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by Nordic » Sat Dec 13, 2014 3:39 am
by coffin_dodger » Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:25 am
Nordic wrote:What has been released to the public seems to be the very definition of "limited hangout".
by Grizzly » Sun Dec 14, 2014 4:05 am
by seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 15, 2014 11:19 am
What Did Bush Know And When Did He Know It?
DEC 11 2014 @ 11:42AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6LtL9lCTRA
For me, the question remains a fascinating one. The revelation that the first briefing that Bush got on waterboarding was in 2006 is a staggering finding. His own book contradicts this. But the CIA has no records of briefings other than that. And their internal response to his 2006 speech showed how distant they were. When he indicated that no inhumane practices were being used, the CIA wondered if their program had been suspended without their knowledge!
But Fred Kaplan doesn’t buy the claim that Bush didn’t know what was going on:
[L]et’s take a close look at the committee’s claim that Bush wasn’t briefed on the program until it had nearly run its course: “According to CIA records,” the report states, “no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006.”
I’ve italicized two words in this passage, for emphasis. The second word is key: Bush wasn’t briefed on the “specific” techniques till 2006. Under the well-known rules of plausible deniability, he would not have wanted to know too much about these specifics. As indicated in the station chief’s presentation, it’s not that the CIA didn’t tell the president certain details; it’s that the president didn’t want the CIA to tell him.
I think that’s easily the best explanation. Bush was briefed the way we all were about “enhanced interrogation” in language designed to obscure the reality. “Long-time-standing,” for example, sounds relatively mild. It does not fully convey the fact that prisoners with broken legs and feet were put in stress positions – the kind of torture you’d expect from ISIS. But there was surely also a desire not to know, not to have direct and explicit knowledge of what was actually being done, because of the immense gravity of the crimes. Who protected him? Almost certainly Alberto Gonzales. Maybe Condi.
Here’s my best guess after puzzling about this for a decade. Bush made the fateful decision to waive core Geneva protections from prisoners suspected of terrorism early on. That was his signal. He told everyone in the CIA (and beyond) in a moment of extreme emotion that you could do anything to these prisoners you wanted. In that sense, Bush is completely and personally responsible for every act of torture on his watch. He is as responsible as the men who decided to waterboard a prisoner until hardened operatives choked up and walked away.
But he then disappears in the CIA records – and Obama refused to give the Senate Committee the White House records that could have cleared it up (another instance of Obama covering up evidence of war crimes). Cheney presumably handles it all – with Addington doing clean-up – giving Bush the reassurances that a) the torture was giving up vital information saving lives (a lie) and b) that it was all legal (only by making an ass of the law in memos that were subsequently rebuked and rescinded). I suspect that this was all Bush decided he wanted to know: it works and it’s legal. And the famously incurious president didn’t want to know any more. I remember in 2005 asking a very senior administration official if we were torturing prisoners. The carefully parsed response, after looking down and away from me: “The president doesn’t believe we’re torturing people.” They were crafting a way to insulate him from war crimes done in his name.
Serwer likewise finds it “hard to believe that the Bush administration couldn’t have had any clue about what was really going on at the CIA”:
Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed an order allowing the CIA to detain and interrogate terror suspects, and in February 2002, he signed “a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention,” according to a 2008 Senate Armed Services’ Committee investigation.
So: Mere months after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was already rewriting the law to make it easy to torture detainees in U.S. custody. You don’t start declaring exceptions to the Geneva Convention if all you’re planning to do is play a competitive game of spades.
Hayden insists that the president was well aware of what was going on:
The president personally approved the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah [in 2002]. It’s in his book! What happened here is that the White House refused to give them [the Senate Intelligence Committee] White House documents based upon the separation of powers and executive privilege.
The question is whether this is actually true or whether Bush decided that, in his book, he had a duty to provide cover for the people who worked for him. I suspect the latter. But the only way to know is to get Obama to release the White House records. Tim Weiner finds a metaphor that sums it up:
The CIA is not “a rogue elephant,” in the deathless phrase of Senator Frank Church, who ran the pioneering congressional investigation of the agency four decades ago. If the beast tramples people, it’s the mahout, the elephant driver, who is to blame. There was clearly one person driving this program, whether he knew what the elephant was doing in his name or not.
