NR, NS: I posted this as an answer on the vets' forum. Human nature is not good or evil, but both and largely situational. Here is my take on it for what it's worth:
Then to NR,NS...it's a situational psychology problem. We live in a "situation" in our society where "normally" we do not behave badly. We generalize this assumption to all Americans, and in this instance to all soldiers. We expect them to behave as they always do when they are in our normal American society. Yet, this neve happens...never has and never will. It was George Washington that ordered the tar and feathers that we used to torture the British out of the country. We have never been so good in fact, as we are now. We were far more brutal in all wars preceding this one. It will and does happen to almost all of us when put into a scenario where we are to assume a role. Just take a look at the Zimbardo Prison Study to see that this WILL happen, if things are left without outside supervision. It happens every day in our own prison systems to a more limited degree, and what puts a check on that is not the humans involved, but the fact tha the guards go home. Situational psychology alone explains why they did what they did, and the problem lies with the chain of command for lack of supervision to prevent it, and because of the implicit "do what you have to do" kind of directives. I hold the chain of command to fault for not understanding this, and being in charge of a prison, without ever having been properly trained, or ever reading Zimbardo or Milgram's work at Yale.
I have worked with the tortured and torturors, many were one and the same, and with vets who suffered from what they did in "situations" that they could not reconcile when they come back to real society. Some people did not engage in this, but it was because they were not left to fall into the situational psychology of the group. In other words, they had a strong chain of command that KNEW to keep this from happening. That's why you get such conflicting stories on Vietnam. It had to do with where you were, what unit, what mission and the dicipline in the chain of command and the drugs too. What I'm saying is that absent an outside force, average people will behave in this way. I know that's hard to believe, but you have to read the experiements in this area to see how much evidence there is to support this...it happens in just about every study they conduct on mere mortals. You have soldiers that don't even believe this happens because they have good dicipline, not because they would not act the same way in the same circumstances. There will always be one or two that will say "no" but that's a special more staunchly independent person, and those are not the people that tend to join the military in the first place.
So, there is no either/or and both sides are actually right on this and the dispute is not even relavent to the discussion. I do not think there is a campaign to do anything like pitting one against another. I think that's also situational. We are judging almost entirely on the basis of 2 things..1. If we have troops in theatre related to us, or around us that we simply cannot believe could do that sort of thing and 2. Those predisposed to support Bush in the first place. We will take any excuse given if we do not want to believe that the average person would do this...and since most Democrats were suspicious of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and Ashcrofts Gitmo project...we chose to believe what fit into that predisposed mindset. Yet, this is just ignoring the situational psychology evidence that has been accumulating for over 50 years in controlled experiments and studies.
That's my take. I'll post this in the "torture" thread too. I doubt it will be welcome by either side...unless they read the studies. You can ask Pegatha....we both have psych backgrounds and I think she can back me up on the studies.
Full Version: Prisoner Abuse News, Commentary & Discussion
What went wrong at Abu Ghraib
- Janis Karpinski
Thursday, April 7, 2005
As commander of prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, my experience with a significant piece of coalition operations attests to how a lack of planning screwed up the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq -- and what we must do to repair the image of the American soldier as a just and principled guardian of human rights.
The occupation was derailed from the start by a profound lack of understanding of what was needed and for how long. Units operated as individual entities, minus guidance or policy. My units, like most in Iraq, did not have sufficient personnel or appropriate equipment to handle our missions. Although the majority of my soldiers were well trained in prisoner detention, they were not trained or equipped to sustain it in a combat zone. This situation was particularly significant in the reserves, because there was no personnel-replacement system for Army Reserve and National Guard units; when we lost a soldier to medical or other redeployment, we were forced to operate short.
Brigade morale declined dramatically when soldiers were notified of the involuntary tour extensions. Soldiers who stepped up and deployed to war with their units did so with bad or false information and were forced to remain twice as long as they had planned, and felt a deep sense of betrayal. Reservists were given orders for 179-day deployments and planned accordingly for child care, bill paying, housing arrangements and family support. Soldiers lost complete trust in the "system" with the news of involuntary extensions of their orders to 365 days, without consideration of the dramatic impact such an extension has on reservists' families.
At one point, a senior officer from the National Guard came to Baghdad to brief several of his units. He was sincere and practically apologetic for the tour extensions and erroneous information provided. He explained, "We never thought you were going to be deployed for anywhere near 179 days, let alone extended beyond your original orders. The situation," he continued, "was not one we anticipated."
Against this backdrop of demoralized soldiers, the lack of planning elsewhere played out. Civil affairs and banking operations, critical to the success of an emerging democracy, were missing or simply dysfunctional. Prisons were relegated to second-class status. Our mission statement directed us to "coordinate with" the provost marshal and the Coalition Provisional Authority's Ministry of Justice personnel "to assist in repairing, restoring and refurbishing Iraqi prisons." When we arrived in Baghdad in mid-2003, the Prisons Department had just three of the 83 people required; the provost marshal dismissed detention operations as "the lowest priority on my list." The mission also directed my brigade to assist "in developing a training program for Iraqi security personnel, and with transitioning Iraqi prisons to Iraqi control." These missions were in addition to "continuing ... high-value detainee prisoner operations ... and constructing and operating a temporary prison camp at Abu Ghraib."
The target for accomplishing these missions was only 90 days -- a totally unrealistic time frame. Nevertheless, my soldiers developed the entire Iraqi guard-training program and conducted training for the first three courses. We were responsible for 17 prisons located throughout Iraq, yet we accomplished far more with far less than any other separate brigade in the theater of operations.
Still, something went terribly wrong. One year ago, the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib were seen around the world. The Pentagon's investigation so far offers nothing new: no smoking gun, and not one individual up the chain of command is targeted for blame or a share of responsibility -- except me. In fact, the biggest outrage from Pentagon brass has not been over the techniques employed, but the audacity of soldiers taking photographs of the activities and the stupidity of appearing in them.
Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr., tagged as the likely ringleader, was not so astute or familiar with the Arab culture to devise the humiliating acts and techniques demonstrated in the photographs. It is unlikely any military person designed or directed these photographs, because soldiers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can face prosecution. However, any one of the contract interrogators, immune from military prosecution, may have given instruction. We certainly know they were involved, because they appear in some of the photos.
Despite the charges, Graner and the six other soldiers accused did not act without instructions from someone. We can safely conclude they were told to set up the photographs, which would be used to enhance interrogations at some future time. The soldiers were made to believe these actions were authorized by someone with a great deal of authority.
The truth is finally emerging, contained in the thousands of pages of documents released under court order to the American Civil Liberties Union. These documents reveal knowledge of the "softening up" techniques at the senior levels of the Department of Defense -- and much earlier than originally reported. The documents reveal similar techniques used in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in other locations in Iraq, before the appearance of the Abu Ghraib photographs. A copy of Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's signed document authorizing the use of a list of more aggressive interrogation techniques is available on the ACLU Web site (www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17851&c=206). At the very least, this confirms that somebody much higher up in the chain of command authorized use of these techniques.
Regardless of how far the investigation goes -- and whom it strikes down and whom it spares -- we must ensure that Abu Ghraib becomes a lesson and not standard operating procedure. We must:
-- Admit mistakes. Appoint an independent committee similar to the Sept. 11 commission to conduct an investigation, assign responsibility, identify requisite changes, determine the origins of policies and problems, and define how to prevent further occurrences.
-- Encourage whistleblowers to report infractions with absolute guarantees of protection from retribution.
-- Earmark the return of prison operations to the host nation's control as the highest priority. The acceptance of responsibility by indigenous personnel for establishing and maintaining security throughout the host nation is critical.
-- For interrogation operations, we must immediately develop one clear and consistent policy, defining appropriate interrogation techniques. The policy must be developed by an international committee and detail specific goals of each technique, provide instructions on using each and in what circumstances use is warranted and approved. Interrogations must never be conducted in isolation from observation.
-- Do not use military or civilian police or security personnel to set the stage or enhance interrogations. Military personnel are appropriate for interrogation operations in conjunction with war. These interrogations must adhere to the Geneva Conventions and facilities must be accessible without notice, to an international committee, including several military members and Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers. The standards will be reviewed and enforced by an independent international committee with full access to every international interrogation facility conducting interrogations relative to the global war on terrorism. Each representative will have authority to interrupt or halt any interrogation when infractions are observed -- or immediately close a facility when infractions warrant it.
-- Stop using contract interrogators, many of whom have no formal training. Immune from legal action or prosecution for violations, they clearly contributed to the situation at Abu Ghraib.
As usual, in a rush to judgment, there were many mistakes, many false conclusions, and many people unfairly accused. We must clear the slates of American soldiers by applying fair and equal justice. Only then will we be able to reclaim our position as the standard bearer of justice, fairness and humane treatment for all.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski commanded the 800th Military Police brigade in Iraq before being suspended pending the Abu Ghraib investigation. She is now writing a book on the episode, due out in 2005 from MiraMax. She will speak Friday at noon at the San Francisco Marriott. For more information, visit www.commonwealthclub.org.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...&type=printable
- Janis Karpinski
Thursday, April 7, 2005
As commander of prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, my experience with a significant piece of coalition operations attests to how a lack of planning screwed up the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq -- and what we must do to repair the image of the American soldier as a just and principled guardian of human rights.
The occupation was derailed from the start by a profound lack of understanding of what was needed and for how long. Units operated as individual entities, minus guidance or policy. My units, like most in Iraq, did not have sufficient personnel or appropriate equipment to handle our missions. Although the majority of my soldiers were well trained in prisoner detention, they were not trained or equipped to sustain it in a combat zone. This situation was particularly significant in the reserves, because there was no personnel-replacement system for Army Reserve and National Guard units; when we lost a soldier to medical or other redeployment, we were forced to operate short.
Brigade morale declined dramatically when soldiers were notified of the involuntary tour extensions. Soldiers who stepped up and deployed to war with their units did so with bad or false information and were forced to remain twice as long as they had planned, and felt a deep sense of betrayal. Reservists were given orders for 179-day deployments and planned accordingly for child care, bill paying, housing arrangements and family support. Soldiers lost complete trust in the "system" with the news of involuntary extensions of their orders to 365 days, without consideration of the dramatic impact such an extension has on reservists' families.
At one point, a senior officer from the National Guard came to Baghdad to brief several of his units. He was sincere and practically apologetic for the tour extensions and erroneous information provided. He explained, "We never thought you were going to be deployed for anywhere near 179 days, let alone extended beyond your original orders. The situation," he continued, "was not one we anticipated."
Against this backdrop of demoralized soldiers, the lack of planning elsewhere played out. Civil affairs and banking operations, critical to the success of an emerging democracy, were missing or simply dysfunctional. Prisons were relegated to second-class status. Our mission statement directed us to "coordinate with" the provost marshal and the Coalition Provisional Authority's Ministry of Justice personnel "to assist in repairing, restoring and refurbishing Iraqi prisons." When we arrived in Baghdad in mid-2003, the Prisons Department had just three of the 83 people required; the provost marshal dismissed detention operations as "the lowest priority on my list." The mission also directed my brigade to assist "in developing a training program for Iraqi security personnel, and with transitioning Iraqi prisons to Iraqi control." These missions were in addition to "continuing ... high-value detainee prisoner operations ... and constructing and operating a temporary prison camp at Abu Ghraib."
The target for accomplishing these missions was only 90 days -- a totally unrealistic time frame. Nevertheless, my soldiers developed the entire Iraqi guard-training program and conducted training for the first three courses. We were responsible for 17 prisons located throughout Iraq, yet we accomplished far more with far less than any other separate brigade in the theater of operations.
Still, something went terribly wrong. One year ago, the infamous photographs of Abu Ghraib were seen around the world. The Pentagon's investigation so far offers nothing new: no smoking gun, and not one individual up the chain of command is targeted for blame or a share of responsibility -- except me. In fact, the biggest outrage from Pentagon brass has not been over the techniques employed, but the audacity of soldiers taking photographs of the activities and the stupidity of appearing in them.
Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr., tagged as the likely ringleader, was not so astute or familiar with the Arab culture to devise the humiliating acts and techniques demonstrated in the photographs. It is unlikely any military person designed or directed these photographs, because soldiers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can face prosecution. However, any one of the contract interrogators, immune from military prosecution, may have given instruction. We certainly know they were involved, because they appear in some of the photos.
Despite the charges, Graner and the six other soldiers accused did not act without instructions from someone. We can safely conclude they were told to set up the photographs, which would be used to enhance interrogations at some future time. The soldiers were made to believe these actions were authorized by someone with a great deal of authority.
The truth is finally emerging, contained in the thousands of pages of documents released under court order to the American Civil Liberties Union. These documents reveal knowledge of the "softening up" techniques at the senior levels of the Department of Defense -- and much earlier than originally reported. The documents reveal similar techniques used in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in other locations in Iraq, before the appearance of the Abu Ghraib photographs. A copy of Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's signed document authorizing the use of a list of more aggressive interrogation techniques is available on the ACLU Web site (www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17851&c=206). At the very least, this confirms that somebody much higher up in the chain of command authorized use of these techniques.
Regardless of how far the investigation goes -- and whom it strikes down and whom it spares -- we must ensure that Abu Ghraib becomes a lesson and not standard operating procedure. We must:
-- Admit mistakes. Appoint an independent committee similar to the Sept. 11 commission to conduct an investigation, assign responsibility, identify requisite changes, determine the origins of policies and problems, and define how to prevent further occurrences.
-- Encourage whistleblowers to report infractions with absolute guarantees of protection from retribution.
-- Earmark the return of prison operations to the host nation's control as the highest priority. The acceptance of responsibility by indigenous personnel for establishing and maintaining security throughout the host nation is critical.
-- For interrogation operations, we must immediately develop one clear and consistent policy, defining appropriate interrogation techniques. The policy must be developed by an international committee and detail specific goals of each technique, provide instructions on using each and in what circumstances use is warranted and approved. Interrogations must never be conducted in isolation from observation.
-- Do not use military or civilian police or security personnel to set the stage or enhance interrogations. Military personnel are appropriate for interrogation operations in conjunction with war. These interrogations must adhere to the Geneva Conventions and facilities must be accessible without notice, to an international committee, including several military members and Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers. The standards will be reviewed and enforced by an independent international committee with full access to every international interrogation facility conducting interrogations relative to the global war on terrorism. Each representative will have authority to interrupt or halt any interrogation when infractions are observed -- or immediately close a facility when infractions warrant it.
-- Stop using contract interrogators, many of whom have no formal training. Immune from legal action or prosecution for violations, they clearly contributed to the situation at Abu Ghraib.
As usual, in a rush to judgment, there were many mistakes, many false conclusions, and many people unfairly accused. We must clear the slates of American soldiers by applying fair and equal justice. Only then will we be able to reclaim our position as the standard bearer of justice, fairness and humane treatment for all.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski commanded the 800th Military Police brigade in Iraq before being suspended pending the Abu Ghraib investigation. She is now writing a book on the episode, due out in 2005 from MiraMax. She will speak Friday at noon at the San Francisco Marriott. For more information, visit www.commonwealthclub.org.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...&type=printable
Heart...I don't have time to read it right now. But I promise that I will come back tomorrow and reply. Thanks
Justice Dept. Defends Value Of Military Trials
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 8, 2005; Page A03
President Bush should be allowed to exercise his power to prosecute and punish al Qaeda terrorists for war crimes without intervention from U.S. courts, the Justice Department told a federal appeals court yesterday.
A government attorney made the arguments in appealing a ruling by a lower court last year that the military commissions created to prosecute suspected terrorists are inherently unfair to the accused and illegal under military and international law. Justice Department attorney Peter D. Keisler said yesterday that U.S. District Judge James Robertson's conclusions were wrong and he should not have ruled on the subject because the courts should give the president broad latitude to wage war against terrorism.
The case centers on the government's efforts to prosecute Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, an Afghan national, on charges of being Osama bin Laden's driver and an active member of his terrorist network.
Hamdan, who is at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one of the first detainees to face trial by the special military commissions last year. He has said that he drove trucks around bin Laden's farm but did not know about terrorist activity or participate in it.
His military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, sued the government last year, saying the military commission was a "kangaroo court" that defied long-established military law and denied his client rights guaranteed under international treaties.
At yesterday's hearing, the three judges on the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia closely questioned attorneys for the government and Hamdan. They raised doubts about whether international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions apply in Hamdan's criminal prosecution, whether it is proper to remove Hamdan from portions of his trial and whether U.S. courts can rule on the commissions' fairness before a single trial has been held.
Robertson's November ruling halted the work of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which had just begun.
Keisler said the commissions, unlike established military courts-martial, are justified in preventing the accused from hearing certain evidence and intelligence gathered in their case.
"We've never had a situation where protecting intelligence is more important than it is now," Keisler said.
Swift and fellow lawyer Neal K. Katyal said commission rules change constantly and are controlled by the military prosecutor who brings the charges.
"The law demands fairness, independence and competence, and none of those things can be said of the commissions," Katyal told the judges. Swift added that Bush has issued an order that concluded Hamdan is guilty, and military officers would jeopardize their careers by ruling otherwise.
"My client doesn't think he can get a fair trial under those circumstances," Swift said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...3-2005Apr7.html
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 8, 2005; Page A03
President Bush should be allowed to exercise his power to prosecute and punish al Qaeda terrorists for war crimes without intervention from U.S. courts, the Justice Department told a federal appeals court yesterday.
A government attorney made the arguments in appealing a ruling by a lower court last year that the military commissions created to prosecute suspected terrorists are inherently unfair to the accused and illegal under military and international law. Justice Department attorney Peter D. Keisler said yesterday that U.S. District Judge James Robertson's conclusions were wrong and he should not have ruled on the subject because the courts should give the president broad latitude to wage war against terrorism.
The case centers on the government's efforts to prosecute Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, an Afghan national, on charges of being Osama bin Laden's driver and an active member of his terrorist network.
Hamdan, who is at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one of the first detainees to face trial by the special military commissions last year. He has said that he drove trucks around bin Laden's farm but did not know about terrorist activity or participate in it.
His military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, sued the government last year, saying the military commission was a "kangaroo court" that defied long-established military law and denied his client rights guaranteed under international treaties.
At yesterday's hearing, the three judges on the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia closely questioned attorneys for the government and Hamdan. They raised doubts about whether international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions apply in Hamdan's criminal prosecution, whether it is proper to remove Hamdan from portions of his trial and whether U.S. courts can rule on the commissions' fairness before a single trial has been held.
Robertson's November ruling halted the work of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which had just begun.
Keisler said the commissions, unlike established military courts-martial, are justified in preventing the accused from hearing certain evidence and intelligence gathered in their case.
"We've never had a situation where protecting intelligence is more important than it is now," Keisler said.
Swift and fellow lawyer Neal K. Katyal said commission rules change constantly and are controlled by the military prosecutor who brings the charges.
"The law demands fairness, independence and competence, and none of those things can be said of the commissions," Katyal told the judges. Swift added that Bush has issued an order that concluded Hamdan is guilty, and military officers would jeopardize their careers by ruling otherwise.
"My client doesn't think he can get a fair trial under those circumstances," Swift said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...3-2005Apr7.html
I think the prisoner abuse cases are one of the reasons why the Republicans are really pressing to pack the courts. They need to get their handpicked judges in there so they can do whatever they want. 
Friday, April 8, 2005 · Last updated 1:57 p.m. PT
Records give voice to Guantanamo detainees
By PETE YOST AND MATT KELLEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERS
WASHINGTON -- A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay asked his U.S. military judge a pointed question: "Is it possible to see the evidence in order to refute it?" In another case, a judge blurted out: "I don't care about international law."
Court documents reviewed by The Associated Press are giving dozens of Guantanamo detainees what the Bush administration had sought to keep from public view: identities and voices.
