Read Gonzales' 2002 torture memo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...emo20020801.pdf

read the rest of his history - ESPECIALLY the death penalty cases

http://tesibria.typepad.com/democracy_is_c...to_gonzale.html

God, I hope this isn't true, but I'd believe it. How has the US fallen so hard and so fast??

The London Sunday Times reported yesterday that the United States government has a special plane devoted to the extradition of suspects in the war on terrorism to countries where they are likely to be interrogated using torture.

"An executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture in their prisons.

"The movements of the Gulfstream 5 leased by agents from the United States defence department and the CIA are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights. Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out 'torture by proxy' -- a charge denied by the American government."

The report, based in part on eyewitness accounts, traces a number of cases dating back to 2001, including those of suspects who were nabbed in Sweeden, Karachi and Jakarta. Witnesses claimed to have seen the same Gulfstream jet in question, and described rough treatment of prisoners, "whose faces were masked by hoods" and, in one account, who were "forcibly given sedatives by suppository."

The two prisoners extradited from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001, at least one of whom was later cleared, claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. The report also notes a harrowing treatment that may have been used in Uzbekistan -- one country the Bush administration has aligned itself with under the banner of the global war on terror.

"Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.

"The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to be interrogated by torture.

"In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to Murray's removal, he told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in Tashkent had 'readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence'.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1357699,00.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 30, 2004
Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.

The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.

The report was distributed to lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and State Department and to the commander of the detention facility at Guantánamo, Gen. Jay W. Hood. The New York Times recently obtained a memorandum, based on the report, that quotes from it in detail and lists its major findings.

It was the first time that the Red Cross, which has been conducting visits to Guantánamo since January 2002, asserted in such strong terms that the treatment of detainees, both physical and psychological, amounted to torture. The report said that another confidential report in January 2003, which has never been disclosed, raised questions of whether "psychological torture" was taking place.

The Red Cross said publicly 13 months ago that the system of keeping detainees indefinitely without allowing them to know their fates was unacceptable and would lead to mental health problems.

The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly "more refined and repressive" than learned about on previous visits.

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the report said. It said that in addition to the exposure to loud and persistent noise and music and to prolonged cold, detainees were subjected to "some beatings." The report did not say how many of the detainees were subjected to such treatment.

Asked about the accusations in the report, a Pentagon spokesman provided a statement saying, "The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism."

It continued that personnel assigned to Guantánamo "go through extensive professional and sensitivity training to ensure they understand the procedures for protecting the rights and dignity of detainees."

The conclusions by the inspection team, especially the findings involving alleged complicity in mistreatment by medical professionals, have provoked a stormy debate within the Red Cross committee. Some officials have argued that it should make its concerns public or at least aggressively confront the Bush administration.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is based in Geneva and is separate from the American Red Cross, was founded in 1863 as an independent, neutral organization intended to provide humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of war.

Its officials are able to visit prisoners at Guantánamo under the kind of arrangement the committee has made with governments for decades. In exchange for exclusive access to the prison camp and meetings with detainees, the committee has agreed to keep its findings confidential. The findings are shared only with the government that is detaining people.

Beatricé Mégevand-Roggo, a senior Red Cross official, said in an interview that she could not say anything about information relayed to the United States government because "we do not comment in any way on the substance of the reports we submit to the authorities."

Ms. Mégevand-Roggo, the committee's delegate-general for Europe and the Americas, acknowledged that the issue of confidentiality was a chronic and vexing one for the organization. "Many people do not understand why we have these bilateral agreements about confidentiality," she said. "People are led to believe that we are a fig leaf or worse, that we are complicit with the detaining authorities."

She added, "It's a daily dilemma for us to put in the balance the positive effects our visits have for detainees against the confidentiality."

Antonella Notari, a veteran Red Cross official and spokeswoman, said that the organization frequently complained to the Pentagon and other arms of the American government when government officials cite the Red Cross visits to suggest that there is no abuse at Guantánamo. Most statements from the Pentagon in response to queries about mistreatment at Guantánamo do, in fact, include mention of the visits.

In a recent interview with reporters, General Hood, the commander of the detention and interrogation facility at Guantánamo, also cited the committee's visits in response to questions about treatment of detainees. "We take everything the Red Cross gives us and study it very carefully to look for ways to do our job better," he said in his Guantánamo headquarters, adding that he agrees "with some things and not others."

"I'm satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way," he said.

Scott Horton, a New York lawyer, who is familiar with some of the Red Cross's views, said the issue of medical ethics at Guantánamo had produced "a tremendous controversy in the committee." He said that some Red Cross officials believed it was important to maintain confidentiality while others believed the United States government was misrepresenting the inspections and using them to counter criticisms.

Mr. Horton, who heads the human rights committee of the Bar Association of the City of New York, said the Red Cross committee was considering whether to bring more senior officials to Washington and whether to make public its criticisms.

The report from the June visit said the Red Cross team found a far greater incidence of mental illness produced by stress than did American medical authorities, much of it caused by prolonged solitary confinement. It said the medical files of detainees were "literally open" to interrogators.

The report said the Biscuit team met regularly with the medical staff to discuss the medical situations of detainees. At other times, interrogators sometimes went directly to members of the medical staff to learn about detainees' conditions, it said.

The report said that such "apparent integration of access to medical care within the system of coercion" meant that inmates were not cooperating with doctors. Inmates learn from their interrogators that they have knowledge of their medical histories and the result is that the prisoners no longer trust the doctors.

Asked for a response, the Pentagon issued a statement saying, "The allegation that detainee medical files were used to harm detainees is false." The statement said that the detainees were "enemy combatants who were fighting against U.S. and coalition forces."

"It's important to understand that when enemy combatants were first detained on the battlefield, they did not have any medical records in their possession," the statement continued. "The detainees had a wide range of pre-existing health issues including battlefield injuries."