The mahout in the Senate report is the president of the United States.
And he stands accused of war crimes in front of the whole world.
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Dec 15, 2014 12:55 pm
by coffin_dodger » Wed Dec 17, 2014 1:46 pm
New poll finds majority of Americans think torture was justified after 9/11 attacks
Wednesday, December 17 2014
A majority of Americans think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half of the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
cont - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html
by Nordic » Thu Dec 18, 2014 1:29 am
coffin_dodger » Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:46 pm wrote:New poll finds majority of Americans think torture was justified after 9/11 attacks
Wednesday, December 17 2014
A majority of Americans think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half of the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
cont - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 18, 2014 1:31 am
The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings
Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.
Lisa Hajjar December 16, 2014
(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)
Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.
At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.
To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Their “theory” had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: “The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop.” In other words, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable intelligence.
Mitchell, like former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have defended the torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the Senate report is the elision of means (waterboarding, “rectal rehydration,” weeks or months of nakedness in total darkness and isolation, and other techniques intended to break prisoners) and ends—manufactured compliance, which, the defenders claim, enabled the collection of abundant intelligence that kept Americans safe. (That claim is amply and authoritatively contradicted in the report.)
As Americans from the Beltway to the heartland debate—again—the legality and efficacy of “enhanced interrogation,” we are reminded that “torture” has lost its stigma as morally reprehensible and criminal behavior. That was evident in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, when more than half of the candidates vowed to bring back waterboarding, and it is on full display now. On Meet the Press, for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who functionally topped the national security decision-making hierarchy during the Bush years, announced that he “would do it again in a minute.”
No one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of prosecutions of low-level troops and contractors. Indeed, impunity has been virtually guaranteed as a result of various Faustian bargains, which include “golden shield” legal memos written by government lawyers for the CIA; ex post facto immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act; classification and secrecy that still shrouds the torture program, as is apparent in the Senate report’s redactions; and the “look forward, not backward” position that President Obama has maintained through every wave of public revelations since 2009. An American majority, it seems, has come to accept the legacy of torture.
Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.
The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”
In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in 1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun. That would have seemed like a “never again” moment.
But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.
The road from abstract hypotheticals (can SERE be reverse-engineered?) to the authorized use of waterboarding and confinement boxes runs straight into the terrain of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen arrived at a black site in Thailand to supervise the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value detainee” captured by the CIA. By July, Mitchell proposed more coercive techniques to CIA headquarters, and many of these were approved in late July. From then until the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.
My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA’s program as one of human experimentation. If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse perpetrators as “patriots” who “acted in good faith.” Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of advocates and apologists.
by conniption » Thu Dec 18, 2014 1:32 am
Nordic » Wed Dec 17, 2014 10:29 pm wrote:coffin_dodger » Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:46 pm wrote:New poll finds majority of Americans think torture was justified after 9/11 attacks
Wednesday, December 17 2014
A majority of Americans think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half of the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
cont - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-poll-finds-majority-of-americans-believe-torture-justified-after-911-attacks/2014/12/16/f6ee1208-847c-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html
I don't believe these polls. Notice how they're always split right down the middle. Half of Americans against the other half. Always!
I think one of the most powerful ways to control people is to tell them "what they all think". It keeps them from speaking out. It keeps them despondent and feeling like there's no point to saying anything, and the futility of ever hoping things will change.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 18, 2014 2:02 am
New Documents Show the US Called Waterboarding Torture During World War II
When Japanese soldiers did it to GIs, the United States prosecuted them for war crimes.
—By Luke Whelan | Wed Dec. 17, 2014 7:05 PM EST
Japanese soldiers during the Battle of Bataan, 1945. KEYSTONE Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS
Decades before it started waterboarding terrorism suspects, the US government had dramatically different standards for what it considered torture, particularly when it was being done to our soldiers in World War II. Recently released documents detail how the the United States charged hundreds of Japanese military officials and prison guards with war crimes for abuses against American prisoners of war, including waterboarding.