The government is holding about 550 terrorist suspects at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. An additional 214 have been released since the facility opened in January 2002 - some into the custody of their home governments, others freed outright.
Little information about those held at Guantanamo has been released through official government channels. But stories of 60 or more are spelled out in detail in thousands of pages of transcripts filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, where lawsuits challenging their detentions have been filed.
The previously anonymous detainees provide accounts of their imprisonment and impressions of U.S. justice. Some express defiance, others stoic acceptance of their fate.
The detainees appeared last year before military tribunals which, after quick reviews, confirmed their status as "enemy combatants" who could be held indefinitely.
Omar Rajab Amin, a Kuwaiti who graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1992, wanted to see the evidence. The "tribunal president," the de facto judge for the proceeding, replied that he could review only unclassified evidence.
Some of the exchanges grew heated.
"You are not the master of the Earth, Sir," Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, told a tribunal president.
Feroz Ali Abbasi was ejected from his September hearing because he repeatedly challenged the legality of his detention.
"I have the right to speak," Abbasi said.
"No you don't," the tribunal president replied.
"I don't care about international law," the tribunal president told Abbasi just before he was taken from the room. "I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law."
The tribunal found Abbasi to have been "deeply involved" in al-Qaida, yet four months later the government released him, saying his home country of Great Britain would keep an eye on him.
The Guantanamo Bay detainees come from about 40 countries and were picked up mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, designated enemy combatants by the Bush administration.
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled last June that the detainees may challenge their imprisonment. The Pentagon hastily responded nine days later, creating the tribunals and pushing through reviews of everyone at Guantanamo by year-end.
A military spokeswoman said Friday the Pentagon believes the tribunals allow for the review called for by the court ruling.
"We believe the tribunal process gave each detainee a fair opportunity to contest their detention," said Navy Capt. Beci Brenton, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department office overseeing the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Administration officials repeatedly have said the prisoners are not entitled to the internationally accepted legal protections given prisoners of war.
In the filings, some detainees seemed stunned by the speed of the process.
"How long will it take before you decide the results of this tribunal?" one detainee asked.
"We should have a decision today," the tribunal president replied.
The tribunals brought out previously unknown information regarding the war on terror.
In one proceeding, the government identified detainee Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dosari as an al-Qaida recruiter who persuaded six Yemeni-Americans in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., to join the terrorist group. The tribunal also disclosed that Dosari had been questioned by Saudi Arabian authorities about the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 members of the U.S. Air Force.
A number of detainees told the three-member panels they had been mistreated or tortured. They complained about the evidence, too.
"You believe anyone that gives you any information," detainee Mohammed Mohammed Hassen, who was arrested in Pakistan, objected to his tribunal. "What if that person made a mistake? Maybe that person looked at me and confused me with someone else."
The unclassified evidence against Hassen, 24, was that a senior al-Qaida lieutenant had identified his picture as that of someone he might have seen in Afghanistan.
The tribunals also had access to classified evidence that the detainees were not allowed to see, a key reason a federal judge said in January that there were constitutional problems with the tribunals. An appeals court is considering that issue.
The tribunals in some cases rejected requests for witnesses or documents that detainees said would help prove their innocence.
Boudella Al Hajj requested a copy of a court document from Bosnia. The tribunal president ordered the document produced, but military personnel couldn't locate it, so the proceedings commenced without it.
A tribunal dropped an effort to find some documents requested by Mustafa Ait Idr after the detainee decided not to participate any further in the proceeding. Terminating the search "was within the tribunal president's discretion," the panel's legal adviser wrote.
Idr told the tribunal that soldiers at Guantanamo had broken two of his fingers and "put my head on the ground, and then another soldier came and put his knee on my face."
"There are a lot of things regarding the soldiers, but I won't talk about all of them," the detainee told the tribunal, which referred his and other allegations of mistreatment up the chain of command.
---
On the Net:
Documents from court proceedings for many of the detainees are available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/detainees/list.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apu...ainee%20Stories
Records give voice to Guantanamo detainees
By PETE YOST AND MATT KELLEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERS
WASHINGTON -- A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay asked his U.S. military judge a pointed question: "Is it possible to see the evidence in order to refute it?" In another case, a judge blurted out: "I don't care about international law."
Court documents reviewed by The Associated Press are giving dozens of Guantanamo detainees what the Bush administration had sought to keep from public view: identities and voices.
The government is holding about 550 terrorist suspects at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. An additional 214 have been released since the facility opened in January 2002 - some into the custody of their home governments, others freed outright.
Little information about those held at Guantanamo has been released through official government channels. But stories of 60 or more are spelled out in detail in thousands of pages of transcripts filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, where lawsuits challenging their detentions have been filed.
The previously anonymous detainees provide accounts of their imprisonment and impressions of U.S. justice. Some express defiance, others stoic acceptance of their fate.
The detainees appeared last year before military tribunals which, after quick reviews, confirmed their status as "enemy combatants" who could be held indefinitely.
Omar Rajab Amin, a Kuwaiti who graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1992, wanted to see the evidence. The "tribunal president," the de facto judge for the proceeding, replied that he could review only unclassified evidence.
Some of the exchanges grew heated.
"You are not the master of the Earth, Sir," Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, told a tribunal president.
Feroz Ali Abbasi was ejected from his September hearing because he repeatedly challenged the legality of his detention.
"I have the right to speak," Abbasi said.
"No you don't," the tribunal president replied.
"I don't care about international law," the tribunal president told Abbasi just before he was taken from the room. "I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law."
The tribunal found Abbasi to have been "deeply involved" in al-Qaida, yet four months later the government released him, saying his home country of Great Britain would keep an eye on him.
The Guantanamo Bay detainees come from about 40 countries and were picked up mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, designated enemy combatants by the Bush administration.
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled last June that the detainees may challenge their imprisonment. The Pentagon hastily responded nine days later, creating the tribunals and pushing through reviews of everyone at Guantanamo by year-end.
A military spokeswoman said Friday the Pentagon believes the tribunals allow for the review called for by the court ruling.
"We believe the tribunal process gave each detainee a fair opportunity to contest their detention," said Navy Capt. Beci Brenton, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department office overseeing the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Administration officials repeatedly have said the prisoners are not entitled to the internationally accepted legal protections given prisoners of war.
In the filings, some detainees seemed stunned by the speed of the process.
"How long will it take before you decide the results of this tribunal?" one detainee asked.
"We should have a decision today," the tribunal president replied.
The tribunals brought out previously unknown information regarding the war on terror.
In one proceeding, the government identified detainee Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dosari as an al-Qaida recruiter who persuaded six Yemeni-Americans in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., to join the terrorist group. The tribunal also disclosed that Dosari had been questioned by Saudi Arabian authorities about the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 members of the U.S. Air Force.
A number of detainees told the three-member panels they had been mistreated or tortured. They complained about the evidence, too.
"You believe anyone that gives you any information," detainee Mohammed Mohammed Hassen, who was arrested in Pakistan, objected to his tribunal. "What if that person made a mistake? Maybe that person looked at me and confused me with someone else."
The unclassified evidence against Hassen, 24, was that a senior al-Qaida lieutenant had identified his picture as that of someone he might have seen in Afghanistan.
The tribunals also had access to classified evidence that the detainees were not allowed to see, a key reason a federal judge said in January that there were constitutional problems with the tribunals. An appeals court is considering that issue.
The tribunals in some cases rejected requests for witnesses or documents that detainees said would help prove their innocence.
Boudella Al Hajj requested a copy of a court document from Bosnia. The tribunal president ordered the document produced, but military personnel couldn't locate it, so the proceedings commenced without it.
A tribunal dropped an effort to find some documents requested by Mustafa Ait Idr after the detainee decided not to participate any further in the proceeding. Terminating the search "was within the tribunal president's discretion," the panel's legal adviser wrote.
Idr told the tribunal that soldiers at Guantanamo had broken two of his fingers and "put my head on the ground, and then another soldier came and put his knee on my face."
"There are a lot of things regarding the soldiers, but I won't talk about all of them," the detainee told the tribunal, which referred his and other allegations of mistreatment up the chain of command.
---
On the Net:
Documents from court proceedings for many of the detainees are available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/detainees/list.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apu...ainee%20Stories
QUOTE(heart @ Apr 7 2005, 12:25 AM)
NR, NS: I posted this as an answer on the vets' forum. Human nature is not good or evil, but both and largely situational. Here is my take on it for what it's worth:
Then to NR,NS...it's a situational psychology problem. We live in a "situation" in our society where "normally" we do not behave badly. We generalize this assumption to all Americans, and in this instance to all soldiers. We expect them to behave as they always do when they are in our normal American society. Yet, this neve happens...never has and never will. It was George Washington that ordered the tar and feathers that we used to torture the British out of the country. We have never been so good in fact, as we are now. We were far more brutal in all wars preceding this one. It will and does happen to almost all of us when put into a scenario where we are to assume a role. Just take a look at the Zimbardo Prison Study to see that this WILL happen, if things are left without outside supervision. It happens every day in our own prison systems to a more limited degree, and what puts a check on that is not the humans involved, but the fact tha the guards go home. Situational psychology alone explains why they did what they did, and the problem lies with the chain of command for lack of supervision to prevent it, and because of the implicit "do what you have to do" kind of directives. I hold the chain of command to fault for not understanding this, and being in charge of a prison, without ever having been properly trained, or ever reading Zimbardo or Milgram's work at Yale.
I have worked with the tortured and torturors, many were one and the same, and with vets who suffered from what they did in "situations" that they could not reconcile when they come back to real society. Some people did not engage in this, but it was because they were not left to fall into the situational psychology of the group. In other words, they had a strong chain of command that KNEW to keep this from happening. That's why you get such conflicting stories on Vietnam. It had to do with where you were, what unit, what mission and the dicipline in the chain of command and the drugs too. What I'm saying is that absent an outside force, average people will behave in this way. I know that's hard to believe, but you have to read the experiements in this area to see how much evidence there is to support this...it happens in just about every study they conduct on mere mortals. You have soldiers that don't even believe this happens because they have good dicipline, not because they would not act the same way in the same circumstances. There will always be one or two that will say "no" but that's a special more staunchly independent person, and those are not the people that tend to join the military in the first place.
So, there is no either/or and both sides are actually right on this and the dispute is not even relavent to the discussion. I do not think there is a campaign to do anything like pitting one against another. I think that's also situational. We are judging almost entirely on the basis of 2 things..1. If we have troops in theatre related to us, or around us that we simply cannot believe could do that sort of thing and 2. Those predisposed to support Bush in the first place. We will take any excuse given if we do not want to believe that the average person would do this...and since most Democrats were suspicious of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and Ashcrofts Gitmo project...we chose to believe what fit into that predisposed mindset. Yet, this is just ignoring the situational psychology evidence that has been accumulating for over 50 years in controlled experiments and studies.
That's my take. I'll post this in the "torture" thread too. I doubt it will be welcome by either side...unless they read the studies. You can ask Pegatha....we both have psych backgrounds and I think she can back me up on the studies.
Then to NR,NS...it's a situational psychology problem. We live in a "situation" in our society where "normally" we do not behave badly. We generalize this assumption to all Americans, and in this instance to all soldiers. We expect them to behave as they always do when they are in our normal American society. Yet, this neve happens...never has and never will. It was George Washington that ordered the tar and feathers that we used to torture the British out of the country. We have never been so good in fact, as we are now. We were far more brutal in all wars preceding this one. It will and does happen to almost all of us when put into a scenario where we are to assume a role. Just take a look at the Zimbardo Prison Study to see that this WILL happen, if things are left without outside supervision. It happens every day in our own prison systems to a more limited degree, and what puts a check on that is not the humans involved, but the fact tha the guards go home. Situational psychology alone explains why they did what they did, and the problem lies with the chain of command for lack of supervision to prevent it, and because of the implicit "do what you have to do" kind of directives. I hold the chain of command to fault for not understanding this, and being in charge of a prison, without ever having been properly trained, or ever reading Zimbardo or Milgram's work at Yale.
I have worked with the tortured and torturors, many were one and the same, and with vets who suffered from what they did in "situations" that they could not reconcile when they come back to real society. Some people did not engage in this, but it was because they were not left to fall into the situational psychology of the group. In other words, they had a strong chain of command that KNEW to keep this from happening. That's why you get such conflicting stories on Vietnam. It had to do with where you were, what unit, what mission and the dicipline in the chain of command and the drugs too. What I'm saying is that absent an outside force, average people will behave in this way. I know that's hard to believe, but you have to read the experiements in this area to see how much evidence there is to support this...it happens in just about every study they conduct on mere mortals. You have soldiers that don't even believe this happens because they have good dicipline, not because they would not act the same way in the same circumstances. There will always be one or two that will say "no" but that's a special more staunchly independent person, and those are not the people that tend to join the military in the first place.
So, there is no either/or and both sides are actually right on this and the dispute is not even relavent to the discussion. I do not think there is a campaign to do anything like pitting one against another. I think that's also situational. We are judging almost entirely on the basis of 2 things..1. If we have troops in theatre related to us, or around us that we simply cannot believe could do that sort of thing and 2. Those predisposed to support Bush in the first place. We will take any excuse given if we do not want to believe that the average person would do this...and since most Democrats were suspicious of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and Ashcrofts Gitmo project...we chose to believe what fit into that predisposed mindset. Yet, this is just ignoring the situational psychology evidence that has been accumulating for over 50 years in controlled experiments and studies.
That's my take. I'll post this in the "torture" thread too. I doubt it will be welcome by either side...unless they read the studies. You can ask Pegatha....we both have psych backgrounds and I think she can back me up on the studies.
QUOTE
We have never been so good in fact, as we are now. We were far more brutal in all wars preceding this one
Before I start my other comments I just want to say that I disagree with the above comment with regards to treatment of prisoners. I am not aware of any "policy" to ignore the Geneva Convention in any other war. Were there isolated abuses, yes.
I agree with you that without supervision a "mob mentality" takes over. And that most people even if they disagree with it will not stop it. I also agree with your comparison to U.S. prisons. I actually posted a link to a video about U.S. prisons in this very thread.
I too blame some in the chain of command for allowing some of this to happen because they must have understood this concept. Some of them abdicated their duty to ensure that it did not occur and for that they should be held accountable.
What is absent, however, from your analysis is any mention about the Bush "policy" to mistreat prisoners. From the evidence that we have seen so far there is a strong suggestion that the Bush administration actually had a policy to mistreat prisoners. This goes far beyond not supervising soldiers and others. This was a deliberate tactic, not just the result of not supervising subordinates.
I also don't think that the focus should be on the military alone. From the evidence, the CIA appears to have played a major role in this scandal. To this day the CIA continues to put up road block after road block to keep documents from coming to light. Because there has been such a major effort to cover up the details by all of the government agencies we still do not know the full extent of the problem. What we do know however, is that this was more than just isolated instances committed by a few bad apples.
Emily Whitfield on Torture Memos, John Prados on Intelligence Commission
(4/8/05-4/14/05)
This week on CounterSpin: New memos about the Bush administration's torture and interrogation policies in Iraq have come to light. There's big news here, but you wouldn't know it by the media's indifference to the story. What is actually in these new torture documents? And why aren't journalists picking up on the story? We'll ask Emily Whitfield of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Also this week: The presidential commission assigned to look into intelligence failures in Iraq and elsewhere, delivered a report placing nearly all the blame for bad information about Iraq's weapons on the CIA and the intelligence community-and none on senior Bush administration officials. We'll talk to John Prados of the National Security Archives about the commission and its report.
Click here to listen to the audio interview. The interview starts a little less than at the half way point.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2485
(4/8/05-4/14/05)
This week on CounterSpin: New memos about the Bush administration's torture and interrogation policies in Iraq have come to light. There's big news here, but you wouldn't know it by the media's indifference to the story. What is actually in these new torture documents? And why aren't journalists picking up on the story? We'll ask Emily Whitfield of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Also this week: The presidential commission assigned to look into intelligence failures in Iraq and elsewhere, delivered a report placing nearly all the blame for bad information about Iraq's weapons on the CIA and the intelligence community-and none on senior Bush administration officials. We'll talk to John Prados of the National Security Archives about the commission and its report.
Click here to listen to the audio interview. The interview starts a little less than at the half way point.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2485
Rumsfeld sued for allowing torture
Author: Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/07/05 12:48
WASHINGTON — Defenders of human rights have hailed as long overdue a lawsuit holding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Filed March 1 in an Illinois federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, the lawsuit charges that Rumsfeld violated the U.S. Constitution and international laws prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. Rumsfeld knew that torture was taking place and did nothing to stop it, according to the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of eight victims of the abuse. All have been released without ever being charged with any wrongdoing. None have been compensated for the torture they endured.
“This lawsuit says exactly what we’ve been saying all along: Rumsfeld is violating the Constitution and international law in the torture and abuse of these prisoners,” Veterans for Peace President David Cline told the World. The group is calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the same grounds.
Retired Rear Admiral John Hutson and retired Army Brig. Gen. James Cullen told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert they fully support the lawsuit. He quoted them in an op-ed titled, “We can’t remain silent.”
“At some point I had to say, Wait a minute. We cannot go along with this [torture],” Cullen said. Hutson said the torture “is a stain on the honor of people who didn’t participate in it at all.”
On March 25 the ACLU released another 1,200 Pentagon documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, exposing more torture and abuse of Iraqi and Afghan detainees. “These documents provide further evidence that the torture of detainees was much more widespread than the government has acknowledged,” said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. “At a minimum, the documents indicate a colossal failure of leadership.”
Cline blasted the lack of accountability for the war crimes. “They want to pin the torture and abuse on a few ‘bad apples’ … But it is clear that torture was a conscious policy coming from the commander in chief in the White House. It’s barbaric.”
The latest revelation is a lawsuit by Maher Arar, 25, a Canadian citizen, charging that U.S. agents kidnapped him while he was changing planes in New York and flew him to Syria where he was brutally tortured for 10 months in a practice the Bush administration calls “rendition.” Aviation records including flight logs of the jet used to transport Arar corroborate his charges.
A top-level Pentagon review released March 10 by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church whitewashed the role of Rumsfeld and other top officials, even though documents have surfaced that the president himself signed a secret executive order authorizing torture.
The lurid photos of U.S. personnel posing with naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib caused worldwide outrage when they were released a year ago. Gen. Antonio Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the torture was “systemic, flagrant … violations of international law.”
Last month, Army officials announced that 17 soldiers involved in the deaths of 27 detainees killed in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq will not be prosecuted. The Pentagon rejected recommendations that the interrogators be court-martialed, arguing they had “lawfully used force” on detainees and there was “not enough evidence for negligent homicide” charges.
Among the newest batch of disclosures was a commander’s report that an Iraqi teenager was beaten so badly by interrogators with the 311th Battalion Military Intelligence that they broke his jaw. His mouth was wired shut and he could only take in nourishment through a straw. His torturers ordered him to tell investigators he broke the jaw when he fell down “and no one beat me.”
The commander wrote, “Abuse of detainees in some form or another was an acceptable practice and was demonstrated to the inexperienced infantry guards almost as guidance.” No punitive action was taken against the unit commanders.
At a U.S. military facility in Mosul, Iraq, detainee Abu Malik Kenami died from a heart attack after being forced to do strenuous “ups and downs” — knee bends — until he collapsed. The Pentagon file claimed the cause of death “will never be known because an autopsy was never performed.” Kenami’s corpse was stashed in a refrigerated van for five days before it was turned over to an Iraqi mortician.
The ACLU/Human Rights First lawsuit seeks a court order determining that the injuries suffered by the plaintiffs “violated international law, the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. military law” and also seeks monetary compensation for the victims.