The Pentagon also said the medical care given detainees was first-rate. Although the Red Cross criticized the lack of confidentiality, it agreed in the report that the medical care was of high quality.

Leonard S. Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, was asked to comment on the account of the Red Cross report, and said, "The use of medical personnel to facilitate abusive interrogations places them in an untenable position and violates international ethical standards."

Mr. Rubenstein added, "We need to know more about these practices, including whether health professionals engaged in calibrating levels of pain inflicted on detainees."

The issue of whether torture at Guantánamo was condoned or encouraged has been a problem before for the Bush administration.

In February 2002, President Bush ordered that the prisoners at Guantánamo be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate with military necessity, in a manner consistent with" the Geneva Conventions. That statement masked a roiling legal discussion within the administration as government lawyers wrote a series of memorandums, many of which seemed to justify harsh and coercive treatment.

A month after Mr. Bush's public statement, a team of administration lawyers accepted a view first advocated by the Justice Department that the president had wide powers in authorizing coercive treatment of detainees. The legal team in a memorandum concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound by either the international Convention Against Torture or a federal antitorture statute because he had the authority to protect the nation from terrorism.

That document provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," it said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

When some administration memorandums about coercive treatment or torture were disclosed, the White House said they were only advisory.

Last month, military guards, intelligence agents and others described in interviews with The Times a range of procedures that they said were highly abusive occurring over a long period, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators. The people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility, said that one regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.

Some accounts of techniques at Guantánamo have been easy to dismiss because they seemed so implausible. The most striking of the accusations, which have come mainly from a group of detainees released to their native Britain, has been that the military used prostitutes who made coarse comments and come-ons to taunt some prisoners who are Muslims.

But the Red Cross report hints strongly at an explanation of some of those accusations by stating that there were frequent complaints by prisoners in 2003 that some of the female interrogators baited their subjects with sexual overtures.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention and intelligence operation at Guantánamo until April, when he took over prison operations in Iraq, said in an interview early this year about general interrogation procedures that the female interrogators had proved to be among the most effective. General Miller's observation matches common wisdom among experienced intelligence officers that women may be effective as interrogators when seen by their subjects as mothers or sisters. Sexual taunting does not, however, comport with what is often referred to as the "mother-sister syndrome."

But the Red Cross report said that complaints about the practice of sexual taunting stopped in the last year. Guantánamo officials have acknowledged that they have improved their techniques and that some earlier methods they tried proved to be ineffective, raising the possibility that the sexual taunting was an experiment that was abandoned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics...artner=homepage

Of course... the Bush Administration continues to interpret laws and international agreeements however it wishes and runs roughshod over anyone who dares get in its way with such formalities. These tyrants have undone and continue to undo what far wiser leaders have worked to achieve in our 200 plus years as a nation.




Looks like you're SOL if you're an "unlawful combatant" which is realistically anyone they detain...

IMHO, this is one of the biggest travesties inflicted on our country by these fiends. To endorse torture or illegal detention is WRONG. Such practices are undoing our moral fabric. I don't care what trumped-up "War on Terror" is being sold to us. We should be listening to agencies like the Red Cross and others who assess conditions under American leadership. If we treat people like this, we lose our soul, plus put our soldiers further in harm's way. We will get back what we dish out.

Man--all these "isolated incidents" are making my head spin!

U.S. general speaks out on new abuse probe


- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sarah El Deeb



Dec. 5, 2004 | CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- A former military spokesman in Iraq said Saturday new pictures showing apparent abuse of Iraqi prisoners were the acts of an isolated few but will be used by some to try to tarnish the entire U.S. military.

Gen. Mark Kimmitt, now based in Qatar, spoke on the pan-Arab television network a day after the U.S. military launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees.

Other photos show what appear to be bloodied prisoners, one with a gun to his head.

The photos, found by an Associated Press reporter, were among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty.

Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003, which could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred months later.

The photos were turned over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which instructed the SEAL command to determine whether they show any serious crimes, said Navy Cmdr. Jeff Bender, a spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif. That investigation will determine the identities of the troops and what they were doing in the photos.

Kimmitt, the spokesman in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, said he believes the photos show the acts of an isolated few.

After months of investigation, Kimmitt said the number of U.S. military troops involved in acts of abuse has been found to be very limited.

Asked by al-Jazeera if such pictures are a problem, Kimmitt said they are certainly a "tool" and some will try to use them to show the U.S. military in a negative light.

After outraged reaction from the Arab world to the first Abu Ghraib pictures, President Bush appeared on Arab television in May and said the torture was the act of a few.

The new photos drew strong reactions in Arab media as did the earlier ones.

"The two scandals confirm the image about the Americans known in the Middle East: that the Americans are not a charity or a humanitarian organization that is leading an experiment of democracy," said Sateh Noureddine, managing editor of the Lebanese leftist newspaper As-Safir. "Rather, (the U.S. government) is leading a retaliatory operation following the Sept. 11 attacks."

Noureddine said the photos "will definitely be front page news" in his paper's Monday edition. Yonadem Kana, a member of an Iraqi government advisory and oversight group, said the photos were "rare cases exaggerated by the media."

One photo on the front page of the daily Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram showed three hooded prisoners pressed against one another on a floor with what appear to be white sheets wrapped around their torsos. The photo caption read: "Signs of a new scandal."

On a Web site known for its militant content, contributors also posted some of the photos, showing the faces of the Navy SEALs -- one with a serviceman sitting on top of a group of prisoners -- but with the faces of the prisoners blackened. The photos were similar to those carried by the satellite stations but had comments on them such as "God destroy America," and "God help the Mujahedeen," or holy fighters.

