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Paul Merrell

US forced to acknowledge secret tapes of Guantánamo force-feedings | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...edge-guantanamo-force-feedings

war & peace torture Gitmo-detainees

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 May 14 - No Cached
  • A federal court has forced the US government to reveal that it has secretly recorded dozens of force-feedings of just one Guantánamo Bay detainee, raising the prospect that the military possesses a vast video library of a practice criticised as abusive.On Wednesday, a federal judge decreed that lawyers for that detainee can view hours of his videotaped force feedings, the first time a non-government official will be permitted to view the secret recordings.Before last week, the Defense Department did not even acknowledge that videotapes of its enteral feedings of hunger striking detainees – conducted by inserting a tube into the stomach through the nose – even existed.
Paul Merrell

Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ony-express-email-surveillance

surveillance state Canada CSE bulk-collection email

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats.
  • Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation — exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada’s criminal code, CSE is not allowed to eavesdrop on Canadians’ communications. But the agency can be granted special ministerial exemptions if its efforts are linked to protecting government infrastructure — a loophole that the Snowden documents show is being used to monitor the emails. The latest revelations will trigger concerns about how Canadians’ private correspondence with government employees are being archived by the spy agency and potentially shared with police or allied surveillance agencies overseas, such as the NSA. Members of the public routinely communicate with government employees when, for instance, filing tax returns, writing a letter to a member of parliament, applying for employment insurance benefits or submitting a passport application.
  • Chris Parsons, an internet security expert with the Toronto-based internet think tank Citizen Lab, told CBC News that “you should be able to communicate with your government without the fear that what you say … could come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.” Parsons said that there are legitimate cybersecurity purposes for the agency to keep tabs on communications with the government, but he added: “When we collect huge volumes, it’s not just used to track bad guys. It goes into data stores for years or months at a time and then it can be used at any point in the future.” In a top-secret CSE document on the security operation, dated from 2010, the agency says it “processes 400,000 emails per day” and admits that it is suffering from “information overload” because it is scooping up “too much data.” The document outlines how CSE built a system to handle a massive 400 terabytes of data from Internet networks each month — including Canadians’ emails — as part of the cyber operation. (A single terabyte of data can hold about a billion pages of text, or about 250,000 average-sized mp3 files.)
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  • The agency notes in the document that it is storing large amounts of “passively tapped network traffic” for “days to months,” encompassing the contents of emails, attachments and other online activity. It adds that it stores some kinds of metadata — data showing who has contacted whom and when, but not the content of the message — for “months to years.” The document says that CSE has “excellent access to full take data” as part of its cyber operations and is receiving policy support on “use of intercepted private communications.” The term “full take” is surveillance-agency jargon that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata from Internet traffic. Another top-secret document on the surveillance dated from 2010 suggests the agency may be obtaining at least some of the data by covertly mining it directly from Canadian Internet cables. CSE notes in the document that it is “processing emails off the wire.”
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 15
     
    " CANADIAN SPIES COLLECT DOMESTIC EMAILS IN SECRET SECURITY SWEEP BY RYAN GALLAGHER AND GLENN GREENWALD @rj_gallagher@ggreenwald YESTERDAY AT 2:02 AM SHARE TWITTER FACEBOOK GOOGLE EMAIL PRINT POPULAR EXCLUSIVE: TSA ISSUES SECRET WARNING ON 'CATASTROPHIC' THREAT TO AVIATION CHICAGO'S "BLACK SITE" DETAINEES SPEAK OUT WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH GRAVE THREATS? NET NEUTRALITY IS HERE - THANKS TO AN UNPRECEDENTED GUERRILLA ACTIVISM CAMPAIGN HOW SPIES STOLE THE KEYS TO THE ENCRYPTION CASTLE Canada's electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians' emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents. The surveillance initiative, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, is sifting through millions of emails sent to Canadian government agencies and departments, archiving details about them on a database for months or even years. The data mining operation is carried out by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada's equivalent of the National Security Agency. Its existence is disclosed in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The emails are vacuumed up by the Canadian agency as part of its mandate to defend against hacking attacks and malware targeting government computers. It relies on a system codenamed PONY EXPRESS to analyze the messages in a bid to detect potential cyber threats. Last year, CSE acknowledged it collected some private communications as part of cybersecurity efforts. But it refused to divulge the number of communications being stored or to explain for how long any intercepted messages would be retained. Now, the Snowden documents shine a light for the first time on the huge scope of the operation - exposing the controversial details the government withheld from the public. Under Canada's criminal code, CSE is no
Paul Merrell

What is no longer classified? (and what does it portend for the credibility of governme... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...-order-911-military-commission

