Last Update: Monday, April 4, 2005. 7:19am (AEST)
Al Qaeda says 7 suicide bombers hit Iraqi prison
Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq says in an Internet statement that seven suicide bombers spearheaded its brazen raid on Abu Ghraib prison that wounded 44 United States soldiers.

In a statement on Saturday's raid on the prison outside Baghdad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group said its fighters killed "dozens of Americans", destroyed more than 15 vehicles and shot down an Apache helicopter.

It said 57 fighters attacked watchtowers from four sides and "silenced them" as seven suicide bombers detonated vehicles laden with explosives around the facility.

"Three martyrs were ... [killed] while infiltrating the infidels' fortresses and seven other martyrdom seekers went to heaven after they blew up the enemy ...," said the statement, posted on a website used by Islamists.

The US military said dozens of insurgents carried out the attack, detonating two car bombs and firing rocket-propelled grenades at US forces before the assault was repelled.

"Your brothers in the Al Qaeda Organisation [for Holy War] in Iraq launched a well-planned attack on Abu Ghraib prison, where Muslim women and men are held," the group said in another statement.

It said the battle, which also involved missile strikes, lasted most of the night.

"Columns of smoke were seen rising from the crusaders' bases," the statement said.

"This battle is part of a series of raids ... which began yesterday across the land of Mesopotamia."

The group said it would provide a film of the attack soon.

Besides the 44 US troops wounded, 12 detainees were hurt, one seriously.

The US military said at least one insurgent was killed.

It was believed to be the largest and most determined attack on Abu Ghraib, a prison where more than 3,000 suspected insurgents are held in US detention and which was at the centre of a prisoner abuse scandal last year.

-Reuters
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1337245.htm

US Afghan allies committed massacre

American experts find that Northern Alliance warlords slaughtered prisoners of war

David Rose
Sunday March 21, 2004
The Observer

Dramatic corroboration of the massacre of Afghan prisoners by the US-backed Northern Alliance at the start of the war in 2001 was last night provided by American pathologists commissioned to investigate the claims by the UN.
A vivid account of the slaughter was provided to The Observer last week by three Britons who were released from the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba more than two years after they were first seized in Afghanistan. They told how they narrowly escaped the massacre before being handed over to American forces and flown to Guantanamo Bay.

Forensic anthropologist William Haglund, who earlier led inquiries into mass graves in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, told The Observer how he dug into an area of recently disturbed desert soil outside the town of Shebargan, and exhumed 15 bodies, a tiny sample, he said, of what may be a very large total.

Thanks to the cold and arid climate, they were well enough preserved to carry out autopsies. Haglund's conclusion 'that they died from suffocation' exactly corroborates the stories told by the Guantanamo detainees in last week's Observer .

'They are the first survivors to describe what we already believed happened to the victims we discovered,' Haglund said yesterday. 'The time has come for a full investigation, under the protection of the international community.'

Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed, from Tipton in the West Midlands, told in their interviews how weeks before they were handed over to the Americans, they were captured by Northern Alliance forces led by General Abdurrashid Dostum in November 2001, as they tried to flee war-torn Afghanistan.

At Shebargan, they were herded into two of several truck containers. Then, Iqbal said, the doors were sealed. He and the others lost consciousness, and when he came to he was 'lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine'.

'We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low, and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.'

Haglund visited the mass grave at Shebargan twice in 2002, in the wake of the coalition's war against the Taliban. On the first occasion, he was part of a team from the US-based Physicians for Human Rights, which identified dozens of mass graves in northern Afghanistan, many containing the remains of prisoners killed by the proxy warlord forces backed by Britain and America.

The team also inspected the Northern Alliance prison at Shebargan in January, 2002, while the 'Tipton Three' were still there. Their findings, said John Heffernan, another team member, also corroborate the Tipton men's story. 'There were nearly 3,000 of them being held in squalid conditions under the control of Dostum, whose palatial headquarters were across the street,' Heffernan said.

Iqbal and Rasul told how they had been marched through the desert towards Shebargan past huge ditches already filled with bodies. Heffernan said: 'After taking into account the thousands crowded into the dilapidated prison, the whereabouts of many taken captive remained unknown. We began to suspect some might have met their fate on the way there. After we left the prison and travelled down the road a few miles into the desert, we smelled the unmistakable odour of decaying flesh and soon found bulldozer tracks and skeletal remains.' Haglund came back under United Nations auspices a few months later.

By chance, on the day he arrived at Shebargan, Dostum had gone into the mountains, he said, leaving behind a military escort which allowed him to open the grave. 'I uncovered one small corner, exposing 15 remains which were quite complete, and did autopsies on three. There were no signs of trauma and these were all young men. This is consistent with death by asphyxiation.

'I told Dostum's security chief that they had died from suffocation, and there was this big silence hanging over the desert.'

The details about elements of the Tipton Three's story assumed a new importance last week, after the Sun published claims by a US Embassy spokesman, Lee McClenny, that the three had trained at an al-Qaeda camp in 2000. They told The Observer last week that they had all confessed to this accusation only after months of solitary confinement and 200 separate interrogation sessions, only to have it finally disproved by MI5, which brought documents showing they had been in Britain at the time.

After making his claims in the Sun, McClenny refused to answer further questions from journalists, while Lt Col Leon Sumpter, the US spokesman at Guantanamo Bay, said any allegations concerning detainees were highly classified, even after their release: 'I don't know how the Embassy got this,' he said. 'It didn't come from us, and we knew nothing about it.' McClenny's letter was widely criticised as an attempt to nullify the Tipton men's stories of abuse at American hands

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/internation...1174554,00.html

Thanks SaluteLiberty. I had not seen these articles. I was particularly horrified at the newsweek article. I am going to post the story here for those that do not click on the links. I think it is an important storry.

I can not believe that the U.S. TV media will not cover any of these stories. My god, the descriptions in this newsweek article bring visions of the Nazi's transporting jews and other prisoners in cattle cars. How can the TV news media ignore these stories?

SaluteLiberty posted a link to this older Newsweek story about prisoner treatment in Afganistan but I am posting the entire story here. Please help contact the TV media to get them to cover these horrendous stories from Afganistan to Iraq to Guantanamo. We can not be like the Americans that ignored the Holocaust stories in the 1930s.

The Death Convoy of Afghanistan
By Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry and Roy Gutman
NEWSWEEK

Witness reports and the probing of a mass grave point to war crimes. Does the United States have any responsibility for the atrocities of its allies?
A NEWSWEEK investigation.

August, 26 Issue

Trudging over the moonscape of Dasht-e Leili, a desolate expanse of low rolling hills in northern Afghanistan, Bill Haglund spotted clues half-buried in the gray-beige sand. Strings of prayer beads. A woolen skullcap. A few shoes. Those remnants, along with track marks and blade scrapes left by a bulldozer, suggested that Haglund had found what he was looking for. Then he came across a human tibia, three sets of pelvic bones and some ribs.

Mass graves are not always easy to spot, though trained investigators know the signs. "You look for disturbance of the earth, differences in the vegetation, areas that have been machined over," says Haglund, a forensic anthropologist and pioneer in the field of "human-rights archeology." At Dasht-e Leili, a 15-minute drive from the Northern Alliance prison at Sheber-ghan, scavenging animals had brought the evidence to the surface. Some of the gnawed bones were old and bleached, but some were from bodies so recently buried the bones still carried tissue. The area of bulldozer activity--roughly an acre--suggested burials on a large scale. A stray surgical glove also caught Haglund's eye. Such gloves are often used by people handling corpses, and could be evidence, Haglund thought, of "a modicum of planning."

Haglund was in Dasht-e Leili on more than a hunch. In January, two investigators from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights had argued their way into the nearby Sheberghan prison. What they saw shocked them. More than 3,000 Taliban prisoners--who had surrendered to the victorious Northern Alliance forces at the fall of Konduz in late November--were crammed, sick and starving, into a facility with room for only 800. The Northern Alliance commander of the prison acknowledged the charnel-house conditions, but pleaded that he had no money. He begged the PHR to send food and supplies, and to ask the United Nations to dig a well so the prisoners could drink unpolluted water.

STORIES OF MASS GRAVES

But stories of a deeper horror came from the prisoners themselves. However awful their conditions, they were the lucky ones. They were alive. Many hundreds of their comrades, they said, had been killed on the journey to Sheberghan from Konduz by being stuffed into sealed cargo containers and left to asphyxiate. Local aid workers and Afghan officials quietly confirmed that they had heard the same stories. They confirmed, too, persistent reports about the disposal of many of the dead in mass graves at Dasht-e Leili.

