CIA

WikiLeaks publishes first round of hacked CIA chief emails

October 22, 2015 by Nasheman

Former CIA Director John Brennan is said to have used the private email account ‘occasionally for several intelligence related projects’

John Brennan has been director of the CIA since 2013. The documents contained in the WikiLeaks cache are from 2008 and before. (Photo: Reuters)

by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams

WikiLeaks on Wednesday began releasing documents from one of former CIA chief John Brennan’s non-government email accounts, which he is said to have “used occasionally for several intelligence related projects.”

Earlier this week an individual, claiming to be a teenager, alleged that he and two other people had hacked into Brennan’s AOL email account and uncovered files dealing with the CIA director’s security clearance application. The hacker told the New York Post that he used a tactic called “social engineering” that involved tricking workers at Verizon into providing Brennan’s personal information and duping AOL into resetting his password. The FBI and Secret Service are reportedly investigating the breach.

The unredacted documents published Wednesday include Brennan’s “National Security Position” form, which WikiLeaks says “reveals a quite comprehensive social graph of the current Director of the CIA with a lot of additional non-govermental and professional/military career details.”

Other documents in the dump cover topics including “challenges for the US Intelligence Community in a post cold-war and post-9/11 world;” “the conundrum of Iran;” and “forbidden interrogation techniques.”

Brennan, who defended the CIA in the wake of the Senate Torture Report, has been accused of “willfully [providing] inaccurate information and misrepresent[ing] the efficacy of torture.”

Victims file suit against CIA torture architects for ‘systemic brutality’

October 14, 2015 by Nasheman

Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who thus far escaped accountability, face charges of ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes.’

Suleiman Abdullah Salim, who survived the CIA’s brutal torture regime, was released after five years of being held without charge. (Photo via ACLU)

by Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams

The two psychologists credited with creating the brutal, post-9/11 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture regime are being sued by three victims of their program on charges that include “human experimentation” and “war crimes.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday filed the suit against CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, on behalf of torture survivors Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, as well as the family of Gul Rahman, who died of hypothermia in his cell as result of the torture he endured.

The suit, which is the first to rely on the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, charges Mitchell and Jessen under the Alien Tort Statute for “their commission of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; non-consensual human experimentation; and war crimes,” all of which violate international law.

The pair, both former U.S. military psychologists, earned more than $80 million for “designing, implementing, and personally administering” the program, which employed “a pseudo-scientific theory of countering resistance that justified the use of torture,” that was based on studies in which researchers “taught dogs ‘helplessness’ by subjecting them to uncontrollable pain,” according to the suit.

“These psychologists devised and supervised an experiment to degrade human beings and break their bodies and minds,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “It was cruel and unethical, and it violated a prohibition against human experimentation that has been in place since World War II.”

In a lengthy report, the ACLU describes each plaintiff’s journey.

After being abducted by CIA and Kenyan agents in Somalia, Suleiman Abdullah, a newly wed fisherman from Tanzania, was subjected to “an incessant barrage of torture techniques,” including being forced to listen to pounding music, doused with ice-cold water, beaten, hung from a metal rod, chained into stress positions “for days at a time,” starved, and sleep deprived. This went on for over a month, and was continually interspersed with “terrifying interrogation sessions in which he was grilled about what he was doing in Somalia and the names of people, all but one of whom he’d never heard of.”

Held for over five years without charge and moved numerous times, Abdullah was eventually sent home to Zanzibar “‘with a document confirming he posed no threat to the United States.” He continues to suffer from flashbacks, physical pain, and has “become a shell of himself.”

Mohamed Ben Soud was captured in April 2003 during a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on his home in Pakistan, where he and his wife moved after fleeing the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Ben Soud said that Mitchell even “supervised the proceedings” at one of his water torture sessions.

Describing Ben Soud’s ordeal, the ACLU writes:

The course of Mohamed’s torture adhered closely to the “procedures” the CIA laid out in a 2004 memo to the Justice Department. Even before arriving at COBALT, [a CIA prison in Afghanistan] Mohamed was subjected to “conditioning” procedures designed to cause terror and vulnerability. He was rendered to COBALT hooded, handcuffed, and shackled. When he arrived, an American woman told him he was a prisoner of the CIA, that human rights ended on September 11, and that no laws applied in the prison.

Quickly, his torture escalated. For much of the next year, CIA personnel kept Mohamed naked and chained to the wall in one of three painful stress positions designed to keep him awake. He was held in complete isolation in a dungeon-like cell, starved, with no bed, blanket, or light. A bucket served as his toilet. Ear-splitting music pounded constantly. The stench was unbearable. He was kept naked for weeks. He wasn’t permitted to wash for five months.