war & peace CIA torture detainees rendition

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The prosecution’s motion to amend the protective order in the 9/11 military commission is finally posted.  As I discussed here, Judge Spath has granted a similar motion in the al-Nashiri case.  Judge Pohl has yet to rule on this motion in the 9/11 case because the defense apparently intends to file at least one response to it. In an earlier post I explained why I think this development is very welcome and overdue. There’s another very noteworthy thing about the prosecution’s motion, as well:  It enumerates those categories of information about the CIA’s rendition/detention/interrogation program that are no longer classified at all, and that therefore presumably can now be discussed even by those (unlike the detainees) who were properly subject to restrictions on disclosing such matters–including information about the treatment of all 119 individuals who were in CIA custody, to wit:
  • • The fact that the former RDI Program was a covert action program authorized by the President in the September 17, 2001 Memorandum of Notification; • General allegations of torture by high-value detainees, unless such allegations reveal the identities (e.g., names, physical descriptions, or other identifying information) of CIA personnel or contractors, the locations of detention sites (including the name of any country in which the detention site was allegedly located), or any foreign intelligence service involvement in the detainees’ capture, rendition, detention, or interrogation; • The names and descriptions of the thirteen Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) that were approved for use, and the specified parameters within which the EITs could be applied;
  • • The techniques themselves as applied to the 119 individuals mentioned in Appendix 2 of the SSCI Executive Summary acknowledged to have been in CIA custody; • Information regarding the conditions of confinement as applied to those 119 individuals; • Information regarding the treatment of those 119 individuals, including the application of standard interrogation techniques; and • Information regarding the conditions of confinement or treatment during the transfer (“rendition”) of the 119 individuals.
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  • This is important for several reasons, not least of which is that it might mean that it is now permissible to release the vast majority of the complete, 6000-or-so-page SSCI Report. One other thing:  The motion relates that in April 2012, in support of the Government’s motion requesting that Judge Pohl issue the protective order, the accompanying declarations of government officials set forth the “grave harm to national security that unauthorized disclosure of such information would cause.”  I think it’s fair to say, now that such information has been disclosed, that these alarms were unwarranted and ill-advised.  No grave harm has befallen the nation.  And so it appears, at least, as though there never was a very good reason why these important categories of information about the RDI program could not and should not have been disclosed years ago.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Mar 15
     
    But what about "extraordinary rendition?"
Paul Merrell

US Navy Seals esaped punishment after reportedly beating detainees in Afghanistan - Tel... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-detainees-in-Afghanistan.html

war & peace torture SEALs Afghanistan

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Members of the US Navy Seals brutally beat detainees in Afghanistan but escaped punishment after the abuse was reported, according to reports. US soldiers told their superiors they witnessed three Seals dropping heavy stones on detainees chests, kicking and stepping on their heads, firing weapons during an interrogation, and employing a variation of waterboarding. The Navy Seals are an elite special operations force perhaps best known for carrying out the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
  • The beatings by the Seals and members of an Afghan militia were so severe that one man died hours later and another has lasting injuries from the 2012 incident. The interrogations followed an explosion at an Afghan Local Police (ALP) checkpoint in the village of Kalach which killed a member of the ALP militia. The militiamen, who were trained by the Seals, rounded up approximately six suspects and brought them to a US base, beating them with rifles and antennae along the way. What happened next shocked Specialist David Walker, an Army medic, and other witnesses. Instead of ending the beatings and reprimanding the ALP members, they say the three Seals joined in and even intensified the abuse.
  • When the men were released later that afternoon they were bloodied and hobbling. One, Muhammad Hashem, 24, was unable to walk. He died later the same day. Specialist Walker and three fellow soldiers decided to report the incident. “It just comes down to what’s wrong and what’s right,” he told the New York Times. “You can’t squint hard enough to make this gray.” A Navy lawyer recommended that the Seals be charged with assault, and potentially face a court martial. Instead, the charges were processed in a closed disciplinary process more commonly used for minor infractions, and the men were moved to different units but faced no further punishment.
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  • Captain Robert Smith, then commander of all East Coast-based Seals and now a senior official in the department of the Navy, ultimately cleared the men of all charges. He said eyewitness accounts of what took place were inconsistent, and “did not give me enough confidence in their overall accuracy to hold the accused accountable for assaults or abuse”.
Paul Merrell

Shaker Aamer, Last British Guantanamo Detainee Released - 0 views

theantimedia.org/h-guantanamo-detainee-released

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy GITMO-detainees Shaker CIA torture tyranny

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantanamo Bay, was released on Friday after being detained without charge for almost 14 years.On September 25th, U.S. and U.K. authorities confirmed that Aamer was to be returned to the U.K. within days. The release comes after Aamer endured well over a decade of torture, detention without charge or trial, and solitary confinement. Aamer’s high profile case has highlighted everything that is wrong with the war on terror — detention without charge or trial, government complicity in torture and lack of accountability for war crimes, gross obstruction of justice, and the humiliating and dehumanising treatment of detainees.A keen community worker and U.K. resident, Aamer is married to a British woman and four British children living in London. He was volunteering for a charity in Afghanistan in 2001 when he was abducted and sold for a bounty to U.S. forces. He was tortured, eventually cracking and agreeing to his captors’ accusations against him. Satisfied with the confession of an abused and broken man, U.S. forces took him to Guantánamo Bay on Valentine’s Day 2002.In a September Daily Mail piece entitled “Torture and the man who could expose Britain’s dirtiest secrets,” journalist Peter Oborne said, “My view is that Mr Aamer may have paid the price for knowing too much. The CIA had very good reason to be terrified of what he might reveal when he emerged from jail.”
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 15
     
    "And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." --- Matthew 25:40. 
Paul Merrell