That's when Haglund, a veteran of similar investigations in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the Balkans and other scenes of atrocity, was called in. Standing at what he reckoned from the 'dozer tracks was an edge of the grave site, he pushed a long, hollow probe deep into the compacted sand. Then he sniffed. The acrid smell reeking up the shaft was unmistakable. Haglund and local laborers later dug down; at five feet, they came upon a layer of decomposing corpses, lying pressed together in a row. They dug a trial trench about six yards long, and in that --short length found 15 corpses. "They were relatively fresh bodies: the flesh was still on the bones," Haglund recalls. "They were scantily clad, which was consistent with reports that [before they died] they had been in a very hot place." Some had their hands tied. Haglund brought up three of the corpses, and a colleague conducted autopsies in a tent. The victims were all young men, and their bodies showed "no overt trauma"--no gunshot wounds, no blows from blunt instruments. This, too, Hag-lund says, is "consistent" with the survivors' stories of death by asphyxiation.

How many are buried at Dasht-e Leili? Haglund won't speculate. "The only thing we know is that it's a very large site," says a U.N. official privy to the investigation, and there was "a high density of bodies in the trial trench." Other sources who have investigated the killings aren't surprised. "I can say with confidence that more than a thousand people died in the containers," says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh, director of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. NEWSWEEK's extensive inquiries of prisoners, truckdrivers, Afghan militiamen and local villagers--including interviews with survivors who licked and chewed each other's skin to stay alive--suggest also that many hundreds of people died.

The dead of Dasht-e Leili--and the horrific manner of their killing--are one of the dirty little secrets of the Afghan war. The episode is more than just another atrocity in a land that has seen many. The killings illustrate the problems America will face if it opts to fight wars by proxy, as the United States did in Afghanistan, using small numbers of U.S. Special Forces calling in air power to support local fighters on the ground. It also raises questions about the responsibility Americans have for the conduct of allies who may have no --interest in applying protections of the Geneva Conventions. The benefit in fighting a proxy-style war in Afghanistan was victory on the cheap--cheap, at any rate, in American blood. The cost, NEWSWEEK's investigation has established, is that American forces were working intimately with "allies" who committed what could well qualify as war crimes.

FALSE STATEMENTS

Nothing that NEWSWEEK learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks or were in a position to prevent that. They were in the area of the prison at the time the containers were delivered, although probably not when they were opened. The small group of Special Forces soldiers were more focused at the time on prison security, and preventing an uprising such as the bloody outbreak that had happened days earlier in the prison fort at Qala Jangi. The soldiers surely heard stories of deaths in the containers, but may have thought them exaggerated. They also may have believed that the dead were war casualties, or wounded prisoners who, among thousands of their comrades, simply didn't survive the rugged journey from the surrender point to the prison. But it's also true that Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions on the subject. Officials across the administration did not respond to repeated requests by NEWSWEEK for a detailed accounting of U.S. activities in the Konduz, Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan areas at the time in question, and Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false.

Questions can be raised, as well, about international agencies. How seriously has the United Nations pursued investigations of what happened at Sheberghan? The reports of atrocity come at a time when the international community is desperately trying to bring stability to Afghanistan. Well-meaning officials may be wondering if a full-scale investigation might set off a new round of Afghan slaughter. Would it be worth it? A confidential U.N. memorandum, parts of which were made available to NEWSWEEK, says that the findings of investigations into the Dasht-e Leili graves "are sufficient to justify a fully-fledged criminal investigation." It says that based on "information collected," the site "contains bodies of Taliban POW's who died of suffocation during transfer from Konduz to Sheberghan." A witness quoted in the report puts the death toll at 960. Yet the re--port also raises urgent questions. "Considering the political sensitivity of this case and related protection concerns, it is strongly recommended that all activities relevant to this case be brought to a halt until a decision is made concerning the final goal of the exercise: criminal trial, truth commission, other, etc."

U.S. INVOLVEMENT

The close involvement of American soldiers with General Dostum can only make an investigation all the more sensitive. "The issue nobody wants to discuss is the involvement of U.S. forces," says Jennifer Leaning, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the pair of Physicians for Human Rights investigators who pushed their way into Sheberghan. "U.S. forces were in the area at the time. What did the U.S. know, and when and --where--and what did they do about it?"

The Taliban and Qaeda forces at Konduz surrendered in a negotiated deal that took two to three days to hammer out. According to Shams-ul-Haq (Shamuk) Naseri, a mid-level Northern Alliance commander who was present, the talks were held in the presence of three American intelligence officers and a dozen or more Special Forces soldiers. Northern Alliance commanders, including General Dostum, agreed to relatively generous conditions: The Afghan fighters would be allowed to go home to their villages. Most of the Pakistanis could also return home after the Americans picked out suspected Qaeda operatives. Arabs and other foreign fighters would be turned over to the United Nations or some other international organization. According to another Afghan present at the talks, Said Vasiqullah Sadat, the Taliban representatives insisted that their men surrender to General Dostum, because they figured he was the least likely to seek revenge for past killings. The surrender would formally start on Sunday, Nov. 25--to give time for the Taliban leaders to sell the deal to their forces in Konduz.

The day after negotiations ended, roughly 400 hard-core fighters made a break for it anyway, fleeing west. But the vast majority of fighters trapped in Konduz surrendered "like sheep," according to Naseri. "One went and the rest followed." The agreed site for the actual surrender was Yerganak, a desert spot about five miles west of Konduz. Most of the top Taliban and foreign commanders drove out, and their vehicles were promptly confiscated by the Northern Alliance. The rest walked. Four checkpoints had been set up at Yerganak to disarm the fighters and load them onto whatever vehicles were available: pickups, big-wheeled, open-topped Russian Kamaz trucks, even some container trucks. But the numbers streaming out of Konduz overwhelmed the facilities, and most of those surrendering waited three or four days in the desert.
CREDIBLE MUSCLE

Dostum and another Northern Alliance commander, Atta Mohammed, were at Yerganak to monitor the surrender. So were dozens of American Special Forces troops, according to U.S. and Afghan participants. Some of the Special Forces teams were zipping around the area on four-wheeler motorcycles; Dostum was filmed at the time enjoying a ride on the back of one. The Americans provided much of the food and water given to the waiting masses. But they were there primarily to provide credible muscle, a message that was reinforced by the frequent appearance of U.S. bombers streaking overhead.

At about this time, soldiers from Dostum's militia arrived at a container depot on the outskirts of Mazar-e Sharif, about 100 miles to the west, and recruited a driver we'll call Mohammed, a bearded man in his mid-40s. (NEWSWEEK has changed the names of several witnesses in this report to lessen the chance of reprisals.) Mohammed was told that his container truck was needed to ship captive Taliban fighters to Sheberghan prison. He was to pick them up that evening at the old fort in Qala Zeini, which lies on the road between Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan. The road actually passes through the fort: one gate in, one gate out.

Mohammed arrived at Qala Zeini about 7 that evening. Several other container trucks were already waiting inside the fort. So were about 150 soldiers, all Afghans. At about 9, the prisoners--a mix of Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens--arrived from Yerganak in open trucks and pickups. Soldiers ordered the prisoners down from the trucks and stripped them of their turbans, caps and vests. Then they herded the captives into the containers, as many as 200 to a truck. The fighters realized they were not going home, as promised. "F--k Shamuk Naseri," one driver recalls a prisoner's screaming. "He betrayed us." The doors of the container trucks were locked.

The prisoners probably realized their fate. "Death by container" has been a cheap means of mass murder used by both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance for at --least five years. Abandoned freight containers--international standard size, 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet--litter the roads of Afghanistan, rusting reminders of the many tons of aid that have poured into the country over the past 20 years. It was reputedly a savage Uzbek general named Malik Pahlawan who first saw the container's potential as a killing machine in 1997. After a Taliban assault on Mazar-e Sharif had been repulsed, Pahlawan--according to a subsequent U.N. report--killed some 1,250 Taliban by leaving them in containers in the desert sun. When the containers were opened, it was found the inmates had been grilled black. When the Taliban took Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, they in turn killed several hundred enemies in thesame fashion.

'WE'RE DYING. GIVE US WATER!'

In the case of the Taliban prisoners from Konduz, the November temperatures weren't hot enough to blacken them. But after a few hours, they started beating on the sides of their overstuffed cells. "We're dying. Give us water!" some shouted. "We are human, not animals." Mohammed used a hammer and spike to bang holes in his container, until one of Dostum's soldiers heard the banging and angrily demanded to know what he was doing. Mohammed said that he was sealing holes to prevent the prisoners' escape.

