TORTURE – Page 2

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)

At home and abroad, UN report details abysmal U.S record of abuse

December 1, 2014 by Nasheman

Torture, indefinite detention, excessive force, and systematic discrimination and mistreatment have become part of the nation’s modern legacy

The findings of a new UN report do not reflect well on the U.S., a nation that continues to tout itself as a leader on such issues despite the enormous amount of criticism aimed at policies of torture, indefinite detention, and various forms of other abuse in recent years. (Image: Witness Against Torture/flickr)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

An official report by the United Nations Committee Against Torture released Friday found that the United States has a long way to go if it wants to actually earn its claimed position as a leader in the world on human rights.

Following a lengthy review of recent and current practices regarding torture, imprisonment, policing, immigration policies, and the overall legacy of the Bush and Obama administration’s execution of the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ the committee report (pdf) found the U.S. government in gross violation when it comes to protecting basic principles of the Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. ratified in 1994, as well as other international treaties.

This was the first full review of the U.S. human rights record by the UN body since 2006 and the release of the report follows a two-day hearing in Geneva earlier this month in which representatives of the Obama administration offered testimony and answered questions to the review panel. The report’s findings do not reflect well on the U.S., a nation that continues to tout itself as a leader on such issues despite the enormous amount of criticism aimed at policies of torture and indefinite detention implemented in the years following September 11, 2001, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, and the global military campaign taking place on several continents and numerous countries that continues to this day.

In addition to calling for full accountability for the worst torture practices that happened during the Bush administration, the panel also demanded the Obama administration end the continued harsh treatment of foreign detainees at its offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. AsReuters notes, the panel’s report criticized what it called a continued U.S. failure to fully investigate allegations of torture and ill-treatment of terrorism suspects held in U.S. custody abroad, “evidenced by the limited number of criminal prosecutions and convictions”.

According to the report:

The Committee expresses its grave concern over the extraordinary rendition, secret detention and interrogation programme operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 2001 and 2008, which involved numerous hum an rights violations, including torture, ill – treatment and enforced disappearance of persons suspected of involvement in terrorism – related crimes. While noting the content and scope of Presidential E.O. 13491, the Committee regrets the scant information pr ovided by the State party with regard to the now shuttered network of secret detention facilities, which formed part of the high – value detainee programme publicly referred to by President Bush on 6 September 2006. It also regrets the lack of information pr ovided on the practices of extraordinary rendition and enforced disappearance; and, on the extent of the CIA’s abusive interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists, such as waterboarding.

As The Guardian reports:

Many of the harshest criticisms are reserved for the Bush administration’s excesses between 2001 and 2009. But the committee is critical of how the current US government has failed, in its view, to clean up the mess that was created in the wake of 9/11.

In particular, it wants to see the US acknowledge torture as a specific criminal offence at the federal level, thereby removing possible loopholes in the law. It also urges the US Senate select committee on intelligence to publish as quickly as possible its report into the CIA’s historic detention and interrogation programme that has been caught up in political wrangling for months.

“The Obama administration needs to match its rhetoric with actions by supporting full accountability for torture,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s human rights program, in response to the report. “As a start, that means allowing the release of the Senate’s torture report summary without redactions that would defeat report’s primary purpose, which is to expose the full extent of government abuse. It also means ensuring a top-to-bottom criminal investigation of the torture that occurred.”

The report says that though the U.S. has tough anti-torture statutes on the books, it has not gone far enough in some areas to guarantee that no loopholes exist and has done far too little to allow redress for violations that have already occurred. In terms of recommendations, panel’s report “calls for the declassification of torture evidence, in particular Guantanamo detainees’ accounts of torture” and said the U.S. “should ensure that all victims of torture are able to access a remedy and obtain redress, wherever acts of torture occurred and regardless of the nationality of the perpetrator or the victim. ”

In addition to criticizing other policies related to military engagement abroad, the committee slammed the U.S. for many of its domestic policies, including prolonged solitary confinement of those in prison; charges of “prolonged suffering” for those exposed to “botched” state executions; heavy-handed and discriminatory policing practices in the nation’s cities; the treatment of juveniles in the criminal justice system; and serious problems with its immigration enforcement policies.

As protests related to the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri continue this week, the UN panel specifically referred to the “frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.”

Speaking with reporters, panel member Alessio Bruni said, “We recommend that all instances of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officers are investigated promptly, effectively and impartially by an independent mechanism.”

“This report – along with the voices of Americans protesting around the country this week – is a wake-up call for police who think they can act with impunity,” said ACLU’s Dakwar. “It’s time for systemic policing reforms and effective oversight that make sure law enforcement agencies treat all citizens with equal respect and hold officers accountable when they cross the line.”

