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.”

Omar Khadr, former child prisoner at Gitmo, granted bail

May 8, 2015 by Nasheman

Once the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, 28-year-old Canadian-born Khadr will be allowed to leave prison after 13 years

Canadian-born Khadr was taken to Afghanistan by his father, a senior al Qaeda member who apprenticed the boy to a group of bomb makers who opened fire when U.S. troops came to their compound. Khadr was captured in the firefight, during which he was blinded in one eye and shot twice. (Photo: freeomar.ca)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was 15 when he was shot and captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and sent to Guantanamo Bay, was granted bail on Thursday after a judge in Alberta rejected a final effort by the Canadian government to keep Khadr in jail.

Court of Appeal Justice Myra Bielby granted the bail after announcing on Tuesday that she would need more time to make a decision on whether to release Khadr, now 28, as he appeals his Guantanamo Bay conviction.

The courtroom reportedly burst into cheers after Bielby announced her decision and said, “Mr. Khadr, you’re free to go.”

A lower court judge granted Khadr bail last month.

Toronto-born Khadr spent a decade in Guantanamo Bay after his capture. At 15, he was once the youngest detainee at the prison.

Khadr pleaded guilty in 2010 to killing an American soldier in Afghanistan eight years earlier, as part of a deal that would allow him to avoid a war crimes trial and be moved to a Canadian prison. He later recanted that admission, saying that it had been made under duress. Khadr said that he was tortured during numerous interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and the U.S.-operated Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, where he was briefly imprisoned before being sent to Cuba.

According to Reuters: “Khadr claims that during at least 142 interrogations in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, he was beaten, chained in painful positions, forced to urinate on himself, terrorized by barking dogs, subjected to flashing lights and sleep deprivation and threatened with rape.”

The Associated Press reported:

Khadr’s long-time lawyer Dennis Edney and wife have offered to take him into their home. Among the bail conditions imposed were that Khadr wear a tracking bracelet, live with the Edneys, observe a curfew between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and have only supervised access to the Internet. Also, he can communicate with his family in Ontario only while under supervision and only in English.

“He’s met very few people outside a jail cell,” said Nate Whitling, one of Khadr’s lawyers.

“It’s going to be a major adjustment for him, but I’m sure he’s up for it.”

Canadian judge grants freedom to Omar Khadr, once held as child at Gitmo

April 25, 2015 by Nasheman

The Canadian government, which news outlets note ‘has consistently opposed any effort to free the one-time child soldier,’ said it would appeal the decision.

by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams

At long last, a Canadian judge has granted bail to Omar Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was shot and captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, and who subsequently became the youngest detainee in Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the Toronto Star, Alberta Justice June Ross released her 23-page verdict Friday, a month after Khadr, now 28, appeared in an Edmonton court appealing for bail while his Guantanamo conviction is being challenged in a Washington, D.C. court.

The Canadian government, which Reuters notes “has consistently opposed any effort to free the one-time child soldier,” said it would appeal the decision.

Commenting after the decision, one of Khadr’s attorneys Nathan Whitling said, “Omar is fortunate to be back in Canada where we have real courts and real laws.”

And Maher Arar, a fellow Canadian whose case also galvanized human rights groups worldwide, tweeted of the verdict:

Child soldiers are need of rehabilitation & not of vilification. #PT #OmarKhadr

— Maher Arar (@ArarMaher) April 24, 2015

Sent as a teenager from the detention center at Bagram U.S. air base in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay naval base in 2002, Khadr has said he was severely mistreated at both facilities.

In 2010, Khadr pleaded guilty to killing an American soldier while he was a young teenager as part of a deal that allowed him to avoid a war crimes trial. He later recanted the admission. The plea agreement also made it possible for him to be moved from Guantanamo to a Canadian prison in 2012.

Upon his transfer to Canada, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) legal director Baher Azmy said in a statement:

Khadr never should have been brought to Guantanamo. He was a child of fifteen at the time he was captured, and his subsequent detention and prosecution for purported war crimes was unlawful, as was his torture by U.S. officials.

Like several other boys held at Guantanamo, some as young as twelve years old, Khadr lost much of his childhood. Canada should not perpetuate the abuse he endured in one of the world’s most notorious prisons. Instead, Canada should release him immediately and provide him with appropriate counseling, education, and assistance in transitioning to a normal life.