After the soldier had gone, one of the prisoners in the container stuck his face close to one of the holes. "Are you a Muslim?" he asked. "Yes," Mohammed replied. "Look at my tongue," said the prisoner, and stuck it out. It was cracked from dehydration. Mohammed filled a two-liter Fanta bottle with water and passed it in through the hole. He also pushed in 10 pieces of bread, all he had. "Thank Allah you are a Muslim," the prisoner said.

Some of the other drivers NEWSWEEK has traced say they, too, tried to help. One described how he also poked holes in his container and tried to bring water to the prisoners. But Dostum's soldiers spotted him, and five of them gave him a beating with their rifle butts. Mohammed saw the beating and spent the rest of the night inside his locked cab.

Someone else saw a similar scene at Qala Zeini, and tried to send a warning. In December, Abdullah was in the settlement of Langar Khaneh, which is close to the fort of Qala Zeini. When the gates of Qala Zeini were closed for a day and a half, and traffic diverted through Langar Khaneh, Abdullah's curiosity was aroused. He made his way over to the fort and peered inside. As he watched, four container trucks were driven into the fort. Not long after, prisoners arrived in pickups and Kamaz trucks, he says. Soldiers in the fort--Dostum's men, Abdullah says--proceeded to tie up the prisoners with their own turbans.

Those who didn't move fast enough or who tried to resist were beaten. Most prisoners, says Abdullah, were bound around their upper arms and blindfolded, but some were hogtied. Unruly prisoners were grabbed by hand and foot and swung into the containers on their bellies. When the containers were full, they were locked. Abdullah was in no doubt what he was witnessing. "The only purpose was to kill the prisoners," he says.

MISSING CONTAINERS

Wondering whom he could alert to these preparations, Abdullah recalled an acquaintance who was working with the American forces based in Mazar. He was Said Vasiqullah Sadat, who was at the surrender negotiations and served as a translator for the Americans. Abdullah says that he told Vasiqullah what was happening, and he says Vasiqullah responded: "We will act." The next day, Abdullah said, a group of Americans arrived at Qala Zeini in two dust-colored pickups. But the containers were gone, and--says Abdullah--the Americans turned around and drove back to Mazar.

Vasiqullah is cautious when asked about this version of events. He says that on the fourth day of the surrender at Yerganak--Nov. 28--he headed back to Mazar with several cars full of American soldiers. Some of these were billeting in Atta Mohammed's headquarters in Mazar. Vasiqullah confirms that he "soon" heard about prisoners' being transferred into containers at Qala Zeini. But he will not confirm that he heard this from the witness from Langar Khaneh. Nor will he confirm that he passed the news on to the Americans he was working with. "The Americans were distracted at this time," he says. The uprising at the Qala Jangi prison in Mazar-e Sharif--in which CIA operative Mike Spann was killed and the American John Walker Lindh was discovered--had occurred on Nov. 25. "Many of them were taking care of arrangements for shipping Mike Spann's body out of Mazar airport." But, says Vasiqullah, the containers could not have remained a secret for long. "I think the Americans found out soon," he says. "They were at Sheberghan prison from the beginning."

At 11 a.m. on Nov. 29, according to the driver Mohammed, a convoy of 13 container trucks set out from Qala Zeini. Each driver had soldiers in the cab beside him. A driver we'll call Ghassan, who had picked up his load of human cargo at a concrete bridge 31 miles west of Mazar-e Sharif, was also on the move around this time. He recalls that some in his container were alive, and beating on the sides. "They just want water ... Keep driving," he was ordered.

By the time the trucks arrived at Sheberghan prison, many were ominously quiet. Mohammed was the driver of the second truck in line, but he got down from his cab and walked into the prison courtyard as the doors of the lead truck were opened. Of the 200 or so who had been loaded into the sealed container not quite 24 hours before, none had survived. "They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish," says Mohammed. "All their clothes were ripped and wet. "

$750 FOR AN AIR HOLE

The following day, Nov. 30, a fresh convoy of seven trucks arrived at Sheberghan. The day after, Dec. 1, brought a third convoy--also seven trucks. NEWSWEEK has traced drivers from both later convoys. Their recollections are that most of those containers contained many dead bodies. But not all. The inmates of one truck in those convoys passed about 45,000 Pakistani rupees (about $750) to the driver through a crack in the floor as a bribe to cut air holes and spray in water through a hose. All 150 inmates survived. In at least one container, the prisoners themselves managed to rip holes in the wooden floor, and all of them survived.

Abdul, a 28-year-old pashtun, is one who lived. NEWSWEEK interviewed him in Sheberghan prison. He recalls that his container was packed to the breaking point. After nearly 24 hours without water, Abdul says, the prisoners were so desperate with thirst that they began licking the sweat off each other's bodies. Some prisoners began to lose their reason and started biting those around them. Abdul's was one of the containers in the third convoy to Sheberghan: by the time they reached the prison, he says, only 20 to 30 in his container were alive.

Other survivors now in Sheberghan tell almost identical stories. One 20-year-old was shoved into a fully packed container. After about eight hours, he thinks, the prisoners began kicking the sides of the container and shouting for air and water. None came. Some of the prisoners began using their turbans to soak and drink the sweat off each other's bodies. After a few more hours many of the prisoners started going crazy and bit each other's fingertips, arms and legs. Anything to get moisture. By the time they reached Sheberghan, the young man says, only about 40 in his container were still alive.

PACKED 'LIKE CATTLE'

For some, the agony in the containers was intensified because they were tied up. This appears to have been a fate reserved for Pakistani--and perhaps other non-Afghan--prisoners. Mahmood, 20, says he surrendered at Konduz along with 1,500 other Pakistanis. All were bound hand and foot either with their own turbans or with strips ripped from their clothing, he says. Then they were packed in container trucks "like cattle," he says. He reckons that about 100 people died in his container.

The drivers remain tormented by what they took part in. "Why weren't there any United Nations people there to see the dead bodies?" asks one. "Why wasn't anything being done?" Another driver shook uncontrollably as he spoke with NEWSWEEK.

The convoys of the dead and dying, along with many truckloads of living prisoners, seem to have arrived at Sheberghan for perhaps 10 days. Prying eyes were kept away. The Red Cross, learning of the arrivals of prisoners from Konduz, applied on--Nov. 29 to get into Sheberghan. Dostum's commander at the prison promised that access would be granted within 24 hours. In fact, it was not until Dec. 10 that the Red Cross got into the prison. By then, most of the bodies had probably been buried. (Dostum's spokesman denies that access was blocked by prison officials.)

There were witnesses near the burial site who noticed unusual activity. The hamlet of Lab-e Jar is about half a mile east of the grave site. On several nights in the first half of December, Dostum's soldiers forbade the villagers to leave their homes. Most of the villagers are now too frightened to talk. "Bodies have been buried there for years," says one. "You know what happened. I know what happened. But nothing is going to change if we talk about it." Still, NEWSWEEK found some who were willing to say what they saw. One man, 49, claims that around the first week in December, Dostum's soldiers blocked the dirt road running past Dasht-e Leili for several days. "No cars, no donkey carts, not even pedestrians were allowed to go down the road," he says. He personally saw four or five container trucks at the burial site, he says. When U.N. investigators talked with the people of Lab-e Jar in May, two residents told of seeing bulldozers at work on the site around the middle of December.

QUESTIONING SURVIVORS

A widening circle of organizations and individuals know, in broad terms, what happened after the fall of Konduz. The Red Cross has questioned survivors and compiled a report about the events; top officials at the Red Cross's Geneva headquarters have met to discuss, inconclusively, what to do next. A pair of U.N. investigators were present when Haglund dug his trial trench across the Dasht-e Leili grave site. After questioning local witnesses, they, too, compiled a report. Two U.N. entities--the Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights--have also been mulling what to do. "You have to understand, you're dealing with a potentially explosive issue here," says a Red Cross official in Afghanistan, explaining why he was hesitant to discuss the matter. Until now, anyway, the American military has not conducted a full-fledged investigation, nor has it been asked to participate in one by other agencies. U.N. sources say that their inquiries have not implicated U.S. forces. Publicly, the Pentagon has kept its distance. At the end of January, Department of Defense officials were told (by the PHR) of the discovery of what appeared to be a recent mass grave. In late February, officials at the Pentagon and the State Department were given confidential copies of the first formal report compiled by Haglund and his colleagues at the PHR. Consistently, however, the Pentagon has responded that Central Command investigated and found that U.S. troops know nothing of any killings--that the Pentagon indeed has no reason to believe there were killings. In June, DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said that Central Command had questioned individually the forces in Af-ghanistan "several months ago": "Central Command looked into it and found no evidence of participation or knowledge or presence. Our guys weren't there, didn't watch and didn't know about it--if indeed anything like that happened." A DOD statement a week later was emphatic: "No US troops were present anywhere near that site in November. US troops were present in the December/January timeframe when the mass graves were discovered."