According to the report, the torture regime designed and implemented by Mitchell and Jessen “ensnared at least 119 men, and killed at least one—a man named Gul Rahman who died in November 2002 of hypothermia after being tortured and left half naked, chained to the wall of a freezing-cold cell.”

Gul’s family has never been formally notified of his death, nor has his body been returned to them for a dignified burial, the ACLU states. Further, no one has been held accountable for his murder. But the report notes, “An unnamed CIA officer who was trained by Jessen and who tortured Rahman up until the day before he was found dead, however, later received a $2,500 bonus for ‘consistently superior work.'”

The ACLU charges that the theories devised by Mitchell and Jessen and employed by the CIA, “had never been scientifically tested because such trials would violate human experimentation bans established after Nazi experiments and atrocities during World War II.” Yet, they were the basis of “some of the worst systematic brutality ever inflicted on detainees in modern American history.”

Despite last year’s release of the Senate Torture Report, the government has prosecuted only a handful of low-level soldiers and one CIA contractor for prisoner abuse. Meanwhile, the architects of the CIA’s torture program, which include Mitchell and Jessen, have escaped any form of accountability.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a statement saying they welcomed the federal lawsuit as “a landmark step toward accountability,” and urged the U.S. Department to follow suit and criminally “investigate and prosecute all those responsible for torture, including health professionals.”

In the wake of the Senate report, the group strongly criticized Mitchell and Jessen for betraying “the most fundamental duty of the healing professions.”

In Tuesday’s statement, Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director, said: “Psychologists have an ethical responsibility to ‘do no harm,’ but Mitchell and Jessen’s actions rank among the worst medical crimes in U.S. history.”

‘Groundbreaking’ torture charges put US rendition tactics in spotlight

September 4, 2015 by Nasheman

‘We need to see more accountability happening in Canada, in the U.S., in Jordan and in Syria. The ones who tortured and the ones who helped these horrible acts to happen should face justice.’

Maher Arar, pictured, was sent to Syria by the CIA in 2002, where he was imprisoned and tortured. (Photo: Lucas Oleniuk/TORONTO STAR)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

Canada on Tuesday filed charges against a Syrian intelligence officer for torturing Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was handed over to the Syrian government in 2002 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The whereabouts of the officer, Col. George Salloum, are unknown and it is unlikely that he will be arrested and extradited to Canada to face charges. But Arar’s family said the move by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) signals a newly strengthened opposition to CIA tactics of kidnapping and rendition.

It is also the first formal acknowledgment that Arar was tortured as a terror suspect, although an earlier investigation by the Canadian government in 2006 also cleared him of any links to extremist organizations. Arar’s ordeal became one of the most well-known cases of extraordinary rendition.

“This is a clear message to my husband—and to whoever denied that torture happened—that this is real and that you cannot commit torture [with] impunity,” his wife, Monia Mazigh, said on Tuesday.

The charges are “a big step in the right direction,” Mazigh added. “We need to see more accountability happening in Canada, in the U.S., in Jordan and in Syria. The ones who tortured and the ones who helped these horrible acts to happen should face justice.”

One of Arar’s attorneys, Paul Champ, said the charges were “groundbreaking and historic… critical for a family who have long struggled for justice.”

Salloum reportedly oversaw Arar’s treatment at the notorious Sednaya prison in Damascus. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented Arar in a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other U.S. government officials, Arar was sent to the facility after being detained during a layover with his family at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. After nearly two weeks in custody by U.S. authorities, Arar was rendered to Syria, where he remained for almost a year. He was never charged with a crime.

Former U.S. spy and whistleblower John Kiriakou recently revealed that the intelligence agency knew Arar was the wrong guy when they arrested him.

“My husband and my family suffered tremendously all these years,” Mazigh added. “Extraordinary rendition is a horrible tool that has been used by the U.S. government in an attempt to make torture legal and acceptable.”

A statement by the RCMP says the force “will continue to work with its domestic and international law enforcement and security partners in locating Salloum in order to begin the extradition process to bring him to Canada where he will face justice.”

But while Arar’s family and human rights activists welcomed the development, they also emphasized that it did not go far enough.

ACLU Human Rights Program director Jamil Dakwar told The Intercept on Tuesday, “As part of the process of providing Mr. Arar his right to truth, the U.S. government should, as a matter of obligation, open an investigation into the responsibility of U.S. officials in his mistreatment.”