MoD pays out millions to Iraqi torture victims | Law | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mod-iraqi-torture-victims

war crimes torture rendition human rights

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The Ministry of Defence has paid out £14m in compensation and costs to hundreds of Iraqis who complained that they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country.Hundreds more claims are in the pipeline as Iraqis become aware that they are able to bring proceedings against the UK authorities in the London courts.
  • Lawyers representing former prisoners of the British military say that more than 700 further individuals are likely to make claims next year.Most of those compensated were male civilians who said they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened before being interrogated by British servicemen and women who had detained them on suspicion of involvement in the violent insurgency against the occupation. Others said that they suffered sexual humiliation and were forced into stress positions for prolonged periods.
  • Many of the complaints arise out of the actions of a shadowy military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (Jfit) which operated an interrogation centre throughout the five-year occupation. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the mistreatment of detainees at Jfit not long after it was first established.Despite this, the interrogators shot hundreds of video films in which they captured themselves threatening and abusing men who can be seen to be bruised, disoriented, complaining of starvation and sleep deprivation and, in some cases, too exhausted to stand unaided.
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  • During proceedings brought before the high court in London, lawyers representing the former Jfit prisoners suggested the interrogation centre could be regarded as "Britain's Abu Ghraib".
  • Next month, the high court will hear a judicial review of the MoD's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the abuses. Human rights groups and lawyers for the former prisoners say the UK government is obliged to hold an inquiry to meet its obligations under the European convention on human rights – and particularly under article three of the convention, which protects individuals from torture.After a hearing, the high court highlighted matters supporting the allegations of systemic abuse. These included:• The same techniques being used at the same places for the same purpose: to assist interrogation.• The facilities being under the command of an officer.• Military doctors examining each prisoner at various stages in their detention.• Investigations by the Royal Military police that were concluded without anyone being held to account.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Dec 12
     
    The Brits at least have the decency to attempt to make amends for its soldiers who tortured prisoners. Not so in the U.S. *Every* "war on terror" detainee who has filed a case for damages in the U.S. has been thrown out of court at the government's request, usually on grounds of the State Secrets privilege. It is a sad situation that our courts allow government secrecy about unlawful conduct to trump individual rights to redress for injury. 
Paul Merrell

Commission finds 'systematic violation of human rights' at Guantanamo Bay | The Raw Story - 0 views

www.rawstory.com/...human-rights-at-guantanamo-bay

IACHR Guantanamo-Bay human rights

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Monday demanded the United States explain abuses allegedly committed at Guantanamo prison, especially its practice of force-feeding inmates on hunger strike. “The information we have indicates that there was a general and systematic violation of human rights” in Guantanamo, said Rodrigo Escobar Gil, one of the Washington-based body’s seven commissioners. The allegations of forced feeding of Guantanamo prisoners on hunger strike constituted “cruel and inhumane treatment,” he added. “We want to know … what research is being done about it” and “what steps have been taken to meet the demands of the prisoners,” the commissioner said. At its peak, some 106 out of 164 detainees were on hunger strike in protest against the legal limbo in which detainees are held at the prison, which is on a US naval base on the southeastern tip of Cuba. According to US authorities, who say that the strike ended in late September after more than six months, up to 46 of the detainees were force-fed through nasal tubes at some point in the protest. The government has argued in US court that the practice, called enteral feeding, “is used only when medically necessary to protect life and health.”
  • The IACHR said Monday it wanted unfettered access to the prison camp to investigate. “We have reports of torture and degrading treatment. But all our requests for visits without conditions have been denied. We want to know when they are going to allow visits without pre-conditions,” Escobar Gil added. The commissioner also requested the IACHR report on “the remaining obstacles to the transfer of prisoners to other countries,” noting US President Barack Obama has promised to shut the camp. But the US deputy representative to the commission, Lawrence Gumbiner, said his team could not answer issues raised at the hearing because the 17-day US government shutdown in October left them inadequate time to prepare. “We respectfully propose to the commission to answer in writing in 30 days,” Gumbiner said, generating a buzz of surprise.
Paul Merrell

CIA and White House under pressure after Senate torture report leaks | World news | the... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-pressure-leaked-senate-report

war & peace torture CIA lies Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A leak of the major findings of a landmark Senate inquiry into the CIA’s post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees led, on Friday, to intensified pressure on the White House and the CIA to release the inquiry speedily and with a minimum of redactions.The classified study, prepared by the Senate select committee on intelligence, concluded that the CIA’s interrogations, secret detentions and outsourced torture sessions were “brutal, and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.” More suspected terrorists underwent the agency’s post-9/11 treatment, which largely lasted from 2002 to 2006, than the CIA has publicly admitted, according to the report’s findings, which were first reported by McClatchy. Last week, committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California stated that the Senate investigated the cases of 100 detainees – dozens more than previously known to have gone through the CIA’s so-called “interrogation, detention and rendition” programs.
  • In addition to misleading policymakers, the Senate report charges the CIA with selectively and leaking classified and inaccurate information to journalists in order to portray the program in a positive light.“The CIA manipulated the media by co-ordinating the leak of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the committee found.The agency also, according to the report, provided factually inaccurate information to Bush administration lawyers, who relied on it to concoct the legal theories that underpinned an apparatus of torturous interrogations and detentions that quickly spread to US military facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Despite the acrimony, the White House announced last week that the CIA will lead the executive-branch panel that will recommend how much of the Senate report’s executive summary, findings and recommendations to make public, a decision blasted by human-rights groups and intelligence scholars as a conflict of interest.
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  • According to the leaked conclusions, the committee found that that the agency poorly managed its interrogation and detention efforts. It relied extensively on outside contractors for design and implementation, especially “two contract psychologists,” whom an earlier Senate Armed Services Committee investigation identified as Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell. Both men were influential in retrofitting techniques that had been designed to train captured US troops to survive and resist torture by foreign adversaries for use on detainees.“Numerous internal critiques and objections concerning the CIA’s management and use of the Detention and Interrogation [sic] were ignored,” according to the committee findings. Those internal critiques include a now partially declassified 2004 inspector general’s report.
  • In a letter he sent to President Obama on Friday, Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat from Colorado, wrote, "[T]he most pressing reason for the White House to step in and manage this process is the CIA's clear conflict of interest on this issue and its demonstrated inability to face the truth about this program. … The CIA is certainly entitled to issue a public response to the Committee's study, but not to impede the declassification of the study itself."
Paul Merrell