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/6765/1/263/
Author: Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/07/05 12:48
WASHINGTON — Defenders of human rights have hailed as long overdue a lawsuit holding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Filed March 1 in an Illinois federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, the lawsuit charges that Rumsfeld violated the U.S. Constitution and international laws prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. Rumsfeld knew that torture was taking place and did nothing to stop it, according to the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of eight victims of the abuse. All have been released without ever being charged with any wrongdoing. None have been compensated for the torture they endured.
“This lawsuit says exactly what we’ve been saying all along: Rumsfeld is violating the Constitution and international law in the torture and abuse of these prisoners,” Veterans for Peace President David Cline told the World. The group is calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the same grounds.
Retired Rear Admiral John Hutson and retired Army Brig. Gen. James Cullen told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert they fully support the lawsuit. He quoted them in an op-ed titled, “We can’t remain silent.”
“At some point I had to say, Wait a minute. We cannot go along with this [torture],” Cullen said. Hutson said the torture “is a stain on the honor of people who didn’t participate in it at all.”
On March 25 the ACLU released another 1,200 Pentagon documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, exposing more torture and abuse of Iraqi and Afghan detainees. “These documents provide further evidence that the torture of detainees was much more widespread than the government has acknowledged,” said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. “At a minimum, the documents indicate a colossal failure of leadership.”
Cline blasted the lack of accountability for the war crimes. “They want to pin the torture and abuse on a few ‘bad apples’ … But it is clear that torture was a conscious policy coming from the commander in chief in the White House. It’s barbaric.”
The latest revelation is a lawsuit by Maher Arar, 25, a Canadian citizen, charging that U.S. agents kidnapped him while he was changing planes in New York and flew him to Syria where he was brutally tortured for 10 months in a practice the Bush administration calls “rendition.” Aviation records including flight logs of the jet used to transport Arar corroborate his charges.
A top-level Pentagon review released March 10 by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church whitewashed the role of Rumsfeld and other top officials, even though documents have surfaced that the president himself signed a secret executive order authorizing torture.
The lurid photos of U.S. personnel posing with naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib caused worldwide outrage when they were released a year ago. Gen. Antonio Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the torture was “systemic, flagrant … violations of international law.”
Last month, Army officials announced that 17 soldiers involved in the deaths of 27 detainees killed in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq will not be prosecuted. The Pentagon rejected recommendations that the interrogators be court-martialed, arguing they had “lawfully used force” on detainees and there was “not enough evidence for negligent homicide” charges.
Among the newest batch of disclosures was a commander’s report that an Iraqi teenager was beaten so badly by interrogators with the 311th Battalion Military Intelligence that they broke his jaw. His mouth was wired shut and he could only take in nourishment through a straw. His torturers ordered him to tell investigators he broke the jaw when he fell down “and no one beat me.”
The commander wrote, “Abuse of detainees in some form or another was an acceptable practice and was demonstrated to the inexperienced infantry guards almost as guidance.” No punitive action was taken against the unit commanders.
At a U.S. military facility in Mosul, Iraq, detainee Abu Malik Kenami died from a heart attack after being forced to do strenuous “ups and downs” — knee bends — until he collapsed. The Pentagon file claimed the cause of death “will never be known because an autopsy was never performed.” Kenami’s corpse was stashed in a refrigerated van for five days before it was turned over to an Iraqi mortician.
The ACLU/Human Rights First lawsuit seeks a court order determining that the injuries suffered by the plaintiffs “violated international law, the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. military law” and also seeks monetary compensation for the victims.
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/6765/1/263/
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Abu Ghraib Officers Claimed They Were Scapegoats
Documents show that three who served at the prison said they were unfairly singled out.
By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — As the Abu Ghraib scandal was going public a year ago, junior Army officers at the prison in Iraq formally protested that they were being singled out for discipline for the actions of a few rogue soldiers. They also complained that it was unfair for senior military leaders to get away without a blemish on their careers.
According to documents released Thursday by the Army, three reservist prison supervisors wrote to Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, then commander of day-to-day operations in Iraq, to complain that the scandal had ruined their Army careers, yet left supervisors such as Metz and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the head of U.S. military operations in Iraq, basically unscathed.
The three said that they never were properly trained to run a prison, and complained that they were not given written Geneva Convention rules to post at the prison warning against torturing inmates.
They also said Red Cross reports of abuse were kept from them. And they said Sanchez and other top officers never alerted them to shortcomings, despite their numerous visits to the facility, where in the fall of 2003 inmates were being abused and sexually humiliated by Americans.
In the end, seven prison guards, none ranking above staff sergeant — the sixth-lowest rank in the Army — pleaded guilty or were convicted for the abuses. Charges against two others are pending.
An unknown number of prison supervisors, including the three who wrote to Metz, received administrative discipline that effectively ended their Army careers.
Separate from the Abu Ghraib case, the Army has said it has charged 21 soldiers in 11 incidents involving the deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and is investigating 16 other cases in which prisoners were killed.
However, Pentagon reports have not implicated any top military commanders or civilian Pentagon leaders in the Abu Ghraib abuses or other misconduct problems.
"I accept full responsibility for the actions of the soldiers of the 372nd [Military Police Company]," one junior officer, whose name was blacked out in documents released Thursday, wrote to Metz last year. "I fully agree that I should have done a better job at supervising them." Most of those charged in the Abu Ghraib case were members of the 372nd Military Police Company.
But the officer said it was unfair that others were not held accountable. "Unlike the general officer appointed above me," he wrote, apparently referring to Metz, "I take the responsibility of what my soldiers did. It's easy sitting back as the Monday morning quarterback and second-guessing everything."
The officer concluded, "It's amazing that the entire chain-of-command could be so incompetent."
The records were released as part of a lawsuit initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Abu Ghraib inquiry began in January 2004 but did not become public until last spring. By then, Army officials had begun investigating some of the guards, and military supervisors were meting out administrative discipline for officers.
The Army declined Thursday to comment on the new documents. "We'll continue to hold people appropriately accountable, and we will go wherever the truth leads for as long as it takes," said Lt. Col Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman.
The three memos to Metz were dated April 12, 2004. On each, the writer's signature was redacted above the notation that he or she came from the 372nd Military Police Company.
One letter said an assessment of prison operations by Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder during the period of much of the abuse "was never shared" with the military units at Abu Ghraib.
The officer maintained that it was unfair to blame prison supervisors. "The unit had less than two weeks to prepare for the [prison] operation," he said.
But, he added, "a few individuals, conducting criminal activity, left the boundaries of good training and judgment. Recognize their shortcomings and take the appropriate action."
Another writer, who identified himself as a noncommissioned officer-in-charge at the prison, said that if Red Cross memos and other documents had been made available to the prison staff, "corrective action would have been taken, possibly making the duties of the MPs safer and easier, and in turn doing the same for the detainees."
The writer took exception to being disciplined for failing to take action after seeing a guard stomp on a detainee's hand, saying he never saw the prisoner actually being hurt.
"The detainee did not flinch, nor did he cry out in pain as if he had been struck," the officer wrote.
The officer recalled later speaking with the guard who was handling that inmate.
The officer added: "The care and welfare of the detainees were priority to me. The Iraqi people were taught by Saddam [Hussein] to hate the Americans. I wanted to prove to them that we were not the bad guys that he made us out to be."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...ack=1&cset=true
Abu Ghraib Officers Claimed They Were Scapegoats
Documents show that three who served at the prison said they were unfairly singled out.
By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — As the Abu Ghraib scandal was going public a year ago, junior Army officers at the prison in Iraq formally protested that they were being singled out for discipline for the actions of a few rogue soldiers. They also complained that it was unfair for senior military leaders to get away without a blemish on their careers.
According to documents released Thursday by the Army, three reservist prison supervisors wrote to Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, then commander of day-to-day operations in Iraq, to complain that the scandal had ruined their Army careers, yet left supervisors such as Metz and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the head of U.S. military operations in Iraq, basically unscathed.
The three said that they never were properly trained to run a prison, and complained that they were not given written Geneva Convention rules to post at the prison warning against torturing inmates.
They also said Red Cross reports of abuse were kept from them. And they said Sanchez and other top officers never alerted them to shortcomings, despite their numerous visits to the facility, where in the fall of 2003 inmates were being abused and sexually humiliated by Americans.
In the end, seven prison guards, none ranking above staff sergeant — the sixth-lowest rank in the Army — pleaded guilty or were convicted for the abuses. Charges against two others are pending.
An unknown number of prison supervisors, including the three who wrote to Metz, received administrative discipline that effectively ended their Army careers.
Separate from the Abu Ghraib case, the Army has said it has charged 21 soldiers in 11 incidents involving the deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and is investigating 16 other cases in which prisoners were killed.
However, Pentagon reports have not implicated any top military commanders or civilian Pentagon leaders in the Abu Ghraib abuses or other misconduct problems.
"I accept full responsibility for the actions of the soldiers of the 372nd [Military Police Company]," one junior officer, whose name was blacked out in documents released Thursday, wrote to Metz last year. "I fully agree that I should have done a better job at supervising them." Most of those charged in the Abu Ghraib case were members of the 372nd Military Police Company.
But the officer said it was unfair that others were not held accountable. "Unlike the general officer appointed above me," he wrote, apparently referring to Metz, "I take the responsibility of what my soldiers did. It's easy sitting back as the Monday morning quarterback and second-guessing everything."
The officer concluded, "It's amazing that the entire chain-of-command could be so incompetent."
The records were released as part of a lawsuit initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Abu Ghraib inquiry began in January 2004 but did not become public until last spring. By then, Army officials had begun investigating some of the guards, and military supervisors were meting out administrative discipline for officers.
The Army declined Thursday to comment on the new documents. "We'll continue to hold people appropriately accountable, and we will go wherever the truth leads for as long as it takes," said Lt. Col Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman.
The three memos to Metz were dated April 12, 2004. On each, the writer's signature was redacted above the notation that he or she came from the 372nd Military Police Company.
One letter said an assessment of prison operations by Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder during the period of much of the abuse "was never shared" with the military units at Abu Ghraib.
The officer maintained that it was unfair to blame prison supervisors. "The unit had less than two weeks to prepare for the [prison] operation," he said.
But, he added, "a few individuals, conducting criminal activity, left the boundaries of good training and judgment. Recognize their shortcomings and take the appropriate action."
Another writer, who identified himself as a noncommissioned officer-in-charge at the prison, said that if Red Cross memos and other documents had been made available to the prison staff, "corrective action would have been taken, possibly making the duties of the MPs safer and easier, and in turn doing the same for the detainees."
The writer took exception to being disciplined for failing to take action after seeing a guard stomp on a detainee's hand, saying he never saw the prisoner actually being hurt.
"The detainee did not flinch, nor did he cry out in pain as if he had been struck," the officer wrote.
The officer recalled later speaking with the guard who was handling that inmate.
The officer added: "The care and welfare of the detainees were priority to me. The Iraqi people were taught by Saddam [Hussein] to hate the Americans. I wanted to prove to them that we were not the bad guys that he made us out to be."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...ack=1&cset=true
By scrapping the USA'S earlier participation in the ICC agreement, the Bush administration set the stage for the abuse scandal. The message was sent around the globe that American soldiers would be immune from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. This message must have affected the thought processes of soldiers told to committ illegal acts. I blame the 'higher ups' who have got off completely excepting the above person, Janis Karpinski. Bringing in the non military to the situation, completely complicated everything for the soldiers. Who were they accountable to, the army or this new security person. Janis Karpinski, at one point, said on television that she was told not to go beyond certain points in her own prison. The whole thing stinks of treachery, bullying, and deliberate blindness by the administration.
Monday 11th April 2005 (04h51) :
The Psychodynamics of Occupation and the Abuse at Abu Ghraib: An Interpretation After One Year of Revelations
by Stephen Soldz
There are various explanations for what went on at Abu Ghraib. The official US position is that a "few bad apples" among the reservist military police (MPs) there went out of control, violating orders to treat the prisoners humanely -- "Animal House on the night shift," as former defense secretary James Schlesinger described it.(1) The MP defendants claim that they were following orders to soften up the prisoners as a prelude to interrogation. Investigative journalists have documented in detail the chain of memos, orders, and "advice" that led from the top reaches of the US administration to the actions of those MPs.
To write about the psychological aspects of the Abu Ghraib horrors, one must have a theory of what actually happened. So let me make explicit my view of what happened, derived from reading hundreds of newspaper and other accounts of abuse throughout the developing network of US detention centers in Iraq and elsewhere. After 9/11, decisions were made at the upper reaches of the US administration that detainees in America’s "War on Terror" did not deserve traditional protections.(2, 3) Justified by the needs of developing intelligence, brutal methods of treatment of detainees -- "tantamount to torture" as the International Committee of the Red Cross calls it(2, 4) -- became routine.(1, 2, 5-18)
The decision was made to adopt brutal techniques in order to "break" the detainees. As one e-mail in August 2003 from a Military Intelligence officer put it: "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication."(19)
The prison was put under the control of military intelligence.(2, 20) As recommended by Guantánamo commander Major General Geoffrey Miller, techniques of total control and torture in use at Guantánamo(4, 12, 19, 21, 22) were imported as Abu Ghraib was "Gitmoized."(1) As a former Army intelligence officer described Miller’s recommendation: "It means treat the detainees like "expletive deleted" until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep."(23) Waterboarding was imported and dogs were frequently used to instill fear in the detainees.(17) Pressure was put on the MPs guarding prisoners to "set the conditions" for interrogations, and to "manipulate an internee’s emotions and weaknesses."(20) Typical of large bureaucratic organizations, the MPs were given no clear instructions, allowing for "plausible deniability." Thus, the official story of a "few bad apples" doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as abuse was typical of the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and at the myriad (over 20) other detention facilities in Iraq, as well as those in Cuba and Afghanistan. Further, it is not plausible to believe that these MPs, unschooled in interrogation techniques, rediscovered so many of the CIA’s standard torture techniques, designed to humiliate and "break" detainees, as well as special forms of sexual humiliation that would be especially humiliating and degrading to Arab males.(2)
However, the official story isn’t totally false, either. While it is hard to be certain, testimony at the trials of the Abu Ghraib MPs designated as the "fall guys" suggests that they did their share of freelancing. A number of these MPs were having quite a good time abusing the prisoners. As Pvt. Jeremy Sivits testified at the court martial of Spc. Charles Graner, "The soldiers were laughing, seeming to be having a good time" and Pvt. Ivan Frederick II testified that "everybody was smiling and carrying on."(24)
While I have no doubt that torture was policy, we still are faced with the questions of why MPs not trained in interrogation and torture proved so willing to adopt these techniques, and enjoyed themselves along the way, and why soldiers throughout Iraq and Afghanistan engaged in repeated acts of torture and abuse.
What I want to focus on here are a few relatively underemphasized aspects of the war and occupation that contributed to the pervasiveness of abuse. Like all wars, the 2003 Iraq invasion was proceeded by a propaganda barrage. Fantasies of weapons of mass destruction were propagated repeatedly by the Administration, politicians of both parties, and the corporate media, despite serious doubts having been raised as to the existence of these weapons by numerous knowledgeable critics.(25-27) Unstated, but understood by all, was that this war was to be revenge for 9/11; revenge for the death, but even more, revenge for the humiliation.(28, 29) When Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square in April 2003, the US troops draped it with an American flag. The desire for revenge, while unstated, suggested that anything visited upon the Iraqis was acceptable, as revenge creates its own logic.
Stated, rather, was the avowed aim to "liberate" Iraqis from an oppressive regime. Iraqis would greet the invading troops with flowers and open arms, it was claimed. Despite cute propaganda exercises like the stage-managed toppling of Saddam’s statue, the flowers and open arms never materialized. Iraqis were decidedly ambivalent about being invaded and occupied by a foreign power. Within weeks American troops were firing into crowds of Iraqis, killing a number,(30, 31) and lying about the events. Deaths of civilians at roadblocks were a constant.(32-35) And the insurgency grew and grew, its supporters coming to number perhaps 200,000, as estimated by the head of the Iraqi Interim government’s intelligence service.(36)
So what do occupation soldiers do when the stated reason for their occupation of another country is to liberate the populace, but many of that populace regard them as invaders and either respond sullenly to their presence, or actively resist occupation? One coping strategy is to try and distinguish between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." As Staff Sgt. Riley Flaherty expressed it: "What’s really hard is the fine line between the bad guys and the good guys.... Because if you piss off the wrong good guys, you’re really in trouble. So you’ve really got to watch what you do and how you treat the people."(37) That is, the occupied population is split into its good and bad elements, with evil projected onto the bad, and the good construed as largely childlike and in need of protection, but also prone to turn bad at a moment’s notice.
However, the task of an occupation army is one of control of the populace. As Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, from the same unit as Sgt. Flaherty, put it: "I’ve got 200,000 Iraqis I’ve got to control with 18 people... so I’ve got to command respect. And unfortunately, all that hearts and minds stuff, I can’t even think about that." He goes on to explain "There are things I have to do out here that I can’t explain to my chain of command, and that the American people would never understand."(37) Given this requirement, the definition of a good Iraqi becomes one who aids the occupiers in their lonesome task, and there are precious few of them. As Sgt. Aldrich explains: "Because you aren’t helping me catch the bad guys, and if you’re not helping me, you are the bad guy."(37) Given this definition, the distinction between good and bad easily breaks down and nearly the entire occupied populace can become bad.
Another characteristic of occupation is the difficulty the occupation troops have in viewing the occupied as adults, as individuals with wishes, dreams, and intentions of their own. Rather, they are essentially childlike, deserving protection when good, and a spanking when bad. The same Sgt. Flaherty, on a frustrating day, explained: "These people don’t understand nice... You’ve got to be a hard-ass."(37) The entire populace becomes the enemy, as expressed by Sgt. Aldrich: "The one thing you learn over here is that there are no innocent civilians, except the kids. And even them -- the ones that are all, ’Hey mister, mister, chocolate?’ -- I’ll be killing them someday."(37) Note, the absence of any pretense that the occupation is intended to help the occupied. Such illusions are left for the media and PR flacks.
War, including war of occupation, of course involves fear, a pervasive fear and an awareness that death is possible at any moment. That fear, and that awareness, we are reminded by Terror Management Theory,(38) leads to a defense of one’s worldview, which in most cases means an increased attachment to the cultural norms of one’s society, and a rejection and punitive attitude towards those that threaten that worldview. For the occupier, it is the natives, the occupied and their culture, who are rejected.
Another aspect of war is its overwhelmingly masculine quality; war is an assertion of dominance over the other, perceived as weak, as cowardly, as a wimp.(39) Thus, the repeated description of the 9/11 attackers as "cowardly," probably the characteristic least accurately descriptive of them. As President Bush said that day: "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,"(40) attempting to remove the shame by describing the attackers with the most denigrating description. By this means the attacker is made both morally depraved and weak, not really masculine. Yet, the rhetoric simultaneously betrays the fear that underlies it. For today’s women in combat, proving that they are "one of the guys" can be the key to survival.(41)
As the occupied are rejected and become the repository of all that which is rejected by the occupiers, it is but a step to portraying the enemy, those unwilling to meekly submit to occupation, as absolute evil, as was expressed by Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl on the eve of the November, 2004 assault on Falluja: "The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him."(42) Is it any wonder that Falluja was almost totally destroyed, with virtually no buildings left undamaged ? Or that Fallujans who return to their city are treated as if they are concentration camp inmates?(43, 44) Or that this new concentration camp was described as the "safest city in Iraq" by Marine Cpl. Daniel Ferrari,(45) while an anonymous soldier left a memento on a random household’s mirror: ""expletive deleted" Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"(44)
Now return to Abu Ghraib. A small contingent of ill-trained reservist MPs was in charge of guarding thousands of unruly prisoners who were enraged at being imprisoned, largely unjustly, and enraged at the squalid conditions in which they were kept, perhaps best symbolized by the bugs infesting their rancid food.(46) The MPs didn’t speak the language of the prisoners, and had few translators; communication difficulties were so great that the guards evidently did not know that a prison riot was a response to the food situation.