But is that entirely true? The American unit most directly involved was the 595 A-team, part of the Fifth Special Forces Group based at Fort Campbell, Ky. The leader of the dozen-man 595 was Capt. Mark D. Nutsch. Throughout the Afghanistan operation, the Pentagon insisted that reporters identify Special Forces personnel by their first names only, claiming this was necessary to protect their families back home from possible terrorist reprisals. But the Army waived that concern in April, when--at the instigation of his Army superiors--the Kansas state Legislature passed a resolution of both houses honoring Captain Nutsch, a 33-year-old native of Kansas. Nutsch's wife, Amy, and their baby daughter, Kaija, born while Nutsch was in Afghanistan, were present at the very public ceremony. Contacted recently by NEWSWEEK about the container deaths, Nutsch said he did not want to discuss them.
595'S ASSIGNMENT

The Special Forces A-teams were the shock troops of the U.S. assault on the Taliban. They were the crucial link between the Northern Alliance militia on the ground and U.S. firepower in the air. Attached to each A-team in the Afghan campaign was at least one Air Force Special Operations soldier called a combat air controller. It was the high-precision airstrikes called in by those CACs that destroyed the Taliban forces. Each A-team was assigned to a specific local commander, and 595's assignment was to work with General Dostum.

595's role in the Afghan conflict made them legends to the wider public. Heloed into Afghanistan, like the rest of the teams, in a Special Forces Chinook, they met up with Dostum on Oct. 19 at his headquarters at Darra-e Suf in the mountain fastnesses south of Mazar-e Sharif. It was the 595 unit that famously carried out its missions on horseback; it was snippets from Nutsch's dispatches that a euphoric Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took to reading at his press briefings. Invigorated --by American air power--and lubricated by the money distributed lavishly to wavering locals by the CIA paramilitaries--Dostum and his fellow Northern Alliance commanders swept north out of the mountains. The climax of the brief campaign began on Nov. 4, when the Northern Alliance launched a three-pronged assault on the major city in the north, Mazar-e Sharif, orchestrated and micromanaged by an assembly of Special Forces, including two A-teams.

595 members had been with Dostum at the surrender negotiations, and then again at the actual surrender at Yerganak. As a consequence they were not with their CIA colleagues, Mike Spann and Dave Tyson, when that pair went to Qala Jangi prison to question the fresh batch of Qaeda and Taliban hard-liners who had arrived there after the abortive breakout from Konduz. The 595 commander, Nutsch, felt bitter about Spann's death. "This was a guy we considered part of our unit," he told Robert Young Pelton, a reporter working for CNN and National Geographic Adventure. "If we had been there, Mike's death would not have happened."

Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving at Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team, in combat gear, at the prison doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. According to Pelton, a swashbuckling freelancer who specializes in writing about dangerous places, Special Forces soldiers were mainly concerned about security at the prison. At the same time the containers of dead were arriving, many truckloads of living prisoners were also streaming in: On the evening of Dec. 1, for instance, a container arrived bearing the 86 survivors from Qala Jangi. One of them was John Walker Lindh. It was the 595 team's medic, Bill, who first treated Lindh. Pelton believed at the time, and still does, that the dead from container trucks numbered "40-some odd" and were mostly people who died of wounds suffered in the siege of Konduz. "When I was with 595, we went over this time and again," says Pelton. "What happened is that these people basically died because they were wounded." A senior Defense Department official, speaking to NEWSWEEK on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease. news-week put this account to Colonel Mulholland through the public-affairs office of the Special Operations Command, but got no response by the time NEWSWEEK went to press.

AGONIZING DILEMMA

For the Red Cross, the killings at Sheberghan represented an agonizing dilemma. The organization's code of operating out of the public eye--a trade-off that allows them access to places no one else is allowed to go, and enables them to provide aid to people in the most difficult circumstances--inhibited its officials from going public with what they heard. "We approached the ICRC more than two months ago to look into this, and they showed no interest," says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. "We got a frosty reception."

In fact, the Red Cross was concerned from the start about the fate of prisoners turning up at Sheberghan. The Taliban's surrender of the northern towns was an extended process; and the first dribble of prisoners from Konduz--captured on its outskirts--began to arrive at Sheberghan on Nov. 22-23. The ICRC office in Mazar-e Sharif learned of these arrivals; and on Nov. 29, a small team sought entry to Sheberghan prison. They were turned away. Asked about this now, an ICRC official says: "The authorities did not want us there." (Dostum's spokesman denies that prison officials refused them access.)

Not until Dec. 10 did the Red Cross manage to talk their way into Sheberghan to interview the new prisoners. They swiftly heard about the horrors of the containers. When NEWSWEEK first approached a Red Cross official to ask about the treatment of prisoners from Konduz, his immediate response was: "I can't talk about containers." Told of the stories that prisoners in Sheberghan had already given to news-week, he responded in some anguish: "If you're hearing stories about containers now, what do you think we were hearing about then?"

Apparently caught between outrage and its own code of secrecy, the Red Cross may have sought to stir attention to Sheberghan indirectly. In mid-January John Heffernan and Jennifer Leaning of the PHR met by chance in Kabul with two Red Cross officials--one a senior official based in ICRC headquarters in Geneva. The Geneva official told them that the Red Cross had, they recall her saying, "grave concerns" about the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces and their allies; and she urged them that this topic was "worth exploring." That was why the PHR pair went up to Sheberghan. At the start of May, the PHR--frustrated by a lack of response in either Kabul or Washington to their private briefings on Haglund's discoveries at Dasht-e Leili--issued a report describing his findings. The Red Cross chimed in, producing for reporters--this was at the Red Cross Kandahar office--a survivor from one of the containers: Sardar Mohammed, 23, from Kandahar. Mohammed reckoned, he said, that they had been packed 150 to a container. And he claimed that he and his fellow survivors had tallied up more 1,000 who had not survived the ordeal.

It may not be easy for Americans to summon much sympathy for Taliban or Qaeda prisoners. But the rules of war cannot be applied selectively. There is no real moral justification for the pain and destruction of combat if it is not to defend the rule of law. The line is tough to hold even in a conventional conflict. In a proxy war, it's much more difficult. The dead at Dasht-e Leili are proof of that.

----------

With Donatella Lorch in Washington, Karen Breslau in San Francisco and Stryker McGuire in London

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.21A.death.convoy.p.htm

The Denver Post


Witness says brass complicit in abuse
By Arthur Kane
Denver Post Staff Writer


Thursday, March 31, 2005 -

Fort Carson - Extreme interrogation techniques like those allegedly used by Fort Carson soldiers in the death of an Iraqi general were known to superior officers, according to a previously undisclosed military court transcript obtained by The Denver Post.
And prisoner-abuse reports made to superior officers were ignored, according to the transcript and court testimony Wednesday. The exchanges in the transcript are believed to be the first acknowledgment that higher level officers other than those who carried out the fatal interrogation knew soldiers were using such techniques.
Four soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are charged with murder and dereliction of duty in the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush in Qaim, Iraq, on Nov. 26, 2003. The soldiers are accused of beating Mowhoush during interrogations, eventually placing a sleeping bag over his head, sitting on his chest and placing their hands over the general's mouth.

The Article 32 hearing to determine whether they will face courts-martial resumed Wednesday after nearly a four- month break.

One of the soldiers, Chief Warrant Officer Jeff L. Williams, also faces possible new charges of assault for allegedly throwing a 20-pound box of food at Mowhoush two days before he died, according to court testimony from Sgt. 1st Class Gerald Pratt, who was stationed at the facility.

The U.S. Army Court of Appeals stopped previous hearings for Williams, Sgt. 1st Class William J. Sommer, and Spec. Jerry Loper in December after The Post sued to get the hearing opened.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer is accused of sitting on Mowhoush's chest and covering the general's mouth. His hearing is to begin today.

Welshofer, Williams, and Maj. Jessica Voss, who headed the 66th Military Intelligence Unit, received reprimands following the death.

An appeals court ruled that the December hearing was closed improperly and ordered the Army to provide a transcript with classified portions redacted. Transcripts provided to The Post on Wednesday include testimony that Welshofer's superior officers knew about the extreme interrogation techniques.

In the document, Voss' rebuttal of the reprimand said she thought the use of the sleeping bag technique was authorized, although no specifics were cited. And Welshofer told Voss the technique was approved by top commanders, according to exchanges between defense council and Col. David Teeples, former commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

The earlier testimony also showed that Welshofer put claustrophobic prisoners in wall lockers to interrogate them.