Dakwar continued: “This episode has never been credibly or independently investigated in the United States. If there is evidence of lawbreaking, including complicity in torture, the individuals responsible need to be held criminally responsible, and there needs to be an apology and reparations provided to the victim.”

Amid torture, experts say CIA's other crime was 'human experimentation'

June 16, 2015 by Nasheman

Formerly classified document exposes how agency’s attempt to legitimize abusive interrogation program was itself another layer of crime

A demonstrator is held down during a simulation of waterboarding outside the US Justice Department in 2007. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

After the Central Intelligence Agency was given authority to begin torturing suspected terrorists in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, newly published documents show that another of that program’s transgressions, according to experts, was a gross violation of medical ethics that allowed the agency to conduct what amounted to “human experimentation” on people who became test subjects without consent.

Reported exclusively by the Guardian on Monday, sections of a previously classified CIA document—first obtained by the ACLU—reveal that a long-standing policy against allowing people to become unwitting medical or research subjects remained in place and under the purview of the director of the CIA even as the agency began slamming people into walls, beating them intensely, exposing them to prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, performing repeated sessions of waterboarding, and conducting other heinous forms of psychological and physical abuse.

The document details agency guidelines—first established in 1987 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan but subsequently updated—in which the CIA director and an advisory board are directly empowered to make decisions about programs considered “human subject research” by the agency.

As journalist Spencer Ackerman reports:

The relevant section of the CIA document, “Law and Policy Governing the Conduct of Intelligence Agencies”, instructs that the agency “shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects” outside of instructions on responsible and humane medical practices set for the entire US government by its Department of Health and Human Services.

A keystone of those instructions, the document notes, is the “subject’s informed consent”.

That language echoes the public, if obscure, language of Executive Order 12333 – the seminal, Reagan-era document spelling out the powers and limitations of the intelligence agencies, including rules governing surveillance by the National Security Agency. But the discretion given to the CIA director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research” has not previously been public.

The entire 41-page CIA document exists to instruct the agency on what Executive Order 12333 permits and prohibits, after legislative action in the 1970s curbed intelligence powers in response to perceived abuses – including the CIA’s old practice of experimenting on human beings through programs like the infamous MK-Ultra project, which, among other things, dosed unwitting participants with LSD as an experiment.

The previously unknown section of the guidelines empower the CIA director and an advisory board on “human subject research” to “evaluate all documentation and certifications pertaining to human research sponsored by, contracted for, or conducted by the CIA”.

Critics have long blasted any members of the medical community who participated in the torture program as traitors to their ethical and professional duties, but as the Guardiannotes, “The CIA, which does not formally concede that it tortured people, insists that the presence of medical personnel ensured its torture techniques were conducted according to medical rigor.”

But Steven Aftergood, a scholar of the intelligence agencies with the Federation of American Scientists, told the Guardian that these men who were tortured by the agency were, in fact, being studied by medical professionals to see how they would respond to such treatment. In addition to the inherent crime of that abuse, they were also unwitting subjects who never gave their informed consent to be studied in this way. “There is a disconnect between the requirement of this regulation [contained in the document] and the conduct of the interrogation program,” Aftergood explained. “They do not represent consistent policy.”

And Nathaniel Raymond, a former war-crimes investigator with Physicians for Human Rights and now a researcher with Harvard University’s Humanitarian Initiative, put it this way: “Crime one was torture. The second crime was research without consent in order to say it wasn’t torture.”

CIA declassifies 9/11 documents on al-Qaeda

June 13, 2015 by Nasheman

A firefighter breaks down following the twin tower attacks in New York, September 11, 2001. (AFP/File)

by Andolu Ajansi

The CIA has declassified documents running to almost-500 pages ten years after the completion of an investigation into purported flaws within the intelligence community which may have led to a failure to stop September 2001 attacks.

The Office of Inspector General’s investigation, prompted by a joint Congressional inquiry in 2005, uncovered several systemic problems within country’s intelligence agencies which missed warnings about the 9/11 plot to attack US targets.

Al-Qaeda operatives crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon headquarters in Washington DC, killing thousands.

“Concerning certain issues, the team concluded that the CIA and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the report read.

The inspectors, according to the report, also found out that intelligence agencies had “no comprehensive strategic plan” to thwart the al-Qaeda threat.

The inspector general’s report also accuses George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, of failing to develop a strategy against al-Qaeda “despite his specific direction that this should be done”.

Angry correspondence between the then CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson and Tenet who rejected Helgerson’s critical draft report in 2005.

“Your report challenges my professionalism, diligence and skill in leading the men and women of US intelligence in countering terrorism,” Tenet wrote to Helgerson.

