the executive branch in the realm of national security decision making,” he wrote. “My complaint is that the executive has failed to articulate the reasons supporting its conclusion that release of the photos would endanger Americans deployed abroad.”

Hellerstein first ordered the release of photos in 2005, but Congress later authorized withholding photos whose release could endanger Americans.

The case is American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Department of Defense et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 04-04151.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/us-must ... udge-says/



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Postby NavnDansk » Tue Dec 18, 2007 10:57 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15270&hilit=Abu+Ghraib


ABU GHRAIB PRISONERS PACKED IN ICE WATER-FILLED GARBAGE CANS
Postby chlamor » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:26 pm
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16693&p=175315&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p175315


Wired publishes new Abu Ghraib photos
Postby professorpan » Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:01 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16417&p=168986&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p168986


250+ Iraqi Torture Victims Sue Military Contractor CACI
Postby AlicetheKurious » Fri Dec 21, 2007 8:53 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15336&p=155853&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p155853


Naomi Wolf: What Is Probably in the Missing Tapes
Postby professorpan » Sat Dec 15, 2007 3:56 pm
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15213&p=154471&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p154471


Waterboarding is torture
Postby professorpan » Thu Nov 01, 2007 10:27 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14293&hilit=Abu+Ghraib


BBC: Abu Ghraib whistleblower's ordeal [outed by Rumsfeld]
Postby MacCruiskeen » Sun Aug 05, 2007 1:31 pm
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12715&p=124008&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p124008


ACLU gains new torture documents
Postby professorpan » Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:31 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10218&p=99100&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p99100


Jose Padilla's Mind has been Effectively Erased
Postby Gouda » Thu Dec 21, 2006 7:13 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9957&p=95888&hilit=Abu+Ghraib#p95888
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 21, 2017 12:02 am

New CIA Docs Offer Torture Details, Show Internal Debate

Some in CIA Feared Psychologist Contractors Had Disregard for Ethics

by Jason Ditz, January 19, 2017

Despite intense efforts to keep most of the details of their use of torture secret over recent years, the CIA’s most recent release of documents included several which shed new light on the practice of torture, as well as underscoring an intense internal debate within the agency about the policy.

Among these were cables about the torture of Abu Zubaydah, revealing he was waterboarded 83 different times in a single month, and kept in a small box to small for him to sit up in for hours on end to induce pain. It also revealed there was a formal policy of smacking him repeatedly head-first into walls, with torturers admonished to put a rolled up towel behind his neck to prevent permanent neck injuries.

The Zubaydah memos are all very clinical, saying things like “water treatment was applied” and that he didn’t offer any new intelligence, before concluding after weeks of vicious abuse that he had not provided “significant actionable intelligence” beyond what they got pre-torture, and that he probably didn’t have anything new to give them.

All of this torture was ongoing under the oversight of a pair of contracted psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, who are now facing a lawsuit over their designing of the torture program. CIA officials weren’t nearly as unanimous in supporting the program as they’ve been presented by some, however.

Other documents show internal emails from the CIA’s own medical staff warning that the behavior was indefensible, and that the two contractors showed a “blatant disregard for ethics” in their operation of the program. They also reveal a faction battle between the CIA Counterterrorism Center, which contracted the two men, and the Office of Medical Services, who warned the techniques proposed would “come back to haunt us.”

The collection also grimly includes accounts of the final hours of Gul Rahman, a detainee who died in CIA custody in 2002, with Jessen arguing that Rahman was so physically strong that there would be no way to “break” him while respecting the Geneva Convention.

Since that apparently was no obstacle, Rahman had a hood put over his head and was dragged out of his cell and beaten, which they deccided was “nothing that required treatment.” He was then doused with water and left in a freezing cold sell called the Salt Pit. This is followed by prison records of guards checking Rahman every night to see if he was still alive, and a single entry at the end concluding that he’d finally died.
http://news.antiwar.com/2017/01/19/new- ... al-debate/



Judge hints at trial for harsh interrogation suit

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of detainees who were allegedly tortured


A federal judge said Thursday that he’s inclined to allow a trial for a suit against two Spokane psychologists who designed the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods. (Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press, April 2016)

By Nicholas Geranios
The Associated Press
JAN. 20, 2017


SPOKANE — Psychologists who designed the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods for the war on terror want a lawsuit from three former detainees dismissed, but a federal judge said Thursday that he was inclined to allow it to move to a trial that was expected to include classified ­information.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the psychologists on behalf of Gul Rahman, who died in custody, and Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who claim they were tortured in CIA prisons. The lawsuit says interrogation methods such as waterboarding were developed by James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, whose Spokane company contracted with the CIA.

U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush heard arguments on whether Mitchell and Jessen acted as agents of the federal government, which could make them immune from lawsuits, or as independent contractors. Lawyers for both sides also ­debated whether the former detainees were considered enemy combatants, blocking them from pursuing a claim.