"I believe the first time I heard about the claustrophobic effect was in Chief Welshofer's rebuttal to the letter of reprimand," Teeples testified. "And so, I could understand why the sleeping bag technique could be used as a claustrophobic technique not intending to harm someone, not intending to kill someone, but intending to put some type of fear into their mind."

In live testimony Wednesday, Pratt said he had reported to superior officers three situations in which he felt American soldiers were acting illegally.

Included in his reports was the theft of more than $2 million worth of Iraqi currency that was to pay for brain surgery for an 8-year-old girl. Some of the money was returned after he complained.

Pratt testified that he was concerned about some of the interrogation techniques and the abuse of prisoners by guards. He and Welshofer, days before the general died, met with staff to clarify what techniques could be used, he said.

Pratt also testified that Welshofer told him Welshofer controlled the interrogation.

"Everything that happens in this facility starts with me and ends with me," Pratt quoted Welshofer as saying.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,3...790868,00.html#

Beating of Iraqi General Alleged in Army Hearing


Associated Press
Sunday, April 3, 2005; Page A21


FORT CARSON, Colo., April 2 -- Previously secret court testimony indicates that an Iraqi general imprisoned by U.S. forces was badly bruised and may have been severely beaten two days before he died of suffocation during interrogation.

References to the alleged beating appear in a transcript, released under court order, from a preliminary military hearing for three soldiers charged with murder and dereliction of duty in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush on Nov. 26, 2003. A fourth soldier faces the same charges but waived a hearing.

During the interrogation, Army prosecutors said, Mowhoush was put headfirst into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord and knocked down before the soldiers sat and stood on him. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation.

The defendants -- Chief Warrant Officers Lewis Welshofer and Jefferson Williams, Sgt. 1st Class William Sommer and Spec. Jerry Loper -- have all denied wrongdoing. They said commanders had sanctioned their actions.

According to the transcript, witnesses said others had also beaten Mowhoush days before the Army interrogation. Their names and the names of their agencies were blacked out.

Col. David A. Teeples, the men's commander, said during the closed hearing: "My thought was that the death of Mowhoush was brought about by . . . [blacked out] and then it was unfortunate and accidental, what had happened under an interrogation by our people."

According to the transcript, Army special investigator Curtis Ryan testified that he found extensive bruising when he examined Mowhoush shortly after he died. "So, at some point prior to the 26th, he had been beaten," Ryan said.

An autopsy revealed that Mowhoush had also suffered broken ribs, testimony showed.

The military closed the hearing to the public shortly after it began in December, but the Denver Post successfully sued to open it, and the proceeding was concluded this week in open court. The transcript was released Thursday and posted on the Internet.

Fort Carson's commander, Maj. Gen. Robert Mixon, will decide whether the soldiers are to be court-martialed, after he receives a recommendation from the investigating officer, Capt. Robert Ayers. No timetable was set.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...pr2.html?sub=AR

Can anyone find a link to the transcript? I have looked everywhere and can not find it.

A good place to get news on what is happening without Right Wing, or corrupted ass-kissers censuring the news is the website, set up by an international peace and justice groups with their Iraqi Counterparts:

http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=9397

ACLU Letter to Attorney General Gozales Requesting Investigation of Possible Perjury by General Ricardo A. Sanchez

March 30, 2005




The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
Robert F. Kennedy Building
Tenth Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530

Re: Request for Investigation of Possible Perjury by General Ricardo A. Sanchez; Renewal of Request for an Outside Special Counsel to Investigate and Prosecute Violations or Conspiracies to Violate Criminal Laws Against Torture or Abuse of Detainees

Dear Attorney General Gonzales:

The American Civil Liberties Union strongly urges you to open an investigation into whether General Ricardo A. Sanchez committed perjury in his sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19, 2004. We also renew our request, made in a letter to you of February 15, 2005 that you appoint an outside special counsel for the investigation and prosecution of any and all criminal acts committed in the mistreatment of detainees held in Abu Ghraib, other places in Iraq or Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, or transferred by the United States to foreign countries that engage in torture or abuse of prisoners. An outside special counsel is the only way to ensure that all persons who violated the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. 2441, or who violated, or conspired to violate, the Anti-Torture Act, 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A, or other federal laws against torture and abuse will be held accountable and responsible for criminal wrongdoing.

During sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19, 2004, Senator Jack Reed asked General Sanchez, who commanded the Combined Joint Task Force Seven (CJTF-7) in Iraq, whether he “ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison.” General Sanchez testified in response that he “never approved any of those measures to be used in CJTF-7 at any time in the last year” and that he “never approved the use of any of those methods within CJTF-7 in the 12.5 months that I’ve been in Iraq.”

However, a document that the Defense Department released to us late in the afternoon of Friday, March 25, 2005 specifically contradicts General Sanchez’s testimony. In a memorandum signed by General Sanchez and dated September 14, 2003, General Sanchez ordered the immediate implementation of a policy signed by him, entitled “CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” The policy approved by him for interrogation of “detainees, security internees and enemy prisoners of war under the control of CJTF-7” specifically approves “significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee,” “adjusting the sleep times of the detainee (e.g., reversing sleep cycles from night to day),” “sleep management: detainee provided minimum 4 hours of sleep per 24 hour period, not to exceed 72 continuous hours.” The policy also approves for detainees who are not prisoners of war (and sets up an individualized approval process for prisoners of war) additional techniques, including “yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock. Volume controlled to prevent injury,” and “presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogation. Dogs will be muzzled and under control of MWD handler at all times to prevent contact with detainee.”

The September 14, 2003 memorandum signed by General Sanchez does not square with his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The need for General Sanchez and all high-level government officials to tell the truth could not be more important. The nation cannot afford to have anyone covering up their wrongdoing when such horrific abuse was the result. And the nation needs a clear accounting of the extent to which the United States government tortured and abused persons under its custody and control. For these reasons, we urge you to order an investigation, and if appropriate, prosecution for any criminal acts arising from General Sanchez’s testimony, as well as for any illegal actions taken pursuant to the September 14, 2003 memorandum.

We also emphasize again the need for you to appoint an outside special counsel. There is an obvious public interest in investigating and prosecuting all persons committing torture or abuse or conspiring to commit those crimes against persons being held by the United States. A small number of enlisted men and women and a few low-ranking military officers should not be the only persons held responsible, if civilians and top military officers also engaged in wrongdoing. Given the increasing evidence of deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse, and that such conduct was the predictable result of policy changes made at the highest levels of government, an outside special counsel is clearly in the public interest. Moreover, your leadership at the Justice Department would clearly benefit from putting all these outstanding matters related to the torture issue to rest.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and we look forward to your response.

Very truly yours,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director
ACLU

Laura W. Murphy
Director
ACLU Washington Legislative Office

Christopher E. Anders
Legislative Counsel
ACLU Washington Legislative Office

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17866&c=206

Thanks for another good site.

Mr. Herbert,

I want to thank you for your ceaseless attention to the lack of accountability in the heinous torture scandals in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The current administration must have its feet continuously held to the fire on this, a task made so difficult in the wake of all the numerous distractions that are interminably hammered in the news, which I need not name to you.

I am one representative of an on-line forum called Common Ground, Common Sense. We are plugging away at attempts to gain just that. We currently have a very active thread going on the torture issue, on which you have been prominently cited.

Please check us out, if you get a few moments.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...pic=24131&st=80

Thank you again.

Peggy Thornton, Ph.D.
Auburn, Alabama

Patty, I'll do more later.

-P

p.s. See, guilt does work!

You are quite welcome. Looking forward to talking with you too. I posted a couple of comments in some military threads trying to get a feel for how the current and former military feel about the torture stories. I really am interested in hearing those opinions. I realize that there will probably be some who do not see this issue the way I do but unless I hear from them it is hard to say whether I think they have a good point or not. I am not against the military I am against policies that would allow our government to torture prisoners. To me that is not American and it ticks me off that our military has been put in the middle on this.

This administration doesn't care about vets. Hell, they don't even care about active duty members. ("You go to war with the army you have.")

It always worked for my mom too! Thanks so much.

The military did not condone torture in their interrogation manual. The Bush Administration sought to change all that. No wonder there are military members speaking out against the torture. It is NOT part of the proud tradition of the military.

FM 34-52
HEADQUARTERS
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
Washington, DC, 8 May 1987

FM 34-52
INTELLIGENCE INTERROGATION

PROHIBITION AGAINST USE OF FORCE
The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor. condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. However, the use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent and noncoercive ruses used by the interrogator in questioning hesitant or uncooperative sources.