It is unclear who took the pictures.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/12/05/probe/index.html

http://dominionpaper.ca/canadian_news/2004...bush_on_tr.html

December 06, 2004
Bush on Trial for War Crimes in Halifax, Nova Scotia

George W. Bush was on mock trial for war crimes this week in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The trial, attended by over 300 spectators, was based on a play by Lawyers Against the War (LAW) and was performed by the Halifax Peace Coalition. On Nov. 30, the eve of the US President’s visit to the Eastern Canadian capital, protesters gathered in Victoria Park to hear the President’s plea. He pled not guilty.

Although the trial was staged, the lawyers actors, and George W. Bush’s accent distinctively East coast (not Texan), the verdict was meant to be taken seriously. The cries of “Guilty!” from the crowd, and the sombre testimony from the prosecution's witnesses (representatives of the Iraqi people, soldiers, prisoners, and Gaia, Mother Earth herself) all sought to raise the same question: could – and should – Bush be prosecuted under Canada’s Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act?

In his Nov. 16th editorial in the Toronto Star, Thomas Walkom admits the question is an interesting one. He writes that the act, passed in 2000 to bring Canada’s ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new International Criminal Court, holds that “Anyone who commits a war crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our courts.”

What constitutes a war crime? As Walkom puts it, “Any conduct defined as such by customary international law or by conventions that Canada has adopted. War crimes also specifically include any breach of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, such as torture, degradation, willfully depriving prisoners of war of their rights ‘to a fair and regular trial,’ launching attacks ‘in the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians’ and deportation of persons from an area under occupation.”

In a letter to Prime Minister Paul Martin, LAW outlines in detail Bush’s responsibility for the estimated 100,000 Iraqi lives taken by the war. “This includes his personal involvement not only in the devising and waging of an aggressive, illegal war, but also of the unlawful refusal to grant prisoner of war status to prisoners of war, contrary to specific provisions of the Geneva Conventions, an act repudiated in the US Courts.”

The reality of bringing these accusations to the court is much more complicated. Walkom mentions three great hurdles: 1) When Belgium attempted to formally indict Bush last year, the US reacted with such fury that Belgium not only backed down, but changed their law to avoid future problems. Canada would not be exempt from the same response; 2) Heads of state are immune from prosecution when in Canada on official business, so action would have to wait until Bush is out of office; 3) Such political decisions would have to be made by the Canadian government, and so Canada would have to want to launch the suit against Bush.

Recognizing these hurdles, LAW also mentions in their letter to Martin that his own inaction and invitation to Bush could also be seen as a crime: “You and your colleagues could be personally liable to prosecution under the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act by virtue of section 21 of the Canadian Criminal Code, for crimes so serious that they are punishable in Canada by up to life imprisonment.”

Whether or not the US President will undergo trial in the near future remains to be seen, but one could safely bet that it would not take place in Nova Scotia. During his official visit to Canada this week, Bush decided not to address parliament but to make his speech in friendly Halifax, where protesters were plentiful but peaceful.

One particular group of protesters, however, did address parliament with its remix of Canada’s national anthem. “Raging Grannies” urged all Canadians “off of their fannies” before it’s too late:

“Woah Canada
Don’t be surprised
When Star Wars clutter up our Northern Skies
They say it wouldn’t happen
Would they lie?”

Shannon Hines

Aspiring dictator?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/

2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
A Justice Department lawyer may have been laying the groundwork for the Iraq invasion long before it was discussed publicly by the White House

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 5:45 p.m. ET Dec. 18, 2004


Dec. 18 - Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them—regardless of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the president’s authority to wage war—a sweeping assertion of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by the department.

Although it makes no reference to Saddam Hussein’s government, the 15-page memo also seems to lay a legal groundwork for the president to invade Iraq—without approval of Congress—long before the White House had publicly expressed any intent to do so. “The President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of Sept. 11,” the memo states.

The existence of the memo, titled “The President’s Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them,” was first reported by NEWSWEEK in the fall of 2001. But its contents—including the conclusion that Bush could order attacks against countries unrelated to the 9/11 attacks—were not publicly available until late this week when, with no notice to the public or the news media, the memo was posted on an obscure portion of the Web site of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. (There is nothing on the site calling attention to the memo. It is was simply added to a list of previously published memos posted for the calendar year 2001.)

A senior White House official alerted a NEWSWEEK reporter to the memo’s posting after mentioning that a copy was also being sent to Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has been pressing the White House to release this and other memos in time for Gonzales’ confirmation hearings next month to be attorney general.

In a footnote that explains why such broad war-making authority is needed, the memo argues that terrorist groups and their state sponsors “operate by secrecy and concealment” and it is therefore difficult to establish, by the standards of criminal law, what groups are behind particular terrorist attacks. Moreover, “it may be impossible” for the president to disclose such evidence even if he has it without compromising classified methods and sources.

But the memo concludes that this should not in any way restrict the president from ordering whatever military actions “in his best judgment” he believes are necessary to protect the country. In the exercise of his power to use military force, “the president’s decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable.”

Addressed to Gonzales’ chief deputy at the time, Tim Flanigan, the memo lays out a line of argument about broad presidential wartime powers that would be repeated time and again in a series of secret memos to the White House about controversial decisions in the war on terror. The arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative scholar who has since left the Justice Department, reached what many view as its apex nearly a year later when, in another memo written by a colleague Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the president’s powers were so expansive that he and his surrogates were not bound by congressional laws or international treaties proscribing torture during the interrogation of detainees.

The disclosure last June of that Aug. 1, 2002, torture memo, in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, provoked a public firestorm and prompted the Justice Department to withdraw it. Even Gonzales, who had participated in meetings where the torture memo was discussed, publicly called its assertions of executive power as “overly broad” and “unnecessary.”

But neither the White House nor the Justice Department has ever disavowed—or for that matter publicly discussed—the similar assertions of presidential power in Yoo’s Sept. 25, 2001, memo. What is particularly striking is that it goes beyond the joint congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to respond to the terror attacks. Although the White House had initially sought authority for the president to “preempt any future acts of terrorism” without any limitation on those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress deleted the pre-emption request and narrowed the scope of the president’s authority to attack only those connected with September 11. “The authority granted is focused on those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11,” Sen. Joe Biden stated on the Senate floor in explaining what Congress intended to authorize.

