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You are here: Home / Archives for 9/11

US judge dismisses 9/11 case against Saudi Arabia

September 30, 2015 by Nasheman

Judge throws out case filed by victims’ families, saying Saudi Arabia cannot be sued due to sovereign immunity.

The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people [Reuters]

The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

A US judge has dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks, who accused the country of providing material support to al-Qaeda.

US District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan, New York, said Saudi Arabia had sovereign immunity from damage claims by families of nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks, and from insurers that covered losses suffered by building owners and businesses.

“The allegations in the complaint alone do not provide this court with a basis to assert jurisdiction over defendants,” Daniels wrote.

The victims had sought to supplement their case with new allegations to avoid that result, including based on testimony they secured from Zacarias Moussaoui, a former al-Qaeda operative imprisoned for his role in the attacks, Reuters reported.

Daniels said even if he allowed the plaintiffs to assert those new claims, doing so would be “futile, however, because the additional allegations do not strip defendants of sovereign immunity”.

Classified evidence

Saudi Arabia was dropped as a defendant before as judges said it was protected by sovereign immunity, but a federal appeals court in December 2013 reinstated it, saying a legal exception existed and the circumstances were extraordinary.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they would appeal. Sean Carter, one the lawyers, said he believed the ruling was also the consequence of the US government’s decision to keep classified evidence that could be favourable to their cause.

Relatives allege that Saudi agents provided the hijackers who carried out the attack with assistance including helping two of them with accommodation in the US.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia.

The US government’s 9/11 Commission said in a 2003 report that there was no evidence Saudi Arabia had funded al-Qaeda.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 9/11, Saudi Arabia, United States, USA

CIA 'torture' practices started long before 9/11 attacks

December 13, 2014 by Nasheman

A U.S. soldier walks between cells with Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad on May 17, 2004. REUTERS

A U.S. soldier walks between cells with Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad on May 17, 2004. REUTERS

by Jeff Stein, Newsweek

“The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 there is a brief reference to KUBARK, the code name for a 1963 instruction manual on interrogation, which was used on subjects ranging from suspected Soviet double agents to Latin American dissidents and guerrillas.

The techniques will sound familiar to anybody who has followed the raging debate over interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA to break Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world. When the going got tough, the CIA got rough.

The 1963 KUBARK manual included the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression,” the committee wrote.

Many such methods were used on a Cold War-era Soviet defector whom a few CIA officials suspected of being a double agent. They came to light in a congressional investigation over 25 years ago. “In 1978, [CIA Director] Stansfield Turner asked former CIA officer John Limond Hart to investigate the CIA interrogation of Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko using the KUBARK methods—to include sensory deprivation techniques and forced standing,” the committee reported.

Hart found the methods repugnant, he told a congressional committee investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “It has never fallen to my lot to be involved with any experience as unpleasant, in every possible way as…the investigation of this [Nosenko] case and…the necessity of lecturing upon it and testifying,” Hart told the committee. “To me, it is an abomination, and I am happy to say that it is not in my memory typical of what my colleagues and I did in the agency during the time I was connected with it.”

But the CIA reached for KUBARK when U.S.-backed Latin American military regimes were faced with human rights protests, left-wing subversion and armed insurgencies. “Just five years” after Hart expressed his dismay about torture on Capitol Hill, “in 1983 a CIA officer incorporated significant portions of the KUBARK manual into the Human Resource Exploitation (HRE) Training Manual, which the same officer used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s,” the Intelligence Committee report said. The new HRE manual was also “used to provide interrogation training to” a party whose name was censored in the committee’s report but was almost certainly the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group the CIA created to overthrow the Marxist revolutionary government in Managua.

“A CIA officer was involved in the HRE training and conducted interrogations” that may have gone overboard, the committee’s report said. “The CIA inspector general later recommended that he be orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.” While it’s not clear whether the officer was disciplined, he was sufficiently rehabilitated so that two decades later, “in the fall of 2002, [he] became the CIA’s chief of interrogations in the CIA’s Renditions Group, the officer in charge of CIA interrogations.”