“They were explicitly identified as enemy combatants,” said James Smith, a lawyer for the psychologists. “If an individual supports the Taliban, they are an enemy combatant.”

But Dror Ladin, an attorney for the ACLU in New York City, said none of the three officially was found to be an enemy combatant. Even so, Rahman died two weeks after being detained.

“He was left to die of hypothermia chained to a floor in a dungeon,” Ladin said. “He was not an ­enemy combatant.”

The other two detainees never were charged with any crimes and now are free.

The judge said he would issue a written decision later but added, “I am inclined to deny the motion to dismiss.” A trial is set for June.

Mitchell and Jessen designed the interrogation methods and took part in sessions with CIA prisoners, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the torture program.

Techniques included slamming the three men into walls, stuffing them inside coffinlike boxes, ­exposing them to ­extreme temperatures, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture, chaining them in stress positions designed for pain, and keeping them awake for days, the ACLU said.

The psychologists have said in court documents that they used harsh ­tactics but denied allegations of torture and war crimes. “Every action taken by our clients was taken at the direction of the principal, which was the United States of America,” said Smith, lawyer for Mitchell and Jessen.

But the ACLU’s attorney argued that the psychologists were independent contractors, paid millions of dollars for their work, and could face lawsuits.

“Independent contractors are not ordinarily agents,” Ladin said.

The Justice Department got involved in the case to represent the government’s interests in keeping classified information secret but has not tried to block the lawsuit. Experts called the government’s stance unprecedented but also a ­recognition that a once-­secret program now largely is out in the open.

The defendants founded Mitchell, Jessen & Associates in Spokane in 2005 and contracted with the CIA to run the interrogation program. The government paid the company $81 million ­during a period of several years.
http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/ ... t.html.csp



Documentary evidence threatens UK government in Libyan rendition and torture case
JANUARY 18TH, 2017 Tom Coburg TOM COBURG GLOBAL

Documentary evidence threatens UK government in Libyan rendition and torture caseGLOBAL
The Supreme Court has ruled that the British government can be sued by a Libyan national. Abdel Hakim Belhadj claims he was subject to rendition, torture and was held prisoner with the full co-operation of British authorities. Belhadj can proceed with litigation against former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, former senior MI6 official Sir Mark Allen, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and the UK security services.

This case has dragged on for years because the government has refused to offer an apology to Belhadj and his wife. But there appears to be significant evidence relating to the allegations.

Rendition and torture allegations

Belhadj – also known as Abdullah al-Sadiq – alleges that he and his wife Fatima Bouchar were abducted and tortured with the approval of the British authorities. He claims they were secretly flown to Tripoli, where Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces tortured them.

In an interview with The Independent, Belhadj describes how three British agents interrogated him over two sessions. The two men and a woman questioned him for two hours at a time. Their questions focused on members of the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group). This was a group based in the UK, with alleged links to al-Qaeda.

Litigation

Belhadj received amnesty in March 2010.

In January 2012, Belhadj and Sami al-Saadi (another kidnapped Libyan) sued Sir Mark Allen, MI6’s former head of counterterrorism, for civil damages. (Here is the original Letter of Claim Against UK Government [pdf] and Letter of Claim Against Sir Mark Allen [pdf].)

In April 2012, Belhadj and his wife sued former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. They alleged UK complicity in the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of Thai, US and Libyan officials. In December 2012, the British government paid al-Saadi £2.23m to settle his lawsuit without admitting liability.

In November 2014, the Court of Appeal ruled that the case against Jack Straw and Mark Allen could be heard in an English court. The latest ruling by the Supreme Court confirmed this decision.

The evidence available

Documents [pdf, pp 90/91] found in Tripoli confirm that the British government was directly involved in assisting the Gaddafi regime to take custody of al-Sadiq (Belhadj).

A memorandum [pdf, p98], dated 4 March 2004, from the CIA to the Libyan government states:

[w]e are working energetically with the Malaysian government to effect the extradition of Abdullah al-Sadiq from Malaysia. The Malaysians have promised to cooperate and arrange for Sadiq’s transfer to our custody.
In March 2004, Mark Allen (also known as ‘M’), wrote to Libya’s notorious spy chief Moussa (Musa) Koussa, as follows:

Most importantly, I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq [Belhadj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week… Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu ‘Abd Allah through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on Abu ‘Abd Allah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us.
Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence from 1994 to 2009.

More evidence

Other documents [pdf], sourced in 2011 in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch, relate to the rendition arrangements of Belhadj and his wife.

These documents describe US offers to transfer, or render, at least four detainees into Libyan custody, one with the active participation of the UK. They also detail US requests for detention and interrogation of other suspects. Along with UK requests for information about terrorism suspects and the sharing of information about Libyans living in the UK.