"What the US was calling torture, what it was prosecuting as war crimes [during World War II] were not even close to what has come out in the torture report," says Shanti Sattler, assistant director at the War Crimes Project at the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London, who fought to have the trove of documents made public.
The torture indictments are documented in the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which was created in 1943 to classify and identify Axis war crimes and to assist in the prosecution of war criminals. Unlike the Nuremburg and Tokyo Tribunals, which prosecuted major figures from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after the war, the UNWCC was set up to help investigate "minor criminals," and did not have prosecutorial powers. In all, the UNWCC investigated more than 30,000 cases that lead to more than 2,000 criminal trials brought by its member states, including the United States. (The tribunals collectively held 49 trials.)
Based on UNWCC's work, the United States charged Japanese military officials for numerous war crimes, such as forcing prisoners to stand outside without meals, slapping prisoners, and subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement. While several articles have cited the Tokyo Tribunal's classification of waterboarding as torture, the UNWCC documents shed more light on how the US government defined torture and pursued it as a violation of international law. "These actions were clearly labeled by the Washington War Crimes office as 'ill-treatment' and 'torture,'" Sattler explains in an email.
Compiled below are excerpts from the United States' cases against Japanese military officials and prison guards accused of torturing and abusing prisoners.
The UNWCC archive has multiple examples of the United States charging Japanese soldiers and prison guards with war crimes for waterboarding prisoners (often referred to as the "water cure" or the "water treatment"):
Waterboarding Charges (pg 2)
Waterboarding charges (pg 3)
Waterboarding Charges (pg 3)
Some Japanese military officials were convicted of waterboarding:
Trial description for Genji Mineno (pg 1)
In addition to waterboarding, the United States brought war crime charges against defendants for other offenses, including making prisoners stand in the sun without food or water:
Charges for standing in the sun (pg 2)
Other charges included clubbing prisoners:
Charges for clubbing (pg 4)
Kicking prisoners:
Charges for kicking (pg 6)
Slapping prisoners:
Charges for slapping (1) (pg 8
Charges for Slapping Prisoners (2) (pg 12)
Whipping prisoners:
Charges for whipping (pg 10)
And subjecting prisoners to solitary confinement:
Charges for solitary confinement (pg 13)
This is just a sampling of the charges brought against Japanese military officials and prison guards. The documents show that the United States' definition of torture in World War II, when it was used by our enemies, was very different than the one the Central Intelligence Agency has been using since 9/11. "Today, nearly 70 years later, the concept of torture has become a debate in the United States," says Sattler. "The United States must recognize the principles of international humanitarian law that we as a nation helped to develop."
by conniption » Sat Dec 20, 2014 7:24 am
alicublog
(embedded links)
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
AND STILL NO BENEFITS OR PAID SICK DAYS.
While some of those few citizens who did not know that America tortures people basically for the hell of it got an earful from the Senate report -- you can read the Republican response, which basically complains that Democrats are unfairly making torture look bad -- House Republicans held a witch trial at which Congressmen stepped up to hurl carefully crafted and vetted insults at Jonathan Gruber, a freelance employee who had the poor taste to articulate said Congressmen's main political operating principle. Contract employees, beware and follow the dress code, these fuckers are strict!
Conservatives did their best to hoopla this travesty, many claiming that the Democrats released the torture report just to upstage it and thus vitiate its potentially devastating effects (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare). But my favorite angle so far is that of National Review Jim Geraghty:
Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors.
That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.
Difference left unmentioned: Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and Gruber was a fucking temp. Next week, a janitor at the Capitol will sneeze on the statue of Father Junipero Serra
Father Junipero Serra
and, when this obvious anti-clericalist's voting record reveals him to be a Democrat, all hell will once again break loose.
Posted by roy edroso
159 Comments
alicublog
(embedded links)
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
WRONG FROM THE START.