These guards were of low status in the military, being reservists, and were assigned to the undesirable task of guarding prisoners. They lived in constant fear, as nightly attacks on the prison were complemented by riots and attacks from the prisoners. Their military comrades-in-arms were dying in large numbers from the growing insurgency.
The pressure built to generate actionable intelligence from the prisoners, so that the anti-occupation insurgency could be broken. General Miller visited and recommended that the prison be dedicated to the gathering of intelligence, and that the brutal torture techniques developed at Guantánamo(4, 12, 21, 47-51) be utilized. MPs were to "set the conditions" for interrogation(20) by abusing and terrorizing prisoners. Military intelligence was placed in control of the prison by the head of US forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.(20) Many arcane torture techniques, such as waterboarding and forced homosexual sex, developed by the CIA over decades, were put into general use.(3, 19, 52) The message was communicated that senior officials, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, were very interested in the intelligence being generated at Abu Ghraib, that the work of these lowly reservists was truly important.(19)
The effort to generate intelligence out of the prisoners was especially difficult as, according to military intelligence sources, perhaps 70%-90% of them were innocent of any involvement with the insurgents,(19, 53) and just happened to be present at a checkpoint, or in their home, when one of the brutal "cordon and capture" raids occurred.(19) Nonetheless, the response of top military leaders to their innocence was callous at best. Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski is quoted as telling Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, the officer in charge of Iraqi prisons: "I don’t care if we’re holding 15,000 innocent civilians! We’re winning the war!" while the officer in charge of US forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, retorted: "Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them."(54)
The nature of prisons is such that prisoners are usually presumed guilty by the guards. If they didn’t commit the offense for which they were arrested, they must have done something wrong; why else would they be in prison? Under interrogation, those prisoners who refuse to divulge important information must be withholding, providing further evidence of their perfidy. These dynamics must have been even stronger in the Abu Ghraib situation, where the MP guards felt in constant danger and under pressure to demonstrate their worth through breaking the prisoners. To accept that many of the prisoners being kept in such abominable conditions were innocent could only be rationalized by dehumanizing them, by making them the embodiment of all that was unacceptable to the guards. If they weren’t guilty of serious offenses, they were, after all, only "hajis"(29) who, outside the prison, were kept in line with metal "haji-be-good sticks."(37) The very fact that these inferior hajis objected to their unfair imprisonment demonstrated that they were dangerous, and cried out for control. How could such dangerous inferior beings expect to be treated better once they were found guilty by reason of imprisonment? Surely the lowly MPs could demonstrate their worth by providing the punishment these unruly natives, the ungrateful occupied, deserved. To do less was not to do one’s duty.
As these guards did their work keeping the evil recalcitrant hajis in line, which, after all is a rather dirty task, it was not surprising that they tried to make the job interesting, even fun. How many of us can carry out an unpleasant job for months on end without finding ways to enjoy the work? Why should we expect that these poor prison guards in an alien land would do less?
Thus we see that the logic of war, the logic of occupation, the logic of imprisonment, and the post 9/11 logic of revenge all came together in an Iraqi torture center in 2003. The fact that similar actions have been reported in numerous other Iraqi prisons, as well as those in Afghanistan demonstrates that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were emblematic of the new American empire, indeed of empire itself.
Also emblematic of empire, is the denial with which this torture was met. The officials responsible ignored and denied numerous reports of prisoner abuse in newspapers and from non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross.(55-59) Within days of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, I, a single concerned citizen with no special resources, had no difficulty detailing this long record of abuse claims.(14) The publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs and all subsequent revelations about the widespread nature of detainee abuse and torture were met with official denials that anything more than a "few bad apples" were to blame.(60) Furthermore, denial, in the psychological sense of unconsciously ignoring the importance of a fact or event, has characterized the American public reaction. While the majority of Americans told pollsters that the torture was wrong and that the US government was lying about it, and also that those who wrote the legal opinions justifying torture bore some blame,(61, 62) there was no major public outcry over the issue. It was hardly mentioned during the American elections by either major party candidate, or at either party’s convention. Those in charge when the torture happened were reelected, and many of those who developed and justified the policy of torture were promoted,(63-65) with little public outcry. Torture is now out of the closet, it has become an accepted, however distasteful, aspect of American life. As Mark Danner puts it: "We are all torturers now."(66)
I’d like to close with words from Chris Hedges’ haunting meditation on war:
"Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment -- often after a terrible price. The myth of war and the drug of war wait to be tasted.... Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war to survive." (67, p. 173)
And we might add, it needs its torturers.
References
1. Carter, P. (2004) The Road to Abu Ghraib (Washington Monthly).
2. Barry, J., Hirsh, M. & Isikoff, M. (2004) The Roots of Torture: The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war (Newsweek).
3. Hersh, S. M. (2004) Chain of command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, Harper Collins).
4. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo (New York Times).
5. (2004) US Navy Seals Torturing Iraqis (ancapistan.typepad.com).
6. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Federal Government Turns Over Thousands of Torture Documents to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
7. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request (American Civil Liberties Union).
8. Croke, L. A. (2004) Abuse, Torture and Rape Reported at Unlisted U.S.-run Prisons in Iraq (NewStandard).
9. Croke, L. A. (2004) Iraq Torture Investigators Reveal Scores of New Cases (New Standard).
10. Croke, L. A. (2004) FBI Glossed Over Abu Ghraib Abuses (TheNewStandard).
11. Gat, Y. (2005) The Year in Torture (CounterPunch).
12. Lewis, N. A. (2005) Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo (New York Times).
13. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2004) New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread (Washington Post).
14. Soldz, S. (2004) Abuse at Abu Ghraib, the psychodynamics of occupation, and the responsibility of us all (ZNet).
15. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Torture FOIA (American Civil Liberties Union).
16. White, J. (2004) U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds (Washington Post).
17. White, J. & Higham, S. (2004) Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized: Military Intelligence Personnel Were Involved, Handlers Say (Washington Post).
18. Zernike, K. & Rohde, D. (2004) Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents (New York Times).
19. Danner, M. (2004) Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (New York Review of Books).
20. Borger, J. (2004) US general linked to Abu Ghraib abuse: Leaked memo reveals control of prison passed to military intelligence to ’manipulate detainees’ (Guardian).
21. Cawthorne, A. (2004) Guantanamo men allege abuse (Reuters).
22. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Broad Use Cited of Harsh Tactics at Base in Cuba (New York Times).
23. Davidson, O. G. (2004) The Secret File of Abu Ghraib (Rolling Stone).
24. Serrano, R. A. (2005) Guard Enjoyed Beating Iraqis, Three Testify (Los Angeles Times).
25. Rangwala, G. (2003) Claims and evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).
26. Rangwala, G. (2003) Review of Hussein Kamel’s interview with UNSCOM of 22 August 1995 (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).
27. Ritter, S. (2003) Scott Ritter in His Own Words (Time Online).
28. Wood, P. (2005) Iraq war: two years on (BBC).
29. Rockwell, P. (2005) Army reservist witnesses war crimes: New revelations about racism in the military (Online Journal).
30. Reeves, P. (2003) At least 10 dead as US soldiers fire on school protest (Independent).
31. Wilson, S. (2003) U.S. Forces Kill Two During Iraqi Demonstration (Washington Post).
32. Burns, J. F. (2005) Checkpoint dangers too familiar for Iraqis (International Herald Tribune).
33. Faramarzi, S. (2003) Jittery U.S. Soldiers Kill 6 Iraqis (Associated Press).
34. Huggler, J. (2003) Family shot dead by panicking US troops (Independent).
35. Ciezadlo, A. (2005) What Iraq’s checkpoints are like (Christian Science Monitor).
36. Reynolds, P. (2005) Blistering attacks threaten Iraq election (BBC).
37. Dilanian, K. (2005) Soldiers sometimes rough despite risk of antagonizing friendly Iraqis (Kansas City Star).
38. Pyszczynski, T. A., Greenberg, J. & Solomon, S. (2003) In the wake of 9/11: the psychology of terror (Washington, DC, American Psychological Association).
39. Ducat, S. (2004) The wimp factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity (Boston, Beacon Press).
40. Bush, G. W. (2001) Remarks by President Bush from Barksdale Air Force Base, (American Rhetoric).
41. Grasso, G. (2000) Review of Hornet’s Nest: The Experiences of One of the Navy’s First Female Fighter Pilots by Missy Cummings (Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military).
42. Harkavy, W. (2004) Running Out of Patients: In our glorious crusade for democracy, we level a Falluja hospital (Village Voice).
43. Barnard, A. (2004) Returning Fallujans will face clampdown (Boston Globe).
44. Fadhil, A. (2005) City of ghosts (Guardian).
45. Niedringhaus, A. (2005) Tanks, Officers Impose Order in Fallujah (Associated Press).
46. Phinney, D. (2004) "Contract Meals Disaster" for Iraqi Prisoners (CorpWatch).
47. Aljazeera (2005) New Guantanamo abuse cases surface (Aljazeera).
48. Azulay, J. (2005) Guantanamo Abuses Caught on Tape, Report Details (New Standard).
49. Leonnig, C. D. & Priest, D. (2005) Detainees Accuse Female Interrogators: Pentagon Inquiry Is Said to Confirm Muslims’ Accounts of Sexual Tactics at Guantanamo (Washington Post).
50. Mickum IV, G. B. (2005) Tortured, humiliated and crying out for some justice: Four Guantánamo Britons are coming home. Don’t forget those left behind (Guardian).
51. Reuters (2005) Lawyer: Guantanamo detainees sodomised (Aljazeera).
52. McCoy, A. W. (2004) The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib (Tomdispatch.com).
53. Associated Press (2004) Red Cross: Iraq abuse "tantamount to torture" (MSNBC).
54. American Civil Liberties Union (2005) Newly Released Army Documents Point to Agreement Between Defense Department and CIA on "Ghost" Detainees, ACLU Says (American Civil Liberties Union).
55. International Committe of the Red Cross (2004) Report of the nternational Committe of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treatment by the coalition forces of prisoners of war and other protected persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq dring arrest, internment and interrogation (International Committe of the Red Cross).
56. Hanley, C. J. (2004) Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence (Associated Press).
57. Beaumont, P. & Burke, J. (2004) Catastrophe (Guardian).
58. Miller, R. (2003) "Disappearing" Iraqis: Why Are So Many Citizens Arrested and Detained by the American Occupying Force? (River Cities’ Reader).
59. Riverbend (2004) Tales from Abu Ghraib. (Baghdad Burning).
60. USA Today (2004) How innocent Iraqis came to be abused as terrorists (USA Today).
61. Kull, S. (2004) Americans on Detention, Torture, and the War on Terrorism, (Program on International Policy Attitudes/ Kmowledge Networks).
62. Morris, D. & Langer, G. (2004) Terror Suspect Treatment: Most Americans Oppose Torture Techniques (ABC News).
63. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2005) Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees (Washington Post).
64. Scheer, R. (2004) Tout Torture, Get Promoted (Los Angeles Times).
65. Anderson, J. R. (2005) Maj. Gen. Fast, former aide to Sanchez at Abu Ghraib, takes intelligence post (Stars and Stripes).
66. Danner, M. (2005) We Are All Torturers Now (New York Times).
67. Hedges, C. (2002) War is a force that gives us meaning (New York, Public Affairs).
Stephen Soldz (mailto:ssoldz@bgsp.edu) is psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5741
The Psychodynamics of Occupation and the Abuse at Abu Ghraib: An Interpretation After One Year of Revelations
by Stephen Soldz
There are various explanations for what went on at Abu Ghraib. The official US position is that a "few bad apples" among the reservist military police (MPs) there went out of control, violating orders to treat the prisoners humanely -- "Animal House on the night shift," as former defense secretary James Schlesinger described it.(1) The MP defendants claim that they were following orders to soften up the prisoners as a prelude to interrogation. Investigative journalists have documented in detail the chain of memos, orders, and "advice" that led from the top reaches of the US administration to the actions of those MPs.
To write about the psychological aspects of the Abu Ghraib horrors, one must have a theory of what actually happened. So let me make explicit my view of what happened, derived from reading hundreds of newspaper and other accounts of abuse throughout the developing network of US detention centers in Iraq and elsewhere. After 9/11, decisions were made at the upper reaches of the US administration that detainees in America’s "War on Terror" did not deserve traditional protections.(2, 3) Justified by the needs of developing intelligence, brutal methods of treatment of detainees -- "tantamount to torture" as the International Committee of the Red Cross calls it(2, 4) -- became routine.(1, 2, 5-18)
The decision was made to adopt brutal techniques in order to "break" the detainees. As one e-mail in August 2003 from a Military Intelligence officer put it: "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication."(19)
The prison was put under the control of military intelligence.(2, 20) As recommended by Guantánamo commander Major General Geoffrey Miller, techniques of total control and torture in use at Guantánamo(4, 12, 19, 21, 22) were imported as Abu Ghraib was "Gitmoized."(1) As a former Army intelligence officer described Miller’s recommendation: "It means treat the detainees like "expletive deleted" until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep."(23) Waterboarding was imported and dogs were frequently used to instill fear in the detainees.(17) Pressure was put on the MPs guarding prisoners to "set the conditions" for interrogations, and to "manipulate an internee’s emotions and weaknesses."(20) Typical of large bureaucratic organizations, the MPs were given no clear instructions, allowing for "plausible deniability." Thus, the official story of a "few bad apples" doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as abuse was typical of the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and at the myriad (over 20) other detention facilities in Iraq, as well as those in Cuba and Afghanistan. Further, it is not plausible to believe that these MPs, unschooled in interrogation techniques, rediscovered so many of the CIA’s standard torture techniques, designed to humiliate and "break" detainees, as well as special forms of sexual humiliation that would be especially humiliating and degrading to Arab males.(2)
However, the official story isn’t totally false, either. While it is hard to be certain, testimony at the trials of the Abu Ghraib MPs designated as the "fall guys" suggests that they did their share of freelancing. A number of these MPs were having quite a good time abusing the prisoners. As Pvt. Jeremy Sivits testified at the court martial of Spc. Charles Graner, "The soldiers were laughing, seeming to be having a good time" and Pvt. Ivan Frederick II testified that "everybody was smiling and carrying on."(24)
While I have no doubt that torture was policy, we still are faced with the questions of why MPs not trained in interrogation and torture proved so willing to adopt these techniques, and enjoyed themselves along the way, and why soldiers throughout Iraq and Afghanistan engaged in repeated acts of torture and abuse.
What I want to focus on here are a few relatively underemphasized aspects of the war and occupation that contributed to the pervasiveness of abuse. Like all wars, the 2003 Iraq invasion was proceeded by a propaganda barrage. Fantasies of weapons of mass destruction were propagated repeatedly by the Administration, politicians of both parties, and the corporate media, despite serious doubts having been raised as to the existence of these weapons by numerous knowledgeable critics.(25-27) Unstated, but understood by all, was that this war was to be revenge for 9/11; revenge for the death, but even more, revenge for the humiliation.(28, 29) When Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square in April 2003, the US troops draped it with an American flag. The desire for revenge, while unstated, suggested that anything visited upon the Iraqis was acceptable, as revenge creates its own logic.
Stated, rather, was the avowed aim to "liberate" Iraqis from an oppressive regime. Iraqis would greet the invading troops with flowers and open arms, it was claimed. Despite cute propaganda exercises like the stage-managed toppling of Saddam’s statue, the flowers and open arms never materialized. Iraqis were decidedly ambivalent about being invaded and occupied by a foreign power. Within weeks American troops were firing into crowds of Iraqis, killing a number,(30, 31) and lying about the events. Deaths of civilians at roadblocks were a constant.(32-35) And the insurgency grew and grew, its supporters coming to number perhaps 200,000, as estimated by the head of the Iraqi Interim government’s intelligence service.(36)
So what do occupation soldiers do when the stated reason for their occupation of another country is to liberate the populace, but many of that populace regard them as invaders and either respond sullenly to their presence, or actively resist occupation? One coping strategy is to try and distinguish between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." As Staff Sgt. Riley Flaherty expressed it: "What’s really hard is the fine line between the bad guys and the good guys.... Because if you piss off the wrong good guys, you’re really in trouble. So you’ve really got to watch what you do and how you treat the people."(37) That is, the occupied population is split into its good and bad elements, with evil projected onto the bad, and the good construed as largely childlike and in need of protection, but also prone to turn bad at a moment’s notice.
However, the task of an occupation army is one of control of the populace. As Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, from the same unit as Sgt. Flaherty, put it: "I’ve got 200,000 Iraqis I’ve got to control with 18 people... so I’ve got to command respect. And unfortunately, all that hearts and minds stuff, I can’t even think about that." He goes on to explain "There are things I have to do out here that I can’t explain to my chain of command, and that the American people would never understand."(37) Given this requirement, the definition of a good Iraqi becomes one who aids the occupiers in their lonesome task, and there are precious few of them. As Sgt. Aldrich explains: "Because you aren’t helping me catch the bad guys, and if you’re not helping me, you are the bad guy."(37) Given this definition, the distinction between good and bad easily breaks down and nearly the entire occupied populace can become bad.
Another characteristic of occupation is the difficulty the occupation troops have in viewing the occupied as adults, as individuals with wishes, dreams, and intentions of their own. Rather, they are essentially childlike, deserving protection when good, and a spanking when bad. The same Sgt. Flaherty, on a frustrating day, explained: "These people don’t understand nice... You’ve got to be a hard-ass."(37) The entire populace becomes the enemy, as expressed by Sgt. Aldrich: "The one thing you learn over here is that there are no innocent civilians, except the kids. And even them -- the ones that are all, ’Hey mister, mister, chocolate?’ -- I’ll be killing them someday."(37) Note, the absence of any pretense that the occupation is intended to help the occupied. Such illusions are left for the media and PR flacks.
War, including war of occupation, of course involves fear, a pervasive fear and an awareness that death is possible at any moment. That fear, and that awareness, we are reminded by Terror Management Theory,(38) leads to a defense of one’s worldview, which in most cases means an increased attachment to the cultural norms of one’s society, and a rejection and punitive attitude towards those that threaten that worldview. For the occupier, it is the natives, the occupied and their culture, who are rejected.
Another aspect of war is its overwhelmingly masculine quality; war is an assertion of dominance over the other, perceived as weak, as cowardly, as a wimp.(39) Thus, the repeated description of the 9/11 attackers as "cowardly," probably the characteristic least accurately descriptive of them. As President Bush said that day: "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,"(40) attempting to remove the shame by describing the attackers with the most denigrating description. By this means the attacker is made both morally depraved and weak, not really masculine. Yet, the rhetoric simultaneously betrays the fear that underlies it. For today’s women in combat, proving that they are "one of the guys" can be the key to survival.(41)
As the occupied are rejected and become the repository of all that which is rejected by the occupiers, it is but a step to portraying the enemy, those unwilling to meekly submit to occupation, as absolute evil, as was expressed by Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl on the eve of the November, 2004 assault on Falluja: "The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him."(42) Is it any wonder that Falluja was almost totally destroyed, with virtually no buildings left undamaged ? Or that Fallujans who return to their city are treated as if they are concentration camp inmates?(43, 44) Or that this new concentration camp was described as the "safest city in Iraq" by Marine Cpl. Daniel Ferrari,(45) while an anonymous soldier left a memento on a random household’s mirror: ""expletive deleted" Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"(44)
Now return to Abu Ghraib. A small contingent of ill-trained reservist MPs was in charge of guarding thousands of unruly prisoners who were enraged at being imprisoned, largely unjustly, and enraged at the squalid conditions in which they were kept, perhaps best symbolized by the bugs infesting their rancid food.(46) The MPs didn’t speak the language of the prisoners, and had few translators; communication difficulties were so great that the guards evidently did not know that a prison riot was a response to the food situation.
