GUANTANAMO – Page 2

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.

U.S releases 5 innocent men from Guantanamo, sends them to Kazakhstan

January 1, 2015 by Nasheman

In this Feb. 27, 2002 file photo, a detainee is escorted by U.S. military guards to be interrogated at the detention facility Camp X-Ray on Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton)

by AP

Miami: Five men who were held for a dozen years without charge at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been sent to the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan for resettlement, the U.S. government announced.

The two men from Tunisia and three from Yemen had been cleared for release from the prison by a government task force but could not be sent to their homelands. The U.S. has sent hundreds of prisoners from Guantanamo to third countries but this is the first time Kazakhstan has accepted any for resettlement.

Their release brings the prison population at Guantanamo to 127, according to a Pentagon statement on Tuesday.

The U.S. identified the Tunisians as 49-year-old Adel Al-Hakeemy, and Abdallah Bin Ali al Lufti, who military records show is about 48.

The Yemenis are Asim Thabit Abdullah Al-Khalaqi, who is about 46; Muhammad Ali Husayn Khanayna, who is about 36; and Sabri Mohammad al Qurashi, about 44.

All five had been captured in Pakistan and turned over to the U.S. for detention as suspected Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda. None of the men were ever charged and a government task force determined it was no longer necessary to hold them.

The U.S. does not say why they could not be sent home but the government has been unwilling to send Yemenis to their country because of unrest and militant activity there while in the past some Tunisians have feared persecution.

Nearly 30 prisoners have been resettled in third countries this year as part of President Barack Obama’s renewed push to close the detention center over opposition from Congress.

The CIA’s torture orgy: 100 or more prisoners tortured to death in U.S detention

December 12, 2014 by Nasheman

CIA torture, crushing democracy and Britain’s new military base in Bahrain all deliver a toxic message

by Seumas Milne, The Guardian

We may have known the outline of the global US kidnapping and torture programme for a few years. But even the heavily censored summary of the US senate torture report turns the stomach in its litany of criminal barbarity unleashed by the CIA on real and imagined US enemies.

The earlier accounts of US brutality in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo pale next to the still sanitised record of forced rectal “infusions” and prolapses, multiple “waterboarding” drownings and convulsions, the shackled freezing to death of a man seized in a mistaken identity case, hooded beatings and hanging by the wrists, mock executions, and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours.

What has been published is in fact only a small part of a much bigger picture, including an estimated 100 or more prisoners tortured to death in US detention. Added to the rampant lying, cover-ups and impunity, it’s a story that the champions of America’s “exceptionalism” will find hard to sell around the world. And it’s hardly out of line with a CIA record of coups, death squads, torture schools and covert war stretching back decades, some revealed by an earlier senate report in the 1970s.

There is of course nothing exceptional about states that preach human rights and democracy, but practise the opposite when it suits them. For all the senate’s helpful redactions, Britain has been up to its neck in the CIA’s savagery, colluding in kidnapping and torture from Bagram to Guantánamo while dishing out abuses of its own in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So you’d hardly think this reminder of the horrors unleashed in the name of the war on terror was the time for Britain to announce its first permanent military base in the Middle East for four decades. The presence of western troops and support for dictatorial Arab regimes were, after all, the original reasons given by al-Qaida for its jihad against the west.

The subsequent invasions, occupations and bombing campaigns led by the US, Britain and others have been endlessly cited by those who resisted them in the Arab and Muslim world, or launched terror attacks in the west. But last week, foreign secretary Phillip Hammond proudly declared that Britain would reverse its withdrawal from “east of Suez” of the late 1960s and open a navy base “for the long term” in the Gulf autocracy of Bahrain.

The official talk is about protecting Britain’s “enduring interests” and the stability of the region. But to those fighting for the right to run their own country, the message could not be clearer. Britain, the former colonial power, and the US, whose 5th Fleet is already based in Bahrain, stand behind the island’s unelected rulers. No wonder there have already been protests against the base.

Bahrainis campaigning for democracy and civil rights, in a state where the majority are Shia and the rulers Sunni, were part of the Arab uprisings in 2011. With US and British support, Saudi Arabia and the UAE crushed the protests by force. Mass arrests, repression and torture followed.