One of the guys stepping up to defend America's recently revealed torture is Max Boot. Like his fellow pain freak Andrew C. McCarthy, he puts quotes around "torture," because apparently the reported horrors of our Black Sites are not a big deal to him. He implicates Dianne Feinstein and John F. Kennedy, which is okay by me, or would be if he were trying to drag them down with him -- but Boot thinks the real crime is complaining about the torture, not furthering it. He actually says, "It’s easy to denounce such brutal measures from the safety of an armchair" as if that were worse than approving them from the same armchair. He concludes:
Whatever the case, of one thing I am positive: that the release of the Senate report will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills. It is hard to see how it will serve the interests of the United States, because even if you believe the interrogations in question were war crimes, the reality remains that they were long discontinued. Feinstein’s report merely rakes up history and for no good purpose beyond predictable congressional grandstanding.
If your conscience does not respond to this, let me remind you what Boot is.
In 2003 Boot cheered the coming Iraq clusterfuck. "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," he said. He had no doubt of the mission's success: "With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us."
That same year he bade America take the fight to North Korea and Iran, quoting Kipling: "Taking on all of them is a big commitment, but as Kipling warned America, 'Ye dare not stoop to less.'" We'll beat those fuzzy-wuzzies in no time!
In 2005, apparently still excited by the bloodbaths, Boot reached back into history to approve the infamous Moro Massacre in the Philippines and its architect, Leonard Wood: "His scorched-earth policy sparked controversy but achieved results."
The course of action Boot endorsed has since been proven a disaster, but he has continued to yap and snarl. In 2011 he wept over America's withdrawal from Iraq -- "The issue of immunity could have been finessed," he insisted, "if administration lawyers from the Departments of State and Defense had not insisted that Iraq’s parliament would have to vote to grant our troops protections from Iraqi laws." It should be no surprise that Boot sees the wishes of elected representatives as a useless nuisance. Boot didn't want us to get out of Afghanistan either -- why, what would Kipling think?
Boot still bays for blood in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. In 2013 he condemned Edward Snowden, whom he said "needs to see a psychiatrist or a minister rather than to be granted access to the front pages of the world to blow some of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence-gathering activities."
In short, Boot is the last person we should be listening to -- but then, he always was. It's worth asking why this moral leper still has a place in our discourse.
Posted by roy edroso
170 Comments
alicublog
(embedded links)
Friday, December 12, 2014
FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.
The new National Anthem.
• I have treated this week's torture revelations as comedy, which is how I treat most of the buffoonery within my jurisdiction. Also as usual, the comedy is of a grim sort because the stupidity and venality of my subjects has far-reaching effects on real people, whether it's the snake-oil salesmen who want to rid us of national health care for our own good, or the psychopaths who have rushed to defend the gruesome torture of individuals who (it cannot be said often enough, or by these psychos at all) were often innocent and were in any case human beings. I feel bad for the victims, but also -- and I hope you will excuse my unchecked privilege in saying so -- I feel just plain bad. When I was boy, back in the days of the vo-de-ville and horseless carriages, they told me ours wasn't the kind of country that did that. It's been a long time since I believed it -- hell, even a trimmer like Peter Beinart doesn't believe it -- but I have to admit it shook me a bit to see nearly every conservative in America run to proclaim hell yeah, we torture, what's wrong with torture? At least they trouble to lie about racism -- the tribute virtue pays to vice and all that -- but they're proud of torture. The days when children saw their country in Sands of Iwo Jima is over, and the day when they see it in Starship Troopers is upon us. Better hang onto yourself; in this country morality isn't even valued as a loss leader anymore.
• Oh holy jumping Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is writing about torture. After several grafs of what-is-torture from someone who probably would start naming names if you took away his appetizer, Goldberg offers this rhetorical masterpiece:
One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross.
Like incest! Sure, I'm fucking my daughter, but let's talk shades of gray. For one thing, she's really sexy.The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless.
This is similar to Goldberg's stock everyone-believes-in-censorship argument: If you were starving and shit was the last thing on earth and you would eat it, that means you believe in eating shit, hurr hurr fart. I would love to see McCain's reaction to Goldberg personally laying out this argument -- or saying this:
When John McCain was brutally tortured — far, far more severely than anything we’ve done to the 9/11 plotters —
Well, mostly, anyway.— it was done to elicit false confessions and other statements for purposes of propaganda. When we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was to get actionable intelligence on ongoing plots. It seems to me that’s an important moral distinction.