The psychological techniques and principles outlined should neither be confused with, nor construed to be synonymous with, unauthorized techniques such as brainwashing, mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion to include drugs. These techniques and principles are intended to serve as guides in obtaining the willing cooperation of a source. The absence of threats in interrogation is intentional, as their enforcement and use normally constitute violations of international law and may result in prosecution under the UCMJ.

Additionally, the inability to carry out a threat of violence or force renders an interrogator ineffective should the source challenge the threat. Consequently, from both legal and moral viewpoints, the restrictions established by international law, agreements, and customs render threats of force, violence, and deprivation useless as interrogation techniques.

Hostile and Antagonistic
A hostile and antagonistic source is most difficult to interrogate. In many cases, he refuses to talk at all and offers a real challenge to the interrogator. An interrogator must have self?control, patience, and tact when dealing with him. As a rule, at lower echelons, it is considered unprofitable to expend excessive time and effort in interrogating hostile and antagonistic sources. When time is available and the source appears to be an excellent target for exploitation, he should be isolated and repeatedly interrogated to obtain his cooperation. A more concentrated interrogation effort can be accomplished at higher levels, such as corps or echelons above corps (EAC), where more time is available to exploit hostile and antagonistic sources.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/libra...fm34-52/toc.htm

Here is a Christian Science Monitor Article from 2004 discussing interrogation techniques. It would appear from this article that the CIA is the group that used the harshest interrogation techinques in the past and possibly now. From what I have read the techniques that were adopted by the Bush Administration mirror the CIA method of interrogation not the military method.

from the May 27, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0527/p02s01-usmi.html

How interrogation tactics have changed
A review of CIA and military manuals from several decades show techniques ranging from low-pressure to coercive.
By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - The prisoner seemed to be a Viet Cong officer of some sort, and he was basically just laughing at his American captors. He didn't even bother to make his lies consistent. His story changed once. Then twice. Three times.

That's the way the Army interrogator remembers it, anyway. His job as a US officer was to try to elicit useful information from POWs. But guidelines for his actions were rigid - the most he was allowed to do was shout.

So the interrogator tried patience. He waited. And waited. Then he threw the man a pack of cigarettes and said that if he didn't give up something the Americans would be forced to turn him over to the South Vietnamese police.

The man talked. It turned out he was a province chief.

"The point is, you get better results from being relatively humane to [prisoners], rather than beating on them," says the interrogator today, who asked to remain anonymous due to continuing work with US intelligence.

That may be so - but it is also likely to be only part of the story. Interrogation is a complicated process in which two people knock against each other under tense conditions. According to past and present US training manuals, loosening a prisoner's tongue requires careful planning, methodical implementation - and, at times, the inspiration of an artist.

How much of the abuse of Iraqi detainees was related to interrogations remains unclear, but the controversy has brought this process under a spotlight - and shown, graphically, what can happen when it goes wrong. An Army field manual on intelligence interrogation quotes Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "In no other profession are the penalties for employing untrained personnel so appalling or so irrevocable as in the military."

US military scientists have studied interrogation methods for decades, according to documents from the library of a retired high-ranking officer made available to the Monitor.

Three generations of CIA and military interrogation manuals show how methods have evolved and been refined. After World War II, personnel pored over the testimony of Hanns Joachim Scharff, a genial German interrogator who questioned every downed US fighter pilot and was famous for his use of props meant to put prisoners at ease. During the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, they weighed the effectiveness of less-savory psychological methods characterized in the press as "brainwashing."

Coercive techniques
Through much of the cold war, US interrogators trained allies in Latin America and elsewhere in the use of humiliation, nakedness, physical discomfort, and other harsh coercive techniques.

Sensory deprivation in dark, sound-proofed cells can deeply affect an interrogee, said the CIA's notorious Vietnam-era KUBARK interrogation manual. "An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective," it stated.

Officially this approach was abandoned following congressional hearings in the mid-1980s. However, even training manuals that predate this change emphasized that the most important quality for an interrogator was not necessarily intimidation. The chief qualification for a questioner is "a genuine insight into the subject's character and motives," concludes the CIA's 1983 Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual.

The first rule of successful interrogation is to set the mood, according to military and CIA manuals. Ideally, that means using a spartan interrogation room. Mirrors, see-through or otherwise, should be positioned so that detainees can't see themselves. If the interrogator has a comfortable chair, and the subject does not, that subtly conveys an impression of power. There should never be a phone in the room. It is both a subliminal connection to the outside world, and an actual source of distraction. And distractions break the spell of an interrogation.

"The effect of someone wandering in because he forgot his pen or wants to invite the interrogator to lunch can be devastating," notes the CIA's KUBARK manual.

The second step is generally an analysis of what type of person the detainee is. Both the KUBARK manual and its 1983 successor, for instance, list presumed categories of prisoner personalities. These include the "orderly-obstinate subject" and the "guilt-ridden subject."

Then comes questioning itself. Interrogators must be alert to any sign that subjects are withholding information, note manuals. They should match demeanor to prisoner psychology - "orderly-obstinate" prisoners, for example, are thought to clam up in response to table-pounding.

Rapid-fire nonsense questions are one way to disorient a prisoner and wear down resistance, noted the CIA in 1983.

FM 34-52
The Army's FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation manual, still in use today, lists a number of approaches. "Emotional hate," for instance, tries to build on any grievance the prisoner might have, through such statements as, "You owe them no loyalty because of the way they've treated you." The "fear-up" approach tries to exploit preexisting fears, according to the manual, without actually lying about the consequences of noncooperation. The "file and dossier" method builds a paper case against a detainee, often with padding to make it look thicker, to trick the prisoner into believing it would be explosive if released to family members or the public.

None of the techniques outlined in FM 34-52 should be construed as allowing physical or mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion, says the manual.

Yet the abuse of prisoners in Iraq shows that the harsh practices that were supposed to have ended decades ago have continued. New iterations of interrogation techniques have been issued by the Pentagon - many of them echoing the harsher practices listed in the earlier CIA manuals.

The investigations into what happened at Abu Ghraib, and why, are widening to look at the military intelligence side of the equation, as well as looking at suspected abuses and even deaths at military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

Meanwhile, the fallout continues. So far, seven members of the military police who participated in the abuses have been charged. On Monday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, in charge of 16 Iraq prisons when the abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred, was indefinitely suspended, pending results of further investigations.

The Pentagon has also announced that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the forces in Iraq, will leave Baghdad this summer. Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army's second-ranking general, has been tipped as his replacement.

Gen. George Fay's report, examining the military intelligence role in the abuses, is expected within the next 10 days.

Once Bush and Cheney are impeached, America can genuinely speak of moral values. Too men of our young men and women died as a result of these two guys' ruch to an unprepared war. They know how to protect the oil wells, but left our troops to face danger and death! Innocent women and children died for Bush and Cheney's greed! Inhumane torture is never forgivable. It's a lesson all has learned from the Holocaust!

Here is a statement from another Vets group that joined with the ACLU in their FOIA request for government documents concerning the torture scandal.

Statement of Seth Pollack, Chairman, Veterans for Common Sense

October 7, 2003

Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a Washington D.C. based, non-profit, United States veterans’ organization, is committed to providing a voice of reason on issues of war and national security from the unique perspective of those who have served their country in uniform.

VCS is comprised of those who have fought in our country’s wars. We are very concerned that in its desire for victory, our current military and civilian leadership may have forgotten the prohibitions under domestic and international law against the use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. We submit this Freedom of Information Act Request to determine whether our concerns are valid, and if so, to begin the process of bringing those responsible to account.

Domestic and international law prohibit torture absolutely. For centuries, warriors have fought conflicts with certain assumptions regarding appropriate conduct. These standards of behavior provide an essential counter-force to the immediacy of combat, where the desire for victory and the passion of war can lead even the most reasonable soldier astray. They protect the honor of the nation and protect the warrior from a lifetime of agony and regret by providing rules relating to issues such as the treatment of non-combatants, choice of weapon systems and the proper treatment of enemy prisoners of war. Any deviation from these rules by our nation may be used to justify torture of our troops by foreign powers.

A strong and capable military is only one facet of national security; just as important is the global perception of America and our role in the world as a leader in human rights, dignity and respect. Accordingly, it is our government’s positive responsibility to fight the “war on terror” while maintaining the standards of conduct established under domestic and international law.

Here is an easy link that will take you to the documents that the ACLU has obtained through FOIA and through their lawsuit against Rumsfeld et al.

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17572&c=206

The site includes:


LEGAL PAPERS
> Legal basis
> Rumsfeld complaint (pdf)
> Karpinski complaint (pdf)
> Sanchez complaint (pdf)
> Pappas complaint (pdf)

TORTURE DOCUMENTS
Government documents released under the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act suit
BIOS
> Plaintiffs involved
> Press conference speakers

NEWS RELEASES
> Rumsfeld Is Sued Over U.S. Torture Policies
English,

COALITION PARTNERS
> Human Rights First
> Lieff Cabraser Heimman and Bernstein, LLP

This is just one of the ACLU press releases. It is from back in December.