Although there has been speculation that some Saudi Arabian officials might have supported al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the investigators note a lack of evidence to support such a claim.

“The team encountered no evidence that the Saudi government knowingly and willingly supported al-Qaeda terrorists,” the report read.

The document is a compilation of the full version of the 2005 Office of Inspector General’s investigation plus several other related documents in addition to two other reports from the Counter Terrorism Center which were released in 2005 and 2010.

US releases trove of Bin Laden letters

May 21, 2015 by Nasheman

More than 100 documents taken from late al-Qaeda chief shed new light on his mindset before he was killed by US troops.

by Al Jazeera

The US has published a trove of declassified documents that shed new light on the mindset of Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, before he was killed by US Navy Seals in 2011.

Hunkered down in his Pakistani compound, Bin Laden pleaded with his followers to stay focused on attacking the United States instead of being dragged into Muslim infighting.

“The focus should be on killing and fighting the American people and their representatives,” Bin Laden wrote in one of the documents revealed on Wednesday.

The letter was among thousands of files found by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 when they descended on Bin Laden’s hideout in the garrison town of Abbottabad and shot him dead.

US intelligence agencies have now declassified more than 100 of these documents taken from Bin Laden’s archive, after politicians ordered the move and critics accused the CIA of withholding material.

The AFP news agency was given exclusive access to the documents ahead of their release.

CIA translations

Jeff Anchukaitis, spokesman for the US Director of National Intelligence’s office, said the release of “a sizeable tranche of documents recovered during the raid” was in keeping with US President Barack Obama’s call for “increased transparency”.

It was also in accordance with a law obliging the spy agencies to review all the Bin Laden materials for possible release, he said.

The documents are Central Intelligence Agency translations of the originals in English, and AFP had no way to independently verify the materials or the accuracy of the translation.

The release came shortly after US journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Washington’s official account of the hunt for Bin Laden and the raid that led to his death was a lie.

But CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said the declassification had been long planned and had not been intended as a response to Hersh’s report.

From the strategic and theological discussions to the mundane details of domestic funding and security measures, the documents show Bin Laden once again attacking the West in a spectacular fashion.

Mindful of drone strikes taking out senior leaders, Bin Laden frequently referred to security headaches and advised against communicating by email.

He scolded his followers for gathering in large groups and fretted about a microscopic bug being inserted in his wife’s clothes.

He laid out plans to groom a new cadre of leaders willing to risk the dangers of joining al-Qaeda, and his associates discussed arrangements for smuggling Bin Laden’s favourite son and likely heir, Hamza, to Pakistan.

Citing domestic US public opposition to the Vietnam War, Bin Laden argued that the only way to alter US foreign policy was to “start striking America to force it to abandon these rulers and leave the Muslims alone”.

But the documents also highlight deep divisions among his followers over how to wage their campaigns.

Bin Laden warned that conflict with regimes in the Middle East would distract the extremists from hitting hard at what as far as he was concerned was the real enemy – America.

“We should stop operations against the army and the police in all regions, especially Yemen,” he wrote.

The correspondence reflected Bin Laden’s “worry that disunity within the global jihadist movement could spell its demise,” said a senior US intelligence analyst.

The letters also show Bin Laden was stunned by the Arab uprisings that erupted across the region from 2010 and urged his deputies to seize the moment of “revolution” and rally Muslim youth.

ISIL and Bin Laden

Al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, which would later morph into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group – and which now increasingly overshadows al-Qaeda – also came up in the documents.

Bin Laden and his then deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, received a scathing rebuke in a letter from some Iraqi supporters, who demanded they denounce the bloodletting in Iraq.

The Jihad and Reform Front warned Bin Laden that God would hold him to account “for blessing the work done by the al-Qaeda in Iraq organisation without disavowing the scandals that are committed in your name”.

“If you still can, then this is your last chance to remedy the jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq, that is mostly caused by your followers,” said the letter dated May 22, 2007.

Bin Laden wrote of the need for large-scale terror operations, even though some of his deputies were finding it difficult to organise massive attacks as they tried to avert drones overhead and US eavesdropping.

One document recently declassified in a terrorism trial in New York but not released on Wednesday quotes Abu Musab al-Suri, an al-Qaeda veteran, who advocated going after smaller targets of opportunity as a more realistic approach, intelligence officials said.

“Bin Laden at the time of his death remained focused on large-scale operations while other al-Qaeda leaders believed smaller operations, or inciting lone terrorist attacks, could succeed at bleeding the West economically,” the intelligence analyst said.