Under torture, KSM gave up the names of two guys who had nothing to do with anything; the CIA hauled them in and jailed them till they eventually figured out they had nothing to do with anything. Mission accomplished and morality established! (None of this is to speak of how torture, non-binary or not, squares with whatever religious bullshit Goldberg pretends to believe in.) Listening to Goldberg defend the indefensible is not as much fun as listening to him defend the technically defensible so badly that it looks indefensible, but we take our yuks where we can.
Posted by roy edroso
277 Comments
by seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 30, 2014 11:30 am
UN-Recommended Prosecution of Lawyers Who Cleared US Torture Program Good First Step
Monday, 29 December 2014 09:09
By Sharon Adams, Truthout | Op-Ed
From left, David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo appear before a House Judiciary subcommittee in Washington on Thursday, June 26, 2008. The panel investigated administration lawyers' role in setting rules for CIA and Defense Department interrogations. (Photo: Andrew Councill / The New York Times)
The United Nations Committee Against Torture (UN-CAT) just completed its review of the United States and found much of concern. In its "Concluding Observations," the panel called for the investigation and prosecution of "persons in positions of command and those who provided legal cover to torture."
The UN-CAT periodically reviews states that have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT-CID). The United States is one of these states - Ronald Reagan signed the CAT-CID in 1988, and the Senate ratified it in 1994. The CAT-CID, like all ratified treaties, is the supreme law of the land according to the US Constitution.
Prosecution Is Needed to Regain Moral Compass
Beginning with TV shows like "24" and continuing more recently with films like Zero Dark Thirty, the powers that be have brought torture into mainstream conversation, apparently attempting to normalize torture. Now, the torture-enablers are going further, and are seeking exoneration and vindication at the bar of history.
Torture is a crime that cannot be legalized away. Torture is as depraved as slavery or rape - all are simply wrong. No amount of rationalization by lawyers or assessments by psychologists can make rape, slavery or torture right. Unless the United States wants to follow Dick Cheney to the dark side, it's time to prosecute those responsible.
Encouragingly, there have been increasing calls for prosecution. The best way to make this happen is to start with the attorneys, because partisan mud-slinging would follow any attempted prosecution of Cheney or Bush and would cloud the issues. Prosecution of the attorneys who worked at the Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) would avoid some of this, as OLC attorneys are nonpartisan and are specifically tasked with "providing authoritative legal advice" to the president.
OLC attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee are the lawyers primarily responsible for implementing the Bush administration's detention, rendition and torture programs. This has been proven through numerous investigations, including these UN Concluding Observations; the Senate Intelligence Committee Report; the CIA's own internal investigation conducted by the CIA Inspector General; the Senate Armed Services Committee Report; the European Court of Human Rights; the tribunal in Kuala Lampur, and more. Yoo and Byee should be the initial focus of investigation and prosecution.
Yoo and Bybee Memos Identified by the UN-CAT
Considering that the UN uses diplomatic speech only, the UN-CAT Concluding Observations are perhaps equivalent to pointing a finger at Yoo and Bybee, jumping up and down and yelling "they did it!"
UN-CAT Concluding Observations specifically reference declassified memoranda written by the OLC, beginning in 2001. The start date of 2001 is significant. Beginning in 2001 and continuing in 2002 and 2003, either, or both, John Yoo and Jay Bybee authored all relevant OLC opinions. (By 2003, Yoo and Bybee had left the OLC.) Thus, when the UN-CAT identifies OLC memos from 2001, 2002 and 2003, they are referring to memos written by Yoo and Bybee. The declassified OLC memos include those released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests and other standardly released memos. (Other memos have never been released, either to the public or to the UN.)
UN-CAT Concluding Observation 10 finds that OLC memos written between 2001 and 2009 are "deeply flawed" in their interpretation of applicability of Geneva Conventions outside of the United States.
UN Concluding Observation 11 expresses "grave concern" over the CIA's rendition, detention and interrogation programs starting in 2001 and continuing until 2008.