But Yoo’s memo, written 11 days later, essentially argued that what Congress authorized didn’t matter. “It should be noted here that the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President’s constitutional authority,” Yoo wrote in the memo, adding that the resolution “does not reach other terrorist individuals, groups or states which cannot be determined to have links to the September 11 attacks.

“Nonetheless,” he added, “the President’s broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters.” The memo was written at a time when, unknown to the public, officials in the Pentagon—including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—were privately pushing the president to consider attacking Iraq. Indeed, according to the September 11 commission, a memo apparently written by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith just five days before Yoo’s memo suggested “hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq.”

“Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists,” the memo stated, according to the September 11 commission.

A senior White House official told NEWSWEEK that there is no indication the Yoo memo was written in the context of a discussion about Iraq. (Yoo, now a law school professor at Berkeley, did not respond to a request for comment.) Another White House lawyer at the time said the proper context for the Yoo memo was a widespread feeling inside the White House that the country had embarked on a war that was far bigger than the particular al Qaeda terrorists involved in the attacks. “There was a general awareness after Sept. 11 that the enemy was not simply al Qaeda—but militant Islam in general,” said Brad Berenson, who served in the White House counsel’s office at the time. The kind of authority Yoo was talking about could be used by Bush to attack such groups as the Abu Sayef guerillas in the Philippines, he said, or Hezbollah in Iran, he said.

“These were memos that were done in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in response to a barrage of questions that we gave to [the Office of Legal Counsel] basically brainstorming what issues could come up,” said Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel to whom the Yoo memo was addressed. “I don't think that those memos themselves formed the basis of presidential action.”

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

Isikoff is one of the few investigative journalists remaining.

Reminds me of that Bush quote: "This would be a heck of a lot easier if this was a dictatorship. As long as I'm dictator."

Now with Torture Guy as Attorney General the war machine will be beating their drums again. What country will be next?

Syria?

Here's the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/

001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
By: michael isicoff
Newsweek
December 18, 2004

The memo, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, argues that
there are effectively "no limits" on the president's authority to
wage war�a sweeping assertion of executive power that some
constitutional scholars say goes considerably beyond any that had
previously been articulated by the department.

Although it makes no reference to Saddam Hussein's government, the 15-
page memo also seems to lay a legal groundwork for the president to
invade Iraq�without approval of Congress�long before the White House
had publicly expressed any intent to do so. "The President may deploy
military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the
States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked
to the specific terrorist incidents of Sept. 11," the memo states.

The existence of the memo, titled "The President's Constitutional
Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and
Nations Supporting Them," was first reported by NEWSWEEK in the fall
of 2001. But its contents�including the conclusion that Bush could
order attacks against countries unrelated to the 9/11 attacks�were
not publicly available until late this week when, with no notice to
the public or the news media, the memo was posted on an obscure
portion of the Web site of the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel. (There is nothing on the site calling attention to the memo.
It is was simply added to a list of previously published memos posted
for the calendar year 2001.)

A senior White House official alerted a NEWSWEEK reporter to the
memo's posting after mentioning that a copy was also being sent to
Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary
Committee, who has been pressing the White House to release this and
other memos in time for Gonzales' confirmation hearings next month to
be attorney general.

In a footnote that explains why such broad war-making authority is
needed, the memo argues that terrorist groups and their state
sponsors "operate by secrecy and concealment" and it is therefore
difficult to establish, by the standards of criminal law, what groups
are behind particular terrorist attacks. Moreover, "it may be
impossible" for the president to disclose such evidence even if he
has it without compromising classified methods and sources.

But the memo concludes that this should not in any way restrict the
president from ordering whatever military actions "in his best
judgment" he believes are necessary to protect the country. In the
exercise of his power to use military force, "the president's
decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."

Addressed to Gonzales' chief deputy at the time, Tim Flanigan, the
memo lays out a line of argument about broad presidential wartime
powers that would be repeated time and again in a series of secret
memos to the White House about controversial decisions in the war on
terror. The arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative scholar
who has since left the Justice Department, reached what many view as
its apex nearly a year later when, in another memo written by a
colleague Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the
president's powers were so expansive that he and his surrogates were
not bound by congressional laws or international treaties proscribing
torture during the interrogation of detainees.

The disclosure last June of that Aug. 1, 2002, torture memo, in the
aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, provoked a public
firestorm and prompted the Justice Department to withdraw it. Even
Gonzales, who had participated in meetings where the torture memo was
discussed, publicly called its assertions of executive power
as "overly broad" and "unnecessary."

But neither the White House nor the Justice Department has ever
disavowed�or for that matter publicly discussed�the similar
assertions of presidential power in Yoo's Sept. 25, 2001, memo. What
is particularly striking is that it goes beyond the joint
congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the
president to respond to the terror attacks. Although the White House
had initially sought authority for the president to "preempt any
future acts of terrorism" without any limitation on those responsible
for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress
deleted the pre-emption request and narrowed the scope of the
president's authority to attack only those connected with September
11. "The authority granted is focused on those responsible for the
attacks of Sept. 11," Sen. Joe Biden stated on the Senate floor in
explaining what Congress intended to authorize.

But Yoo's memo, written 11 days later, essentially argued that what
Congress authorized didn't matter. "It should be noted here that the
Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President's
constitutional authority," Yoo wrote in the memo, adding that the
resolution "does not reach other terrorist individuals, groups or
states which cannot be determined to have links to the September 11
attacks.

"Nonetheless," he added, "the President's broad constitutional power
to use military force to defend the nation, recognized by the Joint
Resolution itself, would allow the President to whatever actions he
deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from
new quarters." The memo was written at a time when, unknown to the
public, officials in the Pentagon� including Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz�were privately
pushing the president to consider attacking Iraq. Indeed, according
to the September 11 commission, a memo apparently written by Under
Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith just five days before Yoo's memo
suggested "hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial
offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like
Iraq."

"Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack
in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the
terrorists," the memo stated, according to the September 11
commission.

A senior White House official told NEWSWEEK that there is no
indication the Yoo memo was written in the context of a discussion
about Iraq. (Yoo, now a law school professor at Berkeley, did not
respond to a request for comment.) Another White House lawyer at the
time said the proper context for the Yoo memo was a widespread
feeling inside the White House that the country had embarked on a war
that was far bigger than the particular al Qaeda terrorists involved
in the attacks. "There was a general awareness after Sept. 11 that
the enemy was not simply al Qaeda�but militant Islam in general,"
said Brad Berenson, who served in the White House counsel's office at
the time. The kind of authority Yoo was talking about could be used
by Bush to attack such groups as the Abu Sayef guerillas in the
Philippines, he said, or Hezbollah in Iran, he said.

"These were memos that were done in the immediate aftermath of 9/11
in response to a barrage of questions that we gave to [the Office of
Legal Counsel] basically brainstorming what issues could come up,"
said Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel to whom the Yoo
memo was addressed. "I don't think that those memos themselves formed
the basis of presidential action."

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17216&c=206


FBI E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques

December 20, 2004




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

Newly Obtained FBI Records Call Defense Department’s Methods "Torture," Express Concerns Over "Cover-Up" That May Leave FBI "Holding the Bag" for Abuses

NEW YORK -- A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

"These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers."

The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

The document also says that no "intelligence of a threat neutralization nature" was garnered by the "FBI" interrogation, and that the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department’s actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail’s author writes that he or she is documenting the incident "in order to protect the FBI."

"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding that these methods appear to have been adopted as a matter of policy by the highest levels of government."

The June 2004 "Urgent Report" addressed to the FBI Director is heavily redacted. The legible portions of the document appear to describe an account given to the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office by an FBI agent who had "observed numerous physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilian detainees," including "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings." The document states that "[redacted] was providing this account to the FBI based on his knowledge that [redacted] were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses."

The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

Other documents released by the ACLU today include:

An FBI email regarding DOD personnel impersonating FBI officials during interrogations. The e-mail refers to a "ruse" and notes that "all of those [techniques] used in these scenarios" were approved by the Deputy Secretary of Defense. (Jan. 21, 2004)
Another FBI agent’s account of interrogations at Guantánamo in which detainees were shackled hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor. The agent states that the detainees were kept in that position for 18 to 24 hours at a time and most had "urinated or defacated [sic]" on themselves. On one occasion, the agent reports having seen a detainee left in an unventilated, non-air conditioned room at a temperature "probably well over a hundred degrees." The agent notes: "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." (Aug. 2, 2004)
An e-mail stating that an Army lawyer "worked hard to cwrite [sic] a legal justification for the type of interrogations they (the Army) want to conduct" at Guantánamo Bay. (Dec. 9, 2002)
An e-mail noting the initiation of an FBI investigation into the alleged rape of a juvenile male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (July 28, 2004)
An FBI agent’s account of an interrogation at Guantánamo - an interrogation apparently conducted by Defense Department personnel - in which a detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music and strobe lights. (July 30, 2004)
The ACLU and its allies are scheduled to go to court again this afternoon, where they will seek an order compelling the CIA to turn over records related to an internal investigation into detainee abuse. Although the ACLU has received more than 9,000 documents from other agencies, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny even the existence of many of the records that the ACLU and other plaintiffs have requested. The CIA is reported to have been involved in abusing detainees in Iraq and at secret CIA detention facilities around the globe.

The lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Art Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and Jeff Fogel of CCR.

The documents referenced above can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/fbi.html.

More on the lawsuit can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/.

I had strarted the same thread here, but it got moved to here.

target='_blank'>


http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=11019

To the Moderators:
Please, please leave important posts like this in General Discussion. I NEVER look in the Afghanistan/Iraq subgroup. This post disappeared before I saw it. I read the news story this a.m. and couldn't believe this hadn't been discussed.

Okay, now for my comment. Someone needs to lock dubya up in Gitmo for a few days, since we closed Abu Gharaib and that isn't an option anymore.

This is an impeachable issue.

We did one better, this one is one the blog.
http://commongroundcommonsense.blogspot.com/

Of course he did - not directly - but he did - Seymour Hersh reported in an article that he had a source that indicated that Rumsfeld reported to Bush that he was going to alter the interrogation methods used to include physicial coercion and sexual humiliation...

Did Bush say - yeah go ahead when presented with this information - I don't know - but I can tell you what he did not say - becasue Rumsfeld went forward with it - and Rusmfeld would never disobey an order of the president - or he would be removed for disobeying an order of his commander in chief.

So - at a minimum - by not saying anything - Bush assented to the tactics.

Rumsfeld 'approved' harsh prison tactics
by The Age, May 17, 2004 Monday May 17, 2004 at 04:33 PM

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorised the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of al-Qaeda to be used against prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker magazine.

The article, by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, reported that Mr Rumsfeld and the undersecretary of defence for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, approved use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq last year to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter growing insurgency.

Mr Rumsfeld gave the green light to methods previously used in Afghanistan for gathering intelligence on members of al-Qaeda, which the US blames for the September 11, 2001, attacks, the magazine reported on its website.

The Pentagon called the assertions "outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with anonymous conjecture". It strongly denied that Mr Rumsfeld or any Pentagon official had sanctioned the interrogation program.

Hersh's account, to be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, said the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and sexually humiliating practices.

"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials," Hersh wrote, "the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

Hersh's reporting focuses new attention on an important question in the prisoner abuse scandal - whether senior military or civilian officials ordered the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. Mr Rumsfeld, who has apologised for the abuses, has said they were carried out by lower-level forces without the approval of senior commanders.