Image

One document included long lists of questions which MI5 and MI6 had request that Libyan interrogators ask Belhadj. The Daily Mail published a redacted version of this document. Below is the unredacted leaked copy:

Image

Jack Straw has denied all knowledge of what happened to Belhadj and his wife, saying:

I was never in any way complicit in the unlawful rendition or detention of anyone by other states.
Assuming litigation proceeds, the hearings could prove embarrassing for the British government. Allegations of US rendition and torture may also come up in the hearings.
http://www.thecanary.co/2017/01/18/docu ... ture-case/



C.I.A. Torture Detailed in Newly Disclosed Documents
By SHERI FINK, JAMES RISEN and CHARLIE SAVAGEJAN. 19, 2017


Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Va. Credit Larry Downing/Reuters
When C.I.A. interrogators in a Thailand prison sent a cable to agency headquarters recounting that they had been slamming Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect, against a wall, they emphasized that they were obeying instructions to take steps to prevent his injury, like putting a rolled-up towel behind his neck, and described the practice in detached terms.

“Subject was walled with the question, ‘What is it that you do not want us to know?’” reported a cable from Aug. 5, 2002, part of a trove of newly disclosed documents about the agency’s now-defunct “enhanced interrogation” program. “Subject continued to deny that he had any information.”

From the perspective of Mr. Zubaydah — whom interrogators eventually conceded had no additional information, contrary to their suspicions at the time — the experience felt far different.

“He kept banging me against the wall,” Mr. Zubaydah told his lawyer in 2008, in a narrative that has now been declassified. “Given the intensity of the banging that was strongly hitting my head I fell down on the floor with each banging. I felt for few instants that I was unable to see anything, let alone the short chains that prevented me from standing tall. And every time I fell he would drag me with the towel which caused bleeding in my neck.”

DOCUMENT
Excerpts From Newly Disclosed Documents on C.I.A. Torture
C.I.A. cables on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected terrorist, and his recollections of those experiences provided to his lawyers.


OPEN DOCUMENT
Batches of newly disclosed documents about the Central Intelligence Agency’s defunct torture program are providing new details about its practices of slamming terrorism suspects into walls, confining them in coffinlike boxes and subjecting them to waterboarding — as well as internal disputes over whether two psychologists who designed the program were competent.

The release of the newly available primary documents, which include information not discussed in a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the C.I.A. torture program that was released in 2014, comes at the same time as an urgent legal battle is unfolding over the potential fate of the still-classified, 6,700-page full version of that report.

Lawyers for two detainees who were subjected to the C.I.A.’s most extreme “enhanced” interrogation techniques, Mr. Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the deadly October 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole, are asking federal judges to order the executive branch to deposit a copy of the full report with the judiciary to ensure that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans do not destroy it. But the Obama administration, in its waning hours, is fighting that idea.

On Thursday, the judge overseeing Mr. Zubaydah’s habeas corpus case, Emmet G. Sullivan, ordered the United States government to “immediately” preserve a complete, unredacted copy of the Senate report and deposit it with the court for secure storage by Feb. 10.

Photo

Newly disclosed documents recount the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect.
Against that backdrop, the two sets of newly available documents present a vivid contrast in perspectives, as the C.I.A. cables recount in bloodless bureaucratese the infliction of techniques that Mr. Zubaydah recalled experiencing in harrowing terms.

For example, when interrogators at a C.I.A. black site prison in Thailand confined Mr. Zubaydah in a cramped box on Aug. 5, 2002, they observed to headquarters that he showed “signs of distress,” according to one of the cables from a group the government declassified as part of a lawsuit against the psychologists who designed the program. The lawsuit is being brought by detainees represented by lawyers including from the American Civil Liberties Union. The A.C.L.U. provided the documents to The New York Times.

Mr. Zubaydah remembered the box experience in more vivid terms.

“I felt I was going to explode from bending my legs and my back and from being unable to spread them not even for short instants,” he wrote to his lawyers in 2008, noting that the box was so short and tight he could not sit up or change positions. “The very strong pain made me scream unconsciously.”

Other C.I.A. cables also clinically recount applying torture methods like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding. (Previously disclosed documents and the Senate report executive summary had already discussed Mr. Zubaydah’s waterboarding in extensive detail, including that he was subjected to the treatment 83 times in one month.) The contemporaneous cables describe him crying, but generally use bland descriptions, like: “Water treatment was applied.”

Photo

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the American destroyer Cole. Credit ABC, via Associated Press
For Mr. Zubaydah, it felt as if he was “dying.” “They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen.”

Mr. Zubaydah also described experiencing what he thought were persistent health consequences of his torture, including severe headaches and seizures. Many other detainees experienced lasting harm after harsh treatment in American custody, including post-traumatic stress disorder, a recent New York Times investigation found.

Another group of documents produced in discovery from that lawsuit, first provided by the A.C.L.U. to The Washington Post, showed that in mid-2003, about a year after the agency hired the two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, to design a torture regimen for Mr. Zubaydah, unidentified C.I.A. employees raised sharp questions about their ethics and competence to judge whether the techniques they had orchestrated were harmful or effective.