‘We crossed the line’, US admits to UN anti-torture body

November 14, 2014 by Nasheman

by Agence France-Presse

The United States said Wednesday it did not condone torture under any circumstances, but acknowledged to a UN anti-torture watchdog it had “crossed the line” following the September 11 attacks.

“The US is proud of its record as a leader in respecting, promoting and defending human rights and the rule of law, both at home and around the world,” acting US legal advisor Mary McLeod told the 10-member UN Committee on Torture.

“But in the wake of 9/11 attacks, we regrettably did not always live up to our own values,” she said.

“We crossed the line and we take responsibility for that,” she said, quoting US President Barack Obama.

McLeod was one of about 30 top US officials gathered in Geneva for Washington’s first grilling by the committee since 2006.

In its first review since Obama came to power, several delegates acknowledged abuses had occurred during the so-called “War on Terror” under the previous administration of George W. Bush.

“We recognise that no nation is perfect, ours included,” Keith Harper, US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, told the committee.

The delegation faced a barrage of questions from committee members on how the country was dealing with rectifying and providing redress for acknowledged abuses during the “war on terror”.

The US delegation was asked to explain why the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba remains open, why many detainees remain there without charge and when Washington plans to shut it down.

The committee members also questioned the treatment of prisoners there, and lack of redress for victims of the widely publicised abuses by US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the early 2000s.

Beyond the “war on terror” legacy, the committee members raised issues of abuses in US prisons, rape in prisons, the broad use of drawn-out solitary confinement, and long years on death row.

And they asked how Washington could justify its widespread detention of non-violent, non-criminal illegal immigrants, including minors.

And they slammed police brutality that appears to disproportionately affect minorities, such as 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri last August.

His parents were in Geneva this week to take part in events on the sidelines of the committee hearing.

The committee is set to publish its conclusions on November 28.

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.

Report to UN condemns US government’s “international criminal program of torture”

November 4, 2014 by Nasheman

by Thomas Gaist, WSWS

A recent report to the UN Committee Against Torture concludes that the US presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for far-reaching violations of international law for directing and covering up a global torture program developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The report, prepared by the “Advocates for US Torture Prosecutions,” Dr. Trudy Bond, Prof. Benjamin Davis, Dr. Curtis F. J. Doebbler, and The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, states unequivocally that entire sections of the state apparatus are responsible for “breathtaking” crimes against international law.

“Civilian and military officials at the highest level created, designed, authorized and implemented a sophisticated, international criminal program of torture,” the report states.

The report details the vast scale of the torture system, noting that detainees were tortured not just at the US Guantanamo Bay Military Base in Cuba, but in numerous secret black sites worldwide, including in “Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Syria, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom (Diego Garcia), and Yemen.”

Having been “conceived and authorized at the highest levels” of the US government, responsibility for the crimes committed is shared by numerous top officials, the report concludes, including “President George W. Bush, then Vice President Dick Cheney, then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) George Tenet, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft.”

The torture techniques were devised by the CIA in collaboration with intelligence officers from the Egyptian and Saudi regimes, according to the report.

“The techniques in question, sometimes styled as interrogation techniques and sometimes as detention procedures, included near-drowning (‘waterboarding’), sleep deprivation for days, and forced nudity,” the report notes.

“They have caused many people intense suffering, including severe mental harm and, in some cases, death,” the report notes.

“Retroactive legal approval” was then contrived by US government lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In order to justify the new methods of “enhanced interrogation,” the torture lawyers of the Bush administration drew up an “absurdly narrow” definition of torture to justify the administration’s policies.

As a CIA lawyer commented to personnel at Guantanamo Bay when summarizing the content of the Bush administration torture memos, “…it is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees,” notes a report by the US Senate Armed Services Committee, cited in the new report to the UN.

Using the definition advanced under Bush, former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself “would be exculpated” for the systematic torture carried out by his regime, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh told the rapporteurs.

Far from being limited to the Bush administration, the report makes clear that the Obama administration, the Justice Department and multiple federal courts have upheld the conception that those involved in “waterboarding, dietary manipulation, walling, long-time standing, sleep deprivation and water dousing” should receive immunity, and that these techniques do not constitute torture.

The Obama administration has sought to safeguard all the senior Bush administration officials most directly responsible for torture from prosecution or any form of legal or punitive action for their involvement in torture.