Bin Laden failed to win the argument. After his death, al-Qaeda’s leadership called for lone-wolf attacks, and Suri’s idea of “individual jihad” won out.

ISIL, which was officially excommunicated from al-Qaeda, now controls vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and its online propaganda has been blamed for inspiring attacks from Paris to the Dallas suburbs.

The CIA just declassified the document that supposedly justified the Iraq invasion

March 20, 2015 by Nasheman

by Jason Leopold, Vice

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked “specific information” on “many key aspects” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that’s not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had “overstated” its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.” But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenewald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on “disarming” Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and “freeing” the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the government funded think-tank RAND Corporation last December titled “Blinders, Blunders and Wars” said the NIE “contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively.”

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons. But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq’s alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had “bulletproof” evidence linking Hussein’s regime to the terrorist group.

“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

“As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand,” the NIE said. “The presence of al-Qa’ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit.”

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress’s later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq’s chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

“Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai’ida members beginning in December 2000,” the NIE says. “He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.”

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, “reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons.”

“Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” the Senate torture report said. “Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear.”

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that “none of the [redacted] al-Qa’ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa’ida’s interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely.”

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein’s links to al Qaeda: “While the Iraqi president “has not endorsed al-Qa’ida’s overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization.”

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. “Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period,” the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, “The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.”

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of “intelligence”: a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

“We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters,” the NIE said. “The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise,” although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant “were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters.”

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that “the NIE’s bio weapons claims” was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

“There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material,” he now says about the unredacted NIE. “I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction.”

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE “didn’t influence [their] decision.” Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE’s five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a “poor job” on the NIE, “probably the worst of the modern NIE’s, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn’t support it.”

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq’s attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,” and that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why “Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes.” The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” and “this is the more likely end use.”

The CIA’s unclassified summary of the NIE did not contain the Energy Department’s dissent.

“Apart from being influenced by policymakers’ desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed,” the RAND study concluded. “Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam’s possession of WMDs was often seen as deception.”

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

“ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

We dream about drones, said 13-year-old Yemeni boy before his death in a CIA strike

February 11, 2015 by Nasheman

Mohammed Tuaiman becomes the third member of his family to be killed by what he called ‘death machines’ in the sky months after Guardian interview

‘My father was martyred by a drone’: Yemeni teenager records life months before suffering a similar fate

by Chavala Madlena, Hannah Patchett & Adel Shamsan, The Guardian

A 13-year-old boy killed in Yemen last month by a CIA drone strike had told the Guardian just months earlier that he lived in constant fear of the “death machines” in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.

“I see them every day and we are scared of them,” said Mohammed Tuaiman, speaking from al-Zur village in Marib province, where he died two weeks ago.

“A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”

Much of Mohammed’s life was spent living in fear of drone strikes. In 2011 an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.

The drone that would kill Mohammed struck on 26 January in Hareeb, about an hour from his home. The drone hit the car carrying the teenager, his brother-in-law Abdullah Khalid al-Zindani and a third man.

“I saw all the bodies completely burned, like charcoal,” Mohammed’s older brother Maqded said. “When we arrived we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t move the bodies so we just buried them there, near the car.”

Several anonymous US government officials told Reuters that the strike had been carried out by the CIA and had killed “three men believed to be al-Qaida militants”. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris last month.

Marib province has become a flashpoint in the struggle between the Houthi rebels –who have ousted the president after overrunning the capital – and the local tribes who reject the Shia group’s attempts to bring Marib under their control. Like the other families around al-Zur and throughout Marib province, the Tuaiman men have been involved in pushing back against the Houthis.

In a secretive programme carried out by the CIA in rural, isolated parts of Yemen, it is easy for confusion to surround the particulars of those killed in a drone strike. Affiliations with al-Qaida and anti-government tribal sympathies mesh and merge depending on who is attacking whom.

Maqdad said the family had been wrongly associated with al-Qaida, and family members strongly deny that Mohammed was involved in any al-Qaida or anti-Houthi fighting. “He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.”

Speaking from al-Zur the day after his brother’s death, Meqdad said: “After our father died, al-Qaida came to us to offer support. But we are not with them. Al-Qaida may have claimed Mohammed now but we will do anything – go to court, whatever – in order to prove that he was not with al-Qaida.”

When the Guardian interviewed Mohammed last September, he spoke of his anger towards the US government for killing his father. “They tell us that these drones come from bases in Saudi Arabia and also from bases in the Yemeni seas and America sends them to kill terrorists, but they always kill innocent people. But we don’t know why they are killing us.