According to the report, an unnamed head of the interrogation program—possibly the same man—threatened to quit over ethical concerns about CIA methods. “This is a train [wreck] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens,” the CIA officer wrote in an email to colleagues obtained by the committee. He said he had notified the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center of his impending resignation and cited a “serious reservation” about “the current state of affairs.”

Other veterans of the Latin American counterinsurgency wars were key players in the questionable post-9/11 interrogation practices exposed by the Senate committee, although they went unmentioned in its report because they were not CIA officers.

Retired Army Colonel James Steele, along with another retired army colonel, James H. Coffman, helped the Iraqi government set up police commando units and “worked…in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of U.S. funding,” the London-based Guardian newspaper and the BBC reported in a joint project in 2013.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisory group in El Salvador during its 1980s civil war, a struggle remembered chiefly for the “death squads” the regime used against nuns and priests allied with the poor. Steele had previously been decorated for his service in South Vietnam as a U.S. Army reconnaissance patrol leader.

Oddly, the CIA’s vast interrogation experience from the Vietnam War gets scant mention in those parts of the Senate committee report dealing with the methods’ origins. It notes only that in May 2013, “a senior CIA interrogator would tell personnel from the CIA’s Office of Inspector General” that the harsh methods being adopted by the agency after 9/11 originated in a practice used by North Vietnamese Communist interrogators to extract “confessions for propaganda purposes” from U.S. prisoners “who possessed little actionable intelligence.” The CIA, the interrogator believed, “need[ed] a different working model for interrogating terrorists where confessions are not the ultimate goal.”

The CIA’s Vietnam interrogation centers, jointly run in most cases with its South Vietnamese counterparts, were chiefly designed to extract information from captured Communist guerrillas, spies and suspected underground political agents, in order to launch attacks. Sometimes, however, a confession was used to then parade an apostate through South Vietnamese-controlled neighborhoods, like a trophy.

And prisoner abuse, including torture in so-called “tiger cages,” was common, according to many witnesses and other sources over the years. In 1969, the Army filed murder charges against the commander of the Green Berets in Vietnam and seven of his men after they used hallucinogenic drugs on a suspected double agent and killed him after he failed to confess. The charges were eventually dropped after a fierce lobbying campaign by then-CIA director Richard Helms, who feared a trial would expose abuses under the agency’s secret Phoenix assassination program.

After Vietnam and El Salvador, Steele went on to work in Baghdad under General David Petraeus, according to the account by the Guardian and BBC. He took Coffman with him. Petraeus commanded CIA and military special ops groups working jointly against Al-Qaeda in Iraq. “They worked hand in hand,” an Iraqi general, Muntadher al-Samari, said of Steele and Coffman. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there…the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.” Steele and Coffman could not be reached for comment.

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” added al-Samari, whose account was buttressed by others. “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee [would] use all means of torture to make the detainee confess, like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

Coffman was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, “for exceptionally valorous conduct while assigned as the Senior Advisor to the 1st Iraqi Special Police Commando Brigade” during the battle for Mosul, Iraq, in 2004, “during which the unit likely would have been overrun were it not for the courageous leadership of Colonel Coffman and the one Commando officer not wounded.”

The prison abuses in Iraq, however, turned out to be the loose strings in the otherwise tightly wound U.S. interrogation program. When the photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib exploded in the media in April 2004, at least one American ambassador in an unidentified country demanded to know if the CIA was doing anything similar under his roof that he didn’t know about. The Senate Intelligence Committee was disturbed enough by the Abu Ghraib revelations to arrange a classified briefing. “The media reports caused members of the Committee and individuals in the executive branch to focus on detainee issues,” the committee’s report said. Top CIA officials were summoned to Capitol Hill.