UN-CAT Concluding Observation 9 specifically criticizes the "interpretative understanding" of "prolonged mental harm" provided by the OLC. "Prolonged mental harm" is included in the US definition of torture. Yoo and Bybee used pretzel logic to find that waterboarding did not result in prolonged mental harm because the "relief is almost immediate when the cloth is removed from the nose and mouth." Therefore, according to their sick logic, waterboarding is not torture. (Memo from Bybee and Yoo to John Rizzo at the CIA, August 1, 2002.)
Below is a complete list of all declassified OLC memos from 2001, 2002 and 2003 that discuss the alleged legal underpinnings for the US rendition, detention and torture programs. Yoo and Bybee authored or coauthored each and every declassified memoranda on these subjects. In doing so, Yoo and Bybee provided the "legal cover" that the UN-CAT condemned and for which the UN-CAT recommended prosecution. The United States should live up to its obligations under international law, the Geneva Conventions and federal law, and prosecute Yoo and Bybee.
OLC Memos Regarding Rendition, Detention and Torture From 2001 to 2003
Memo from Yoo, President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations Against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them, September 25, 2001
Memo from Yoo and [Robert J.] Delahunty, Treaties and Laws Applicable to the Conflict in Afghanistan and to the Treatment of Persons Captured by the US Armed Forces in that Conflict, November 30, 2001
Memo from Yoo and Delahunty, Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qadea and Taliban Detainees, January 9, 2002
Memo from Bybee, Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainee, January 22, 2002
Memo from Bybee, Re: Memorandum From Alberto Gonzales to the President on the Applicability of the Geneva Conventions to al Qaeda and the Taliban, January 26, 2002
Memo from Yoo, Potential Legal Constraints Applicable to Interrogations of Persons Captured by US armed Forces in Afghanistan, February 26, 2002
Memo from Bybee, Potential Legal Constraints Applicable to Interrogations of Persons Captured by US Armed Forces in Afghanistan, February 26, 2002
Memo from Bybee, President's Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captured Terrorist to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations, March 13, 2002
Memo from Bybee, Determination of Enemy Belligerency and Military Detention, June 8, 2002
Letter from Yoo to Rizzo, acting general counsel of the CIA, a total of three paragraphs to eviscerate the prohibition against torture, relied on by those in Thailand who tortured Abu Zubaydah, July 13, 2002
Memo from Bybee, written by Yoo, Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative, the infamous torture memo, August 1, 2002
Letter from Yoo, regarding the legality under international law of certain interrogation techniques, August 1, 2002
Memo from Bybee, Standards of Conduct for Interrogation, August 1, 2002
Memo from Yoo, Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, October 21, 2002
Memo from Yoo, Response to the Preliminary Report of the ABA Task Force on the Treatment of Enemy Combatants, February 7, 2003
Memo from Yoo, Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States, March 14, 2003
by conniption » Thu Jan 22, 2015 1:39 am
Washington's Blog
No, the American People DON’T Support Torture
Posted on January 21, 2015
by WashingtonsBlog
Were Widely-Publicized Polls Misleading?
We reported last month that Americans support torture … because they don’t know the facts.
But it turns out that Americans’ view on torture may be more nuanced than that.
As several professors reported on December 11th, Americans are NOT okay with most of the torture techniques which their government actually used at Guantanamo, Abu Gharaib, and various “black sites”.
Steven Kull – director of the Program for Public Consultation, affiliated with the University of Maryland – found the same thing.
Bottom line: Sloppy polling (using vague terms instead of asking about specific techniques) – coupled with Americans’ ignorance about what was done in their name – may have led to misleading results.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 13, 2015 2:39 pm
Obama under pressure to declassify 28 pages of report showing Saudi link to 9/11
Home Tue Feb 17, 2015 4:23PM
US President Barack Obama (L) is greeted by Saudi Arabia's King Salman as he arrives at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on January 27, 2015.
US President Barack Obama has come under growing pressure by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to release 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report that indirectly implicates Saudi Arabia in the September, 2001 attacks.