The article suggested that Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cambone had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses away from top civilians at the Pentagon to lower-level military police guards who are facing disciplinary proceedings in military courts.

Administration officials disputed critical details in Hersh's article.

They said they were aware of no high-level decision to use coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.

A military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues said the covert operators worked out of their own secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib.

The official said the group was no longer working in Iraq.

"It was a battlefield thing," the official said. "You get people. You question them, then you turn them over to people who can get more out of them."

The official said Major-General Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited the covert compound last September, during a trip to assess problems with detention and interrogation efforts in Iraq.

Administration officials pointed to testimony before Congress in which several Administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Convention applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit coercive tactics.

But some officials acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence. Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita vigorously denied the allegations that Mr Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. The Hersh story was published as US President George Bush said he was determined that the Iraqi prison abuses would never happen again, and as a Newsweek magazine poll showed Mr Bush's job approval rating sinking to 42 per cent, a record low for his presidency.

The poll said 57 per cent of Americans disapproved of his handling of Iraq.

In his weekly radio address, Mr Bush again suggested the abuse scandal was limited to those directly involved at Abu Ghraib prison. "My Administration and our military are determined that such abuses never happen again," Mr Bush said.

"All Americans know that the actions of a few do not reflect the true character of the United States armed forces."

US Secretary of State Colin Powell told a World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan: "Our many friends around the world share our anguish right now about the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib. I can tell you straight from my heart we will deal with this. We will see that justice is done."

www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/16/1084646074861.html

Bush was "informed" of the program. Well - if I told you I was going to bomb a village with women and children in it and you as commander in chief did not say no - then I would say you assented...

SIGN - A token of anything; a note or token given without words.
http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s154.htm
To sign a judgment, is to enter a judgment for want of something which was required to be done; as, for example, in the English practice, if he who is bound to give oyer does not give it within the time required, in such cases, the adverse party may sign judgment against him.

Contracts are express or implied. The express are manifested viva voce, or by writing; the implied are shown by silence, by acts, or by signs.

THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15

http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.

See target='_blank'>


http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...87&#entry106687 started last night.

This story has been picked up (according to Google) by >350 newspapers!

if this is true (and the ACLU are usually truthful) then this is massive. Is this the moment we have all been waiting for? Pass this on to all media!! All round the world!

On DemocracyNow.org, today, (shown on Sattelite TV-Link TV and FSTV[9415], Pacifica radio and the internet) has an excellent interview with Michael Isikoff about the memos, etc., on the new torture links to WH and Rumsfeld. Also, Paul Krugman was interviewed on SS and other topics, and Conassan (from Salon.com) interviewed on the new torture info.

Democracy Now is aired several times during the day on Sattelite TV, the times can be checked on their website.

This must be the thing the CIA wouldn't release until after the election.

I wonder when bush will finally get chastized for all of his purposeful wrongdoings. I wonder as well, if more of this will encourage the Senate and Congress to be more supportive of the election inspection. It would be a more dignified way for getting bush out of the White House if it were just proven that he did not win the election than having to impeach and remove him from office. One would think that the republicans would support this.

Thanks, you are a sweetie!

Also, do you think this might have been why dubya held his little news conference yesterday? He never holds them unless he is trying to hide something!

now that we have 2 threads on this HUGE topic (great!) and on the blog it should be aired EVERYWHERE. Australia have picked it up - will the Washington Post? Please phone them at their newsdesk and dare them to run it as today's big headline!!! Go on be a devil....

Go to the other thread (scroll up for link). I've been following Google this moring, it has been picked up by >350 newspapers, including major MSM players.

don't see it in the main newspapers yet?

We'll teach those Iraqis and Afghans what it is like to live free, in a country without a dictatorial military ruling presence, and without the fear of torture and murder. Whether they like it or not.

This is nothing more than the other exposures.

Granted - it makes it more likely than not that Sey Hersh was correct in his story - but Bush can get his fingerprints on whatever he wants and he stays clean.

Bush is bulletproof. I wish he weren't but this will never stick with him and even if it did - what good would it do - at most - and this is the absolute most - Congress would censure him - and I doubt even this would happen.

I came to that conclusion with the $700 million that was diverted without notice to Congress from the Afghanistan appropriation to be spent on planning for an Iraq invasion. This was an impeachable offense and Bush clearly directed Tommy Franks to use the money in an illegal manner - and nothing happened for this.

The only way we were going to hand Bush was to get a Dem in there to uncover the crap that's been going on - but that won't happen unless the election is overturned.

Well, whether the election is overturned or not, which I still hold out hope for, this story isn't going to die. This sort of thing sickens people. If you remember, what finally blew the Vietnam consciousness open was not the numbing number of deaths, but the massacres and reports of good soldiers gone bad under the terrific stress. My faith is still good that at the core, most of the middle-Americans, with their values, who voted for dubya, won't stomach this.

The White House has already disclaimed the story - unless some highly sensitive documents come forward there is not going to be anything to this story.

We'll see, but I stand by my previous statements - this president is teflon and the Dems are too weak to challenge him...Reid is a more subtle form of the go along Daschle.

I was hoping with his defeat we'd get a real oppostion party leader - but no - we just go along to get along - its pathetic.

War Crimes
Washington Post
Thursday, December 23, 2004;

THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.

Though they represent only part of the record that lies in government files, the documents show that the abuse of prisoners was already occurring at Guantanamo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after the outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs. FBI agents reported in internal e-mails and memos about systematic abuses by military interrogators at the base in Cuba, including beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag. "On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," an unidentified FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more." Two defense intelligence officials reported seeing prisoners severely beaten in Baghdad by members of a special operations unit, Task Force 6-26, in June. When they protested they were threatened and pictures they took were confiscated.