As the report notes, all senior US government officials have received blanket immunity for their involvement in orchestrating a worldwide torture network, and “courts-martial and administrative proceedings for acts of torture have been almost exclusively limited to low-level private contractors or soldiers.”

The authors conclude that the “enhanced interrogation” methods violated the UN Convention Against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, which builds on the ban on torture contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The report maintains that “the prohibition against torture is absolute,” rejecting the legal concepts of the Bush administration and calling for the prosecution of top Bush administration lawyers, including the drafter of the three main “Torture Memos,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

The failure of the US government to hold accountable any of the leadership elements that organized the torture is undermining the “preemptory norm against torture,” according to the report. Torture is becoming more widespread and viewed as more acceptable by states everywhere in response to the unabashed repudiation of international law by the US.

In its concluding recommendation to the UN Committee Against Torture, the legal scholars demand that the US government adopt a legal and policy course that is 180 degrees opposed to that followed by the Obama administration since taking office.

“The United States should promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing or consenting in any way to acts of torture committed by their subordinates,” the rapporteurs write.

Were the demands of the report to be implemented, the result would be the prosecution of command elements and numerous individuals within the upper layers of the most powerful agencies of the American government, including the CIA, the military and the Department of Justice, together with numerous high-ranking members of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Countless figures, many now ensconced in academia and the corporate establishment, would face long jail sentences.

No such accountability will be forthcoming from any section of the political establishment, however, given that the torturers and their defenders are the preeminent political servants and military-intelligence specialists of the capitalist class.

The torture program was developed and implemented as part of an explosion of American militarism, as the ruling class has sought to maintain its global position through war and violence in every corner of the globe. It is also part of a wholesale assault on democratic rights, directed fundamentally against any opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial elite.

Far from prosecuting those responsible, the Obama administration is currently seeking to prevent the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee summary on CIA torture, working closely with the spy agency itself to cover up its crimes.

US ordered to explain withholding of Iraq and Afghanistan torture photos

October 23, 2014 by Nasheman

Obama admistration must justify suppression of never-before-seen photographs depicting US military torture of detainees

The photographs discussed in court on Tuesday are said to be even more disturbing than the infamous prison photos from Abu Ghraib. Photograph: Khalid Mohammed/AP

by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

The Obama administration has until early December to detail its reasons for withholding as many as 2,100 graphic photographs depicting US military torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge ordered on Tuesday.

By 12 December, Justice Department attorneys will have to list, photograph by photograph, the government’s rationale for keeping redacted versions of the photos unseen by the public, Judge Alvin Hellerstein instructed lawyers. But any actual release of the photographs will come after Hellerstein reviews the government’s reasoning and issues another ruling in the protracted transparency case.

While Hellerstein left unclear how much of the Justice Department’s declaration will itself be public, the government’s submission is likely to be its most detailed argument for secrecy over the imagery in a case that has lasted a decade.

“The only thing that bothers me is that we’re taking a lot of time,” Hellerstein told a nearly empty courtroom.

At issue is the publication of as many as 2,100 photographs of detainee abuse, although the government continues not to confirm the precise number. Said to be even more disturbing than the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs that sparked a global furor in 2004, the imagery is the subject of a transparency lawsuit that both the Bush and Obama administrations, backed by the US Congress, have strenuously resisted.

In 2009, US president Barack Obama reversed his position on the photographs’ release and contended they would “further inflame anti-American opinion and … put our troops in greater danger”. That year, Congress passed a law, the Protected National Security Documents Act, intended to aid the government in keeping the images from the public. Two secretaries of defense, Robert Gates in 2009 and Leon Panetta in 2012, have issued assertions that US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would be placed at risk by the disclosure.

But in August, Hellerstein said the government’s declaration was overbroad. Some of the photographs, which he said on Tuesday he had seen behind closed doors, “are relatively innocuous while others need more serious consideration”, Hellerstein said in August.

Disclosure, sought by the American Civil Liberties Union since 2004, will not come this year. Hellerstein scheduled a hearing to discuss the upcoming government declaration for 23 January.

The return of the US to war in Iraq raises the stakes for the case. Unlike in 2012, when Panetta certified that the release of the photographs would endanger the US military in Afghanistan, some 1,600 US troops are also now in Iraq again, this time to confront the Islamic State (Isis).

But while Hellerstein indicated he was interested in an “update” about current exposure to danger, he only ordered the government to specify its reasons for keeping each individual photograph withheld as of Panetta’s November 2012 declaration.

Potential release of the photographs dovetails with another imminent torture disclosure. The Senate intelligence committee is expected to soon unveil sections of its long-awaited investigation into CIA torture. The government’s most recent filing in a different transparency suit indicated the report’s release will come on 29 October, though the government has asked for extensions in the past and may do so again.