US to UN Human Rights Committee: Move Along, Nothing to See Here | American Civil Liber... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...ee-move-along-nothing-see-here

Dark-State U.S. CIA torture U.N.-Human-Rights-Committee committee

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Yesterday the United States gave the U.N. Human Rights Committee its one year follow-up report on progress made to implement four priority recommendations made by the committee a year ago. The independent human rights experts had reviewed the United States' compliance with a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). They found the U.S. coming up short in many areas, including accountability for torture, privacy and surveillance, Guantánamo, and gun violence. Yesterday’s disappointing 15-page submission does provide some information on Justice Department investigations regarding police misconduct, including the recent Ferguson report. But, there was nothing on accountability measures taken in the aftermath of the release of the Senate report on the CIA torture program. The need for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor remains as glaring as ever.
  • The submission notes that the Senate report’s 500-page executive summary was “declassified with minimal redactions to protect national security,” but it failed to commit to release the entire report (which the ACLU is currently fighting for in a FOIA lawsuit). And while the submission states that the U.S. “supports transparency and has taken steps to ensure that it never resorts to the use of those [harsh interrogation] techniques again,” there is no mention of any concrete actions taken to criminally investigate CIA torture, especially in light of the new information made public in the report about the brutality of the CIA’s methods, and its lies to Congress, the media, and the public about its torture program. Under the ICCPR and the Convention Against Torture, the U.S. has an obligation to effectively, independently, and impartially investigate all cases of unlawful killing or torture, as well as arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance. The U.S. also has an international legal obligation to appropriately prosecute perpetrators – including high-level policymakers.
  • The U.S. submission mentions the investigation by Justice Department prosecutor John Durham, which he closed in 2012 without any charges being filed. But, the submission fails to provide detailed information on the precise scope of Durham’s mandate. We remain concerned that the investigation may have focused on instances in which interrogators overstepped limits set by senior officials, rather than on the culpability of senior officials themselves. It also remains unclear whether investigators interviewed any prisoners who were subjected to the CIA torture program. During the November 2014 review of the United States before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva, the committee raised concerns, based on letters and accounts from torture victims or their attorneys, indicating that Durham had never interviewed any detainees. The U.S. delegation responded that it had interviewed 96 persons as part of the investigation, but it did not indicate whether any of the prisoners who were subjected to abuse and torture were amongst those interviewed.
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  • A comprehensive criminal investigation by the U.S. government would dissuade future government officials from ordering or using torture and abuse. Failure to conduct an independent criminal investigation not only flouts international law but it also undermines America’s ability to advocate for human rights abroad and compromises Americans’ faith in the rule of law at home. The ACLU and other human rights groups have until May 1st to submit “shadow reports” to the Human Rights Committee, which will subsequently assess and grade U.S. implementation of the key priority recommendations.  The Obama administration can still avoid a low grade by responding to domestic and international calls to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the tactics described in the Senate torture report, including all acts authorizing or ordering acts of torture and other abuses and provide redress to victims of torture.  
Paul Merrell

Pentagon fears blowback from 'humane' Guantánamo video release | The Miami He... - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article4263887.html

war & peace GITMO forced-feedings litigation appeal

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • A Pentagon official is invoking the revulsion of Muslims worldwide over images of U.S. Marines urinating on corpses to predict the global backlash at seeing videos of Guantánamo troops hauling a captive to force-feedings.The Justice Department included the declaration in a renewed bid to prevent the public from seeing 32 videos made by U.S. forces at the detention center in Cuba. “While the videos at issue in this litigation do not in my opinion depict any improper treatment of the detainees, but rather the lawful, humane and appropriate interaction between guards and detainees,” wrote U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Sinclair Harris, “persons and entities hostile to the United States and its detention of enemy belligerents at Guantánamo Bay are likely to think otherwise.”Harris is vice director of operations at the Department of Defense Joint Staff, and said he had watched some of the videos — which lawyers say portray troops forcing captive Abu Wa’el Dhiab to tube feedings. The admiral said he concluded the images could be used for propaganda purposes to stoke anti-American sentiment and put U.S. citizens at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Dhiab, 43, was cleared for release from Guantánamo years ago but can’t be repatriated to his native Syria, a nation now wracked with Islamic State violence. Instead, Uruguay has offered him sanctuary in a deal that was sidelined first by the Pentagon then by that South American nation’s elections. He has been protesting by hunger striking.Dhiab wants the videos released, according to one of his attorneys, Cori Crider, and so does a consortium of 16 media organizations, which petitioned a federal court in Washington, D.C. On Oct. 3, Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the U.S. government to obscure the faces and identities in the videos of everyone but the captive, then make them public. Tuesday, U.S. government lawyers notified Kessler’s court that it would file an appeal.
  • Dhiab’s attorney argues that ugly optics are no excuse.“I’ve seen the videos — and of course they’re upsetting,” Crider said Wednesday by email from Reprieve, a London-based law firm that represents Dhiab at no charge. “But that’s no reason to hide the truth from Americans.” “By that logic, think of all the government scandals that never would have seen the light of day,” she added, citing the 2003 photos of guards abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and images of the 1968 My Lai massacre that “changed the conversation about Vietnam.”Reprieve’s legal team discovered there were recordings during a forced-feeding challenge; the detention center says it has since discontinued taping the tube feedings for reasons of patient privacy.
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  • Harris suggested the videos could lead to the “perceived mistreatment of individuals,” and serve as a recruiting tool for the Islamic State. In his declaration he noted that South Florida journalist Steven Sotloff was forced by his captors to make an anti-Guantánamo statement before he was beheaded earlier this year. When Sotloff was killed, he was clad in an orange jumpsuit that has come to symbolize the prison in southeast Cuba.
  • Harris argued against release based on “prior experience from the release of certain provocative photographs and information.” He noted that “in 2012 the release of a video depicting Marines urinating on the corpses of alleged Taliban members was used as a recruitment tool for the Taliban and led to an Afghan soldier attacking and killing French troops.”It is not known when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would take up the Justice Department appeal because Tuesday’s filing was not the appeal itself but notice to the court that the Obama administration was appealing Kessler’s release order.Separately, the prison camps commander Navy Rear Adm. Kyle Cozad, argued that disclosure of the videos would tip captives to certain techniques used by its tackle-and-shackle squad of soldiers — something Judge Kessler ridiculed in her ruling as “implausible” because the captives experience what is portrayed in the videos.
  • Cozad, however, suggested in a heavily redacted 13-page sworn statement that if the videos are released he might restrict access to news media in the cellblocks, a popular distraction at the detention center that the admiral characterized as “important for intellectual stimulation and overall morale.”He also listed a series of assaults that apparently occurred since he took over this summer, including a captive who resisted his force-feeding by biting a guard and another who hit a soldier in the face with a handcuffed fist.He called the videos a useful tool for the prison, saying staff likened them to “an NFL team watching video of the previous week’s football game to determine what plays worked well, what they did wrong, and what they could do better during the next game.”
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Dec 14
     