Special Ops Task Force Threatened Government Agents Who Saw Detainee Abuse in Iraq, Documents Obtained by ACLU Reveal

December 7, 2004


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

Iraqi Detainees Had Burn Marks and Bruises; Harsh Techniques Appear to Have Continued Even After Abu Ghraib Scandal

NEW YORK - Documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union reveal that a special operations task force in Iraq sought to silence Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who observed abusive interrogations and that the Department of Defense adopted questionable interrogation techniques at Guantanamo over FBI objections.

"The more the government is forced to reveal, the more we learn that individuals in U.S. custody, many of whom have not been accused of wrongdoing, were tortured and abused," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "These documents tell a damning story of sanctioned government abuse -- a story that the government has tried to hide and may well come back to haunt our own troops captured in Iraq."

The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU and 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.

The documents the ACLU released today, posted online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia, include:

A June 25, 2004 memo from Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Defense Intelligence Agency chief, entitled "alleged detainee abuse by TF 62-6," describing how DIA personnel who complained about abuses were threatened, had their car keys confiscated and e-mails monitored, and were ordered "not to talk to anyone in the U.S." or leave the base "even to get a haircut."
The June 25 memo also describes how the task force’s officers punched a prisoner in the face "to the point he needed medical attention," failed to record the medical treatment, and confiscated DIA photos of the injuries. The date of the incident is unclear.
FBI emails showing a rift between the Department of Defense and the FBI on the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees. One email notes that Major General Miller "continued to support interrogation strategies [the FBI] not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness." Another e-mail to Thomas Harrington, an FBI counterterrorism expert who led a team of investigators to Guantanamo, records "somewhat heated" conversations with Pentagon officials in which they admitted that DOD’s harsh interrogation methods did not yield any information not obtained by the FBI. A December 2003 e-mail notes that the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit (MLDU), which "had a long standing and documented position against use of some of DOD’s interrogation practices," had requested certain information "be documented to protect the FBI."
Notes describing 15 interviews of FBI personnel who were at Abu Ghraib prison between Oct.-Dec. 2003, some of whom observed nudity, sleep deprivation and humiliation of detainees. A summary of these interviews was previously released.
E-mail from an FBI Behavioral Analysis Advisor who observed "aggressive" and "extreme interrogation practices" at GTMO, noting that he and his colleagues had summarized these observations in communications between October and May of 2002.
These and other documents were released by the ACLU one day after the Associated Press reported on a detailed letter from FBI counter-terrorism expert Thomas Harrington to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder describing "highly aggressive" interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at Guantanamo as far back as 2002. The AP also reported on the Harrington e-mail indicating a rift between DOD and the FBI over interrogation methods.

"While these documents confirm the systemic nature of detainee abuse, it appears that the government is still withholding many more documents that shed light on which high-ranking officials are responsible for that abuse," said ACLU attorney Amrit Singh. "The public must know the full truth about the U.S. government’s involvement in this scandal."

The disclosures come in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other civil liberties and human rights organizations after the Defense Department and other federal agencies failed to release records in response to FOIA requests. The requests sought records concerning the interrogation and treatment of detainees and the extrajudicial "rendition" of detainees to countries known to use torture.

Singh said the ACLU is continuing to press the government to disclose more documents and will return to court if necessary to ensure that every relevant document is released.

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 Singh, Jameel Jaffer, and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Art Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and Jeff Fogel of CCR.

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq?

By Deborah Davies

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’

If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.

The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.

But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas

They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast next week.

Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected from all over the U.S.

In many American states, prison regulations demand that any ‘use of force operation’, such as searching cells for drugs, must be filmed by a guard.

The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many of them record the exact opposite.

Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life inside the U.S. prison system – a reality that sits very uncomfortably with President Bush’s commitment to the battle for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996, when Bush was state Governor.

Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S. politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.

‘I thought: “What hypocrisy,” Carlson told me. ‘Because they know we do it here every day.’

All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared Carlson’s belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of a few rogue individuals, was simply the export of the worst practices that take place in the domestic prison system all the time. They pointed to the mountain of files stacked on their desks, on the floor, in their office corridors – endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment inside America’s own prisons.

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

But for every ‘historical’ tape we collected, we also found a more recent story. What you see on the tape is still happening daily.

It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying.

In one horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a ‘restraint chair’. His hands and feet are shackled, there’s a strap across his chest, his head lolls forward. He looks dead. He’s not. Not yet.

The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off. The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his barbaric treatment.

The tape comes from Utah – but there are others from Connecticut, Florida, Texas, Arizona and probably many more. We found more than 20 cases of prisoners who’ve died in the past few years after being held in a restraint chair.

Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the title of ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff.’

His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and we were promised ‘unfettered access.’ It was a reassuring turn of phrase – you don’t want to be fettered in one of Sheriff Joe’s jails.

We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing how his tough stance can end in tragedy.

The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles. Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The police handed him over to the Sheriff’s deputies in the jail. Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but he’s struggling.

The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster’s stomach, pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms back to strap his wrists into the chair.

Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous – the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair’ warn of the dangers of ‘positional asphyxia.’

Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious. The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he’s already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital. Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.

His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: ‘If that’s not torture, I don’t know what is.’ Charles’s father, Chuck, listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.

The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun and forced into the chair where – like Charles Agster – he suffocated.

The county’s insurers paid Norberg’s family more than £4 millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was furious with the deal. ‘My officers were clear,’ he said. ‘The insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.’

Now he’s determined to fight the Agster case all the way through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe’s jail, there’ll probably be someone else strapped into the chair.

Not all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic sucking of the ventilator.

He was another of Sheriff Joe’s inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison doctor they’d beaten him up. Six days later, he was found unconscious of the floor of his cell with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he died from septicaemia.

‘Mr Arpaio is responsible.’ Linda Evans told me, struggling to speak through her tears. ‘He seems to thrive on this cruelty and this mentality that these men are nothing.’

In some of the tapes it’s not just the images, it’s also the sounds that are so unbearable. There’s one tape from Florida which I’ve seen dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.

It’s an authorised ‘use of force operation’ – so a guard is videoing what happens. They’re going to Taser a prisoner for refusing orders.

The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down into a wheelchair. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ he shouts with increasing desperation. ‘It hurts!’

One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won’t get into the wheelchair.

The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain. The man’s lawyer told me he has a very limited mental capacity. He says he has a back injury and can’t walk or bend his legs without intense pain.

The tape becomes even more harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony. They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to cry and just lies there moaning.

One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in California records an argument between staff members and two ‘wards’ – they’re not called prisoners.

One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over and over again in the head.

Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second youth is also punched and kicked in the head – even after he’s been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.

We also collected some truly horrific photographs.

A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of ‘use of force operations.’ So we have no tapes to show how prison guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.

But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep burns on his buttocks.

‘They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper spray,’ lawyer Christopher Jones explained. ‘We have had prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their bodies.

‘The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in the crack of the door to make sure it’s really air-tight.’

And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also have photographs of Frank Valdes – autopsy pictures. Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric Chair – he didn’t expect to be beaten to death.

Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen and left him to die.

Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the trial was held in their own small hometown where almost everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison officer. The guards were all acquitted.

Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the time of the killing – the same man who changed the policy on videoing – has been promoted. He’s now the man in charge of all the Florida prisons.

How could anyone excuse – still less condone – such behaviour? The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no matter what.

I asked one serving officer what happened if colleagues beat up an inmate. ‘We cover up. Because we’re the good guys.’

No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general climate of acceptance among the many.

At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment – even loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the restraint devices and the chemical sprays.

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I’ve stayed in contact with various prisoners’ rights groups and the families of many of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being held there.

His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye. American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and apparently found ‘no evidence of systematic abuse.’

But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey across the U.S. told me: ‘We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.’

So far, the U.S. government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If they are ever made public – or leaked – I suspect the images will be very familiar.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – or even Texas. The prisoners and all guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much is it is taking place in America’s own backyard.

Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her investigation, Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, was shown on Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.



(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

Abu Ghraib, Afganistan, Guantanamo are American prisons on steroids.

Snuffysmith, no retreat, no surrender,
I think it’s great what you two have going on here, can you tell me where we can go to discuss any possibilities of what we citizens might try in response to these illegal government actions. Somehow somewhere somebody needs to be accountable, as impossible as that seems, we should pursue it anyway.
Do you think it would be progressive to hear discussions from vets who might have been witness to these types of things from back in the day. Americans torturing suspects is not at all a new concept, maybe the methods are new, I can’t attest to that, but I can say that our military does have some experience derived from previous conflicts.

was this ever posted?