US Representative Walter Jones (pictured below), a Republican from Kentucky, has sponsored a bill that would make public all of the commission’s report, which is the official report of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
So far, 11 lawmakers from the House of Representatives, including eight Democrats, have co-sponsored the resolution to declassify the blacked out report from the 9/11 Commission, which was established on November 2002 and their final report was issued on July 2004.
US Representatives Thomas Massie and Stephen Lynch, along with Jones, are seeking support for the bill, according to a report published by The Hill newspaper on Monday. Jones is speaking with several senators, including potential presidential candidate Rand Paul, about introducing a similar measure in the Senate.
“You cannot have trust in your government when your government hides information from you, particularly on something horrific like 9/11,” Jones told the Washington-based newspaper on Friday.
“If I thought this was going to do anything to jeopardize the national security of this country, I would not advocate for it,” said Jones, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.
He emphasized that Obama had held two meetings with the families of the 9/11 victims and promised he would release the pages.
“What we’re trying to do is put pressure on the White House to keep its promise to the families,” Jones said.
Earlier this month, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that based on a congressional request made last year, the administration is considering whether to declassify the still-secret sections of the congressional inquiry.
The 9/11 Commission Report was prepared by the 9/11 Commission at the request of former president George W. Bush and Congress. The commission was set up "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks."
The commission concluded that 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia, and all were members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, but found no evidence the government of Saudi Arabia conspired in the attacks.
The commission’s report has long been rumored to contain information about a relationship between Saudi Arabia’s royal family and al-Qaeda.
US officials assert that the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage, were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists but many analysts say it was a false-flag operation and that Osama bin Laden was just a bogeyman for the US military-industrial complex.
They believe rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to boost the US economy and advance the Zionist agenda.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 03, 2015 11:38 am
Exclusive: Detainee alleges CIA sexual abuse, torture beyond Senate findings
NEW YORK | BY DAVID ROHDE
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a wider array of sexual abuse and other forms of torture than was disclosed in a Senate report last year, according to a Guantanamo Bay detainee turned government cooperating witness.
Majid Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his "private parts" – none of which was described in the Senate report. Interrogators, some of whom smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and leather belts, Khan said.
Khan's is the first publicly released account from a high-value al Qaeda detainee who experienced the "enhanced interrogation techniques" of President George W. Bush's administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
Khan's account is contained in 27 pages of interview notes his lawyers compiled over the past seven years. The U.S. government cleared the notes for release last month through a formal review process.
Before the Senate report detailed the agency's interrogation methods last December, CIA officials prohibited detainees and their lawyers from publicly describing interrogation sessions, deeming detainee's memories of the experience classified.
Khan's detailed allegations of torture could not be independently confirmed. CIA officials have said they believed Khan repeatedly lied to them during interrogations.
The 35-year-old Khan, a Pakistani citizen who attended high school in Maryland, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2012 to conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges. In exchange for serving as a government witness, Khan will be sentenced to up to 19 years in prison, with the term beginning on the date of his guilty plea.
Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia. That money was later used to carry out the 2003 truck bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 11 people and wounded at least 80 others. Khan also confessed to plotting with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to poison water supplies, blow up gas stations and serve as a "sleeper agent" for al Qaeda in the United States.
Khan was captured in Pakistan and held at an unidentified CIA "black site" from 2003 to 2006, according to the Senate report. Khan's lawyers declined to comment on where he was captured or held, which they said remained classified.
DEATH WISH
In the interviews with his lawyers, Khan described a carnival-like atmosphere of abuse when he arrived at the CIA detention facility.
"I wished they had killed me," Khan told his lawyers. He said that he experienced excruciating pain when hung naked from poles and that guards repeatedly held his head under ice water.
" 'Son, we are going to take care of you,' " Khan said his interrogators told him. " 'We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine.' "
Current and former CIA officials declined to comment on Khan's account.
Khan's description of his experience matches some of the most disturbing findings of the U.S. Senate report, the product of a five-year review by Democratic staffers of 6.3 million internal CIA documents. CIA officials and many Republicans dismissed the report's findings as exaggerated.