Marcellene Hearn, an attorney for the ACLU, portrayed the release of the torture photographs as an accountability measure.

“It’s disappointing that the government continues to fight to keep these photographs from the public,” Hearn said after the half-hour hearing. “The American people deserve to know the truth about what happened in our detention centers abroad. Yet the government is suppressing as many as 2,100 photographs of detainee abuse in Iraq and elsewhere. We will continue to press for the release of the photos in the courts.”

The U.S. Soldier who killed herself after refusing to take part in torture

October 14, 2014 by Nasheman

– by Greg Mitchell, Huffington Post

More than a decade ago, when I was the editor of Editor & Publisher, I was, as far as I know, the first writer with a national platform who regularly drew attention to the then largely-hidden tragedy of the rising rate of suicides among American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan–and then after they return home.

Despite the decline in fighting in those two theaters for many years, that suicide rate remains at very high or record levels. Last year there was this troubling report.

I have written about dozens of sad, tragic, individual cases. But one of the saddest of all concerns a young soldier who died eleven years ago last month. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what most would call torture — another wrong turn by the United States following 9/11 — Alyssa Peterson refused, then killed herself a few days later, on September 15, 2003.

Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the US Senate committee probe and various press reports that the “Gitmo-izing” of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it. I featured her in my book on Bush and media falures in Iraq, So Wrong for So Long.

Spc. Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers who died in Iraq. Her death under these circumstances should have drawn wide attention. It’s not exactly the Tillman case, but a cover-up, naturally, followed.

Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Arizona, native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. She was a valuable Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on September 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

A “non-hostile weapons discharge” leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials “said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson’s own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian.” And that might have ended it right there.

But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, not satisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, “just on a hunch,” he told me in late 2006. He made “hundreds of phone calls” to the military and couldn’t get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations.

Here’s what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston worked, reported:

Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.

The official probe of her death would later note that earlier she had been “reprimanded” for showing “empathy” for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of the report, in fact, is this: “She said that she did not know how to be two people; she… could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire.”

She was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. “But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle,” the documents disclose.

The official report revealed that a notebook she had written in was found next to her body, but blacked out its contents.

The Army talked to some of Peterson’s colleagues. Asked to summarize their comments, Elston told me:

The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties. That was the consistent point in the testimonies, that she objected to the interrogation techniques, without describing what those techniques were.

Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, which suggested that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note. It did not emerge.

Peterson a devout Mormon — her mother, Bobbi, claims she always stuck up for “the underdog” — had graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship. She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003, reportedly going in place of another soldier who did not wish to go.

A report in the Arizona Daily Sun of Flagstaff — three years after Alyssa’s death — revealed that Spc. Peterson’s mother, reached at her home in northern Arizona, said that neither she nor her husband Richard had received any official documents that contained information outlined in Elston’s report.

In other words: like the press and the public, even the parents had been kept in the dark. (Someone has posted a song tribute at YouTube, “The Ballad of Alyssa Peterson.”)

Kayla Williams, an Army sergeant who served with Alyssa, told me that she talked to her about her problems (including questioning her religious faith) shortly before she killed herself. Williams also was forced to take part in torture interrogations, where she saw detainees punched. Another favorite technique: strip the prisoners and then remove their blindfolds so that the first thing they saw was Kayla Williams. (Here’s the sad story of another soldier who revealed in his suicide note that he’d been forced to commit war crimes.)

She also opted out, but survived, and is haunted years later. She wrote a book about her experience in the military, Love My Rifle More Than You.

Here’s what Williams told Soledad O’Brien of CNN:

I was asked to assist. And what I saw was that individuals who were doing interrogations had slipped over a line and were really doing things that were inappropriate. There were prisoners that were burned with lit cigarettes.

Kayla Williams would end up attending her memorial service.

When I wrote a piece about Peterson a few years ago, her brother, Spencer Peterson, left a comment:

Alyssa is my little sister. I usually don’t comment on boards like this, and I don’t speak for the rest of my family (especially my folks), but I think she probably did kill herself over this. She was extremely sensitive and empathetic to others, and cared a lot more about the welfare and well-being of the people around her than she cared about herself…. Thank you to everyone for your continued support of our troops and our family. Alyssa’s death was a tremendous loss to everyone who knew her, and we miss her sweet and sensitive spirit. No one is happier than I am that (many of) our troops are coming home from Iraq, and I pray that the rest of our brave soldiers return home safely as soon as possible. Support our troops–bring them home!

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.