While other documents, including the Senate report summary, have shown that there were internal concerns about relying so heavily on the two psychologists, the newly available documents add texture to that history.

Photo

The American destroyer Cole after it was attacked in Yemen in 2000. Credit Reuters
For example, a June 2003 message that appears to have been sent by an official representing a “Renditions and Detainees Group” at the C.I.A., which had assumed control of Mr. Mitchell’s and Mr. Jessen’s activities, criticized the psychologists’ “arrogance and narcissism” and “blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues.” But the same message also recommended that the two psychologists be assigned to develop a code of ethics and standards for interrogators. “We have identified this as a major gap in our program,” the official wrote.

A lawyer for the psychologists, Henry F. Schuelke III, declined to comment.

The newly available files supplement the publicly available historical record about the torture program, intensifying questions about whether the public will ever see the full fruits of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation — the result of years of combing and contextualizing millions of pages of government documents by committee staff members.

Democrats raised fears last month that the incoming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has voiced support for the outlawed interrogation methods detailed in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, could cause all copies of the document to be “hidden indefinitely, or destroyed.”

In 2015, after Republicans took control of the Senate and the Intelligence Committee, they asked President Obama to return all copies of the full report, which former Democratic senators have said contains “volumes of new information” that were not made public when a 500-page executive summary was disclosed in 2014.

LASTING SCARS
Articles in this series examine the American legacy of brutal interrogations.


How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

Secret Documents Show a Tortured Prisoner's Descent

Memories of a Secret C.I.A. Prison
Mr. Obama did not comply with that request, and in December of last year, he notified the Senate that he was including a copy of the full, still-classified report in his presidential records that would be deposited at the National Archives. But Michel Paradis, a lawyer for Mr. Nashiri, argued that Mr. Obama’s decision about his presidential records was insufficient, because Mr. Trump might seek to withdraw the report from the archives and destroy it.

Last week, in response to a request by Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers to secure a copy of the full report in the hands of the judiciary, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Obama administration to provide a copy to the court’s security officer. (Lawyers for Mr. Zubaydah are separately making the same request.)

But in court filings, the Obama administration asked Judge Lamberth to reconsider, making two arguments: Preserving it would interfere with congressional-executive branch relations, and giving a copy to the court was unnecessary in part because of Mr. Obama’s archived copy. It also suggested that the executive branch would appeal if the judge did not change his mind.

On Thursday afternoon, Judge Lamberth refused, saying in a terse, two-page order that the court was “obliged” to protect Mr. Nashiri’s possible right to access the report and saying that nothing had changed since he issued the original, “crystal clear” order. He threatened to hold the executive branch in contempt if it did not comply, although he did not set a specific deadline.

The C.I.A. cables revealed other potentially important new details. For example, detainees at C.I.A. prisons have long claimed that they were injected with unknown drugs against their consent, which had powerful effects on them — something that medical experts have denounced as unethical. While previously released documents from 2004 said that C.I.A. prisoners could be sedated as a last resort, a newly released cable describes a different practice.

In April 2002, C.I.A. personnel at an interrogation site wrote that they planned to transport a detainee — apparently Mr. Zubaydah — “in a state of pharmaceutical unconsciousness to decrease potential security concerns as well as to maximize the intended effect of disorienting” him. It is unclear from the documents whether the C.I.A. followed through.

The new information is consistent with the conclusion of the Senate committee’s torture report that the C.I.A.’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was not effective in acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

On Aug. 18, 2002, after 15 days during which Mr. Zubaydah was repeatedly waterboarded, kept for hours in small boxes, pushed into walls and threatened, the interrogators sent a cable to headquarters stating their conclusions. The prisoner “has not provided significant actionable info beyond previously provided details,” they wrote.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 11:45 am

The CIA’s latest dump of declassified documents makes clear how far the US has come on torture