These guards were of low status in the military, being reservists, and were assigned to the undesirable task of guarding prisoners. They lived in constant fear, as nightly attacks on the prison were complemented by riots and attacks from the prisoners. Their military comrades-in-arms were dying in large numbers from the growing insurgency.
The pressure built to generate actionable intelligence from the prisoners, so that the anti-occupation insurgency could be broken. General Miller visited and recommended that the prison be dedicated to the gathering of intelligence, and that the brutal torture techniques developed at Guantánamo(4, 12, 21, 47-51) be utilized. MPs were to "set the conditions" for interrogation(20) by abusing and terrorizing prisoners. Military intelligence was placed in control of the prison by the head of US forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.(20) Many arcane torture techniques, such as waterboarding and forced homosexual sex, developed by the CIA over decades, were put into general use.(3, 19, 52) The message was communicated that senior officials, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, were very interested in the intelligence being generated at Abu Ghraib, that the work of these lowly reservists was truly important.(19)
The effort to generate intelligence out of the prisoners was especially difficult as, according to military intelligence sources, perhaps 70%-90% of them were innocent of any involvement with the insurgents,(19, 53) and just happened to be present at a checkpoint, or in their home, when one of the brutal "cordon and capture" raids occurred.(19) Nonetheless, the response of top military leaders to their innocence was callous at best. Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski is quoted as telling Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, the officer in charge of Iraqi prisons: "I don’t care if we’re holding 15,000 innocent civilians! We’re winning the war!" while the officer in charge of US forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, retorted: "Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them."(54)
The nature of prisons is such that prisoners are usually presumed guilty by the guards. If they didn’t commit the offense for which they were arrested, they must have done something wrong; why else would they be in prison? Under interrogation, those prisoners who refuse to divulge important information must be withholding, providing further evidence of their perfidy. These dynamics must have been even stronger in the Abu Ghraib situation, where the MP guards felt in constant danger and under pressure to demonstrate their worth through breaking the prisoners. To accept that many of the prisoners being kept in such abominable conditions were innocent could only be rationalized by dehumanizing them, by making them the embodiment of all that was unacceptable to the guards. If they weren’t guilty of serious offenses, they were, after all, only "hajis"(29) who, outside the prison, were kept in line with metal "haji-be-good sticks."(37) The very fact that these inferior hajis objected to their unfair imprisonment demonstrated that they were dangerous, and cried out for control. How could such dangerous inferior beings expect to be treated better once they were found guilty by reason of imprisonment? Surely the lowly MPs could demonstrate their worth by providing the punishment these unruly natives, the ungrateful occupied, deserved. To do less was not to do one’s duty.
As these guards did their work keeping the evil recalcitrant hajis in line, which, after all is a rather dirty task, it was not surprising that they tried to make the job interesting, even fun. How many of us can carry out an unpleasant job for months on end without finding ways to enjoy the work? Why should we expect that these poor prison guards in an alien land would do less?
Thus we see that the logic of war, the logic of occupation, the logic of imprisonment, and the post 9/11 logic of revenge all came together in an Iraqi torture center in 2003. The fact that similar actions have been reported in numerous other Iraqi prisons, as well as those in Afghanistan demonstrates that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were emblematic of the new American empire, indeed of empire itself.
Also emblematic of empire, is the denial with which this torture was met. The officials responsible ignored and denied numerous reports of prisoner abuse in newspapers and from non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross.(55-59) Within days of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, I, a single concerned citizen with no special resources, had no difficulty detailing this long record of abuse claims.(14) The publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs and all subsequent revelations about the widespread nature of detainee abuse and torture were met with official denials that anything more than a "few bad apples" were to blame.(60) Furthermore, denial, in the psychological sense of unconsciously ignoring the importance of a fact or event, has characterized the American public reaction. While the majority of Americans told pollsters that the torture was wrong and that the US government was lying about it, and also that those who wrote the legal opinions justifying torture bore some blame,(61, 62) there was no major public outcry over the issue. It was hardly mentioned during the American elections by either major party candidate, or at either party’s convention. Those in charge when the torture happened were reelected, and many of those who developed and justified the policy of torture were promoted,(63-65) with little public outcry. Torture is now out of the closet, it has become an accepted, however distasteful, aspect of American life. As Mark Danner puts it: "We are all torturers now."(66)
I’d like to close with words from Chris Hedges’ haunting meditation on war:
"Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment -- often after a terrible price. The myth of war and the drug of war wait to be tasted.... Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war to survive." (67, p. 173)
And we might add, it needs its torturers.
References
1. Carter, P. (2004) The Road to Abu Ghraib (Washington Monthly).
2. Barry, J., Hirsh, M. & Isikoff, M. (2004) The Roots of Torture: The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war (Newsweek).
3. Hersh, S. M. (2004) Chain of command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, Harper Collins).
4. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo (New York Times).
5. (2004) US Navy Seals Torturing Iraqis (ancapistan.typepad.com).
6. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Federal Government Turns Over Thousands of Torture Documents to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
7. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request (American Civil Liberties Union).
8. Croke, L. A. (2004) Abuse, Torture and Rape Reported at Unlisted U.S.-run Prisons in Iraq (NewStandard).
9. Croke, L. A. (2004) Iraq Torture Investigators Reveal Scores of New Cases (New Standard).
10. Croke, L. A. (2004) FBI Glossed Over Abu Ghraib Abuses (TheNewStandard).
11. Gat, Y. (2005) The Year in Torture (CounterPunch).
12. Lewis, N. A. (2005) Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo (New York Times).
13. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2004) New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread (Washington Post).
14. Soldz, S. (2004) Abuse at Abu Ghraib, the psychodynamics of occupation, and the responsibility of us all (ZNet).
15. American Civil Liberties Union (2004) Torture FOIA (American Civil Liberties Union).
16. White, J. (2004) U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds (Washington Post).
17. White, J. & Higham, S. (2004) Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized: Military Intelligence Personnel Were Involved, Handlers Say (Washington Post).
18. Zernike, K. & Rohde, D. (2004) Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents (New York Times).
19. Danner, M. (2004) Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (New York Review of Books).
20. Borger, J. (2004) US general linked to Abu Ghraib abuse: Leaked memo reveals control of prison passed to military intelligence to ’manipulate detainees’ (Guardian).
21. Cawthorne, A. (2004) Guantanamo men allege abuse (Reuters).
22. Lewis, N. A. (2004) Broad Use Cited of Harsh Tactics at Base in Cuba (New York Times).
23. Davidson, O. G. (2004) The Secret File of Abu Ghraib (Rolling Stone).
24. Serrano, R. A. (2005) Guard Enjoyed Beating Iraqis, Three Testify (Los Angeles Times).
25. Rangwala, G. (2003) Claims and evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).
26. Rangwala, G. (2003) Review of Hussein Kamel’s interview with UNSCOM of 22 August 1995 (MiddleEastReference.org.uk).
27. Ritter, S. (2003) Scott Ritter in His Own Words (Time Online).
28. Wood, P. (2005) Iraq war: two years on (BBC).
29. Rockwell, P. (2005) Army reservist witnesses war crimes: New revelations about racism in the military (Online Journal).
30. Reeves, P. (2003) At least 10 dead as US soldiers fire on school protest (Independent).
31. Wilson, S. (2003) U.S. Forces Kill Two During Iraqi Demonstration (Washington Post).
32. Burns, J. F. (2005) Checkpoint dangers too familiar for Iraqis (International Herald Tribune).
33. Faramarzi, S. (2003) Jittery U.S. Soldiers Kill 6 Iraqis (Associated Press).
34. Huggler, J. (2003) Family shot dead by panicking US troops (Independent).
35. Ciezadlo, A. (2005) What Iraq’s checkpoints are like (Christian Science Monitor).
36. Reynolds, P. (2005) Blistering attacks threaten Iraq election (BBC).
37. Dilanian, K. (2005) Soldiers sometimes rough despite risk of antagonizing friendly Iraqis (Kansas City Star).
38. Pyszczynski, T. A., Greenberg, J. & Solomon, S. (2003) In the wake of 9/11: the psychology of terror (Washington, DC, American Psychological Association).
39. Ducat, S. (2004) The wimp factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity (Boston, Beacon Press).
40. Bush, G. W. (2001) Remarks by President Bush from Barksdale Air Force Base, (American Rhetoric).
41. Grasso, G. (2000) Review of Hornet’s Nest: The Experiences of One of the Navy’s First Female Fighter Pilots by Missy Cummings (Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military).
42. Harkavy, W. (2004) Running Out of Patients: In our glorious crusade for democracy, we level a Falluja hospital (Village Voice).
43. Barnard, A. (2004) Returning Fallujans will face clampdown (Boston Globe).
44. Fadhil, A. (2005) City of ghosts (Guardian).
45. Niedringhaus, A. (2005) Tanks, Officers Impose Order in Fallujah (Associated Press).
46. Phinney, D. (2004) "Contract Meals Disaster" for Iraqi Prisoners (CorpWatch).
47. Aljazeera (2005) New Guantanamo abuse cases surface (Aljazeera).
48. Azulay, J. (2005) Guantanamo Abuses Caught on Tape, Report Details (New Standard).
49. Leonnig, C. D. & Priest, D. (2005) Detainees Accuse Female Interrogators: Pentagon Inquiry Is Said to Confirm Muslims’ Accounts of Sexual Tactics at Guantanamo (Washington Post).
50. Mickum IV, G. B. (2005) Tortured, humiliated and crying out for some justice: Four Guantánamo Britons are coming home. Don’t forget those left behind (Guardian).
51. Reuters (2005) Lawyer: Guantanamo detainees sodomised (Aljazeera).
52. McCoy, A. W. (2004) The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib (Tomdispatch.com).
53. Associated Press (2004) Red Cross: Iraq abuse "tantamount to torture" (MSNBC).
54. American Civil Liberties Union (2005) Newly Released Army Documents Point to Agreement Between Defense Department and CIA on "Ghost" Detainees, ACLU Says (American Civil Liberties Union).
55. International Committe of the Red Cross (2004) Report of the nternational Committe of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treatment by the coalition forces of prisoners of war and other protected persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq dring arrest, internment and interrogation (International Committe of the Red Cross).
56. Hanley, C. J. (2004) Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence (Associated Press).
57. Beaumont, P. & Burke, J. (2004) Catastrophe (Guardian).
58. Miller, R. (2003) "Disappearing" Iraqis: Why Are So Many Citizens Arrested and Detained by the American Occupying Force? (River Cities’ Reader).
59. Riverbend (2004) Tales from Abu Ghraib. (Baghdad Burning).
60. USA Today (2004) How innocent Iraqis came to be abused as terrorists (USA Today).
61. Kull, S. (2004) Americans on Detention, Torture, and the War on Terrorism, (Program on International Policy Attitudes/ Kmowledge Networks).
62. Morris, D. & Langer, G. (2004) Terror Suspect Treatment: Most Americans Oppose Torture Techniques (ABC News).
63. Smith, R. J. & Eggen, D. (2005) Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees (Washington Post).
64. Scheer, R. (2004) Tout Torture, Get Promoted (Los Angeles Times).
65. Anderson, J. R. (2005) Maj. Gen. Fast, former aide to Sanchez at Abu Ghraib, takes intelligence post (Stars and Stripes).
66. Danner, M. (2005) We Are All Torturers Now (New York Times).
67. Hedges, C. (2002) War is a force that gives us meaning (New York, Public Affairs).
Stephen Soldz (mailto:ssoldz@bgsp.edu) is psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5741
As far as the British participation in torture goes. The only reason it got glossed over was because of the fake photos sent to the Mirror newspaper. Mr Blair IMO should be trusted as far as you can throw him. I believe he instigated the fake photos so that it would get the torture accusations off their backs. Some large number of Iraqis died in British custody. I do not know how they have got off the hook.
US accused of seizing Iraqi women to force fugitive relatives to give up
Rory Carroll in Baghdad
Monday April 11, 2005
The Guardian
American forces were yesterday accused of violating international law by taking two Iraqi women hostage in a bungled effort to persuade fugitive male relatives to surrender.
US soldiers seized a mother and daughter from their home in Baghdad two weeks ago and allegedly left a note on the gate: "Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention."
It was signed Bandit 6, apparently a military code, and gave a mobile phone number. When phoned by reporters an American soldier answered but he declined to take questions and hung up.
Salima al-Batawi, 60, and her daughter Aliya, 35, were blindfolded, handcuffed and driven away in a Humvee convoy on April 2, leaving the Arab Sunnis of Taji, a suburb north of the capital, incandescent.
Instead of surrendering, her three sons, Ahmad, Saddam and Arkan, alerted the media. None of them are called Muhammad, but it is believed that the note referred to Ahmad and that the Americans wanted all three brothers.
The brothers have spent time in Abu Ghraib jail, but have never been charged and say they are citrus farmers with no connection to the insurgency.
Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Kent, of the 3rd infantry division, said the women had been seized as suspected insurgents in their own right and not as a bargaining chip.
"We do not take hostages. Sources told us the women were present during meetings to plan attacks against coalition forces and that they had knowledge of terror cell leaders and the location of weapons caches in the area."
He said there was a separate inquiry into Bandit 6's note, which was handwritten in Arabic.
After six days in a US jail near Baghdad airport the women were released without charge but could be rearrested if implicated in an ongoing investigation, Lt Col Kent said.
Nicole Choueiry, of Amnesty International, said: "I do not think it is the first time. It is against international law to take civilians and use them as bargaining chips."
Detaining women has become an explosive issue in Iraq. A statement purportedly from the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said a recent rocket attack by insurgents on Abu Ghraib was partly to avenge the incarceration of women.
US officials claim there are no longer any female inmates in a facility made notorious for abuses revealed last year, including evidence of sexual misconduct against women.
Back home yesterday, Mrs Batawi said Americans threatened to hold her until her sons surrendered but treated her and her daughter with respect. "They carried out a professional investigation. We found beds with clean sheets and copies of the Koran and bottles of water in a big room."
However, she felt humiliated being forced to wear an orange prison uniform without a headscarf and resented being asked whether she was Shia or Sunni.
A militant group said yesterday it kidnapped the deputy of the Pakistani chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, Malik Mohammad Javed. A separate group said it had captured and killed Basem Mohammed Kadem, a brigadier general in the Iraqi army.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1456773,00.html
Rory Carroll in Baghdad
Monday April 11, 2005
The Guardian
American forces were yesterday accused of violating international law by taking two Iraqi women hostage in a bungled effort to persuade fugitive male relatives to surrender.
US soldiers seized a mother and daughter from their home in Baghdad two weeks ago and allegedly left a note on the gate: "Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention."
It was signed Bandit 6, apparently a military code, and gave a mobile phone number. When phoned by reporters an American soldier answered but he declined to take questions and hung up.
Salima al-Batawi, 60, and her daughter Aliya, 35, were blindfolded, handcuffed and driven away in a Humvee convoy on April 2, leaving the Arab Sunnis of Taji, a suburb north of the capital, incandescent.
Instead of surrendering, her three sons, Ahmad, Saddam and Arkan, alerted the media. None of them are called Muhammad, but it is believed that the note referred to Ahmad and that the Americans wanted all three brothers.
The brothers have spent time in Abu Ghraib jail, but have never been charged and say they are citrus farmers with no connection to the insurgency.
Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Kent, of the 3rd infantry division, said the women had been seized as suspected insurgents in their own right and not as a bargaining chip.
"We do not take hostages. Sources told us the women were present during meetings to plan attacks against coalition forces and that they had knowledge of terror cell leaders and the location of weapons caches in the area."
He said there was a separate inquiry into Bandit 6's note, which was handwritten in Arabic.
After six days in a US jail near Baghdad airport the women were released without charge but could be rearrested if implicated in an ongoing investigation, Lt Col Kent said.
Nicole Choueiry, of Amnesty International, said: "I do not think it is the first time. It is against international law to take civilians and use them as bargaining chips."
Detaining women has become an explosive issue in Iraq. A statement purportedly from the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said a recent rocket attack by insurgents on Abu Ghraib was partly to avenge the incarceration of women.
US officials claim there are no longer any female inmates in a facility made notorious for abuses revealed last year, including evidence of sexual misconduct against women.
Back home yesterday, Mrs Batawi said Americans threatened to hold her until her sons surrendered but treated her and her daughter with respect. "They carried out a professional investigation. We found beds with clean sheets and copies of the Koran and bottles of water in a big room."
However, she felt humiliated being forced to wear an orange prison uniform without a headscarf and resented being asked whether she was Shia or Sunni.
A militant group said yesterday it kidnapped the deputy of the Pakistani chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, Malik Mohammad Javed. A separate group said it had captured and killed Basem Mohammed Kadem, a brigadier general in the Iraqi army.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1456773,00.html
Posted on Sat, Apr. 09, 2005
General defends actions regarding Abu Ghraib
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The general formerly in charge of military prisons in Iraq deflected blame Friday for the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, whose lack of leadership has been cited for allowing guards to humiliate Iraqi prisoners, said she believed she was intentionally left in the dark.
''I find it hard to believe that I did not know,'' she said. ''If I had known, I would've raised the issue. I would've shouted about it.''
Karpinski spoke for about 30 minutes to about 200 people during an event sponsored by The Commonwealth Club of California, a nonprofit and nonpartisan public affairs forum. She then answered screened audience questions for another 40 minutes.
Karpinski, 51, was asked repeatedly about her level of responsibility and who is to blame for the mistreatment of prisoners, revealed last April with a shocking series of photographs that included naked prisoners piled in a pyramid and a soldier holding a leash attached to a prone prisoner's neck.
Karpinski said she was expressly forbidden from visiting Abu Ghraib at night -- when the abuse occurred -- and that meetings dealing with complaints were held when she was unavailable. She said she had ''never a word, a hint, a suggestion'' that abuse was going on.
''Hold me responsible for those things I could control,'' Karpinski said, explaining that the cell blocks where the abuse took place were under the control of the U.S. Army's 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, whose officers gave orders to the military police guarding the prisoners.
Karpinski said she was expressly forbidden from visiting Abu Ghraib at night -- when the abuse occurred -- and that meetings dealing with complaints were held when she was unavailable.
She said she had ''never a word, a hint, a suggestion'' that abuse was going on.
Karpinski assumed command of the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade in June 2003 and was responsible for 17 separate prison facilities in Iraq where 3,400 soldiers worked. She was suspended by the Pentagon last May. An independent panel in September recommended she be relieved of her command and given a letter of reprimand, which essentially would end her nearly 30-year military career.
After her presentation, she shook the hand of a soldier who had served under her and who said he had taken the day off to hear her speak. He said he wanted clarification about whether the area where he worked had been under her control. It wasn't, she said.
The man refused to speak to reporters.
''It was a very nebulous chain-of-command,'' Karpinski said.
She said she complained about Abu Ghraib from the beginning. She said she didn't have the right number of people, the right type of equipment to supervise and care for thousands of detainees.
''That planning was never done,'' she said. ''From every angle, it was an absolute disaster
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/monterey...ws/11353960.htm
General defends actions regarding Abu Ghraib
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The general formerly in charge of military prisons in Iraq deflected blame Friday for the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, whose lack of leadership has been cited for allowing guards to humiliate Iraqi prisoners, said she believed she was intentionally left in the dark.
''I find it hard to believe that I did not know,'' she said. ''If I had known, I would've raised the issue. I would've shouted about it.''
Karpinski spoke for about 30 minutes to about 200 people during an event sponsored by The Commonwealth Club of California, a nonprofit and nonpartisan public affairs forum. She then answered screened audience questions for another 40 minutes.
Karpinski, 51, was asked repeatedly about her level of responsibility and who is to blame for the mistreatment of prisoners, revealed last April with a shocking series of photographs that included naked prisoners piled in a pyramid and a soldier holding a leash attached to a prone prisoner's neck.