Other documents detail abuses by Marines in Iraq, including mock executions and the torture of detainees by burning and electric shock. Several dozen detainees have died in U.S. custody. In many cases, Army investigations of these crimes were shockingly shoddy: Officials lost records, failed to conduct autopsies after suspicious deaths and allowed evidence to be contaminated. Soldiers found to have committed war crimes were excused with noncriminal punishments. The summary of one suspicious death of a detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison reads: "No crime scene exam was conducted, no autopsy conducted, no copy of medical file obtained for investigation because copy machine broken in medical office."

Some of the abuses can be attributed to lack of discipline in some military units -- though the broad extent of the problem suggests, at best, that senior commanders made little effort to prevent or control wrongdoing. But the documents also confirm that interrogators at Guantanamo believed they were following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld. One FBI agent reported on May 10 about a conversation he had with Guantanamo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who defended the use of interrogation techniques the FBI regarded as illegal on the grounds that the military "has their marching orders from the Sec Def." Gen. Miller has testified under oath that dogs were never used to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, as authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002; the FBI papers show otherwise.

The Bush administration refused to release these records to the human rights groups under the Freedom of Information Act until it was ordered to do so by a judge. Now it has responded to their publication with bland promises by spokesmen that any wrongdoing will be investigated. The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record. Congress, too, has abdicated its responsibility under its Republican leadership: It has been nearly four months since the last hearing on prisoner abuse. Perhaps intervention by the courts will eventually stem the violations of human rights that appear to be ongoing in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

Glad to see this.

But be sure the spin will be on, in fact it has started.

Did anyone catch Kristinn Taylor of the DC chapter of "FREE REPUBLIC" on CSPAN yesterday??

It was a press conference to announce the freepers' plans to "protect" the US Navy Memorial, to create a safety zone for conservatives. Only 5-6 media showed. Only 1 reporter asked a question.

http://www.dcchapter.com/

Watch for rebroadcasts. More fun than watching FAUX news.

Methinks one has to know how upset people on all sides of the political spectrum were over the damage done to that memorial during the inauguration almost four years ago. A lot of disparate groups came together to get it repaired and cleaned up.

Knowing this history I'm a bit curious why A.N.S.W.E.R. asked for and received a permit to stage protests at that site. Their web site was no help, all references to their plans of action during the inauguration seem to have been removed. Can anyone else shed any light on this?

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washingt...for_abuse_data/

CIA resists request for abuse data
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | December 27, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, invoking a legal precedent that involved a secret project by billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s.

The CIA allegedly oversaw interrogations of top-level detainees, and some investigators think the agency's tactics are at the heart of the question of whether the Bush administration has authorized torture. But nearly all the disclosures concerning abuses have come from other agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI.

The CIA traditionally has invoked special protections aimed at shielding its intelligence-gathering operations, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing to obtain the records, and some independent observers think the agency's insistence on secrecy is inappropriate in this instance.

Megan Lewis, a lawyer for the ACLU, said she would file an objection in early January to the CIA's efforts to avoid scrutiny.

The CIA asserts that it is protected according to the submarine case, in which a judge allowed the agency to neither confirm nor deny that it possessed records of a deep-sea mining project thought to be a front to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. The CIA has refused to acknowledge whether it has documents and photographs related to abuse of detainees.

Among the records sought in the ongoing Freedom of Information Act case pursued by the ACLU are a Justice Department legal opinion about interrogation techniques and pictures of John Walker Lindh, an American who was detained with Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

In the same suit, the FBI chose to turn over troves of e-mails regarding accusations of prisoner abuse that were made public last week.

"CIA . . . asserts that it is not able to confirm or deny whether it has any records relating to its purported involvement in these specific activities related to the treatment, death, or rendition of detainees in US custody because to do so would tend to reveal classified information and intelligence sources and methods that are protected from disclosure," the agency said in a court filing Oct. 15.

The lawsuit has met stiff resistance from some other government agencies, most notably the Pentagon. Legal wrangling continues over Pentagon assertions that certain documents are exempt from disclosure on the grounds of national security. Still, all agencies involved other than the CIA have answered whether sought-after documents exist.

In seeking to keep its role in the detainee-abuse scandal from public view, the CIA has invoked the so-called "Glomar response," named for the Glomar Explorer, the deep-sea mining ship built by a Hughes-owned company for the CIA. The operation was exposed in 1975, leading to a Freedom of Information Act suit that established the precedent.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists who has extensive experience in Freedom of Information Act cases, said the use of the Glomar response is relatively rare and is particularly questionable in the context of records of detainee abuse. A more typical use, he suggested, would be a request for information about a secret technology or installation.

"The Glomar response has its place in FOIA litigation, but it doesn't follow that every time it's invoked, it is legitimate," he said.

A spokesman for the US attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, which is representing the CIA in the lawsuit filed in June, declined to comment.

Most of the documents in a 70-item list sought by the ACLU and other civil rights groups were derived from media coverage since the disclosures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The rights groups have received more than 9,000 pages of documents from other government agencies, but have received nothing from the CIA.

The agency's response stands in stark contrast to the FBI, which issued a series of e-mails describing agents' outrage at witnessing physical and mental harm inflicted on detainees at Guantanamo and in Iraq, often during interrogation sessions. Among the items sought from the CIA:

An alleged memorandum issued in late 2001 from the Justice Department to the CIA setting boundaries for interrogations in the light of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

From December 2001, alleged photographs, documents, and materials said to depict mistreatment of Lindh while in the custody of the Defense Department or the CIA.

An alleged memo from the Justice Department from August 2002 specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members.

An alleged study from September 2002 by the CIA raising questions on the significance of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Alleged communications from 2002 and 2003 among CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency officials about the questioning of the most important detainees and the use of new tactics such as "physical roughing up; sensory, food, and sleep deprivation"; and a water pit in which detainees must stand on tiptoe to keep from drowning, according to a June 2004 article in Newsweek.

A directive allegedly signed by President Bush that grants the CIA authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States.