Khadr’s lawyers have said that at his appeal in the United States, “the defense will argue that Khadr is not guilty of a war crime, and only made his admissions under extreme duress,” CBC News reports.

The Canadian Press has a full timeline of Khadr’s legal saga. The conditions of Khadr’s release will be set May 5, 2015.

Judge orders US government to stop suppressing evidence of torture and abuse

March 23, 2015 by Nasheman

Ruling on Friday is latest development in years-long legal battle, in which the ACLU has argued the photos ‘are crucial to the public record’

“Indefinite Detention” (Photo: Justin Norman/flickr/cc)

by Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to release more than 2,000 photographs showing abuse and torture of people detained by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decision is the latest development in a more than 10-year-long legal battle, in which the American Civil Liberties Unions has argued that disclosure of the records is critical for public debate and government accountability.

Many of the concealed photographs were taken by U.S. military service members and collected during more than 200 military investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some could be on par with, or worse than, those released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

U.S. district judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled (pdf) that the government “is required to disclose each and all of the photographs” in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from the ACLU. In the order, Hellerstein argued that the government did not adequately prove that “disclosure would endanger Americans.”

The decision gives the Solicitor General two months to decide whether to appeal.

The ACLU has pressed for the release of records relating to torture and extrajudicial killings of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world since 2003.

The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have vigorously fought to keep these photographs suppressed, and in 2009, the White House collaborated with Congress to secretly change FOIA law to enable the concealment of the images, arguing it is necessary to protect national security.

However, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer argued in response to Friday’s ruling, “To allow the government to suppress any image that might provoke someone, somewhere, to violence would be to give the government sweeping power to suppress evidence of its own agents’ misconduct. Giving the government that kind of censorial power would have implications far beyond this specific context.”

“The photos are crucial to the public record,” Jaffer continued. “They’re the best evidence of what took place in the military’s detention centers, and their disclosure would help the public better understand the implications of some of the Bush administration’s policies. And the Obama administration’s rationale for suppressing the photos is both illegitimate and dangerous.”

UN reveals 'credible and reliable' evidence of US military torture in Afghanistan

February 27, 2015 by Nasheman

New report finds U.S.-backed Afghan government still committing widespread torture

UNAMA Human Rights Director, Georgette Gagnon (left), and Special Representative Nicholas Haysom. Photo: (Photo: UNAMA/Fardin Waezi)

by Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

The United Nations revealed Wednesday it has “credible and reliable” evidence that people recently detained at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan have faced torture and abuse.

The UN’s Assistance Mission and High Commissioner for Human Rights exposed the findings in a report based on interviews with 790 “conflict-related detainees” between February 2013 and December 2014.

According to the investigation, two detainees “provided sufficiently credible and reliable accounts of torture in a U.S. facility in Maydan Wardak in September 2013 and a U.S. Special Forces facility at Baghlan in April 2013.”

The report states that the allegations of torture were investigated by “relevant authorities” but provided no information about the outcome of the alleged probes or the nature of the mistreatment.

This is not the first public disclosure of evidence of torture during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, now into its 14th year. The U.S. military’s Bagram Prison, which was shuttered late last year, was notorious for torture, including beatings, sexual assault, and sleep deprivation, and further atrocities were confirmed in the Senate report (pdf) on CIA torture, released late last year in a partially-redacted form. Afghan residents have repeatedly spoken out against torture and abuse by U.S., international, and Afghan forces.

The Senate report on CIA torture, released late last year in a partially-redacted form, exposes U.S. torture at black sites in Afghanistan and around the world.

Moreover, residents of Afghanistan have testified to—and protested—torture by U.S., international, and Afghan forces.

Beyond U.S.-run facilities, the UN report finds that torture and abuse have slightly declined over recent years but remain “persistent” throughout detention centers run by the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including police, military, and intelligence officials. Of people detained for conflict-related reasons, 35 percent of them faced torture and abuse at the hands of their Afghan government captors, the report states.

According to the report, prevalent torture methods used by Afghan forces include, “prolonged and severe beating with cables, pipes, hoses or wooden sticks (including on the soles of the feet), punching, hitting and kicking all over the body including jumping on the detainee’s body, twisting of genitals including with a wrench-like device, and threats of execution and/or sexual assault.”

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.

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

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.