Years before the report was released, Khan complained to his lawyers that he had been subjected to forced rectal feedings. Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan had received involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. In an incident widely reported in news media after the release of the Senate investigation, CIA cables showed that "Khan's 'lunch tray,' consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was 'pureed' and rectally infused."
The CIA maintains that rectal feedings were necessary after Khan went on a hunger strike and pulled out a feeding tube that had been inserted through his nose. Senate investigators said Khan was cooperative and did not remove the feeding tube.
Most medical experts say rectal feeding is of no therapeutic value. His lawyers call it rape.
Khan told his lawyers that some of the worst torture occurred in a May 2003 interrogation session, when guards stripped him naked, hung him from a wooden beam for three days and provided him with water but no food. The only time he was removed from the beam was on the afternoon of the first day, when interrogators shackled him, placed a hood over his head and lowered him into a tub of ice water.
An interrogator then forced Khan's head underwater until he feared he would drown. The questioner pulled Khan's head out of the water, demanded answers to questions and again dunked his head underwater, the detainee said. Guards also poured water and ice from a bucket onto Khan's mouth and nose.
Khan was again hung on the pole hooded and naked. Every two to three hours, interrogators hurled ice water on his body and set up a fan to blow air on him, depriving him of sleep, he said. Once, after hanging on the pole for two days, Khan began hallucinating, thinking he was seeing a cow and a giant lizard.
"I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear and anticipation of the unknown," Khan said, describing his panic attacks and nightmares at the black site. "Sometimes, I was struggling and drowning under water, or driving a car and I could not stop."
In a July 2003 session, Khan said, CIA guards hooded and hung him from a metal pole for several days and repeatedly poured ice water on his mouth, nose and genitals. At one point, he said, they forced him to sit naked on a wooden box during a 15-minute videotaped interrogation. After that, Khan said, he was shackled to a wall, which prevented him from sleeping.
When a doctor arrived to check his condition, Khan begged for help, he said. Instead, Khan said, the doctor instructed the guards to again hang him from the metal bar. After hanging from the pole for 24 hours, Khan was forced to write a "confession" while being videotaped naked.
METAL CUFFS
Khan's account also includes previously undisclosed forms of alleged CIA abuse, according to experts. Khan said his feet and lower legs were placed in tall boot-like metal cuffs that dug into his flesh and immobilized his legs. He said he felt that his legs would break if he fell forward while restrained by the cuffs.
Khan is not one of the three people whom current and former CIA officials say interrogators were authorized to “waterboard,” whereby water is poured over a cloth covering a detainee's face to create the sensation of drowning. Nor is he the fourth detainee whose waterboarding was documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012.
His descriptions, however, match those of other detainees who have alleged that they were subjected to unauthorized interrogation techniques using water. Human-rights groups say the use of ice water in dousing and forced submersions is torture.
Khan's account also includes details that match those of lower-level detainees who have described their own interrogations. Like other prisoners, Khan said he was held in complete darkness and isolated from other prisoners for long periods. To deprive him of sleep, his captors kept the lights on in his cell and blared loud music from KISS and other American rock and rap groups.
He said that he was given unclean food and water that gave him diarrhea and that he was held in an outdoor cell and in cells with biting insects. Other prisoners later told him they were held in coffin-shaped boxes.
Conditions improved significantly in 2005, after the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act. That measure includes anti-torture provisions sponsored by Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner in Vietnam.
Khan is scheduled to be sentenced by a military judge in Guantanamo Bay by February. His lawyers, however, want his case moved to the U.S. federal courts because, they said, federal law allows for fairer sentences for cooperating witnesses.
"He has made a decision to trust the U.S. government and cooperate with the U.S. government in order to try to atone for what he did," said J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But it is incumbent on the United States to treat him fairly."
Katya Jestin, a former federal prosecutor who also represents Khan, said Khan remains committed to cooperating in the military commission system. But, she said, "from a broader criminal justice policy perspective, I would like to see him sentenced in U.S. federal court. Federal judges have more experience in assessing the value of cooperation and incentivizing cooperation from others."
The Department of Justice and military prosecutors declined to comment.
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