Three years later, Bahrain’s human rights situation has got worse, and even the US government voices concerns. But British ministers purr about the “progress” of the monarchy’s “reforms”, praising phoney elections to a toothless parliament, boycotted by the main opposition parties. Last week Bahraini activist Zainab al-Khawaja was sentenced to three years in jail for tearing up the king’s photograph. Her father, Abdulhadi, is already serving a life sentence for encouraging peaceful protest.

In reality, the British base’s main job won’t be to prop up the Bahraini regime, but to help protect the entire network of dictatorial Gulf governments that sit on top of its vast reserves of oil and gas – and provide a springboard for future interventions across the wider Middle East. British troops never really left the region and have been part of one intervention after another.

The US itself controls an archipelago of military bases across the Gulf: in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE, as well as Bahrain. And despite Barack Obama’s much-heralded pivot to Asia, they are also clearly there for the long haul. After the US accepted the overthrow of the Egyptian dictator Mubarak three years ago, the Gulf autocrats are looking for extra security, which Britain and France are glad to provide. For the London elite, the Gulf is now as much about arms sales and finance as about oil and gas – and a web of political, commercial and intelligence links that go to the heart of the British establishment.

So the British military is also looking to beef up its presence in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. The crucial thing is that these colonial creations remain in the grip of their ruling families and democratisation is put on the back burner. That’s the only guarantee that this corrosive relationship will endure – on the back of disenfranchised populations and armies of grotesquely exploited migrant labour.

On a larger scale, the return of western-backed dictatorship in Egypt, the Arab world’s most important country, has helped re-establish the conditions that led to the war on terror in the first place. Obama has traded the CIA’s Bush-era kidnap-and-torture programme for expanded special forces and CIA drone killings, often of people targeted only by their “signatures” – such as being males of military age. And British forces have this week been accused of training and providing intelligence for Kenyan death squads targeting suspected Islamist activists.

The impact of all this – the revelations of the CIA’s torture orgy, the growing western military grip, the vanishing chances of democratic change – on the Arab and Muslim world should by now be obvious, along with the social backlash in countries such as Britain.

But with its new commitment to station troops in Bahrain, we can have no doubt where the British government stands: behind autocracy and “enduring interests”. Just as the refusal to hold previous US governments to account for terror and torture laid the ground for what happened after 9/11, the failure of parliament even to debate the decision to garrison the Gulf is an ominous one. Britain’s new base isn’t in the interests of either the people of Britain, Bahrain or the Middle East as a whole – it’s a danger and affront to us all.

UN officials demand prosecutions for US torture

December 11, 2014 by Nasheman

by John Heilprin, AP

Geneva: All senior U.S. officials and CIA agents who authorized or carried out torture like waterboarding as part of former President George W. Bush’s national security policy must be prosecuted, top U.N. officials said Wednesday.

It’s not clear, however, how human rights officials think these prosecutions will take place, since the Justice Department has declined to prosecute and the U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court.

Zeid Raad al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said it’s “crystal clear” under international law that the United States, which ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, now has an obligation to ensure accountability.

“In all countries, if someone commits murder, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they commit rape or armed robbery, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they order, enable or commit torture – recognized as a serious international crime – they cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency,” he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hopes the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques at secret overseas facilities is the “start of a process” toward prosecutions, because the “prohibition against torture is absolute,” Ban’s spokesman said.

Ben Emmerson, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, said the report released Tuesday shows “there was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration, which allowed (it) to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law.”

He said international law prohibits granting immunity to public officials who allow the use of torture, and this applies not just to the actual perpetrators but also to those who plan and authorize torture.

“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever. Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability,” Emmerson said.

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth echoed those comments, saying “unless this important truth-telling process leads to the prosecution of officials, torture will remain a `policy option’ for future presidents.”

The report said that in addition to waterboarding, the U.S. tactics included slamming detainees against walls, confining them to small boxes, keeping them isolated for prolonged periods and threatening them with death.

However, a Justice Department official said Wednesday the department did not intend to revisit its decision to not prosecute anyone for the interrogation methods. The official said the department had reviewed the committee’s report and did not find any new information that would cause the investigation to be reopened.

“Our inquiry was limited to a determination of whether prosecutable offenses were committed,” the official said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an investigation. “Importantly, our investigation was not intended to answer the broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.”

The United States is also not part of the International Criminal Court, which began operating in 2002 to ensure that those responsible for the most heinous crimes could be brought to justice. That court steps in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves for genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. The case could be referred to the ICC by the U.N. Security Council, but the United States holds veto power there.