    If DOJ does not win its appeal, watch for the GITMO prisoner to be suddenly released in order to moot his case so the video doesn't have to be disclosed.  
Paul Merrell

The Woman at the Center of the C.I.A.'s Torture Report - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...unidentified-queen-torture

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report accountability

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • or the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why. The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
  • Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.” Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
  • Amazingly, perhaps, more than thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, no one at the C.I.A. has ever been publicly held responsible for this failure. Evidently, the C.I.A. was adamant in its negotiations with the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the American public never learn the names of anyone directly involved in this failure.
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  • According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks.
  • As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
  • Readers can speculate on how the pieces fit together, and who the personalities behind this program are. But without even pseudonyms, it is exceedingly hard to connect the dots. It seems entirely possible—though, again, one can only speculate—that the C.I.A. overcompensated for its pre-9/11 intelligence failures by employing overly harsh measures later. Once they’d made a choice that America had never officially made before—of sanctioning torture—it seems possible that they felt they had to defend its efficacy, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. If so, this would be worth learning. But without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.
Paul Merrell

Mubarak, Nazif to be investigated for allegedly serving as proxy for US torture | Cairo... - 0 views

www.thecairopost.com/...erving-as-proxy-for-us-torture

war & peace torture CIA rendition Egypt Iraq false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • CAIRO: Former President Hosni Mubarak and his former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif will be investigated for serving as a proxy to torture U.S. prisoners, Youm7 reported Wednesday. Attorney General Hisham Barakat referred the case, filed by lawyer Samir Sabry, to the Supreme State Security prosecution. Sabry noted in his litigation that Egypt was cited in the December Senate CIA report as having tortured detainees in extraordinary rendition under the Mubarak regime. In his 2007 book The Guantanamo Files, British investigative journalist Andy Worthington wrote that a Libyan was rendered in 2003 to Egypt where he was tortured to make “a false confession that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons, which was subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.”
  • In 2009, a former Pakistani Guantanamo detainee detailed his torture in Egypt after the CIA sent him to Cairo. Muhammad Saad Iqbal was arrested in Jakarta in 2002 over supporting an Islamic group, but he was transported days after being arrested to Egypt where he were beaten, shackled, received electroshocks and was sleep-deprived for six months, the New York Times reported in 2009. Iqbal, who was released in 2008, confessed under torture that he had met with Osama bin Laden. Mubarak, who is still jailed, was acquitted of graft, and charges of murdering January 25 Revolution protesters were dropped in November. His appeal over a three-year sentence for embezzling funds was accepted earlier in January. His two sons, Gamal and Alaa, walked free late January pending an embezzlement lawsuit, after serving the maximum remand period of two years.
Paul Merrell

Drone memo should reverse Gitmo convictions, attorneys claim - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...170260-drone-memo-omar-khadr