WRITTEN BY
Daniel R. DePetris
OBSESSION

"America First"
4 hours ago
More than two years ago, on December 13, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its exhaustive, five-year, $40 million study on the ins-and-outs of the CIA’s former enhanced interrogation program. The report, to put it mildly, was a bombshell and the biggest public embarrassment for the intelligence community since the Iraq WMD fiasco.
The roughly 500-page executive summary was a shot across the bow of the CIA leadership, explaining in gut-wrenching detail the waterboarding, facial-slapping, walling, and cramped confinement that terrorist suspects in US custody experienced on a near daily basis. And as it turns out, those techniques were largely useless according to the report: “The Committee finds, based on a review of CIA interrogation records, that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation.”
Courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, additional information has been released to the public about the interrogation program that created such an outcry that the CIA is still trying to fully recover from the stink of what any impartial observer of the program would call torture.
Indeed, ten years since the CIA stopped using waterboarding on detainees and eight years since former president Barack Obama ordered the closure of the agency’s black sites, the new documents expose in meticulous detail how systemic the waterboarding and walling sessions were—and how the two psychologists who designed the interrogation plans were increasingly distrusted by their colleagues.
The dossier published by the New York Times last week is a stark comparison between the step-by-step bureaucratic language that CIA interrogators used to describe their sessions with Al-Qaeda detainees Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and the harrowing, first-person description that both men provided to their lawyers about that experience.
After reading the 28 pages of internal CIA communications, you’ll quickly discover a pattern of intensive confinement in small boxes for hours at a time, stress positions for hours at a time, physical berating sprinkled with the most basic questions that an interrogator could ask, and finally the use of the waterboard. After the waterboard is utilized, the detainee is led back into the “large confinement box” for several hours for a break—that is, of course, if you consider being cramped into a dark box, chained, and unable to move, a break. It’s all a very sinister exercise, one that was that blessed by the Bush administration’s Justice Department as perfectly legal since Al-Qaeda detainees didn’t have protections under the Geneva Convention.
There really aren’t words to accurately describe how the enhanced interrogation program was administered, so here is an excerpt:
“Subject was elevated as necessary in order to clear his air passage. Subject continued to whimper. The interrogators told subject that they had been patient while talking to him for several days, that it was time to say the truth, that we wanted to know what he knew when he was captured, and what he knew that Mukhtar was up to. Subject responded that if he knew the target, he would have told them. Subject raised his own plan of using remote control devices. The interrogators stopped subject’s denials and applied the water treatment, and told subject that they would not let subject drown, and that unless he provided the information, he had better get used to it. Subject continued crying and whimpering.”
Needless to say, after fifteen days of administering these types of techniques, the CIA team on the ground reported to headquarters that it was their assessment that Zubyadah didn’t possess any additional information that would be useful to US counterterrorism officials. Four years after these techniques were applied, he would be transferred to Guantanamo for indefinite detention. Last August, Zubaydah pleaded for his release, but the Periodic Review Board would rule less than a month later that Zubaydah will remain behind bars, citing his “past involvement in terrorist activity to include probably serving as one of Usama bin Laden’s most trusted facilitators.”
To its credit, the CIA—indeed the US government at large—has come a long way from those early days in 2002 and 2003, when holding prisoners in a dark cell for hours on end was just the normal cost of doing the nation’s dirty business of preventing the next terrorist attack on the US homeland. The agency has learned an incredible deal from its recent history, the least of which is that torturing men under its custody for information that the prisoners didn’t possess to begin with is a public relations fiasco and directly contrary to the values that Washington hopes to instill in other societies around the world.

Notwithstanding president Donald Trump’s earlier boasts about strapping terrorists to a gurney and leveraging these same interrogation practices again, the chances of US government personnel waterboarding anybody every again is slim to none; for one, it’s now against the law. Secondly, Trump’s own Director-designate of the CIA has commented that there is no way he would follow through if Trump ordered waterboarding again (although Mike Pompeo’s written answers seem to leave some legroom on the question). And finally, the CIA rank-and-file would strongly resist re-embrace a tactic that caused their agency so much international shame that it is still trying to turn the page on that time-period.
If the latest cache of documents provides a lesson for US national security officials, it is this: Emotion should never trump cold-hearted reason. Before making a decision that may be difficult to take back, think about the strategic and reputational consequences that the decision may have. Because if the decision proves to be the wrong one, the agency that you work for and the country that you seek to defend may not recover for a very long time.
https://qz.com/895512/the-cias-latest-d ... n-torture/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Posts: 32090
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 1:30 pm

Liz Cheney Wants to Make Torture Great Again

She's back in Washington, and she's eager to pick up where her dad left off.

TIM MURPHYJAN/FEB 2017 ISSUE


Jenna Vonhofe/Casper Star-Tribune/AP
When Liz Cheney returned to her ancestral home state of Wyoming in 2012, she expected to be greeted as a liberator. She moved into a house in Jackson Hole, not far from her parents, Dick and Lynne; she bought a horse for her 13-year-old daughter; and she began laying the foundation for a Senate run.

But in the rush to jump-start her political career, Cheney neglected to inform the man she was angling to replace—Mike Enzi, her father's fly-fishing buddy and the state's senior senator. Enzi had been planning to retire after 2014, and had Cheney asked for his blessing, he might have stepped aside. When she surprised him by jumping into the race, he decided his retirement could wait.

Things descended from there. A local newspaper revealed that Cheney had obtained a Wyoming fishing license without fulfilling the residency requirements. Robo­calls alleged that she supported same-sex marriage, prompting her to proclaim that she did not, and provoking her sister, Mary, who is gay, to denounce her on Facebook and cancel their Christmas plans. Cheney found herself in the crosshairs of a bitter insurgency with few allies on her side. She dropped out of the race before the primary.