In one U.S. case mentioned in the report, suspected extremist Gul Rahman was interrogated in late 2002 at a CIA detention facility in Afghanistan called “COBALT” in the report. There, he was shackled to a wall in his cell and forced to rest on a bare concrete floor in only a sweatshirt. He died the next day. A CIA review and autopsy found he died of hypothermia.

Justice Department investigations into his death and another death of a CIA detainee resulted in no charges.

President Barack Obama said the interrogation techniques “did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies.” CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and learned from them, but insisted the coercive techniques produced intelligence “that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”

The Senate investigation, however, found no evidence the interrogations stopped imminent plots.

European Union spokeswoman Catherine Ray emphasized Wednesday that the Obama administration has worked since 2009 to see that torture is not used anymore but said it is “a commitment that should be enshrined in law.”

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was quoted as telling the Bild daily that Obama had clearly broken with Bush policies and, as a result, Washington’s “new openness to admitting mistakes and promising publicly that something like this will never happen again is an important step, which we welcome.”

“What was deemed right and done back then in the fight against Islamic terrorism was unacceptable and a serious mistake,” Steinmeier said. “Such a crass violation of free and democratic values must not be repeated.”

Bush approved the program through a covert finding in 2002 but wasn’t briefed by the CIA on the details until 2006. Obama banned waterboarding, weeks of sleep deprivation and other tactics, yet other aspects of Bush’s national security policies remain, most notably the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and sweeping government surveillance programs.

U.S. officials have been tried in absentia overseas before.

Earlier this year, Italy’s highest court upheld guilty verdicts against the CIA’s former Rome station chief Jeff Castelli and two others identified as CIA agents in the 2003 extraordinary rendition kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect. The decision was the only prosecution to date against the Bush administration’s practice of abducting terror suspects and moving them to third countries that permitted torture.

All three had been acquitted in the original trial due to diplomatic immunity. They were among 26 Americans, mostly CIA agents, found guilty in absentia of kidnapping Milan cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.

In Geneva last month, a U.N. anti-torture panel said the U.S. government is falling short of full compliance with the international anti-torture treaty. It criticized U.S. interrogation procedures during the Bush administration and called on the U.S. government to abolish the use of techniques that rely on sleep or sensory deprivation.

The word “torture,” meanwhile, wasn’t mentioned in U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power’s statement Wednesday for Human Rights Day in which she criticized countries including North Korea and South Sudan.

Eric Tucker in Washington and Cara Anna at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Beatings, waterboarding, insects: CIA's cruel interrogation methods

December 10, 2014 by Nasheman

(Image: Witness Against Torture/flickr)

Washington: Sleep deprivation for over a week, beatings, shackling, and waterboarding – a grim litany of the cruel methods used by the Bush-era CIA to interrogate al Qaeda terror suspects was exposed in a report on Tuesday.

The shocking report released by the US Senate found that the techniques employed by the Central Intelligence Agency were “far more brutal” than the spy agency had previously admitted to.

Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the surveillence of US military police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (AFP Photo)

It was drawn up over several years by the Senate intelligence committee, which revealed such techniques were applied with “significant repetition for days or weeks at a time” on prisoners rounded up in the “war on terror” launched after the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

The worst treatment was meted out at a secret CIA detention site dubbed COBALT where “unauthorized” interrogation techniques were used in 2002.

Slaps and ‘wallings’

Beginning with the CIA’s first high-value al Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah, suspects were routinely slammed against a wall by their interrogators and hit with rolled-up towels.

Facial slaps, or “insults,” as well as stomach punches were also used.

The interrogators also used “attention grasps” in which the prisoner is grabbed with both hands, one on each side of the collar and pulled towards the interrogator.

Sleep deprivation

This involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, or more than a week, usually standing or in stress positions, sometimes with their hands shackled above their heads, chained to the ceiling.

Abu Zubaydah was kept in an all-white room that was lit 24 hours a day. Or he was kept awake by non-stop questioning.

At least five detainees suffered “disturbing hallucinations” but in at least two cases the CIA continued with the interrogation method.

Confinement and isolation

Over 20 days, Abu Zubaydah spent 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in a large coffin-size box, and 29 hours in an even smaller one during his interrogation at what was dubbed Detention Site Green.

In the COBALT facility, dubbed a “dungeon” by the chief of interrogations, prisoners were kept in complete darkness, often shackled with their hands above their heads and mainly nude.