Lewis said the ACLU is certain to challenge the CIA's use of the Glomar case to shield the alleged documents. She singled out the legal memos about the torture convention as particularly egregious.

The memos "look like particularly inappropriate uses of the Glomar response because they are basically legal analyses of laws against torture and the use of certain harsher interrogation techniques, which on its face does not look like it would compromise national security," Lewis said.

"They're just using [Glomar] to withhold these documents and to protect themselves. And it's very hard for anyone on the outside to pierce that veil. They just said, 'We can't confirm or deny it exists.' "

U.S. Releases New Memo Defining Torture


By Curt Anderson / Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department released a rewritten legal memo on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve "excruciating and agonizing pain."

The 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.

The new document said torture violates U.S. and international law.

"Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture," said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.

Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement document.

The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to consider Bush's nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.

Democrats have said they would question Gonzales closely on memos he wrote that were similar to the now-disavowed Justice Department documents that critics said appeared to justify torture.

The release also coincided with continuing revelations of possible detainee abuse, most recently a series of memos from FBI agents uncovered in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging instances of Defense Department wrongdoing during a variety of interrogations.

The new Justice Department memo sets a far different tone, beginning with this sentence: "Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms."

The document, again directly contradicting the previous version, says torture need not be limited to pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Instead, the memo concludes that anti-torture laws passed by Congress equate torture with physical suffering "even if it does not involve severe physical pain" but still must be more than "mild and transitory." That can include mental suffering under certain circumstances, but it would not have to last for months or years, as the previous document said.

"This damage need not be permanent, but it must continue for a prolonged period of time," the memo says.

In addition, the memo clearly states that U.S. personnel involved in interrogations cannot contend that their actions were motivated by national security needs or other reasons. And, it says, the interrogator cannot justify torture after telling the victim that he could avoid it if only he would cooperate.

"Presumably, that has frequently been the case with torture, but that fact does not make the practice of torture any less abhorrent or unlawful," the Justice Department memo says.

Most of the original memos were signed by then-assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, who was writing in the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as government officials scrambled to confront a new terrorist foe. Bybee is now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco.

The Pentagon, Justice Department and CIA have opened numerous investigations into allegations of prisoner abuse and some detainee deaths stemming from the war on terror and in Iraq. Several U.S. soldiers have also been subjected to court-martial proceedings for their roles in the alleged abuse, some of which was documented in photographs from Abu Ghraib circulated worldwide earlier in 2004.

Too little, too late. I see this as a open admission that torture was condoned by the administration.

Please see target='_blank'>


http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...topic=12902&hl=

To the existing Blomberg and Washington Post stories, I'm about to add the actual Dept of Justice memo.

https://www.kintera.org/site/apps/ka/sd/don...HeIHLTMvHjKSL4J

A coalition of groups, including TrueMajority, MoveOn.org, and The National Council of Churches, are working to highlight Alberto Gonzales' shameful record on torture. We hope to have senators pressure him on the issue and have him publicly renounce the use of torture.

The campaign includes news conferences with veterans concerned about danger to future American POWs and human rights activists.

A key to the campaign is an ad in the New York Times about the issue. As part of the coalition, TrueMajority has pledged to raise $30,000 for the production and printing of the ad. If you would like to see this ad appear in the New York Times, you can contribute a few bucks and we'll get it run.

Remember that the power of online activism is that a little effort or money from a lot of people can add up to something significant. If we raise more than our goal, we'll use the money toward our work for peace and justice.

Click Here to See Ad:

"You May Not Know Alberto Gonzalez. But We're Sure You'll Recognize His Work" [Print Ad]

Torture is something we've usually accused our enemies of doing- from the early Indian Wars to the USSR. Now the US is doing it, and Congress is preparing to validate American use of torture, by 'promoting' the author of the policy.

Where do you stand on this?

Torture is never acceptable and for a supposedly civilized country to endorse it (as we have) and then claim we are freeing citizens from other countries from torture is reprehensible. If we don't want other countries torturing people then we shouldn't be endorsing it ourselves.

Ditto.

Sorry, couldn't resist this based on your thread... What if the torturee is on the M side of an S/M relationship?

The torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo got us nothing but a really bad rap which helps incite more violence against us and undermines our relationships with other civilized countries. If I were being tortured to the point I'd have to spill information, I'd expect the end result would be more torture and death. As such, if I gave any info, it would be false info.

When it comes to the mind-set of the terrorists, you have to bear in mind that martyrdom is their goal, torture won't yield anything worthwhile (the weak ones they'd expect to cave,won't have information worth knowing).

I voted ( B ). The problem is that in these marginal cases you often don't know whether using 'excessive' force is appropriate until AFTER the fact. Not that I in anyway condone Abu Ghraib. Those men knew nothing and even if they did there were more humane and effective methods to dig it up.

NEVER

Misere.....I am already scared to read that some people did not vote NEVER: I thought better of this forum: some few Barbars with us
Did you remember (or what it presented too, in the USA?) this TV serie where they put people in some kind of electric device and in front of them, somebody had the trigger to send electric shocks....stronger and stronger. The "patient" faked pain, more and more suffering, but the other guy continued giving stronger shocks, even after hesitating and feeling bad about it.
Most people just obeyed, even when they felt terrible, seeing the result of the tortur and justified that they got the order to do it.
Sorry for my english explaining this...hope you heard about it?

Milgram's experiment, very well known, very frightening - shows that people will do what they know and feel is wrong when directed by an authority figure.

There's interrogation and then there's merciless physical/psychological torture. The latter is counterproductive on so many levels.

Torture usually begins in about the third year of marriage,,,,,, Hey my marriage was torture. Mental abuse, OMG its happening in households all over America and we worry about terrorists!!! NOT ME I SAY FORCEM TO MARRY NASTY CHICKS< EITHER THAT OR TALK!!!

Torture is never acceptable. It is also not an effective way to get credible information.