Lesson learned. In November, bolstered by a few mended fences and backed by family friends such as Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney easily won her race to succeed retiring Republican Rep. Cynthia Lummis for Wyoming's lone House seat, which was once held by her dad. After eight long years in exile, the Cheneys are back in government, and it might be a while before they go away again.

Cheney, a veteran of the Bush administration who has inherited her father's hawkish views, is returning to a Washington, DC, far different from the one the former vice president left eight years ago. After the missing weapons of mass destruction, the Iraqi insurgency, Abu Ghraib, and the other foreign policy and national security fiascoes of the 2000s, neoconservatives lost their grip on the Republican Party. President Barack Obama's two terms gave rise to a new kind of anti-interventionist Republican, such as Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul (dubbed "wacko birds" by Sen. John McCain), who opposed intervention in Libya and Syria and criticized the growth of the surveillance state. The 2016 Republican presidential primary, with Cruz and Paul on one side and Sen. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush on the other, was supposed to settle the question of what kind of foreign policy Republicans would push going forward.

Then Donald Trump blew up everything. With Trump, the GOP coalesced around a candidate who'd lambasted George W. Bush for invading Iraq (despite once supporting the invasion) and flirted with 9/11 truthers. He played footsie with Vladimir Putin and, according to the National Security Agency's director, got an intentional boost from Russian hacking—all while chastising Hillary Clinton for not being tough enough. He opposed military intervention in Syria but promised to "bomb the shit" out of ISIS and, for good measure, to take its oil. He enthusiastically defended torture and said Edward Snowden should be killed. Several veterans of the Bush administration, including Colin Powell, endorsed Clinton. (The ex-president himself said he did not vote for Trump.)

Unlike many members of the Bush administration, Cheney was also an unabashed supporter of Donald Trump.
Yet the Cheneys' politics are poised to make at least a partial comeback under Trump. After the election, old hawks and Bushies such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former CIA head James Woolsey, and former UN Ambassador John Bolton were floated for roles in the new administration. And Liz Cheney is not likely to sit on the sidelines. Even as her father's dark shadow receded after 2008, she emerged as one of Obama's most relentless national security critics. With a fervor that felt personal, she pilloried the president for changing course on torture and Iraq. But unlike many members of the Bush administration, Cheney was also an unabashed supporter of Trump, embracing some of his more heretical views on trade and immigration and warning that Clinton was little more than a "felon." In her first week on Capitol Hill, she has emerged as one of the most vocal defenders of President Trump's plan to bring back torture. She may just be a bridge by which the neocon establishment returns from exile.

Although her campaign ads touted her family's deep Western roots, Cheney spent all but two years of her childhood in the suburbs of northern Virginia. As girls, she and Mary played in the White House, stealing candy from the secretary of President Gerald Ford's chief of staff—Rumsfeld, then serving as their dad's boss. She returned to Wyoming with her family during election season and was campaigning for Republican candidates by the time she was eight years old.

When she arrived at Colorado College in 1984, Cheney was firmly molded in her father's image. Her views made her an outlier on a liberal campus. She helped launch a conservative students union and a right-wing publication called the Disparaging Eye. During a polarizing stint as the opinions editor at the student newspaper, Cheney irked her classmates by adding an American flag to the masthead, and she wrote earnest op-eds supporting the Contras and assailing the campus campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa.

Her senior political science thesis, "Evolution of Presidential War Powers," argued that Congress had only limited authority to restrain the executive branch on matters of military intervention. "The president's duty to protect national security sometimes comes before his responsibility to keep Congress informed," she wrote. A decade and a half later, the Bush-Cheney administration would take much the same position.

After college, Cheney entered the family business, taking a job at the US Agency for International Development during the first Bush administration and working under the direction of Richard Armitage, a future architect of the invasion of Iraq. When Dick Cheney chose himself as George W. Bush's running mate in 2000, Liz left her job in international finance to join the campaign. And in 2002, as the second Bush administration was gearing up for its dramatic attempt to remake the Middle East, Liz joined the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary focusing on the Near East. Her signature project was the $25 million Middle East Partnership Initiative, which doled out money for education and human rights. The vice president, who preferred his nation-building efforts with a few more explosions, dubbed her "my left-wing daughter."

But if anything, she was just as much of a hardliner as he was. According to a recent biography, George H.W. Bush called Liz "tough" and speculated that she'd pushed her father to become even more hawkish.

It was her work after leaving office that may offer the best preview of why neoconservatives are so excited that Liz Cheney is back. Following the 2008 election, many of the Bush administration's leading lights went into a sort of self-enforced hibernation. Save for a few forceful speeches trashing Obama, Dick Cheney retreated to Jackson Hole to fly-fish in peace. Into the void stepped Liz.