They were bombarded with loud music and noise and given a bucket as a toilet. In 2002 a prisoner who had been partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died of suspected hypothermia.

Ice water baths or showers were also used to try to break suspects.

Some detainees were also forced to wear diapers, although guidelines said they could not be left on longer than 72 hours.

‘Rough takedowns’

This was used at the COBALT facility. About five CIA agents would scream at a detainee, drag him outside his cell, cut his clothes off and wrap him in duct tape.

He would then be hooded and dragged up and down a dirt hallway while being slapped and punched.

After his death at the COBALT site, Gul Rahman was found to have been covered with bruises and abrasions on his shoulders, pelvis, arms, legs and face.

Nudity

Prisoners were often stripped and left nude in their cells. Zubaydah was kept naked but given a towel to cover himself during interrogations. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, was often naked during his grillings. But at one point he was given clothes when he was wracked by shivering due to a head-cold.

Psychological threats

CIA officers regularly threatened the detainees. One was told he would only leave the facility in “a coffin-shaped box.”

At least three detainees were told the CIA would hurt their families, including their children.
There was a threat to sexually abuse the mother of one, while another was told his mother’s throat would be cut. The methods were supposed to ensure prisoners developed a sense of “Learned helplessness.”

Nashiri was blindfolded and a pistol was placed near his head, while a CIA officer also operated a cordless drill near his body in a macabre game of Russian roulette.

Forced rectal feeding

At least five prisoners were subjected to “rectal rehydration or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity,” the report said.

Other detainees were given a liquid diet of protein drinks known as Ensure “as a means of limiting vomiting during waterboarding.”

Waterboarding

In this technique of previously described “near drownings,” the detainee was bound to an inclined bench with his feet usually raised.

A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes and water is then poured in a controlled way onto the clothing. The cloth is then lowered over the nose and mouth.

Once the cloth is saturated, the prisoner’s flow of air is restricted for up to 40 seconds while the cloth is left in place over the nose and mouth.

The self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is known to have been waterboarded 183 times.

In March 2003 he was subjected to five waterboard sessions over 25 hours.

“The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting,” the report said.

Insects

In July 2002, the attorney general verbally approved putting Zubaydah in a box with an non-stinging insect because he is afraid of them. It was not clear from Tuesday’s summary though if this technique was actually used.

Spy agency faces backlash

US President Barack Obama declared some of the past practices to be “brutal, and as I’ve said before, constituted torture in my mind. And that’s not who we are,” he told the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo in an interview.

Obama said releasing the report was important “so that we can account for it, so that people understand precisely why I banned these practices as one of the first acts I took when I came into office, and hopefully make sure that we don’t make those mistakes again.”

Republican Senator John McCain, tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, was out of step with some fellow Republicans in welcoming the report and endorsing its findings.

“We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer,” he said in a Senate speech. “Too much.”

Five hundred pages were released, representing the executive summary and conclusions of a still-classified 6,700-page full investigation.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic committee chairman whose staff prepared the summary, branded the findings a stain on US history.

“Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” she declared, commanding the Senate floor for an extended accounting of the techniques identified in the investigation.

In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes and has learned from them.

But he also asserted the coercive techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”

In Geneva, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said, the report confirms “that there was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration, which allowed to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law.”

He said international law prohibits the granting of immunity to public officials who have engaged in acts of torture, including both the actual perpetrators and senior government officials who authorized the policies. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.”

The report, released after months of negotiations with the administration about what should be censored, was issued as US embassies and military sites worldwide strengthened security in case of an anti-American backlash.

The US embassies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Thailand warned of the potential for anti-American protests and violence after the release of the Senate report. The embassies also advised Americans in the three countries to take appropriate safety precautions, including avoiding demonstrations.

(AFP)

Uruguay set to take six Guantanamo prisoners

December 8, 2014 by Nasheman

President Mujica said Uruguay was offering its hospitality to “human beings who have suffered a terrible kidnapping in Guantanamo Bay”

by BBC

Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica has confirmed his country will resettle six Guantanamo Bay prisoners on humanitarian grounds.

President Mujica was himself held for over a decade in terrible prison conditions during his country’s period of military rule in the 1970s and 80s.

An October opinion poll showed 58% of Uruguayans were opposed to bringing in the prisoners.

Newspaper reports say they are expected to arrive by Tuesday morning.

The arrival date for the prisoners was not confirmed by President Mujica.