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17868&c=206

Army Memo Released By ACLU Suggests Perjury In Lt. Gen. Sanchez Sworn Testimony on Torture

March 31, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union today sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking him to open an investigation into possible perjury by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the theater commander at the outset of the Iraq War. The ACLU said that a memo sent by Lt. Gen Sanchez flatly contradicts sworn testimony given by him before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he denied authorizing highly coercive interrogation methods.

"Lt. Gen. Sanchez’s testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. "This clear breach of the public’s trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the attorney general."

Although the Washington Post first disclosed its existence, the memorandum at issue was initially withheld from public release by the Defense Department under national security grounds. The ACLU obtained a physical copy of the memorandum, however, under an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and released a hard copy on Tuesday.

The memorandum, dated September 14, 2003, was signed by Lt. Gen. Sanchez and laid out specific interrogation techniques, modeled on those used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for use by coalition forces in Iraq. These include sleep "management," the inducement of fear at two levels of severity, loud music and sensory agitation, and the use of canine units to "exploit [the] Arab fear of dogs."

During sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Sanchez flatly denied approving any such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false.

Specifically, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Sanchez, "today's USA Today, sir, reported that you ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison." To which Sanchez replied, using the acronym for Coalition Joint Task Force-7, "Sir, that may be correct that it's in a news article, but I never approved any of those measures to be used within CJTF-7 at any time in the last year."

"We deserve to know if our military commanders are being honest when reporting to Congress and the American people what’s been done in our country’s name," said Christopher E. Anders, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "The attorney general clearly has to bring us those answers by appointing an independent investigator, and possible perjury is a good place to start."

Earlier this month, the ACLU and Human Rights First filed a lawsuit charging Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with direct responsibility for the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody. The action was the first federal court lawsuit to name a top U.S. official in the ongoing torture scandal in Iraq and Afghanistan; many of the charges are based on documents obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The ACLU has also filed separate lawsuits naming Brig. Gen. Karpinski, Col. Thomas Pappas and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

Paulie posted it in a thread and I posted it in the torture thread.

yikes I'm falling behind

ACLU Plans to Bring Torture Issue to the UN
By Joel Wendland


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

Related stories: Human Rights 4-04-05, 9:51 am

The magnitude of revelations of torture committed at Abu Ghraib and other US-run detention facilties, among other human rights problems, will be among the issues raised by a delegation sent by the 400,000-member American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the UN Commission on Human Rights. "The delegation seeks to bring issues of torture and detention ... to the Commission’s attention," says a recent ACLU statement.

"If the U.S. government truly wants to be a beacon of liberty and freedom around the world," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, "it must abide by the same universal human rights principles it requires of the rest of the world." The UN commission is meeting now in Geneva, Switzerland.

New evidence of widespread prisoner abuse havs surfaced despite failues of the Bush administration to comply fully with a federal court order to release thousands of pages of documents related to the Pentagon's role in the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The court order resulted from a June 2004 lawsuit filed by the civil liberties organization and other human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Veterans for Peace, after the Pentagon refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Papers filed in the suit characterized the Department of Defense's failure to comply with the FOIA request as "a deliberate and unlawful withholding of information from the public."

Since the court order, the Bush administration has released about 30,000 pages, but the civil liberties organizations say that documents that seem to provide the clearest evidence of prisoner abuse have been delayed to reduce press scrutiny.

Some documents were released recently to coincide with the Easter weekend, several days after the court's deadline, in order to minimize press coverage of the contents of the documents, says the ACLU, which has taken the lead in examining and publicizing most of the Pentagon's papers.

In an effort to spin the torture scandal its way, the Pentagon also released much of the material to selected reporters with less critical opinions of the US' role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The contents of the documents showed that US soldiers and miltiary intelligence officials engaged in treatment of prisoners that violates various treaties and conventions against torture and abuse.

Released documents report killings, beatings, excessive exercise of prisoners while handcuffed, physical punishment of uncooperative prisoners, extreme isolation, mock executions, physical and sexual humiliation, and more.

Some documents use the word torture, in fact, to describe the activities soldiers were ordered to carry out.

So far, at least 24 cases of murder of prisoners are being or have been officially investigated in Afghanistan and Iraq with 12 commited in US prison facilities.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which aided in the lawsuit, says, "at least 26 prisoners who died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 were likely the victims of criminal homicide.” CCR adds that the Army and the Pentagon aren't doing enough to investigate and punish soldiers involved.

So far, out of the dozens of specific cases that have been reported, only a handful of low-level soldiers have been brought to trial or punished. For example, just last week Army Captain Rogelio Maynulet left a court martial smiling, a free man, although he was convicted of personally shooting to death a captured wounded Iraqi man near the city of Najaf. Two subordinate enlisted men were also convicted and will serve between one and three years in prison.

Courts martial that have punished low-ranking soldiers for their conduct is warranted, but so far have simply been used to cover up the responsibility of higher officials, including generals, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales, says CCR.

The civil rights organization argues that the August 2002 memo from Jay Bybee to Alberto Gonzales, which stated that the President could authorize torture in the name of national security and that defined torture so narrowly that even conduct found to have happened in the highly publicized cases at Abu Ghraib would not come within the definition.

Gonzales acknowledged in his Attorney General confirmation testimony to the US Senate that he agreed with the Bybee memo at the time it was written. This memo became the basis for April 2003 DOD working group report upon which interrogation techniques were apparently based.

Last week, the ACLU revealed a document signed by the highest ranking general in Iraq, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, outlining interrogation techniques that complied with this Pentagon's working group's findings.

A clear line that exists from the widespread brutal activites taking place in US prison facilties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other places all the way up to members of the Bush cabinet is being obscured by highly publicized trials of very low-level personnel and repeated claims of "a few bad apples."

CCR is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to conduct a full, independent and public inquiry into the role of high-ranking U.S. officials in the abuse and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world.

So far, CCR has filed a number of lawsuits against members of Bush's cabinet, most recently Donald Rumsfeld, in order to hold higher-ranking officials responsible for their particpation in the abuse of prisoners held by the US.

The Pentagon's policy, despite a self-authored and self-serving report released weeks ago in which the Pentagon exonerated itself, originated in the bowels of the Justice Department, was finely tuned by Pentagon bureaucrats, and was obediently carried out by soldiers in the field.


--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/ar...eview/899/1/32/

URL: http://www.aclu.org/International/Internat...m?ID=17910&c=36

Global Lens Focused on U.S. Torture and Detention Policies
April 4, 2005

GENEVA - The American Civil Liberties Union today called for immediate action by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to address the abuse and torture of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at other U.S.-controlled detention centers.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

ACLU Seeks to Hold U.S. Government to Universal Standards of Human Rights

GENEVA - The American Civil Liberties Union today called for immediate action by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to address the abuse and torture of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at other U.S.-controlled detention centers.

A delegation of attorneys from the ACLU arrived in Geneva this week to attend the 61st meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The ACLU delegation seeks to bring issues of torture and detention, racial profiling, and the exploitation of migrant domestic workers to the Commission’s attention.

"Senior officials in the Bush administration adopted policies that were entirely inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and customary international law," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "Those unlawful policies, some of which are still in place, led directly to the maltreatment of hundreds of prisoners."

Through litigation under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU has obtained more than 30,000 documents concerning the detention, mistreatment and confinement of prisoners apprehended by the U.S. after September 11, 2001. The documents, which reinforce previous reports and testimonies, establish beyond any doubt that prisoners under U.S. control are being abused and even tortured. The documents also show that the abuse and torture of prisoners is not irregular or isolated but rather widespread and systemic.

The documents are online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia.

"Nearly a year after the Abu Ghraib torture and abuses came to public light, serious violations of human rights continue to be committed in U.S. controlled detention centers around the globe," said Jamil Dakwar, a senior human rights attorney with the ACLU. "No country is above the law, and the United States should not be permitted to violate fundamental human rights in the name of national security."

Citing serious violations of fundamental human rights, the ACLU makes several urgent recommendations to the Commission on Human Rights, including:

A reaffirmation of the absolute prohibition of all forms of torture and a reaffirmation that no circumstance whatsoever may justify the violation of this principle;
A global call upon the United States to take effective measures to prevent acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in all places under its jurisdiction and control, to ensure that all acts are thoroughly and impartially investigated, and to hold accountable those officials who encouraged or sanctioned such acts;
Support for the request that the United States permit U.N. human rights experts and