Karpinski said she was expressly forbidden from visiting Abu Ghraib at night -- when the abuse occurred -- and that meetings dealing with complaints were held when she was unavailable. She said she had ''never a word, a hint, a suggestion'' that abuse was going on.
''Hold me responsible for those things I could control,'' Karpinski said, explaining that the cell blocks where the abuse took place were under the control of the U.S. Army's 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, whose officers gave orders to the military police guarding the prisoners.
Karpinski said she was expressly forbidden from visiting Abu Ghraib at night -- when the abuse occurred -- and that meetings dealing with complaints were held when she was unavailable.
She said she had ''never a word, a hint, a suggestion'' that abuse was going on.
Karpinski assumed command of the U.S. Army's 800th Military Police Brigade in June 2003 and was responsible for 17 separate prison facilities in Iraq where 3,400 soldiers worked. She was suspended by the Pentagon last May. An independent panel in September recommended she be relieved of her command and given a letter of reprimand, which essentially would end her nearly 30-year military career.
After her presentation, she shook the hand of a soldier who had served under her and who said he had taken the day off to hear her speak. He said he wanted clarification about whether the area where he worked had been under her control. It wasn't, she said.
The man refused to speak to reporters.
''It was a very nebulous chain-of-command,'' Karpinski said.
She said she complained about Abu Ghraib from the beginning. She said she didn't have the right number of people, the right type of equipment to supervise and care for thousands of detainees.
''That planning was never done,'' she said. ''From every angle, it was an absolute disaster
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/monterey...ws/11353960.htm
Colombian Artist Depicts Abu Ghraib Abuse
By DAN MOLINSKI
Associated Press Writer
BOGOTA, Colombia -- In a new series of paintings by famed Colombian artist Fernando Botero, Iraqi detainees are shown being beaten by American prison guards, made to wear women's lingerie and suffering other abuse.
Botero has taken his sharpest departure yet from his normally placid scenes of chubby people and other still life paintings and sculptures, which have hung in such places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
He told The Associated Press that he became so upset by prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison that he felt compelled to produce works that would graphically depict it.
"I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion," he said in an interview from his art studio in Paris.
Most of the 50 oils and sketches will be part of a broader exhibit of 170 paintings that opens June 16 in Rome. There are plans for the show to go to Germany later this year and then in 2006 to the United States. Botero said the Abu Ghraib paintings will not be included in the U.S. tour unless museums ask for them.
One of the works shows three naked, bound and hooded Iraqis stacked in a human pyramid behind prison bars. The only color in the sketch is red blood pouring from one of the detainees. Another is a painting of an American soldier swinging a bloody club at the head of a half-naked, helpless man. Many of the characters have the puffiness normally seen in Botero's works, but some have the physique of beefy body builders.
The scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib surfaced when pictures of guards humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners became public early last year, tarnishing the military's image in Arab countries and worldwide, and sparking wider investigations into detainee abuses. So far, seven soldiers have been sentenced for the abuse, with the longest sentence of 10 years in prison going to Spc. Charles Graner Jr., the alleged ringleader of the abuse. Army Pfc. Lynndie England -- who in some of the photos is seen holding a hooded, naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash and pointing at a naked detainee's genitals -- goes on trial in May.
The 73-year-old Botero said his paintings are inspired more by written descriptions of the abuse than by the photographs. The paintings are each titled simply "Abu Ghraib," followed by a number from 1-50 to distinguish them.
Botero said his intent is to emblazon the images upon the consciousness of the world.
"No one would have ever remembered the horrors of Guernica if not for the painting," said Botero, referring to Pablo Picasso's masterpiece "Guernica," which depicts the aerial bombardment of civilians during the Spanish Civil War.
This is not the first time that Botero has depicted violence.
About six years ago, he began painting scenes of bloodshed in Colombia. One such canvas, on display in a Medellin museum, shows Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar being killed by police during a rooftop shootout. Last year, Botero held an exhibition in Bogota about Colombia's 40-year-old guerrilla conflict.
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/news/ce...-celebrity_heds
By DAN MOLINSKI
Associated Press Writer
BOGOTA, Colombia -- In a new series of paintings by famed Colombian artist Fernando Botero, Iraqi detainees are shown being beaten by American prison guards, made to wear women's lingerie and suffering other abuse.
Botero has taken his sharpest departure yet from his normally placid scenes of chubby people and other still life paintings and sculptures, which have hung in such places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
He told The Associated Press that he became so upset by prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison that he felt compelled to produce works that would graphically depict it.
"I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion," he said in an interview from his art studio in Paris.
Most of the 50 oils and sketches will be part of a broader exhibit of 170 paintings that opens June 16 in Rome. There are plans for the show to go to Germany later this year and then in 2006 to the United States. Botero said the Abu Ghraib paintings will not be included in the U.S. tour unless museums ask for them.
One of the works shows three naked, bound and hooded Iraqis stacked in a human pyramid behind prison bars. The only color in the sketch is red blood pouring from one of the detainees. Another is a painting of an American soldier swinging a bloody club at the head of a half-naked, helpless man. Many of the characters have the puffiness normally seen in Botero's works, but some have the physique of beefy body builders.
The scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib surfaced when pictures of guards humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners became public early last year, tarnishing the military's image in Arab countries and worldwide, and sparking wider investigations into detainee abuses. So far, seven soldiers have been sentenced for the abuse, with the longest sentence of 10 years in prison going to Spc. Charles Graner Jr., the alleged ringleader of the abuse. Army Pfc. Lynndie England -- who in some of the photos is seen holding a hooded, naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash and pointing at a naked detainee's genitals -- goes on trial in May.
The 73-year-old Botero said his paintings are inspired more by written descriptions of the abuse than by the photographs. The paintings are each titled simply "Abu Ghraib," followed by a number from 1-50 to distinguish them.
Botero said his intent is to emblazon the images upon the consciousness of the world.
"No one would have ever remembered the horrors of Guernica if not for the painting," said Botero, referring to Pablo Picasso's masterpiece "Guernica," which depicts the aerial bombardment of civilians during the Spanish Civil War.
This is not the first time that Botero has depicted violence.
About six years ago, he began painting scenes of bloodshed in Colombia. One such canvas, on display in a Medellin museum, shows Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar being killed by police during a rooftop shootout. Last year, Botero held an exhibition in Bogota about Colombia's 40-year-old guerrilla conflict.
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/news/ce...-celebrity_heds
I wonder if any US museums will request them.
Guantanamo Detainee Suing U.S. to Get Video of Alleged Torture
By Carol Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 14, 2005; Page A02
A detainee at a U.S. military prison alleges that U.S. military guards jumped on his head until he had a stroke that paralyzed his face, nearly drowned him in a toilet and later broke several of his fingers, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court.
The detainee, Mustafa Ait Idr, 34, an Algerian citizen living in Bosnia, has been held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for three years on suspicion that he plotted to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia. The lawsuit, filed by his attorneys in federal court in Boston, alleges that the government has probably videotaped Idr's beatings and demands that it produce any such tapes and all records of alleged torture and interrogation tactics at the detention facility.
The lawyers asked for the material seven months ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit asserts that the Defense and Justice departments are refusing to provide the material.
A Defense Department representative, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the department does not comment on individual detainees' cases and could not comment on the lawsuit because it had not yet received it.
Idr described the alleged abuse to his attorneys when they visited him in Cuba recently. His account of the beatings is very similar to written military summaries of the incidents, according to the lawsuit.
The military videotaped the work of teams of prison guards responsible for quelling disturbances by detainees and created written summaries of the material on the tapes. More than two dozen detainees have alleged in declassified accounts given to their attorneys that the teams' real purpose was to force them to confess or cooperate with interrogators.
"The departments of Defense and Justice must explain how these abuses happened and take action," said Avi Cover, senior associate at Human Rights First, an advocacy group.
Idr was accused of plotting with five others to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in November 2001. All were acquitted by a Bosnian court in January 2002, but U.S. agents arrested them as they left the courthouse and eventually took them to Guantanamo Bay.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Apr13.html
By Carol Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 14, 2005; Page A02
A detainee at a U.S. military prison alleges that U.S. military guards jumped on his head until he had a stroke that paralyzed his face, nearly drowned him in a toilet and later broke several of his fingers, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court.
The detainee, Mustafa Ait Idr, 34, an Algerian citizen living in Bosnia, has been held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for three years on suspicion that he plotted to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia. The lawsuit, filed by his attorneys in federal court in Boston, alleges that the government has probably videotaped Idr's beatings and demands that it produce any such tapes and all records of alleged torture and interrogation tactics at the detention facility.
The lawyers asked for the material seven months ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit asserts that the Defense and Justice departments are refusing to provide the material.
A Defense Department representative, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the department does not comment on individual detainees' cases and could not comment on the lawsuit because it had not yet received it.
Idr described the alleged abuse to his attorneys when they visited him in Cuba recently. His account of the beatings is very similar to written military summaries of the incidents, according to the lawsuit.
The military videotaped the work of teams of prison guards responsible for quelling disturbances by detainees and created written summaries of the material on the tapes. More than two dozen detainees have alleged in declassified accounts given to their attorneys that the teams' real purpose was to force them to confess or cooperate with interrogators.
"The departments of Defense and Justice must explain how these abuses happened and take action," said Avi Cover, senior associate at Human Rights First, an advocacy group.
Idr was accused of plotting with five others to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo in November 2001. All were acquitted by a Bosnian court in January 2002, but U.S. agents arrested them as they left the courthouse and eventually took them to Guantanamo Bay.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Apr13.html
Lawsuit Filed Against Government Contains Shocking New Guantanamo Torture Allegations
4/13/2005 7:58:00 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: Assignment Desk, Daybook Editor
Contact: Melissa Hoffer, 617-526-6875 or melissa.hoffer@wilmerhale.com
News Advisory:
-- Press conference April 13 at 11:30 a.m.
-- Lawyers for detainees allege deliberate obstruction by U.S. authorities
Filing a major new lawsuit against the Government today, lawyers for six Bosnian Guantanamo detainees accused the Department of Defense and Department of Justice of refusing to release information on severe torture conducted at the U.S. base. Filing a Freedom of Information Act suit in federal district court in Boston, the lawyers made shocking new allegations of torture by U.S. forces against detainees, including severe beatings resulting in facial paralysis for one prisoner, chemical irritant gassing, near suffocation by repeatedly ramming a prisoner's head into a toilet, and religious persecution by forced removal of clothing required for prayer.
-- A press conference will be held this morning at 11:30am at the entrance of the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston
The lawyers filed today's suit after the government failed to respond to detailed FOIA requests served in September of last year. Despite repeated assurances from the Departments, they refuse to release information relating to the shocking torture allegations and the United States' policy on torture at Guantanamo.
"This lawsuit is about the core values of Government transparency and accountability in our democracy," said Robert Kirsch. "The Departments of Defense and Justice are refusing to let American people know about torture, abuse, and religious persecution being carried out in their names. It is already well known that, in many instances, the Defense Department has actually filmed torture and abuse-but not a single frame has been released to the American public. This deliberate obstruction simply cannot continue."
"Something is clearly wrong with the system when a detainee in the care of the United States is beaten so badly he suffers paralysis," said Avi Cover, Senior Associate of Human Rights First. "The Departments of Defense and Justice must explain how these abuses happened and take action against those who perpetrated these crimes."
Lawyers for Messrs. Boumediene, Ait Idir, Bensayah, Lahmar, Nechla, and Boudella submitted a request for information to the DOD and DOJ in September. Both agencies acknowledged receipt of the request and the DOD even granted a request for expedited processing. But seven months later, the agencies have yet to produce any of the information requested, including:
-- Information on how and why detainees were taken to Guantanamo,
-- What policies and procedures govern their detention,
-- What policies govern the methods of interrogation at the base,
-- Information into abuses and failures to adhere to such policies, procedures or guidelines
Lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees are available for print, television and radio interviews throughout this week out of Boston. For more information on the lawsuit filed today, or to arrange an interview, please contact Melissa Hoffer, 617-526-6875 or melissa.hoffer@wilmerhale.com.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
4/13/2005 7:58:00 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: Assignment Desk, Daybook Editor
Contact: Melissa Hoffer, 617-526-6875 or melissa.hoffer@wilmerhale.com
News Advisory:
-- Press conference April 13 at 11:30 a.m.
-- Lawyers for detainees allege deliberate obstruction by U.S. authorities
Filing a major new lawsuit against the Government today, lawyers for six Bosnian Guantanamo detainees accused the Department of Defense and Department of Justice of refusing to release information on severe torture conducted at the U.S. base. Filing a Freedom of Information Act suit in federal district court in Boston, the lawyers made shocking new allegations of torture by U.S. forces against detainees, including severe beatings resulting in facial paralysis for one prisoner, chemical irritant gassing, near suffocation by repeatedly ramming a prisoner's head into a toilet, and religious persecution by forced removal of clothing required for prayer.
-- A press conference will be held this morning at 11:30am at the entrance of the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston
The lawyers filed today's suit after the government failed to respond to detailed FOIA requests served in September of last year. Despite repeated assurances from the Departments, they refuse to release information relating to the shocking torture allegations and the United States' policy on torture at Guantanamo.
"This lawsuit is about the core values of Government transparency and accountability in our democracy," said Robert Kirsch. "The Departments of Defense and Justice are refusing to let American people know about torture, abuse, and religious persecution being carried out in their names. It is already well known that, in many instances, the Defense Department has actually filmed torture and abuse-but not a single frame has been released to the American public. This deliberate obstruction simply cannot continue."
"Something is clearly wrong with the system when a detainee in the care of the United States is beaten so badly he suffers paralysis," said Avi Cover, Senior Associate of Human Rights First. "The Departments of Defense and Justice must explain how these abuses happened and take action against those who perpetrated these crimes."
Lawyers for Messrs. Boumediene, Ait Idir, Bensayah, Lahmar, Nechla, and Boudella submitted a request for information to the DOD and DOJ in September. Both agencies acknowledged receipt of the request and the DOD even granted a request for expedited processing. But seven months later, the agencies have yet to produce any of the information requested, including:
-- Information on how and why detainees were taken to Guantanamo,
-- What policies and procedures govern their detention,
-- What policies govern the methods of interrogation at the base,
-- Information into abuses and failures to adhere to such policies, procedures or guidelines
Lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees are available for print, television and radio interviews throughout this week out of Boston. For more information on the lawsuit filed today, or to arrange an interview, please contact Melissa Hoffer, 617-526-6875 or melissa.hoffer@wilmerhale.com.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
After reading post 192 I feel quite sick. The poor man, if animals were treated in this way and the soldiers were reported, I bet they would be out of the army, or at least very severely disciplined. (As happened in the case of some Australian service men who mistreated some cats a few months ago.)
Case Studies in Hypocrisy:U.S. Human Rights Policy, Part I
Chomsky
U.S. Human Rights Policy
Producer: David Barsamian of Alternative Radio
Length: 107 minutes (both CDs) minutes
[Watch]
The U.S. prides itself as the defender of democracy and beacon of human rights. Chomsky explodes this myth and shows us how to peek behind the curtain to see what is really at work behind the human rights rhetoric.
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/cont...?content_id=717
Case Studies in Hypocrisy:U.S. Human Rights Policy, Part II
Chomsky
Case Studies in Hypocrisy: U.S. Human Rights Policy disc 2
Producer: David Barsamian of Alternative Radio
Length: 108 min. minutes
[Watch]
Chomsky cleanly seperates the real motives of the ongoing assault on Iraq from the explanations of politicians and the corporate media.
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/cont...?content_id=718
Chomsky
U.S. Human Rights Policy
Producer: David Barsamian of Alternative Radio
Length: 107 minutes (both CDs) minutes
[Watch]
The U.S. prides itself as the defender of democracy and beacon of human rights. Chomsky explodes this myth and shows us how to peek behind the curtain to see what is really at work behind the human rights rhetoric.
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/cont...?content_id=717
Case Studies in Hypocrisy:U.S. Human Rights Policy, Part II
Chomsky
Case Studies in Hypocrisy: U.S. Human Rights Policy disc 2
Producer: David Barsamian of Alternative Radio
Length: 108 min. minutes
[Watch]
Chomsky cleanly seperates the real motives of the ongoing assault on Iraq from the explanations of politicians and the corporate media.
http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/cont...?content_id=718
The security and intelligence dossier
United States: trade in torture
This is a story of private jets flying out of Germany, of kidnappings on European streets, and of torture. It has a cast of lawyers, spies, suspected terrorists, innocent bystanders and an ex-CIA boss who believes that ‘human rights is a very flexible concept’.
By Stephen Grey
A SWEDISH immigration lawyer, Kjell Jönsson, was on the phone to a client, asylum seeker Mohamed al-Zery from Egypt, on the afternoon of 18 December 2001. “Suddenly there was a voice coming in, saying to al-Zery to end the telephone conversation,” Jönsson recalls. “It was the Swedish police, who had arrested him.”
Jönsson had requested the Swedish government to promise that there would be no quick decision on Zery’s application for refugee status: he feared that Zery would be tortured if sent back to Cairo. But Zery was expelled in the shortest time that Jönsson had encountered in 30 years of asylum work.
Five hours after the arrest of Zery and another Egyptian, Ahmed Agiza, both were deported from Stockholm’s Brömma airport. It was not revealed for another two years that there had been a US plane at the airport, plus a team of US agents who, it has been claimed, picked up the suspects, manacled their wrists and ankles, dressed them in orange overalls, drugged them, and bundled them into the plane.
Jönsson said the US team “were wearing black hoods and they had no uniforms; they were wearing jeans. The Swedish security police described them as very professional.” The whole operation took less than 10 minutes. “It was obvious that they have done things like this before.”
The events, including the presence of the US agents, were kept quiet for months. But in response to concern in Sweden, its parliament has set up an inquiry and already released documents that confirm what happened. In one, the head of the deportation operation with the Swedish security agency, Arne Andersson, said they had problems obtaining a plane that night and turned to the CIA: “In the end we accepted an offer from our American friends . . . in getting access to a plane that had direct over-flight permits over all of Europe and could do the deportation in a very quick way.”
When agreeing to the transfer of the prisoners to Egypt, the Swedish government had sought and obtained diplomatic assurances that both men would not be tortured and would receive regular consular visits from Swedish diplomats in Cairo. They received such visits in jail. The authorities told the Swedish parliament and a United Nations committee that the prisoners had made no complaints. But they had - right from the first visit, they protested that they had been severely tortured. Jönsson says Zery was tortured repeatedly for almost two months. “He was kept in a very cold, very small cell and he was beaten; the most painful torture was . . . where electrodes were put to all sensitive parts of his body many times, under surveillance by a medical doctor.”
Zery has now been freed, and has not been charged with any crime. But he is banned from leaving Egypt or from speaking openly about his time in prison. Agiza remains in an Egyptian prison. His mother, Hamida Shalibai, who has visited him many times, said in Cairo: “When he arrived in Egypt, they took him, hooded and handcuffed, to a building. He was led to an underground facility, going down a staircase. Then, they started interrogation, and torture. As soon as he was asked a question and he replied, ‘I don’t know’, they would apply electric shocks to his body, and beat him . . . During the first month of interrogation, he was naked, and not given any clothes. He almost froze to death.”
The confirmation that US agents were involved in the Swedish case provided the first concrete evidence that since 9/11 the US has been involved in organising a worldwide traffic in prisoners. Official and journalistic investigations show that the US has systematically organised the repatriation of Islamic militants to countries in the Arab world and East Asia where they can be imprisoned and interrogated using methods forbidden to US agents. Some call it torture by proxy. Prisoners have been captured and transported by the US not only from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Gambia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The official term, coined by the CIA, is “extraordinary rendition”. No serving US official will discuss it in public. But a former senior official of the CIA, who left the agency last November, has provided a detailed and candid explanation. Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio programme, File on Four. He confirmed the Swedish case was part of a much wider system.