He also called on the United States to release three Cuban prisoners held in United States jails on spying charges.

He also called for the release of a Puerto Rican detainee held for more than 30 years on conspiracy charges for demanding the island’s independence from the US.

He made the decision to take detainees from Guantanamo in March but the move was delayed until after the elections in November.

Former President Tabare Vazquez, who led the country from 2005 to 2010, won in the second round of presidential elections and is due to start his new mandate next March.

More than half of the 172 men still in Guantanamo have been cleared for transfer but have nowhere to go because their countries are unstable or unsafe.

More than 50 countries have accepted former Guantanamo detainees.

In Latin America, El Salvador is the only country to have given Guantanamo prisoners sanctuary, taking two in 2012.

An innocent man, tortured by the US, asks the UN: Where's the accountability?

November 13, 2014 by Nasheman

by Dan Froomkin, The Intercept

U.S. officials are in for a serious grilling on Wednesday as they get hauled before the U.N. Committee against Torture and questioned about about a multitude of ways in which the U.S. appears to be failing to comply with the anti-torture treaty it ratified 20 years ago.

As Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program noted on Monday:

This marks the first U.N. review of the United States’ torture record since President Obama took office in 2009, and much is at stake. The review will test the pledges President Obama made to reverse disastrous Bush-era policies that led to gross violations of human rights, like torture, secret and incommunicado detention, “extraordinary renditions,” unfair trials, and more. It is also likely to examine practices that emerged or became entrenched during Obama’s time in office, such as indefinite detention at Guantánamo, immigration detention and deportations, and the militarization of the police, as witnessed by the world during this summer’s events in Ferguson.

The ACLU’s “shadow report” to the committee is a profoundly grim indictment of the nation’s failure to live up to its principles.

And although Obama claims to oppose torture, the New York Times recently reported that he could well fail another key test of his sincerity by reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the international Convention Against Torture imposes no legal obligation on the U.S. to bar cruelty outside its borders.

Obama has already flouted the convention’s requirement that member states hold torturers accountable. I have long argued that his failure there has been particularly profound.

U.S. non-governmental agencies were allowed to address the U.N. committee today, and Murat Kurnaz (pictured above), who was tortured and detained by the U.S. at Kandahar and then Guantanamo over a period of five years, traveled to Geneva with his attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Baher Azmy. He made the following statement:

Good afternoon. My name is Murat Kurnaz. I am a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Bremen, Germany, where I currently live. I spent five years of my life in detention in Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay from 2001-2006.My story is like many others. In 2001, while traveling in Pakistan, I was arrested by Pakistani police and sold to the U.S. military for a $3,000 bounty. In Kandahar, the U.S. military subjected me to electric shocks, stress positions, simulated drowning, and endless beatings. In Guantanamo, there was also psychological torture—I was stripped of my humanity, treated like an animal, isolated from the rest of the world, and did not know if I would ever be released.

Even though my lawyers proved that the U.S. knew of my innocence by 2002, I was not released until 2006. I lost five years of my life in Guantanamo.

Eight years later, I cannot believe that Guantanamo is still open and that there are almost 150 men detained there indefinitely. My time in Guantanamo was a nightmare, but I sometimes consider myself lucky. I know that part of the reason I am free today is because I am from Germany.

Most of the current prisoners remain in Guantanamo because they are from Yemen and the U.S. refuses to send them home. Many are as innocent as I was. But they are enduring the torture of Guantanamo for over 12 years because of their nationality, not because of anything they have done.

I understand that international human rights laws like the Convention Against Torture were created so that the people who commit torture are punished. Isn’t that how we can end torture in the world? So why has no U.S. official been held responsible for brutal practices and torture at Guantanamo or other U.S. prisons?

I will never get five years of my life back, but for me and others, it is important that the Committee confronts the United States about its actions in Guantanamo and other prisons.

Thank you.

The committee’s proceedings are being livestreamed here. The questioning of the U.S. delegation begins as 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Geneva time — 4 a.m. ET.

Moazzam Begg’s letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

October 13, 2014 by Nasheman

Moazzam Begg leaves Belmarsh prison in south London after his release. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

Moazzam Begg, who was recently released from prison after new evidence exonerated him from terrorism charges, wrote the following appeal to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi for the release of British citizen Alan Henning .

Begg wrote the letter whilst still detained in Belmarsh jail. He approached the Foreign Office to facilitate this appeal but they refused to assist and thus the letter never publicly went out.