Their testimony was basically: That’s the Army, not us.

“The CIA used the Abu Ghraib abuses as a contrasting reference point for its detention and interrogation activities,” the committee’s report said. “In a response to a question from a Committee member, CIA Deputy Director [John] McLaughlin said, ‘We are not authorized in [the CIA program] to do anything like what you have seen in those photographs.’”

One member of the committee was soothed. “I understand,” the senator said, that the “norm” of CIA interrogations was “transparent law enforcement procedures [that] had developed to such a high level…that you could get pretty much what you wanted” without torture.

“The CIA did not correct the Committee member’s misunderstanding,” Tuesday’s report said, “that CIA interrogation techniques were similar to techniques used by U.S. law enforcement.”

That understanding would come later.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 9/11, Barack Obama, CIA, Cold War, Dianne Feinstein, George Bush, TORTURE, USA

Inside jobs and Israeli stooges: Why is the Muslim World in thrall to conspiracy cheories?

September 7, 2014 by Nasheman

There's a theory out there that the 2010 floods in Pakistan were caused by secret US military technology. Photo: Getty

There’s a theory out there that the 2010 floods in Pakistan were caused by secret US military technology. Photo: Getty

– by Mehdi Hasan

Did you know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was trained by Mossad and the CIA? Were you aware that his real name isn’t Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai but Simon Elliot? Or that he’s a Jewish actor who was recruited by the Israelis to play the part of the world’s most wanted terrorist?

If the messages in my email in-box and my Twitter timeline and on my Facebook page are anything to go by, plenty of Muslims are not only willing to believe this nonsensical drivel but are super-keen to share it with their friends. The bizarre claim that NSA documents released by Edward Snowden “prove” the US and Israel are behind al-Baghdadi’s actions has gone viral.

There’s only one problem. “It’s utter BS,” Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist who helped break the NSA story, told me. “Snowden never said anything like that and no [NSA] documents suggest it.” Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, has called the story a hoax.

But millions of Muslims across the globe have a soft spot for such hoaxes. Conspiracy theories are rife in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities here in the west. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” unleashed a vast array of hoaxers, hucksters and fantasists from Birmingham to Beirut.

On a visit to Iraq in 2002, I met a senior Islamic cleric who told me that Jews, not Arabs, had been responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He loudly repeated the Middle East’s most popular and pernicious 9/11 conspiracy theory: that 4,000 Jews didn’t turn up for work on 11 September 2001 because they had been forewarned about the attacks.

There is, of course, no evidence for this outlandish and offensive claim. The truth is that more than 200 Jews, including several Israeli citizens, were killed in the attacks on the twin towers. I guess they must have missed the memo from Mossad.

Yet the denialism persists. A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.

This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.

Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.

Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?

First, we should be fair: it’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have been on the receiving end of various actual conspiracies. France and Britain did secretly conspire to carve up the Middle East between them with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. They also conspired to attack Egypt, with Israel’s help, and thereby provoked the Suez crisis of 1956. Oh, and it turned out there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq in 2003 despite what the dossiers claimed.

I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time.. everything becomes a conspiracy.”

The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.

Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.

Where will it end? When will credulous Muslims stop leaning on the conspiracy crutch? We blame sinister outside powers for all our problems – extremism, despotism, corruption and the rest – and paint ourselves as helpless victims rather than indepen­dent agents. After all, why take responsibility for our actions when it’s far easier to point the finger at the CIA/Mossad/the Jews/the Hindus/fill-in-your-villain-of-choice?

As the Egyptian intellectual Abd al-Munim Said once observed, “The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from confronting our faults and problems.” They also make us look like loons. Can we give it a rest, please?

Mehdi Hasan is the political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman, where this article is crossposted

Filed Under: Muslim World Tagged With: 9/11, Conspiracy theory, Edward Snowden, Husain Haqqani, Jews, Middle East, Mossad, Muslims, NSA

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