Her first splash came three months after the inauguration, when the Justice Department released new information on the Bush administration's use of torture. Cheney took the move, along with Obama's efforts to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, as a personal insult to her family's legacy. On cable news programs and at conservative conferences, Cheney became her father's defender in chief. "When you see the current administration making decisions that really do have the potential to make us less safe, in those circumstances, I would say the vice president doesn't think that there's an obligation to be silent," she said in her fiery debut as a conservative talking head on MSNBC. "There are important reasons why we put policies in place. They clearly kept us safe for seven years." She co-authored her dad's memoir, a spirited defense of his tenure as one of America's least popular vice presidents, and even half-seriously floated him as a possible presidential candidate.

But some of Dick Cheney's biggest fans, like Rove, were speculating about Liz's political prospects. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol suggested that she run for president. "I was excited about Palin; I'm more excited about Liz," the neoconservative Michael Goldfarb told New York magazine.

With Kristol, a former McCain staffer, and the sister of a man who was killed on 9/11, Cheney formed a dark-money outfit called Keep America Safe, which sought to paint Obama as weak on security. One of the group's first ads bashed Attorney General Eric Holder for hiring attorneys who had once defended Guantanamo detainees. The spot referred to the lawyers as the "Al Qaeda 7" and asked, "Whose values do they share?" as b-roll of someone who looked like Osama bin Laden played in the background. It was like 2004 all over again.

Now, Cheney is likely to emerge as one of the most assertive insiders trying to harness the new president's bluster and contradictory promises. "She can be an important voice for a traditional Republican foreign policy focused on standing up to tyrants and promoting democracy abroad," says Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a supporter of the Bush administration's overseas adventures. "I hope that she and other mainstream Republicans can steer President Trump away from the isolationist and protectionist approach he advocated on the campaign trail."

The chaos of the Trump campaign shattered some of the party's long-held tenets, but neocon dead-enders who see the president as a blank slate sense an opportunity to return to influence. Cheney has already begun assembling a coalition of the willing. In the final days of the election, she started writing personal checks to Republican candidates in swing districts, future colleagues who just might remember the favor sometime in the near future. Even a Cheney can dabble in soft power now and then.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... mp-torture
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby Grizzly » Fri Jan 27, 2017 6:48 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 20, 2017 3:09 pm

U.S. Military And CIA Leaders May Be Investigated For War Crimes
11/18/2017 09:37 am ET Updated 2 days ago

HISHAM IBRAHIM VIA GETTY IMAGES
130
On November 3, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) informed the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber, ”[T]here is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan.”

In what Amnesty International’s Solomon Sacco called a “seminal moment for the ICC,” Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked the court for authorization to commence an investigation that would focus on US military and CIA leaders, as well as Taliban and Afghan officials.

Bensouda wrote in a November 14, 2016, report that her preliminary examination revealed “a reasonable basis to believe” the “war crimes of torture and ill-treatment” had been committed “by US military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, principally in the 2003-2004 period, although allegedly continuing in some cases until 2014.”

The chief prosecutor noted the alleged crimes by the CIA and US armed forces “were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals,” but rather were “part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ from detainees.” She added there was “reason to believe” that crimes were “committed in the furtherance of a policy or policies ... which would support US objectives in the conflict of Afghanistan.”

In accordance with its Rome Statute, the ICC only asserts jurisdiction over people whose home country is unwilling or unable to bring them to justice. In explaining why this war crimes investigation falls under the ICC’s jurisdiction, Bensouda wrote that the US Department of Justice investigations regarding ill-treatment of 101 detainees were limited to whether interrogation techniques used by CIA interrogators were unauthorized and violated criminal statutes. The US Attorney General (AG) said the Justice Department would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the guidance provided by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The AG investigated only two incidents and found the evidence insufficient to obtain convictions. In one case, Gul Rahman froze to death after being stripped and shackled to a cold cement floor in the secret Afghan prison known as the Salt Pit. In the other, Manadel al-Jamadi died in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison after he was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists which were bound behind his back. Former military policeman Tony Diaz, who witnessed al-Jamadi’s torture, said that blood gushed from his mouth like “a faucet had turned on” when he was lowered to the ground. A military autopsy concluded that al-Jamadi’s death was a homicide. However, the AG ultimately refused to prosecute the Bush officials responsible for the torture and deaths of those two men.

In 2008, ABC News reported that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and John Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. George W. Bush admitted in his 2010 memoir that he authorized waterboarding. Cheney, Rice and John Yoo - author of the OLC’s most egregious torture memos - have made similar admissions.

Were the ICC to pursue its investigation, the United States, which is not a party to the Rome Statute, would very likely refuse to relinquish any US person to the ICC. During the Bush administration, Congress passed the American Service-Members Protection Act, which says if US persons are sent to the ICC in The Hague, the US military can forcibly extract them. The act also restricts US cooperation with the ICC and prohibits military assistance to states parties to the Rome Statute unless they sign bilateral immunity agreements with the US.