Henning was subsequently beheaded.

Moazzam Begg freed after terrorism case against him collapses

October 3, 2014 by Nasheman

Secret intelligence material handed to prosecutors demolished case against former Guantánamo Bay detainee

Moazzam Begg leaves Belmarsh prison in south London after his release. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

– by Ian Cobain

The prosecution of the former Guantánamo inmate Moazzam Begg has dramatically collapsed after the police and crown prosecutors were handed secret intelligence material that undermined the terrorism case against him.

Five days before Begg was due to go on trial on a string of terrorism charges, which carried prison terms of up to 15 years, prosecutors announced at the Old Bailey that they had “recently become aware of relevant material” that obliged them to offer no evidence.

He was released from Belmarsh high-security prison in south London after the judge entered a formal verdict of not guilty. Speaking to reporters at the gates of the prison, Begg said he had wanted his “day in court” but was happy to be a free man.

“I need to reconnect with my family again,” he said. “I need to understand what it’s like to be a free man and I think that it’s important to point out some of the government’s failures in its foreign policy and its internal policy: its clear demonising of the Muslim community.”

Police sources said the decision to halt the prosecution was taken following the receipt of intelligence material two months ago, while the Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement: “If we had been made aware of all of this information at the time of charging, we would not have charged.”

Asked whether the information had been handed over by MI5 and, if so, how long the agency had possessed the material, the Home Office said it would be inappropriate to comment, on the grounds that the decision to halt the prosecution had been taken by the police and CPS.

There was speculation that the newly disclosed material detailed the way in which Begg had informed British authorities of his plans to travel to Syria.

Begg spent more than seven months in custody after being arrested and questioned over a number of trips he had made to Syria a year earlier. His friends say that the experience had been deeply traumatic.

The 46-year-old from Birmingham was facing seven charges of possessing a document for the purposes of terrorism funding and training, and attending a terrorism training camp. He denied all the charges.

Christopher Hehir, prosecuting, told the Old Bailey that the CPS had previously been satisfied that they possessed sufficient evidence to secure Begg’s prosecution. He added, however: “The prosecution have recently become aware of relevant material, in the light of which, after careful and anxious consideration, the conclusion has been reached that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction in this case. The prosecution therefore offers no evidence.”

Begg’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, said he should never have been charged as his activities did not amount to terrorism. “This is a good man trying to do the right thing in a very difficult world,” she said.

“He is a rare individual who will talk to everyone and listen to everyone, even those with whom he profoundly disagrees. He has spent the near decade since he was released from the torture of Bagram and Guantánamo in attempting to wake the world up to injustice and to comprehend its causes and effects. There is nothing new that can have been discovered now that was not always crystal clear – that this is an innocent man.”

Begg had made no secret of trips he had made to Syria, at one point writing about his experiences in an internet post. He was taken aback by his arrest, protesting that he had not been engaged in terrorism.

On appearing in court, he denied attending a terrorist training camp “knowing or believing instruction or training was provided there for the purposes of terrorism” between 9 October 2012 and 9 April 2013.

He had also denied five charges of possessing articles for purposes connected with terrorism between 31 December 2012 and 26 February 2014. Those counts related to electronic documents found on a laptop computer in his possession.

Begg had further denied being involved in a funding arrangement between 14 July 2013 and 26 February 2014 by making available a Honda generator.

Had the case gone to trial, Begg was planning to argue before the jury that his actions – several months before the British government tried, and failed, to persuade parliament to sanction air strikes against Syrian government forces – were not the actions of a terrorist.

At an earlier hearing, his counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, told the court that his client’s stance on Syria was not at odds with the British government’s position. He said: “Mr Begg did not train anyone for the purposes of terrorism as defined in the 2001 [Terrorism] Act. Mr Begg says he was involved in training young men to defend civilians against war crimes by the Assad regime.

“This is not some sort of political defence. This is a serious point about the lethal and physical limits of the definition of terrorism because if the defence says the occasions concerned were defensive actions, in much the same way the UK was itself providing non-lethal aid, then we submit that would not be defined as an act of terrorism.”

Emmerson also said Begg had “never made any secret of his visits to Syria and on two occasions informed authorities of his travel plans in advance”.

Begg spent three years detained without charge after the al-Qaida attacks of 2001. In February 2002 he was arrested in Pakistan, handed over to US forces, and detained first at Bagram prison, north of Kabul, and then Guantánamo Bay. During his detention he was interrogated by British as well as US intelligence officers.