war & peace Gitmo-detainees drone-memo DoJ

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Attorneys for a Canadian man who spent a decade detained by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay say details in the Obama administration’s recently released “drone memo” exonerates their client of war crimes.
  • But in a recent court filing [PDF], lawyers for Khadr, now 27, say a just-published US Department of Justice memorandum contains information that directly challenges the American government’s case against their client. Khadr’s attorneys wrote this week that the secret “drone memo” released by the White House last month — the DOJ document that the government relied on to justify the 2010 drone strike in Yemen that killed American citizen and suspected AL-Qaeda member Anwar Al-Awlaki — suggests prosecutors had no place to charge the Canadian teenager with murder in violation of the laws of war after he allegedly killed an American soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan. The DOJ memo itself was a penned by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel in response to the question of whether Central Intelligence Agency officers — who are not members of the US military — can be blamed for war crimes by launching drone strikes. The memo was written in July 2010, and justified the strike that later that year killed Al-Awlaki.
  • According to a footnote within the memo, released June 24 of this year due to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, “lethal activities conducted in accordance with the laws of war, and undertaken in the course of lawfully authorized hostilities, do not violate the laws of war by virtue of the fact that they are carried out in part by government actors who are not entitled to the combatant’s privilege.” "That completely blows away one of the major prongs of the government's theory in all these Guantanamo cases," Sam Morison, Khadr's Pentagon-based lawyer, told The Canadian Press during an interview on Wednesday this week. Although Khadr was charged with violating the “US common law of war” that dates back centuries, his attorneys say the memo concerning CIA drone strikes suggest such legislation simply doesn’t exist.
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  • "The whole purpose...was to evaluate whether the CIA agents were violating the law," Morison said. "The only reasonable interpretation of that analysis is that there is no such thing (as the common law of war)." On Monday this week, Morrison and the rest of Khadr’s legal counsel, filed a motion in Guantanamo’s appeals court asking that the conviction against their client be vacated.
  • Should Khadr’s attorneys succeed, then a number of cases pertaining to current or former Guantanamo detainees accused of war crimes could be called into question. According to Human Rights Watch, however, only six of the 149 detainees at Gitmo face any formal charges — fewer than the number of prisoners who have died while held there in military custody.
Paul Merrell

Britain faces exposure over links to CIA secret torture sites | World news | The Observer - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-links-to-cia-torture-flights

war & peace CIA torture rendition UK Poland Diego-Garcia

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • US Senate report may confirm that Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition after 9/11
  • The government stands accused of seeking to conceal Britain's role in extraordinary rendition, ahead of the release of a declassified intelligence report that exposes the use of torture at US secret prisons around the world.
  • Now, in a letter to the human rights group Reprieve, former foreign secretary William Hague has confirmed that the UK government has held discussions with the US about what it intends to reveal in the report which, according to al-Jazeera, acknowledges that the British territory of Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition."We have made representations to seek assurances that ordinary procedures for clearance of UK material will be followed in the event that UK material provide[d] to the Senate committee were to be disclosed," Hague wrote.Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve, accused the UK government of seeking to redact embarrassing information: "This shows that the UK government is attempting to censor the US Senate's torture report. In plain English, it is a request to the US to keep Britain's role in rendition out of the public domain."
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  • Lawyers representing a number of terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay believe their clients were rendered via Diego Garcia. Papers found in Libya indicated that the US planned to transport Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, and his wife via the territory, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased by Britain to the US. The government has denied Belhaj was rendered via Diego Garcia, but there are suspicions that others were held on the atoll.Crider said the UK's attempts to lobby the US into redacting parts of the report "turns the government's defence in the Libyan renditions case of Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and his wife entirely on its head".The government has consistently sought to block Belhaj from bringing a case against it.
  • "The government protested America would be angered if this kidnap case ever went to trial – and now we learn the British government is leaning on the Americans not to air Britain's dirty laundry. It exposes their litigation stance as mere posturing," she added.Confirmation that a British territory was involved in extraordinary rendition could leave the government vulnerable to legal action. Last month the European court of human rights ruled that the Polish government actively assisted the CIA's European "black site" programme, which saw detainees interrogated in secret prisons across the continent.The court concluded it was "established beyond reasonable doubt" that Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo detainee the US mistakenly believed to be a senior member of al-Qaida, was flown from a secret site in Thailand to another CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty in northern Poland.The judges concluded that not only was Poland "informed of and involved in the preparation and execution of the [High Value Detainee] Programme on its territory", but also "for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen and made no attempt to prevent it", prompting lawyers to ask what else it has been used for since.
Paul Merrell

In Report to UN Committee Against Torture, US Government Touts Division That Doesn't Re... - 0 views

dissenter.firedoglake.com/...snt-really-prosecute-torturers

war & peace torture U.S. non-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The United States government submitted its “periodic report” to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. There are multiple glaring aspects of the government’s report on how it believes it is complying fully with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), however, one part of the report where the government claims to have done what it was supposed to do to investigate torture stands out. In particular, the government highlights a Justice Department division as a challenge to impunity for torture, which appears to have prosecuted zero public cases of torture against US officials. To those unfamiliar, countries which are signatories to the CAT are expected to submit reports every four years to the committee. The committee reviews the report and then issues its own “concluding observations” with concerns and recommendations to the “State party.”
  • One of the committee’s “observations” in its 2006 report involved “reliable reports of acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment committed by certain members of the State party’s military or civilians personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq.” It was also “concerned that the investigation and prosecution of many of these cases, including some resulting in the death of detainees,” had “led to lenient sentences, including of an administrative nature or less than one year’s imprisonment.” The committee requested that the US government explain the following in its report: (a) Steps taken to ensure that all forms of torture and ill-treatment of detainees by its military or civilian personnel, in any territory under its de facto and de jure jurisdiction, as well as in any other place under its effective control, is promptly, impartially and thoroughly investigated, and that all those responsible, including senior military and civilian officials authorizing, acquiescing or consenting in any way to such acts committed by their subordinates are prosecuted and appropriately punished, in accordance with the seriousness of the crime (para. 26). Are all suspects in prima facie cases of torture and ill-treatment as a rule suspended or reassigned during the process of investigation?
  • The government answered [PDF], “US law provides jurisdiction in a number of ways that could be relied on for criminal prosecution of torture and ill-treatment of detainees” and some examples. One could read this as, theoretically, if the US government wanted to prosecute US officials involved in torture, this is what is available in US law to do just that.
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  • Later, the government adds: …In March 2010, the [Justice Department] announced the merger of two Criminal Division components that were responsible for investigating and prosecuting various types of human rights violations. The creation of the new component, the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP), underscores the commitment of United States authorities to end impunity for torturers and other human rights violators. HRSP and other DOJ components have prosecuted U.S. military and civilian personnel who have perpetrated human rights violations outside the United States… Although the government acknowledges the merger was “intended to enhance the government’s effectiveness in pursuing violators and denying them safe haven in the United States,” the detail is being provided within the context of what the US government is doing to prosecute US military and civilian personnel, who are implicated in acts of torture.
  • The Human Rights and Special Prosecutions section does not prosecute US officials involved in torture or human rights abuses.
  • What it has not prosecuted recently—Or, more importantly, what it has not publicly pursued is accountability for officials involved in torture in war zones like Afghanistan or Iraq. It has not sought to hold former Bush administration officials accountable for their role in torture in war zones or in secret detention facilities, where CIA interrogators operated either. The UN Committee Against Torture should not be misled. The HRSP has nothing to do with challenging the impunity US military and civilian personnel currently enjoy when it comes to torture. And, more than likely, it may never hold any current or former high-ranking officials accountable.
Paul Merrell