“In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.”

Mohammed’s father, Saleh Tuaiman, was killed in 2011 in a drone strike that also killed Mohammed’s teenage brother, Jalil. Saleh Tuaiman left behind three wives and 27 children.

The CIA and Pentagon were both asked to comment on whether the teenager had been confirmed as an al-Qaida militant. Both declined to comment.

Mohammed’s 27 siblings have now lost three family members in US drone strikes and may grow up with the same sense of confusion and injustice Mohammed expressed shortly before his death.

“The elders told us that it’s criminal to kill the civilians without distinguishing between terrorists and innocents and they kill just on suspicion, without hesitation.”

For Meqdad, Mohammed’s death has reignited his determination to seek out justice for his family. “We live in injustice and we want the United States to recognise these crimes against my father and my brothers. They were innocent people, we are weak, poor people, and we don’t have anything to do with this.”

However, he added: “Don’t blame us because we sympathise with al-Qaida, because they were the only people who showed their faces to us, the government ignored us, the US ignored us and didn’t compensate us. And we will go to court to prove this is wrong.”

Additional reporting by Iyad al-Qaisi in Jordan

John Kiriakou: Blowing whistle on Bush-era torture 'was worth it'

February 10, 2015 by Nasheman

Whistleblower, who’s now serving remainder of 30-month sentence at home, told Democracy Now! that ‘entire torture program was approved by the president himself.’

CIA whisteblower John Kiriakou as depicted in artist Robert Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series. (Credit: Robert Shetterly)

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou said Monday that the Bush-era torture program “was approved by the president himself” and that the two years he spent behind bars for blowing the whistle on that program was worth it.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2013 after pleading guilty to releasing the name of an officer implicated in a CIA torture program to the media and violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. He was released from federal prison last week and is serving out the remainder of his sentence at home.

He is the only government employee who has gone to jail in connection with the torture program—a fact attorney Jesselyn Radack has called “a miscarriage of justice” and which Kiriakou said makes him feel like he’s “in the Twilight Zone sometimes.”

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Kirikou said he was convinced about the reason for his imprisonment: “My case was about blowing the whistle on torture.”

He explained what led him to reveal in 2007 that “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded and tortured in numerous other ways. Kiriakou was part of the CIA team that captured Zubaydah in a house raid in Pakistan, but did not participate in his torture.

“I learned initially that he had been waterboarded in the summer of 2002, at the end of the summer of 2002. And as I said in the 2007 interview with Brian Ross, I believed what the CIA was telling us, that he was being waterboarded, it was working, and we were gathering important, actionable intelligence that was saving American lives,” Kiriakou told host Amy Goodman.

“It wasn’t until something like 2005 or 2006 that we realized that that just simply wasn’t true—he wasn’t producing any information—and that these techniques were horrific. It was in 2007, Amy, that I decided to go public. President Bush said at the time, categorically, ‘We do not torture prisoners. We are not waterboarding.’ And I knew that that was a lie. And he made it seem as though this was a rogue CIA officer who decided to pour water on people’s faces. And that simply wasn’t true.”

“Torture—the entire torture program was approved by the president himself, and it was a very carefully planned-out program. So to say that it was rogue, it was just a bald-faced lie to the American people,” Kiriakou said.

He added that the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture shows “how wrongheaded the CIA torture program was,” and because of this, some prosecutions need to be made.

“What about case officers who took the law into their own hands or who flouted the law and raped prisoners with broomsticks or carried out rectal hydration with hummus? Those were not approved interrogation techniques. Why aren’t those officers being prosecuted? I think, at the very least, that’s where we should start the prosecutions.”

That President Obama is not going to pursue prosecution of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department or CIA heads was understandable, he said, “But what about the CIA officers who directly violated the law, who carried out interrogations that resulted in death?” “Those people should not be above the law.” he said.

Despite the nearly two years in Loretto Prison, where he previously described people under medical care “die with terrifying frequency,” he told Democracy Now! he’d do it all again.

“What has happened since that 2007 ABC News interview is that torture has been banned in the United States. It is no longer a part of U.S. government policy. And I’m proud to have played a role in that. If that cost me 23 months of my life, well, you know what? It was worth it,” he concluded.

See more from his interview in the video below:

Were NATO dogs used to rape Afghan prisoners at Bagram air base?

January 6, 2015 by Nasheman

by Emran Feroz, AlterNet

After the release of the CIA torture report by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) the world is reeling in shock at the level of brutality revealed in the documents. In fact, the whole report is nothing more than a confession of sadistic procedures that could have been lifted from the diaries of Torquemada, from “rectal feeding” to nude beatings and humiliation — horrors that were well-known but not officially confirmed. But the report remains incomplete. Indeed, some 9000 documents have been withheld.