He was eventually released in January 2005. Working with the London-based rights group Cage, he became a prominent campaigner on behalf of terrorism suspects who were being denied basic legal rights.

Asim Qureshi, Cage’s research director, said on the collapse of Begg’s prosecution: “This has been a testing time for Moazzam, his family and the Muslim community. The criminalisation of virtually any Muslim who has been to Syria has only increased in intensity, while Cage has been attacked from every angle by a host of government agencies.

“We hope that Moazzam’s release is a sign that the government are now willing to adopt a more measured strategy in relation to anti-terrorism policy and avoid the attempt to criminalise all dissent and crush any organisation like Cage that stands up for the rule of law and justice.”

The Islamic Human Rights Commission chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, added: “As was widely suspected there seems to have been no basis for his arrest and it does seem that as a high-profile member of the Muslim community, Mr Begg was being made an example of in order to silence activists campaigning against draconian anti-terrorism laws.”

While West Midlands police and the CPS were not disclosing the exact nature of the new information, detectives and prosecutors were dismayed that it had not been made available to them earlier.

A CPS spokesperson said: “At the time that the charges against Mr Begg were authorised the CPS was satisfied, in accordance with the code for crown prosecutors, that there was sufficient evidence available to provide a realistic prospect of a conviction and that it was in the public interest to prosecute. However, in accordance with our continuing duty to review and working closely with the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit, we have been made aware of material previously not known to the police investigation that means that there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. If we had been made aware of all of this information at the time of charging, we would not have charged.”

West Midlands Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale said: “New material has recently been disclosed to police and CPS, which has a significant impact on key pieces of evidence that underpinned the prosecution’s case. Our criminal justice system – quite rightly – demands a very high standard of proof.

“I understand this is going to raise many questions. However, explaining what this newly revealed information is would mean discussing other aspects of the case which would be unfair and inappropriate as they are no longer going to be tested in court.

“From the beginning this case has challenged the relationship between West Midlands police and some of the communities we serve. I would like to reassure them and Mr Begg that at every stage of this investigation my officers acted in the best interests of the public and of justice.”

Source

U.S Court: Releasing images of Guantanamo prisoner would incite violence, especially since he was tortured

September 29, 2014 by Nasheman

– by Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter

A federal appeals court has ruled that the United States government can keep video and photos of high-profile Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani secret because it is well-known that he was tortured and abused and any future release of information depicting him could be used by terrorist groups to incite anti-American violence.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. At issue are at least 58 FBI videos “depicting Qahtani’s activities in his cell and his interactions” with Defense Department personnel. There are also two videos showing “forced cell extractions,” where Qahtani was likely removed from his cell in an abusive or aggressive manner, two videos showing “document intelligence debriefings” and “six mugshots” of Qahtani.

The Second US Court of Appeals in Manhattan declared in its decision [PDF] that the government had established “with adequate specificity” that images of Qahtani, who the government alleges was the 20th hijacker in the September 11th attacks, “could logically and plausibly harm national security because these images are uniquely susceptible to use by anti‐American extremists as propaganda to incite violence against United States interests domestically and abroad.”

The appeals court embraced the pro-secrecy arguments of US Central Command Chief of Staff Karl Horst, who had submitted a declaration to the court.

Release of the records, Horst argued, would endanger “US military personnel, diplomats and aid workers serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere” and aide the “recruitment and financing of extremist and insurgent groups” because “enemy forces in Afghanistan” and elsewhere “have previously used videos and photographs [particularly of US forces interacting with detainees] out of context to incite the civilian population and influence government officials.” For example, the media published images in 2004 “relating to allegations of abuse of Iraqi detainees” (i.e. Abu Ghraib) and media reported in 2005 on “alleged incidents of mishandling of the Koran at Guantanamo.”

Horst added, “[T]he subject of US detainee operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at [Guantanamo] is extremely sensitive with the host nations and governments whose nationals we detain.” Additionally, releasing information ” would facilitate the enemy’s ability to conduct information operations and could be used to increase anti‐American sentiment,” especially since the images “could be manipulated to show greater mistreatment than actually occurred, or change the chronology of actual events.”

As the court noted, in January 2009, the Defense Department’s Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Crawford, stated that Qahtani’s treatment at Guantanamo “met the legal definition of torture” in an interview for The Washington Post. This statement was stunningly invoked to justify keeping videos and images concealed from the public.