Occupier orders Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar held six months without charge or t... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...r-held-6-months-without-charge

war & peace Israel Palestine political-prisoners

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • After seizing her from her home in the middle of the night last week, Israeli occupation forces have ordered that a Palestinian lawmaker be held without charge or trial for six months. Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar was given a so-called “administrative detention” order on Sunday, the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer said in a statement.
  • Jarrar is one of 15 Palestinian legislators and 23 female political prisoners currently detained by Israeli occupation forces, Addameer states. Jarrar, a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is closely involved in prisoner issues. Last August, Israeli occupation forces issued Jarrar with an order banishing her to Jericho. She defied the order, remaining in her home in the occupied West Bank town of al-Bireh from where she was arrested by dozens of armed soldiers.
  • There are currently six thousand Palestinian political detainees in Israeli prisons, including almost 500 administrative detainees, according to Addameer’s most recent statistics. Human rights defenders have consistently condemned Israel’s practice of prolonged detention of Palestinians without charge or trial. In a 2012 report, Amnesty International called on Israel to stop using administrative detention – a relic of British colonial rule in Palestine – and urged “the immediate and unconditional release [of] prisoners of conscience held just for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly.” Amnesty says that administrative detainees, like many other Palestinian prisoners, “have been subjected to violations such as the use of torture and other ill-treatment during interrogation, as well as cruel and degrading treatment during their detention, sometimes as punishment for hunger strikes or other protests.”
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  • Administrative detention orders are indefinitely renewable. Addameer says that it considers administrative detention to be a war crime under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing the rights of civilians in occupied territory. Jarrar’s arrest, it states, is “part of the systemic targeting of Palestinian political figures in order to criminalize their work and to silence them and stop them from practicing their roles in defending and supporting the Palestinian cause.”
Paul Merrell

UN Denounces Israel's Administrative Detention Policy - International Middle East Media... - 0 views

www.imemc.org/71231

war & peace Israel Palestine detentions OHCHR

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Israeli practices of detaining Palestinians without charge or trial is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which defines humanitarian protection for civilians, the United Nations has said.
  • The comments made by a spokeswoman for the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) came just days after Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian lawmaker, was imprisoned without trial by Israeli authorities, The Nation website said. "We are concerned at the continued and increasing use of administrative detention by Israeli authorities against Palestinians. Administrative detainees are held without charge or trial, often on the basis of secret evidence, for periods of up to six months, which are extendable indefinitely," UN spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said, during a press briefing in Geneva, adding that this practice had been condemned by the UN on numerous occasions in the past. OHCHR reiterates its call on Israel to end its practice of administrative detention and to either release without delay or to promptly charge all administrative detainees and prosecute them with all the judicial guarantees required by international human rights law, she said. Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Palestinian parliament and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested on Monday and is currently being held in administrative detention, PNN reports.
  • Jarrar is just one of the many Palestinians that include several other legislators, believed to be held in prisons by Israel. "As of February this year, there were reportedly 424 Palestinians held under administrative detention orders - more than double the 181 held at the same time last year," Shamdasani said. "We call, once again, on Israel to end its practice of administrative detention and to either release without delay or to promptly charge all administrative detainees and prosecute them with all the judicial guarantees required by international human rights law and standards." The policy of administrative detention, which Israel has reportedly defended as necessary to prevent attacks, has also been criticized by several Israeli lawmakers, who have denounced it as "draconian." "Israel should be ashamed of the draconian regime of administrative detentions, which is unparalleled in any democracy," Aida Touma-Suliman, a member of the Arab Joint List party, said, according to a report by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.
Paul Merrell

ICC cites evidence of international forces abusing Afghanistan detainees | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...hanistan-idUSKCN0T127620151112

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Afghanistan ICC-prosecutor torture abuse