What new horrors could be discovered with the publication of these records?

Perhaps the most gut-wrenching story to emerge from Bagram has been buried in the German media and remains unknown to much of the world. Published by German author and former politician Juergen Todenhoefer in his latest book, Thou Shalt Not Kill, the account stems from a visit to Kabul. At a local hotel, a former Canadian soldier and private security contractor named Jack told Todenhoefer why he could not longer stand working in Bagram.

“It’s not my thing when Afghans get raped by dogs,” Jack remarked.

Todenhoefer’s son, who was present with him in Kabul and was transcribing Jack’s words, was so startled by the comment he nearly dropped his pad and pen.

The war veteran, who loathed manipulating Western politicians even as he defended tactics of collective punishment, continued his account: Afghan prisoners were tied face down on small chairs, Jack said. Then fighting dogs entered the torture chamber.

“If the prisoners did not say anything useful, each dog got to take a turn on them,” Jack told Todenhoefer. “After procedure like these, they confessed everything. They would have even said that they killed Kennedy without even knowing who he was.”

A former member of parliament representing the right-of-center Christian Democratic Union from 1972 to 1990, Todenhoefer transformed into a fervent anti-war activist after witnessing the Soviet destruction of Aghanistan during the 1980’s. His journalism has taken him to Iraq and back to Afghanistan, where he has presented accounts of Western military interventions from the perspective of indigenous guerrilla forces. Unsurprisingly, his books have invited enormous controversy for presenting a sharp counterpoint to the war on terror’s narrative. In Germany, Todenhofer is roundly maligned by pro-Israel and US-friendly figures as a “vulgar pacifist” and an apologist for Islamic extremism. But those who have been on the other side of Western guns tend to recognize his journalism as an accurate portrayal of their harsh reality.

Though his account of dogs being used to rape prisoners at Bagram is unconfirmed, the practice is not without precedent. Female political prisoners of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s jails have described their torturers using dogs to rape them.

More recently, Lawrence Wright, the author of the acclaimed history of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, “One of my FBI sources said that he had talked to an Egyptian intelligence officer who said that they used the dogs to rape the prisoners. And it would be hard to tell you how humiliating it would be to any person, but especially in Islamic culture where dogs are such a lowly form of life. It’s, you know, that imprint will never leave anybody’s mind.”

I spoke to an Afghan named Mohammad who worked as an interpreter in Bagram and insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals. He told me Todenhoefer’s account of dogs being used to rape prisoners in the jail was “absolutely realistic.” Mohammad worked primarily with US forces in Bagram, taking the job out of financial desperation. He soon learned what a mistake he had made. “When I translated for them, I often knew that the detainee was anything but a terrorist,” he recalled. “Most of them were poor farmers or average guys.”

However, Mohammad was compelled to keep silent while his fellow countrymen were brutally tortured before his eyes. “I often felt like a traitor, but I needed the money,” he told me. “I was forced to feed my family. Many Afghan interpreters are in the very same situation.”

A “traitor” is also what the Taliban calls guys like Mohammad. It is well-known that they make short-shrift of interpreters they catch. Mohammad has since left Afghanistan for security reasons and is reluctant to offer explicit details of the interrogations sessions he participated in. However, he insisted that Todenhoefer’s account accurately captured the horrors that unfolded behind the walls of Bagram.

“Guantanamo is a paradise if you compare it with Bagram,” Muhammad said.

Waheed Mozhdah, a well-known political analyst and author based in Kabul, echoed Muhammad’s account. “Bagram is worse than Guantanamo,” Mozdah told me, “and all the crimes, even the most cruel ones like the dog story, are well known here but most people prefer to not talk about it.”

Hometown for soldiers, hellhole for inmates

It is hard to imagine what more hideous acts of torment remain submerged in the chronicles of America’s international gulag archipelago. Atrocities alleged to a German journalist by a former detainee at the US military’s Bagram Airbase in Kabul, Afghanistan, suggest that the worst horrors may be too much for the public to stomach.

Bagram Airbase is the largest base the US constructed in Afghanistan and also one of the main theaters of its torture regime. You have to drive about one and a half hour from Kabul to reach the prison where hundreds of supposedly high-value detainees were held. The foundations of the base are much older, laid by the Soviets in the 1950s, when the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir, maintained friendly connections with Moscow. Later, during the Soviet occupation, Bagram as the main control center for the Red Army.