“Apart from his notable profile, Qahtani is unusual because a significant government official has publicly opined that the interrogation methods used on him met the legal definition of torture,” the court contended.

“In effect, the court has embraced a rule that allows the government to use its own human rights abuses as a justification for concealing evidence of that misconduct from the public,” attorney Larry Lustberg, who argued the case for CCR, stated. “This rule is not only perverse, but it is also contrary to the Freedom of Information Act’s prohibition against using illegality or embarrassment as justifications for withholding information.”

Lustberg continued, “Fortunately, the Court of Appeals emphasized the limits of its opinion, noting that it was not holding that ‘every image of a specifically identifiable detainee is exempt from disclosure pursuant to FOIA,’ nor that ‘the government is entitled to withhold any documents that may reasonably incite anti‐American sentiment.’ But that qualification aside, this decision represents a sad illustration of the judicial abandonment of its obligations to secure the people’s rights under the Freedom of Information Act.”

A federal district court judge in the Southern District of New York had previously issued a similar ruling in September of last year. In fact, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald had argued in her decision the “written record of torture” made it “all the more likely that enemy forces would use Qahtani’s image against the United States’ interests.”

This anti-transparency argument is not all that different from arguments previously articulated by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

When the ACLU filed a FOIA lawsuit for photographs of detainee abuse, O’Reilly declared on July 25, 2005:

…Everybody knows those pictures incite violence against Americans. So why should more of them be fed to the press? We already know what happened at Abu Ghraib, and people are going to prison because of it. Clearly, more pictures of Abu Ghraib help the terrorists, as do Geneva Convention protections and civilian lawyers. So there is no question the ACLU and the judges who side with them are terror allies…

Additionally, Buchwald argued in the district court’s decision, “There is no evidence that any of the withheld videotapes or photographs depict illegal conduct, evidence of mistreatment, or other potential sources of governmental embarrassment.” Based off a review of the “FBI’s individualized description of the FBI Videotapes,” these records “do not document any abuse or mistreatment.”

It is difficult to determine if this claim is true. CCR cannot address the veracity of the claim because that would put attorneys at risk of being accused of improperly disclosing information to the public they are not authorized to disclose, according to a protective order in Qahtani’s habeas case.

Buchwald did not view the actual videotapes, an example of extreme deference toward the national security state. She read descriptions the government provided, which were likely written to ensure the judge was not suspicious or concerned about any of the tapes’ contents. It would appear the appeals court also accepted descriptions in an “FBI index” provided, which CCR was not allowed to view.

Either way, the appeals court adopted another pro-secrecy argument that because so much was known about Qahtani’s alleged treatment and detention already there was an even higher risk of violence being incited by terrorists.

CCR had argued that this “propaganda” justification would “stymie FOIA’s aims” and make it possible for the “government to disregard people’s right to a transparent government whenever there is a distant risk that someone somewhere could respond with violence.”

In other words, fear wins. The terrorists win. Terrorist groups can continue to relish the impact they are having on closing off American society.

The decision punishes Qahtani for being tortured. His lawyers do not get to reveal to the world additional details related to his abusive treatment because the government is afraid evidence of their torture will lead to blowback.

Court decisions like this also send a message to autocratic leaders of other countries, who are threatened by extremist groups, that they can defend keeping certain evidence of human rights abuses secret. All they have to do is point to the country that considers itself the freest nation in the world and invoke “national security” to justify keeping certain evidence of human rights abuses secret too.

Furthermore, it would be much easier to accept the arguments advanced by the government and complaisantly adopted as some kind of isolated and exceptional case if there had been US officials held accountable for torturing detainees, like Qahtani.

There has been virtually no justice for victims of US torture, and the bulk of one of the few and only official investigations by the government into torture by the Senate intelligence committee is likely to remain mostly concealed for many, many years as the CIA invokes similar arguments to justify heavily censoring a version of the report’s summary that may or may not be released to the public some time this year.

All the government needs is the confidence that it can argue, case by case, that information, which reflects poorly on the US shouldn’t be released. That is unquestionably what this decision gives the government the ability to do.

Essentially, if there is an enemy that can benefit from finding out how the US government brutally violates the human rights of people, those abuses do not ever have to be disclosed by the government. And, in that sense, the appeals court decision encourages a slide toward totalitarianism.