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • U.N. prosecutors said on Thursday they had evidence suggesting international forces in Afghanistan had caused serious harm to detainees by subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse.The court has been investigating alleged crimes committed since 2003 by all parties to the conflict in Afghanistan, but in previous reports on the status of its inquiry it has been far more circumspect about alleged crimes and the harm caused.In its latest report on the many preliminary examinations it has open, the court's Office of the Prosecutor said U.S. investigations of alleged crimes by its soldiers had not yielded convictions or risen high up the chain of command.The determination marks a significant escalation of the court's long-running investigation and could prove controversial in the U.S., which is not a member of the court and has in the past opposed it vociferously. "The infliction of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques' ... would have caused serious physical and psychological injury," prosecutors wrote.
  • They also noted that there was evidence of violations committed by Taliban and forces that supported the Afghan government, adding that neither appeared to be seriously investigating allegations against its own side. Up to 37,000 civilian casualties had been attributed to anti-government forces since 2007, and pro-government forces appeared to have meted out "gruesome" treatment to some 5,000 detainees, prosecutors said.They were still trying to determine the gravity and scale of any violations committed by international and U.S. forces, they said. All NATO members contributed to the International Security Assistance Force mission to Afghanistan that ran from 2001 until last year. Forces from the U.S. and other countries remain in the country on a NATO training exercise.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15
     
    The ICC has jurisdiction because Afghanistan is a member of the Rome Statute that governs the ICC. It will be interesting to see if the ICC has the guts to prosecute high U.S. officials. (By law, the ICC is required to go for the highest ranking members of government who had responsibility. 'Twould be justice to see Bush 43, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in the dock. 
Paul Merrell

Court Rules Bush Administration Can Be Sued for Its "War on Terror" Conduct - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...sued-for-war-on-terror-conduct

war & peace detainees litigation Bush2-administration

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • For almost a decade and a half, the people behind the Bush administration's shameful treatment of terrorism suspects have avoided punishment for their crimes, but that may be about to change. The courts have had their say and have ruled that former Bush administration officials can, in fact, be sued for how they conducted the "war on terror." The Second Circuit Court of Appeals made that pretty much official on Friday when it refused to hear a challenge to its earlier ruling in the case of Turkmen v. Ashcroft. That case involves hundreds of Arab, Muslim or South Asian men who were detained and then abused by our government in the weeks following 9/11.
  • Some of them were beaten by security guards and kept in solitary confinement, which the United Nations considers a form of torture. After they were released, these men sued the people they say authorized their detentions - people like former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former FBI director Robert Mueller. A district court initially blocked their claims, but in June, the Second Circuit Court allowed them, saying that Ashcroft, Mueller and company could be sued. The government then made one more last ditch push to protect the Bush administration, but that effort failed last Friday when the Second Circuit rejected it. Everyone else who authorized and participated in the illegal roundup of hundreds of innocent men after 9/11, from high-up government officials on down, is now fair game for a lawsuit.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 15
     
    The case centers of detainees conditions of confinement and denial of Equal Protection for a number of people detained for several months immediately after 9-11. 
Paul Merrell

CIA Documents Expose the Failed Torture Methods Used on Guantanamo's Most Famous Detain... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...failed-torture-guantanamo

war & peace CIA torture Zubaydah

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 May 17 - No Cached
  • It is early on in Abu Zubaydah’s time at a CIA black site. He insists to his interrogators that he has no additional information on jihadist operations planned against the US, but his captor won’t stop slapping him. Eventually a hood is placed over Zubaydah's head and he is placed into a confinement box by unseen security officers. He is told this is his new home until he’s prepared to provide information on operations against the US.Several physically stressful hours in the confinement box fail to elicit any intelligence, so Zubaydah’s captors place him in an even smaller box. He makes painful groans and is forced to scoot out of the box on his hindquarters when he’s finally allowed out. He is immediately made to stand and backed up against a wall. Two interrogators begin to double-team him with rapid-fire questions. Zubaydah is told that if he does not cooperate, he will only bring more misery on himself. Again he denies having any additional knowledge, but this time, he isn’t slapped. Instead, Zubaydah is hooded and a water board is brought into the cell.Zubaydah is the first post-9/11 detainee to be waterboarded, and this is his first session. He coughs and vomits. The waterboarding lasts for over two hours, but he still insists he does not have any additional information beyond that which he already provided to the FBI. He is then put into the larger confinement box, where he spends the rest of the evening. The interrogation process resumes in the morning: more slapping, zero new information, and more time in the smaller box.This was a summary of CIA documents obtained by AlterNet’s Grayzone Project. The records were originally obtained by Zubaydah’s defense team through the discovery process and were provided to me by a source familiar with the case who considered their publication critical to the public’s understanding of Zubaydah’s treatment. The vast majority of the documents have not been available to the public prior to this story.
  • As clinically detailed as they are gut-wrenching, the documents comprise hundreds of pages on the interrogation of Zubaydah, perhaps Guantanamo Bay’s most famous detainee. The files revealed here have renewed significance as Zubaydah has decided to testify about conditions at Guantanamo Bay despite the likelihood that it will imperil his legal situation. The records also highlight the methods of psychologist James Mitchell, a top architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program.” Though Mitchell had previously worked as an Air Force psychologist, the Senate “Torture Report” noted that he had no prior experience as an interrogator. Mitchell’s private contracting company had received over $80 million from the CIA by the time their contract was terminated in 2009. The contract was terminated because, as the CIA Inspector General put it, there was no reason to believe Mitchell’s interrogation techniques were effective or even safe.Mitchell and the US government originally believed Zubaydah to be a top leader of Al Qaeda who had knowledge of imminent plots against the US; however, the government would later concede that Zubaydah was never an Al Qaeda leader but still contend that he poses a threat. According to the US government, Zubaydah "possibly" knew in advance about the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.After his capture in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was held in CIA black sites for four years where he was subjected to extended torture so intense he lost his left eye. Following his first waterboarding, he was subjected to the same form of torture 82 times. It is unclear the brutal methods applied to Zubaydah’s body elicited any valuable intelligence.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 May 17
     
    In our name, they did this ...
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