Known as the “second Guantanamo,” even though conditions at Bagram are inarguably worse, you will find the dark dungeons, which were mentioned in the latest CIA report, next to American fast food restaurants. During the US occupation, the military complex in Bagram became like a small town for soldiers, spooks and contractors. In this hermetically sealed hellhole, the wanton abuse of human rights existed comfortably alongside the “American Way of Life.”

One of the persons sucked into the parallel world of Bagram was Raymond Azar, a manager of a construction company. Azar, a citizen of Lebanon, was on his way to the US military base near the Afghan Presidential Palace known as Camp Eggers when 10 armed FBI agents suddenly surrounded him. The agents handcuffed him, tied him up and shoved him into an SUV. Some hours later Azar found himself in the bowels of Bagram.

According to Azar’s testimony, he was forced to sit for seven hours while his hands and feet were tied to a chair. He spent the whole night in a cold metal container. His tormentors denied him food for 30 hours. Azar also claimed that the military officers showed him photos of his wife and four children, warning him that unless he cooperated he would never see his family again. Today we know that officers and agents have threatened prisoners with their relatives’ rape or murder.

Azar had nothing to do with Al Qaida or the Taliban. He was caught in the middle of a classic web of corruption. The businessman’s company had signed phony contracts with the Pentagon for reconstruction work in Afghanistan. Later, Azar was accused of having attempted to bribe the U.S. Army contact to secure the military contracts for his company. This was not the sort of crime for which a suspect is normally sent to a military prison. To date, no one has explained why the businessman was absconded to Bagram.

Most prisoners from Bagram are not rich business men or foreign workers from abroad, but average Afghan men who had a simple life before they had been kidnapped. One of these men was Dilawar Yaqubi, a taxi driver and farmer from Khost, Eastern Afghanistan. After five days of brutal torture in Bagram, Yaqubi was declared dead on Dec. 10, 2002. His legs had been “pulpified” by his interrogators, who maintained that they were simply acting according to guidelines handed down to them by the Pentagon and approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The case of the Afghan taxi driver’s killing was highlighted in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The film established that Yaqubi had simply been at the the wrong place at the wrong time. His family, his daughter and his wife, are waiting for justice. (Watch the full version of Taxi To The Dark Side.)

A US-backed government of rapists, warlords and torturers

The latest CIA torture report is focused entirely on the crimes of the Bush administration. But it should not be forgotten that the horrors that have plagued Afghanistan continued under Barack Obama’s watch. When Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, entered power two months ago, the first thing he did was sign a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the US. According to the terms of this bogus deal negotiated without the consent or agreement of the Afghan public, the Afghan judiciary is forbidden from prosecuting criminal US soldiers in Afghanistan. This means that any American, whether a torturer or a drone operator who destroys a family with the push of a button, is above the law.

During the last days of his presidency, Hamid Karzai railed against the bilateral agreement, while other Afghan critics described it as a “colonial pact.” Karzai knew that his signature on the deal would damn him in the annals of history. On his way out, Karzai condemned the US occupation and remarked that Bagram had become “a terrorism factory,” radicalizing waves of men through torture and isolation. The responsible hands in Washington did not look kindly on Karzai’s sudden transformation into a man of the people.

Now that Karzai is gone, Ghani is doing all he can to prove his absolute obedience towards the US. According to different reports, currently he sits down for tea each week with various NATO commanders and generals, listening to their concerns and doing all he can to accommodate them. Ghani has reversed Karzai’s decrees regarding night-raids and NATO bombings and encouraged the Afghan National Army — a corrupt and criminal gang built and trained by the US military — to fight “terrorism” without mercy. Regarding the torture report, Ghani said that the described practices are “inhuman,” even as his actions bely his empty protestations.

On Dec. 10, 2014, exactly 12 years after the brutal murder of Dilawar Yaqubi and just one day after the CIA torture report’s release, the US Defense Departement announced it has closed the Bagram detention center once and for all. Yet it is not known how many secret prisons still exist in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, most elements in the Afghan government are absolutely loyal to the United States and know that they would lose power and financial support without them. The country’s new Vice President, Abdul Rashid Dostum, is a widely reviled warlord and militia leader who killed, tortured and personally oversaw the rape of countless Afghan civilians. His crimes are well documented by the world’s leading human rights organizations. Alongside other warlords notorious for human trafficking and sundry crimes operate alongside an Afghan intelligence service (NDS) that regularly engages in brutal abuse while tendering US salaries.

In an Afghanistan still dominated by Western interests and American power, the torture never stops.