States which sign these “Article 98” agreements ― referring to the section of the Rome Statute that addresses treaties between countries ― pledge not to hand over US nationals to the ICC. The United States has reportedly extracted those agreements from over 100 countries ― primarily small nations, or fragile democracies with weak economies. Moreover, the US government has withdrawn military aid from several nations that refused to be coerced into signing them.

However, under the Rome Statute, the ICC can take jurisdiction over a national of even a non-party state if he or she commits a crime in a state party’s territory. The US vehemently objects to this, but it’s nothing new. Under well-established principles of international law, the crimes being prosecuted in the ICC ― genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity ― are crimes of universal jurisdiction.

The doctrine of universal jurisdiction permits any country to try foreign nationals for the most egregious crimes, even without any direct relationship to the prosecuting country. That means other nations can bring US leaders to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Indeed, the United States has asserted jurisdiction over foreign nationals in anti-terrorism, anti-narcotics trafficking, torture and war crimes cases. The US government tried, convicted and sentenced Charles “Chuckie” Taylor Jr. to federal prison for torture committed in Liberia. Israel tried, convicted and executed Adolph Eichmann for his crimes during the Holocaust.

There will be strong political pressure to avoid liability for US leaders. But Bensouda has undoubtedly withstood heavy pressure by asking the court to approve an investigation into crimes committed in Afghanistan. She also invariably faced considerable pushback for opening a preliminary examination in January 2015 of possible war crimes committed by Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. Bensouda is expected to announce the results of that examination in December.

The ICC has been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on African leaders. This is apparently changing with possible investigations into the conflicts in Afghanistan and Palestine.

If a full investigation of US officials proceeds as requested, it “would send a clear signal to the Trump administration and other countries around the world that torture is categorically prohibited, even in times of war, and there will be consequences for authorizing and committing acts of torture,” according to Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared he would “immediately” resume waterboarding and would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” because the United States is facing a “barbaric” enemy. He labeled waterboarding a “minor form” of interrogation.

“The long overdue message that no one is above the law is particularly important now, as the Trump administration ramps up military machinations in Afghanistan and embraces the endless war with no plan in sight,” Katherine Gallagher, a senior lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement.



Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a member of the national advisory board of Veterans for Peace. The second, updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was published in November.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us ... mg00000004
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Re: Justice Department’s Torture Photo Deadline Looms

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 28, 2019 10:58 am

Something Classified Was Scheduled at Guantánamo. A Judge Stopped It.
Published Sept. 26, 2019

Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, in a photo provided by his lawyers, at Guantánamo Bay in 2019.
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Something secret was supposed to start on Saturday related to the case of a Malaysian prisoner who has been held as a terror suspect for 13 years at Guantánamo Bay.

Then a federal judge put a stop to it following a classified hearing. The judge did not say what it was or why he had blocked it, other than to note that he was making his order public so that the people involved did not arrive for the secret proceeding only to find that it had been canceled.

“The defendants are restrained from conducting the two proceedings that are scheduled to commence on September 28, 2019 in a certain location,” Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., wrote in an order dated last Friday but released this week. “We are issuing this order today as a courtesy to petitioner and defendants as it may affect their travel or logistical arrangements.”
Judge Bates’s reasoning for issuing the order is classified, as were all the associated filings, including an emergency habeas corpus petition filed by military and civilian lawyers for the defendant, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep.
But people with general knowledge of what was to take place said military commission prosecutors and defense lawyers for Mr. Bin Lep and two other Southeast Asian men had Defense Department approval to travel to both an undisclosed overseas location as well as Guantánamo to carry out the mysterious proceedings.

Mr. Bin Lep, 42, is a Malaysian man whom the United States intelligence community considers a lieutenant to an Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali, 55, who is in turn described as “an operational mastermind” of the Southeast Asian extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah. United States and Thai security forces captured Mr. Hambali, Mr. Bin Lep and another Malaysian man, Mohd Farik Bin Amin, 44, in 2003. They spent three years in the secret overseas prison network of the C.I.A. before they were transferred to Guantánamo Bay prison in 2006.
Pentagon prosecutors have repeatedly tried, and failed, to charge Mr. Hambali, Mr. Bin Lep and Mr. Bin Amin since 2017. Three successive overseers of the military commissions, people who hold the title of convening authority, have refused to approve the case. In the meantime, the three men are held as Law of War prisoners, essentially irregular P.O.W.s in the war on terror.
Two people with knowledge of the case said there was an effort to take sworn statements in the case but would not say on whose authority, since there is no judge. The Manual for Military Commissions allows for the convening authority to authorize depositions. Retired Rear Adm. Christian Reismeier, the current convening authority, had no comment, said Ron Flesvig, the spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions.
Last Friday night, after Judge Bates issued his order, the Office of Military Commissions halted plans to airlift a team of court stenographers and lawyers who were assigned to the case to Guantánamo the next morning.
http://archive.is/jXWoT#selection-383.98-383.187
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