Scheuer said the CIA invented rendition because it was ordered by the White House to deal with al-Qaida but had few options on what to do with terrorists it captured. “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals,” he said. “And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policymaker, where do you want to take them, the answer was - that’s your job. And so we developed this system of assisting countries to capture individuals overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system.”
Among those at the centre of investigations into rendition is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Barbara Olshansky. She is examining modern cases and how rendition is being justified legally. She believes the US is not only using third countries to interrogate prisoners but also its own offshore jail facilities run and operated by the CIA. She says that for more than 100 years the US seized fugitives outside its jurisdiction to bring them back to the US to face justice. General Manuel Noriega, the former president of Panama, was one high-profile example (1). That was ordinary rendition.
After the CIA began to fight al-Qaida, and especially since 9/11, extraordinary rendition emerged; the prisoner was captured, not for return to the US, but for transfer elsewhere. “Rendition started in the 1880s,” Olshansky says. “The US would always use any measure to get an individual back to be tried in front of a court here . . . Now this entire idea has been turned on its head. We now have extraordinary rendition, which means the US is capturing people and sending them to countries for interrogation under torture: rendering people for the purpose of extracting information. There is no planned justice at the end.”
Surprisingly, the CIA and other US agencies often use private executive jets to transfer prisoners. I obtained the confidential flight logs of a long-range Gulfstream V jet at the centre of the traffic. Since 2001 the plane has been to 49 destinations outside the US and has criss-crossed the world. It made frequent visits to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Uzbekistan, all destinations from where the US has been repatriating prisoners.
The white jet, which has been photographed by plane spotters, has no marking except its US civilian registration number, until recently N379P. I have seen documentary evidence that it was the plane used to fly the Egyptians from Sweden. In October 2001 witnesses saw it in Karachi, Pakistan, when a group of masked men deported a terrorist suspect to Jordan.
According to a former covert officer with the CIA, Robert Baer, who has seen the flight logs, the jet is definitely involved in renditions. “The ultimate destinations of these flights are places that are involved in torture,” he says. Baer, who worked for the CIA in the Middle East for 21 years until he left in the mid-1990s, said such civilian jets were useful to the CIA because there were no military markings. “You can run these things out of shelf companies. You can set them up quickly, dismantle them when they are exposed; you can do it overnight - change the airplane if you have to. It’s fairly standard practice.”
Baer says rendition is about more than sending terrorists to be locked up in prison. Each country has its own value. “If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner to Egypt you will probably never see him again; the same with Syria.” Countries such as Syria might seem to be US enemies but remain allies in the secret war against Islamic militancy. Baer says: “The simple rule in the Middle East is my enemy’s enemy is my friend . . . that’s the way it works. All of these countries are suffering in one way or another from Islamic fundamentalism, militant Islam.” For years the Syrians have offered to work with the US against Islamic militancy. “So at least until 11 September these offers were turned down. We generally avoided the Egyptians and the Syrians because they were so brutal.”
Baer believes the CIA has been carrying out renditions for years, but they became bigger and more systematic after 9/11. He says hundreds of prisoners, more than were sent to Guantánamo, may have been sent by the US to Middle Eastern prisons and that 9/11 had “justified scrapping the Geneva Convention” and was the end of “our rule of law as we knew it in the West”.
Some defenders of rendition inside the US administration view its purpose as the removal of terrorists from the streets. After a terrorist suspect has been sent back to Egypt, the US takes no interest in what happens. But the case of an Australian suspect, Mamdouh Habib, indicates that renditions are also aimed at collecting intelligence, which can be extracted with torture, forbidden to US agents. Habib, a former coffee shop manager from Sydney, was arrested in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, a month after 9/11.
He was handed over to US agents, who flew him to Cairo, where he was tortured for six months, according to his US lawyer, Professor Joe Margulies, of the MacArthur Justice Centre of the University of Chicago. Margulies says: “Mr Habib describes routine beatings. He was taken into a room and handcuffed and the room was gradually filled with water until the water was just beneath his chin. Can you imagine the terror of knowing you can’t escape?” On another occasion, he was suspended from a wall. “His feet rested on a drum with a metal bar through it. And when they passed an electric current on the drum he got a jolt of electricity and he had to move his feet, and he was left suspended by his hands. And it went on until he fainted.”
Under this interrogation, Margulies, says, Habib confessed to his involvement with al-Qaida and readily signed “every document they put in front of him”.
He was transferred back to US custody, sent to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. The confessions he signed in Egypt were used against him in military tribunals. According to Margulies: “Those combatant status review tribunals relied on the evidence secured in Egypt as a basis to detain Mr Habib.”
After Margulies and others lodged public protests over his torture, Habib was freed from Guantánamo in January and flown to Australia, where the government said he would not be charged with any crime, although intelligence officials there continue to accuse him of involvement with al-Qaida.
Most prisoners sent by the US to jails in the Middle East are not free to reveal their treatment. But a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, a mobile phone technician rendered to a Syrian jail by the US, is now free to speak. His story supports the assertion that prisoners are sent abroad to be questioned. In September 2002 Arar, returning home from a holiday in Tunisia, was changing planes at JFK airport in New York. He had often visited and worked in the US, so he expected no problems. But he was taken to an interrogation room and eventually an immigration holding centre, the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.
It became clear that the reason for his arrest was information passed from Canada to the US. Canada was secretly investigating a terrorist suspect in Ottawa, and Arar had used the suspect’s name as an emergency contact when he signed a lease on a flat. Although he is a Syrian national by birth, Arar is a citizen of Canada and has lived there for 17 years. He was surprised to be asked questions in New York that could easily be dealt with in Ottawa.
Twelve days after his arrest, Arar was woken at 3am to be told he was being removed from the US. He was driven to New Jersey and, in chains, put aboard an executive jet. “I thought when they put me on this private jet with its leather seats, who am I for them to do that? What kind of information could I offer them? So when they fed me this nice dinner, I thought of the tradition in the Muslim world called Eid, where they slaughter an animal, and before they slaughter the animal they feed him. That’s exactly what I thought when I was in the plane. I was always thinking how I could avoid torture, because at that point I realised that the only reason why they were sending me somewhere was to be tortured for them to get information. I was 100% sure about that.“
After two stops for fuel, the plane arrived in Amman, Jordan, and Arar was taken by road to Damascus, to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. He says he was placed in a cell little bigger than a coffin and was kept there for more than 10 months. His fears of torture were realised. “The interrogator said: ‘Do you know what this is?’. I said: ‘Yes, it’s a cable’ and he told me: ‘Open your right hand.’ I opened my right hand and he hit me like crazy. And the pain was so painful, and of course I started crying and then he told me to open my left hand, and I opened it and he missed, then hit my wrist. And then he asked me questions. If he does not think you are telling the truth, then he hits again. An hour or two later he put me in this room where sometimes I could hear people being tortured.”
After three days short of a year in Syrian custody, Arar was released and flown home to Ottawa. No charges have ever been laid against him by Canada or Syria. In Canada his case has caused a political outcry and there is a public inquiry. Like many modern torture victims, Arar has no physical scars. Professional interrogators are too clever. His scars are psychological.
But the head of Amnesty International in Canada, Alex Neve, is convinced that Arar is telling the truth: “I believe it for a number of reasons. I interviewed him in considerable detail, and in the course of my many years of work with Amnesty International I have interviewed torture survivors here in Canada, in refugee camps, individuals who have just been released from jail cells; and I found his experience to be consistent and credible with what I have known and learned and experienced at other interviews.”
Who is responsible for this system of rendition, and who in Washington authorised it? At the Fall’s Church, Virginia, home of Michael Scheuer, we spoke about the tactics of the war on terror and about why, when he headed the Osama bin Laden unit at the CIA, they developed rendition as a tactic against al-Qaida. Scheuer is outspoken - while at the CIA he wrote two critical books (published anonymously) about anti-terror activities. But he has never before been so candid about such a sensitive matter.
Scheuer insists that every rendition operation was approved by lawyers: “There is a large legal department within the CIA, and there is a section of the department of justice that is involved in legal interpretations for intelligence work, and there is a team of lawyers at the national security council. And on all of these things those lawyers are involved in one way or another and have signed off on the procedure. The idea that somehow this is a rogue operation that someone has dreamed up is just absurd.” Scheuer recalls that when he organised such operations, the authority had to come from director of central intelligence or his assistant director. “So basically the number one and two men in the intelligence community are the ones who sign off.”
Scheuer says that with each rendition, he is convinced that “these people deserved to be off the street”. But mistakes would happen, as they always did, and innocents might be captured. “It is impossible not to have a mistake in the business of espionage and intelligence,” he says. “There was never anything flip or blasé about the way this was approached. It was a deadly serious business, and if we were wrong, we were wrong. But the evidence pointed us toward what we did.”
Scheuer has few qualms about the danger that such men might be tortured: “The bottom line is getting anyone off the street who you’re confident has been involved or is planning to be involved in operations that could kill Americans is a worthwhile activity.”
Even if he might be tortured? “It wouldn’t be us torturing them. And I also think that there is a lot of Hollywood involved in our portrayal of torture in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia. It’s rather hypocritical to worry about what the Egyptians do to people who are terrorists and not condemn the Israelis for what they do to people they deem terrorists. Human rights is a very flexible concept. It kind of depends on how hypocritical you want to be on a particular day.”
To be fair to Scheuer, he has concerns about rendition as a long-term tactic. He believes that dictatorial regimes such as Egypt and Jordan cause Islamic militancy, so it makes little strategic sense to be working closely with them. “Any kind of a detainee capture is a technical success, but in the strategic sense we are losing, and one of the main reasons is because of our support for dictatorships in the Muslim world.”
But, he says, the US has little option about what to do with these prisoners. Politicians do not want terrorists brought back to US soil and dealt with in US courts. “We’re in a lot of positions around the world where we don’t have a lot of options, and sometimes you have to work with the devil.” As long as US policymakers did not decide how to deal with prisoners under the US legal system, the CIA had no choice but “do what you can with what you have”.
Scheuer estimates that there have been about 100 CIA renditions of Sunni terrorists. Others, including Robert Baer, think the figure is much higher and that in the post-9/11 world the US department of defence under Donald Rumsfeld is now in the business of moving prisoners around the world, while the US military has shifted hundreds of prisoners to jails in the Middle East.
The US department of defence and the CIA declined to speak about rendition and its justification. I did speak to a vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank linked to the Bush administration. Danielle Pletka was a former senior staffer on the Senate foreign relations committee. “I’m not a big fan of torture,” she says. She does not endorse Syria or the way Egypt runs its prisons or security system.“Unfortunately, there are times in war when it is necessary to do things in a way that is absolutely and completely abhorrent to most good, decent people. While I don’t want to say that the US has engaged routinely in such practices, because I don’t think that it is routine by any standard . . . if it is absolutely imperative to find something out at that moment, then it is imperative to find something out at that moment, and Club Med is not the place to do it.”
What is the legality of these operations? Pletka says that, as a non-lawyer, she cannot answer such questions. The United Nations convention against torture, ratified by the US and endorsed by President Bush, states that “no state shall expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”. Every year the US state department condemns and details human rights abuse and torture in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Last year’s report on Egypt described torture as “common and persistent”.
So how can rendition be legal? No one at the justice department would comment. The US legal justification is a state secret. Official Washington’s coyness about defending rendition may have something to do with the increased threat of being held to account in the courts. Apart from the danger of lawsuits in US courts, there are judicial investigations opening into alleged CIA abductions on European soil.
Germany has been a key base for the CIA jets. The flight logs I have seen show frequent stops of the Gulfstream jet, and a Boeing 737 jet used for rendition, at Frankfurt airport. There is a judicial inquiry under way in Germany into the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen from Ulm who claimed he was kidnapped in Skopje, Macedonia, on 31 December 2003. He was flown three weeks later to Afghanistan and a US prison facility where, he has claimed, he was repeatedly beaten before being released four months later and dumped on a roadside in Albania.
At first his claims seemed unbelievable, but flight logs I obtained from aviation sources show clear evidence that the CIA’s Boeing 737 transported him to Skopje on 23 January 2004. My documents show the plane flew in from Majorca and then took Masri to Kabul via Baghdad. Such evidence could put the CIA in a difficult position with its German counterparts, who may be forced to treat the case as an illegal kidnap.
In Italy there is now a judicial investigation into the kidnapping of a suspected al-Qaida activist in Milan. It is claimed that US agents, without legal permission, kidnapped a suspect from the streets of a close European ally. At noon on 16 February 2003 an Egyptian, Abu Omar, disappeared in Milan’s Via Guerzona during a 10-minute walk from his home to a local mosque. An eyewitness said he was stopped on the street by three white men, with a van drawn up on the pavement. He had been under surveillance by Italian authorities but they denied any role in his disappearance. The claim is that he was seized by US agents, taken to the US Aviano air base and flown to Egypt.
The deputy prosecutor of Milan, Armando Spataro, who is the magistrate investigating the case, refuses to accuse the US but is treating the case as involuntary kidnap and is certain that Omar is now in Egypt. If the US was involved, would it be a crime? “If it were true, it would be a serious breach of Italian law. It would be absolutely illegal,” he says.
http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/04usatorture
United States: trade in torture
This is a story of private jets flying out of Germany, of kidnappings on European streets, and of torture. It has a cast of lawyers, spies, suspected terrorists, innocent bystanders and an ex-CIA boss who believes that ‘human rights is a very flexible concept’.
By Stephen Grey
A SWEDISH immigration lawyer, Kjell Jönsson, was on the phone to a client, asylum seeker Mohamed al-Zery from Egypt, on the afternoon of 18 December 2001. “Suddenly there was a voice coming in, saying to al-Zery to end the telephone conversation,” Jönsson recalls. “It was the Swedish police, who had arrested him.”
Jönsson had requested the Swedish government to promise that there would be no quick decision on Zery’s application for refugee status: he feared that Zery would be tortured if sent back to Cairo. But Zery was expelled in the shortest time that Jönsson had encountered in 30 years of asylum work.
Five hours after the arrest of Zery and another Egyptian, Ahmed Agiza, both were deported from Stockholm’s Brömma airport. It was not revealed for another two years that there had been a US plane at the airport, plus a team of US agents who, it has been claimed, picked up the suspects, manacled their wrists and ankles, dressed them in orange overalls, drugged them, and bundled them into the plane.
Jönsson said the US team “were wearing black hoods and they had no uniforms; they were wearing jeans. The Swedish security police described them as very professional.” The whole operation took less than 10 minutes. “It was obvious that they have done things like this before.”
The events, including the presence of the US agents, were kept quiet for months. But in response to concern in Sweden, its parliament has set up an inquiry and already released documents that confirm what happened. In one, the head of the deportation operation with the Swedish security agency, Arne Andersson, said they had problems obtaining a plane that night and turned to the CIA: “In the end we accepted an offer from our American friends . . . in getting access to a plane that had direct over-flight permits over all of Europe and could do the deportation in a very quick way.”
When agreeing to the transfer of the prisoners to Egypt, the Swedish government had sought and obtained diplomatic assurances that both men would not be tortured and would receive regular consular visits from Swedish diplomats in Cairo. They received such visits in jail. The authorities told the Swedish parliament and a United Nations committee that the prisoners had made no complaints. But they had - right from the first visit, they protested that they had been severely tortured. Jönsson says Zery was tortured repeatedly for almost two months. “He was kept in a very cold, very small cell and he was beaten; the most painful torture was . . . where electrodes were put to all sensitive parts of his body many times, under surveillance by a medical doctor.”
Zery has now been freed, and has not been charged with any crime. But he is banned from leaving Egypt or from speaking openly about his time in prison. Agiza remains in an Egyptian prison. His mother, Hamida Shalibai, who has visited him many times, said in Cairo: “When he arrived in Egypt, they took him, hooded and handcuffed, to a building. He was led to an underground facility, going down a staircase. Then, they started interrogation, and torture. As soon as he was asked a question and he replied, ‘I don’t know’, they would apply electric shocks to his body, and beat him . . . During the first month of interrogation, he was naked, and not given any clothes. He almost froze to death.”
The confirmation that US agents were involved in the Swedish case provided the first concrete evidence that since 9/11 the US has been involved in organising a worldwide traffic in prisoners. Official and journalistic investigations show that the US has systematically organised the repatriation of Islamic militants to countries in the Arab world and East Asia where they can be imprisoned and interrogated using methods forbidden to US agents. Some call it torture by proxy. Prisoners have been captured and transported by the US not only from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Gambia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The official term, coined by the CIA, is “extraordinary rendition”. No serving US official will discuss it in public. But a former senior official of the CIA, who left the agency last November, has provided a detailed and candid explanation. Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio programme, File on Four. He confirmed the Swedish case was part of a much wider system.
Scheuer said the CIA invented rendition because it was ordered by the White House to deal with al-Qaida but had few options on what to do with terrorists it captured. “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals,” he said. “And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policymaker, where do you want to take them, the answer was - that’s your job. And so we developed this system of assisting countries to capture individuals overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system.”
Among those at the centre of investigations into rendition is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Barbara Olshansky. She is examining modern cases and how rendition is being justified legally. She believes the US is not only using third countries to interrogate prisoners but also its own offshore jail facilities run and operated by the CIA. She says that for more than 100 years the US seized fugitives outside its jurisdiction to bring them back to the US to face justice. General Manuel Noriega, the former president of Panama, was one high-profile example (1). That was ordinary rendition.
After the CIA began to fight al-Qaida, and especially since 9/11, extraordinary rendition emerged; the prisoner was captured, not for return to the US, but for transfer elsewhere. “Rendition started in the 1880s,” Olshansky says. “The US would always use any measure to get an individual back to be tried in front of a court here . . . Now this entire idea has been turned on its head. We now have extraordinary rendition, which means the US is capturing people and sending them to countries for interrogation under torture: rendering people for the purpose of extracting information. There is no planned justice at the end.”
Surprisingly, the CIA and other US agencies often use private executive jets to transfer prisoners. I obtained the confidential flight logs of a long-range Gulfstream V jet at the centre of the traffic. Since 2001 the plane has been to 49 destinations outside the US and has criss-crossed the world. It made frequent visits to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Uzbekistan, all destinations from where the US has been repatriating prisoners.
The white jet, which has been photographed by plane spotters, has no marking except its US civilian registration number, until recently N379P. I have seen documentary evidence that it was the plane used to fly the Egyptians from Sweden. In October 2001 witnesses saw it in Karachi, Pakistan, when a group of masked men deported a terrorist suspect to Jordan.
According to a former covert officer with the CIA, Robert Baer, who has seen the flight logs, the jet is definitely involved in renditions. “The ultimate destinations of these flights are places that are involved in torture,” he says. Baer, who worked for the CIA in the Middle East for 21 years until he left in the mid-1990s, said such civilian jets were useful to the CIA because there were no military markings. “You can run these things out of shelf companies. You can set them up quickly, dismantle them when they are exposed; you can do it overnight - change the airplane if you have to. It’s fairly standard practice.”
Baer says rendition is about more than sending terrorists to be locked up in prison. Each country has its own value. “If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner to Egypt you will probably never see him again; the same with Syria.” Countries such as Syria might seem to be US enemies but remain allies in the secret war against Islamic militancy. Baer says: “The simple rule in the Middle East is my enemy’s enemy is my friend . . . that’s the way it works. All of these countries are suffering in one way or another from Islamic fundamentalism, militant Islam.” For years the Syrians have offered to work with the US against Islamic militancy. “So at least until 11 September these offers were turned down. We generally avoided the Egyptians and the Syrians because they were so brutal.”
Baer believes the CIA has been carrying out renditions for years, but they became bigger and more systematic after 9/11. He says hundreds of prisoners, more than were sent to Guantánamo, may have been sent by the US to Middle Eastern prisons and that 9/11 had “justified scrapping the Geneva Convention” and was the end of “our rule of law as we knew it in the West”.
Some defenders of rendition inside the US administration view its purpose as the removal of terrorists from the streets. After a terrorist suspect has been sent back to Egypt, the US takes no interest in what happens. But the case of an Australian suspect, Mamdouh Habib, indicates that renditions are also aimed at collecting intelligence, which can be extracted with torture, forbidden to US agents. Habib, a former coffee shop manager from Sydney, was arrested in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, a month after 9/11.
He was handed over to US agents, who flew him to Cairo, where he was tortured for six months, according to his US lawyer, Professor Joe Margulies, of the MacArthur Justice Centre of the University of Chicago. Margulies says: “Mr Habib describes routine beatings. He was taken into a room and handcuffed and the room was gradually filled with water until the water was just beneath his chin. Can you imagine the terror of knowing you can’t escape?” On another occasion, he was suspended from a wall. “His feet rested on a drum with a metal bar through it. And when they passed an electric current on the drum he got a jolt of electricity and he had to move his feet, and he was left suspended by his hands. And it went on until he fainted.”
Under this interrogation, Margulies, says, Habib confessed to his involvement with al-Qaida and readily signed “every document they put in front of him”.
He was transferred back to US custody, sent to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. The confessions he signed in Egypt were used against him in military tribunals. According to Margulies: “Those combatant status review tribunals relied on the evidence secured in Egypt as a basis to detain Mr Habib.”
After Margulies and others lodged public protests over his torture, Habib was freed from Guantánamo in January and flown to Australia, where the government said he would not be charged with any crime, although intelligence officials there continue to accuse him of involvement with al-Qaida.
Most prisoners sent by the US to jails in the Middle East are not free to reveal their treatment. But a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, a mobile phone technician rendered to a Syrian jail by the US, is now free to speak. His story supports the assertion that prisoners are sent abroad to be questioned. In September 2002 Arar, returning home from a holiday in Tunisia, was changing planes at JFK airport in New York. He had often visited and worked in the US, so he expected no problems. But he was taken to an interrogation room and eventually an immigration holding centre, the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.
It became clear that the reason for his arrest was information passed from Canada to the US. Canada was secretly investigating a terrorist suspect in Ottawa, and Arar had used the suspect’s name as an emergency contact when he signed a lease on a flat. Although he is a Syrian national by birth, Arar is a citizen of Canada and has lived there for 17 years. He was surprised to be asked questions in New York that could easily be dealt with in Ottawa.
Twelve days after his arrest, Arar was woken at 3am to be told he was being removed from the US. He was driven to New Jersey and, in chains, put aboard an executive jet. “I thought when they put me on this private jet with its leather seats, who am I for them to do that? What kind of information could I offer them? So when they fed me this nice dinner, I thought of the tradition in the Muslim world called Eid, where they slaughter an animal, and before they slaughter the animal they feed him. That’s exactly what I thought when I was in the plane. I was always thinking how I could avoid torture, because at that point I realised that the only reason why they were sending me somewhere was to be tortured for them to get information. I was 100% sure about that.“
After two stops for fuel, the plane arrived in Amman, Jordan, and Arar was taken by road to Damascus, to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. He says he was placed in a cell little bigger than a coffin and was kept there for more than 10 months. His fears of torture were realised. “The interrogator said: ‘Do you know what this is?’. I said: ‘Yes, it’s a cable’ and he told me: ‘Open your right hand.’ I opened my right hand and he hit me like crazy. And the pain was so painful, and of course I started crying and then he told me to open my left hand, and I opened it and he missed, then hit my wrist. And then he asked me questions. If he does not think you are telling the truth, then he hits again. An hour or two later he put me in this room where sometimes I could hear people being tortured.”
After three days short of a year in Syrian custody, Arar was released and flown home to Ottawa. No charges have ever been laid against him by Canada or Syria. In Canada his case has caused a political outcry and there is a public inquiry. Like many modern torture victims, Arar has no physical scars. Professional interrogators are too clever. His scars are psychological.
But the head of Amnesty International in Canada, Alex Neve, is convinced that Arar is telling the truth: “I believe it for a number of reasons. I interviewed him in considerable detail, and in the course of my many years of work with Amnesty International I have interviewed torture survivors here in Canada, in refugee camps, individuals who have just been released from jail cells; and I found his experience to be consistent and credible with what I have known and learned and experienced at other interviews.”
Who is responsible for this system of rendition, and who in Washington authorised it? At the Fall’s Church, Virginia, home of Michael Scheuer, we spoke about the tactics of the war on terror and about why, when he headed the Osama bin Laden unit at the CIA, they developed rendition as a tactic against al-Qaida. Scheuer is outspoken - while at the CIA he wrote two critical books (published anonymously) about anti-terror activities. But he has never before been so candid about such a sensitive matter.
Scheuer insists that every rendition operation was approved by lawyers: “There is a large legal department within the CIA, and there is a section of the department of justice that is involved in legal interpretations for intelligence work, and there is a team of lawyers at the national security council. And on all of these things those lawyers are involved in one way or another and have signed off on the procedure. The idea that somehow this is a rogue operation that someone has dreamed up is just absurd.” Scheuer recalls that when he organised such operations, the authority had to come from director of central intelligence or his assistant director. “So basically the number one and two men in the intelligence community are the ones who sign off.”
Scheuer says that with each rendition, he is convinced that “these people deserved to be off the street”. But mistakes would happen, as they always did, and innocents might be captured. “It is impossible not to have a mistake in the business of espionage and intelligence,” he says. “There was never anything flip or blasé about the way this was approached. It was a deadly serious business, and if we were wrong, we were wrong. But the evidence pointed us toward what we did.”
Scheuer has few qualms about the danger that such men might be tortured: “The bottom line is getting anyone off the street who you’re confident has been involved or is planning to be involved in operations that could kill Americans is a worthwhile activity.”
Even if he might be tortured? “It wouldn’t be us torturing them. And I also think that there is a lot of Hollywood involved in our portrayal of torture in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia. It’s rather hypocritical to worry about what the Egyptians do to people who are terrorists and not condemn the Israelis for what they do to people they deem terrorists. Human rights is a very flexible concept. It kind of depends on how hypocritical you want to be on a particular day.”
To be fair to Scheuer, he has concerns about rendition as a long-term tactic. He believes that dictatorial regimes such as Egypt and Jordan cause Islamic militancy, so it makes little strategic sense to be working closely with them. “Any kind of a detainee capture is a technical success, but in the strategic sense we are losing, and one of the main reasons is because of our support for dictatorships in the Muslim world.”
But, he says, the US has little option about what to do with these prisoners. Politicians do not want terrorists brought back to US soil and dealt with in US courts. “We’re in a lot of positions around the world where we don’t have a lot of options, and sometimes you have to work with the devil.” As long as US policymakers did not decide how to deal with prisoners under the US legal system, the CIA had no choice but “do what you can with what you have”.
Scheuer estimates that there have been about 100 CIA renditions of Sunni terrorists. Others, including Robert Baer, think the figure is much higher and that in the post-9/11 world the US department of defence under Donald Rumsfeld is now in the business of moving prisoners around the world, while the US military has shifted hundreds of prisoners to jails in the Middle East.
The US department of defence and the CIA declined to speak about rendition and its justification. I did speak to a vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank linked to the Bush administration. Danielle Pletka was a former senior staffer on the Senate foreign relations committee. “I’m not a big fan of torture,” she says. She does not endorse Syria or the way Egypt runs its prisons or security system.“Unfortunately, there are times in war when it is necessary to do things in a way that is absolutely and completely abhorrent to most good, decent people. While I don’t want to say that the US has engaged routinely in such practices, because I don’t think that it is routine by any standard . . . if it is absolutely imperative to find something out at that moment, then it is imperative to find something out at that moment, and Club Med is not the place to do it.”
What is the legality of these operations? Pletka says that, as a non-lawyer, she cannot answer such questions. The United Nations convention against torture, ratified by the US and endorsed by President Bush, states that “no state shall expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”. Every year the US state department condemns and details human rights abuse and torture in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Last year’s report on Egypt described torture as “common and persistent”.
So how can rendition be legal? No one at the justice department would comment. The US legal justification is a state secret. Official Washington’s coyness about defending rendition may have something to do with the increased threat of being held to account in the courts. Apart from the danger of lawsuits in US courts, there are judicial investigations opening into alleged CIA abductions on European soil.
Germany has been a key base for the CIA jets. The flight logs I have seen show frequent stops of the Gulfstream jet, and a Boeing 737 jet used for rendition, at Frankfurt airport. There is a judicial inquiry under way in Germany into the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen from Ulm who claimed he was kidnapped in Skopje, Macedonia, on 31 December 2003. He was flown three weeks later to Afghanistan and a US prison facility where, he has claimed, he was repeatedly beaten before being released four months later and dumped on a roadside in Albania.
At first his claims seemed unbelievable, but flight logs I obtained from aviation sources show clear evidence that the CIA’s Boeing 737 transported him to Skopje on 23 January 2004. My documents show the plane flew in from Majorca and then took Masri to Kabul via Baghdad. Such evidence could put the CIA in a difficult position with its German counterparts, who may be forced to treat the case as an illegal kidnap.
In Italy there is now a judicial investigation into the kidnapping of a suspected al-Qaida activist in Milan. It is claimed that US agents, without legal permission, kidnapped a suspect from the streets of a close European ally. At noon on 16 February 2003 an Egyptian, Abu Omar, disappeared in Milan’s Via Guerzona during a 10-minute walk from his home to a local mosque. An eyewitness said he was stopped on the street by three white men, with a van drawn up on the pavement. He had been under surveillance by Italian authorities but they denied any role in his disappearance. The claim is that he was seized by US agents, taken to the US Aviano air base and flown to Egypt.
The deputy prosecutor of Milan, Armando Spataro, who is the magistrate investigating the case, refuses to accuse the US but is treating the case as involuntary kidnap and is certain that Omar is now in Egypt. If the US was involved, would it be a crime? “If it were true, it would be a serious breach of Italian law. It would be absolutely illegal,” he says.
http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/04usatorture
Deported terror suspects tortured
Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday April 15, 2005
The Guardian
Western governments are increasingly sending terrorist suspects to countries on the basis of flimsy "diplomatic assurances" which expose the detainees to serious risk of torture, a leading human rights group says today.
The practice among western governments of seeking assurances of humane treatment before sending suspects to their home country undermines international law, including the global ban on torture, says New-York-based Human Rights Watch.
Its 91-page report, Still at Risk: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, documents how countries, including Britain, have already transferred or intend to transfer suspects to states with well-established records of torture.
They include Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Russia, and Turkey, where, it says, suspected Islamists, Chechens, or Kurds are singled out for particularly brutal abuse.
Human Rights Watch also refers to the repeated intervention by Tony Blair - first reported in the Guardian - to deport four asylum seekers including Hany Youssef to Egypt, despite being told that they might be tortured and sentenced to death.
The men were not deported because Egypt was unwilling to provide assurances. But even if these assurances are forthcoming they have no legal effect, the report says.
"Governments that engage in torture always try to hide what they're doing, so their 'assurances' on torture can never be trusted," says Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director.
"This is a very negative trend in international diplomacy and it's doing real damage to the global taboo against torture," he adds.
In an increasing number of cases - so-called extraordinary renditions - suspects have credibly alleged that they were tortured, the report says.
In one well-documented case in September 2002, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York on his way to Canada.
Mr Arar, who had claims about him made by others under torture, was "rendered" in a private jet to Jordan, from where he was handed over to Syria. He was finally released in October 2003.
The report says the problem is not confined to any one country. The expulsion of two Egyptians - Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zari - from Sweden in 2001, based on assurances against torture, caused a national scandal after they said they had been tortured in Egyptian custody.
· A Chinese court has barred the use of evidence gained through torture after a man who said police coerced him into confessing to murder was freed after 11 years in prison, a Chinese government website reported yesterday. (China is really scoring propaganda points with this policy used by the West)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/stor...1460079,00.html
Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday April 15, 2005
The Guardian
Western governments are increasingly sending terrorist suspects to countries on the basis of flimsy "diplomatic assurances" which expose the detainees to serious risk of torture, a leading human rights group says today.
The practice among western governments of seeking assurances of humane treatment before sending suspects to their home country undermines international law, including the global ban on torture, says New-York-based Human Rights Watch.
Its 91-page report, Still at Risk: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, documents how countries, including Britain, have already transferred or intend to transfer suspects to states with well-established records of torture.
They include Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Russia, and Turkey, where, it says, suspected Islamists, Chechens, or Kurds are singled out for particularly brutal abuse.
Human Rights Watch also refers to the repeated intervention by Tony Blair - first reported in the Guardian - to deport four asylum seekers including Hany Youssef to Egypt, despite being told that they might be tortured and sentenced to death.
The men were not deported because Egypt was unwilling to provide assurances. But even if these assurances are forthcoming they have no legal effect, the report says.
"Governments that engage in torture always try to hide what they're doing, so their 'assurances' on torture can never be trusted," says Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director.
"This is a very negative trend in international diplomacy and it's doing real damage to the global taboo against torture," he adds.
In an increasing number of cases - so-called extraordinary renditions - suspects have credibly alleged that they were tortured, the report says.
In one well-documented case in September 2002, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York on his way to Canada.
Mr Arar, who had claims about him made by others under torture, was "rendered" in a private jet to Jordan, from where he was handed over to Syria. He was finally released in October 2003.
The report says the problem is not confined to any one country. The expulsion of two Egyptians - Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zari - from Sweden in 2001, based on assurances against torture, caused a national scandal after they said they had been tortured in Egyptian custody.
· A Chinese court has barred the use of evidence gained through torture after a man who said police coerced him into confessing to murder was freed after 11 years in prison, a Chinese government website reported yesterday. (China is really scoring propaganda points with this policy used by the West)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/stor...1460079,00.html
I saw photos of a man who had been boiled alive in Uzbekistan. US has diplomatic relations with them, there must be some oil pipeline that crosses the region. The photos were so appalling I did not keep them on file, but in my anger I sent them to some people who are close to the American Embassy in Tokyo. I think there was a photo of Mr Bush shaking hands with the Uzbekistan PM. Uzbekistan is often mentioned as a place torture is outsourced to, according to the NGO emails.
Uzbekistan oil reserves 297 million barrels
Ditto gas reserves 63 billion (whatever they are)
I just had a look in the CIA world factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/goes/uz.html
I know the USA is looking for gas as well as oil abroad as well as at home.
Ditto gas reserves 63 billion (whatever they are)
I just had a look in the CIA world factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/goes/uz.html
I know the USA is looking for gas as well as oil abroad as well as at home.
Terror suspects at risk of torture, report claims
15.04.05 4.00pm
by Robert Verkaik
Britain, the United States and other western countries are meeting the terror threat by sending suspects to regimes where they risk torture and abuse, it is claimed in a damning report published today.
The report says that dozens of terror suspects have been forcibly deported by Western countries to Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Uzbekistan on the basis of "flimsy" assurances that their human rights will be respected. Many of them claim they have been tortured.
The British government is singled out for criticism for adopting a policy of 'extradition at all costs' to overcome the problem of monitoring alleged terror suspects where there is insufficient evidence to try them in this country.
Human Rights Watch, authors of the 91-page report, calls on the British government to "halt immediately" all negotiations with Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco over the deportation of the former Belmarsh terror suspects still being held under control orders.
Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons visited North Africa in February to try to secure bilateral agreements for the men's deportation although the government has already acknowledged that these regimes torture terror suspects.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said yesterday that ministers rejected the suggestion that any assurances would be unreliable.
"If they are properly handled and the assurances come from a high enough level and satisfy both this government and the UK's independent courts then they can be relied on," said the spokesman.
One of the report's key recommendations is that Britain surrender details of all other cases in which it has sought diplomatic assurances to secure deportations of terror suspects.
The United States is also criticised for adopting a practice known as "extraordinary rendition" in which suspects are sent to countries which use torture to extract confessions or other information. This intelligence is then passed on the US security services.
Officials in the US recently acknowledged the transfer of an undisclosed number of suspects to countries where torture is a serious human rights problem, claiming they received diplomatic assurances prior to he transfers. But in an increasing number of those cases so-called "renditions" the suspects have alleged that they were tortured.
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has recently accused Britain of complicity in torture, because of the use that MI6 makes of the intelligence gathered in this way by CIA.
He said many prisoners of Uzbek origin captured by American forces were taken back to Uzbek jails where they received the most brutal tortures.
These interrogations ended up in MI6 reports that he received. "I was told by the Foreign Office's senior legal adviser there was nothing in law to prevent us obtaining and using material which had been extracted under torture provided that we had not ourselves done the torture.
"And MI6 said they found the intelligence useful. I was shattered and disillusioned."
The report, Still at Risk: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, documents the growing trend among Western governments including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands of seeking assurances of humane treatment in order to transfer terrorism suspects to states with well-established records of torture. The report details a dozen cases involving actual or attempted transfers to countries where torture is commonplace.
"Governments that engage in torture always try to hide what they're doing, so their 'assurances' on torture can never be trusted," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
"This is a very negative trend in international diplomacy, and it's doing real damage to the global taboo against torture."
States that offer such assurances include some of the most abusive regimes in the world: Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan. Transfers have also been effected or proposed to Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Russia, and Turkey, where certain people - for example, suspected Islamists, Chechens, or Kurds - are singled out for particularly brutal abuse.
Torture is banned under international law and there are no exceptions, even in times of war or national emergency. The ban includes the absolute prohibition on transferring people to places where they face a risk of torture.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Council of Europe Commissioner on Human Rights, and the UN Independent Expert on human rights and counter-terrorism have all warned that the use of assurances is eroding the global ban on torture.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10120658
15.04.05 4.00pm
by Robert Verkaik
Britain, the United States and other western countries are meeting the terror threat by sending suspects to regimes where they risk torture and abuse, it is claimed in a damning report published today.
The report says that dozens of terror suspects have been forcibly deported by Western countries to Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Uzbekistan on the basis of "flimsy" assurances that their human rights will be respected. Many of them claim they have been tortured.
The British government is singled out for criticism for adopting a policy of 'extradition at all costs' to overcome the problem of monitoring alleged terror suspects where there is insufficient evidence to try them in this country.
Human Rights Watch, authors of the 91-page report, calls on the British government to "halt immediately" all negotiations with Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco over the deportation of the former Belmarsh terror suspects still being held under control orders.
Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons visited North Africa in February to try to secure bilateral agreements for the men's deportation although the government has already acknowledged that these regimes torture terror suspects.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said yesterday that ministers rejected the suggestion that any assurances would be unreliable.
"If they are properly handled and the assurances come from a high enough level and satisfy both this government and the UK's independent courts then they can be relied on," said the spokesman.
One of the report's key recommendations is that Britain surrender details of all other cases in which it has sought diplomatic assurances to secure deportations of terror suspects.
The United States is also criticised for adopting a practice known as "extraordinary rendition" in which suspects are sent to countries which use torture to extract confessions or other information. This intelligence is then passed on the US security services.
Officials in the US recently acknowledged the transfer of an undisclosed number of suspects to countries where torture is a serious human rights problem, claiming they received diplomatic assurances prior to he transfers. But in an increasing number of those cases so-called "renditions" the suspects have alleged that they were tortured.
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has recently accused Britain of complicity in torture, because of the use that MI6 makes of the intelligence gathered in this way by CIA.
He said many prisoners of Uzbek origin captured by American forces were taken back to Uzbek jails where they received the most brutal tortures.
These interrogations ended up in MI6 reports that he received. "I was told by the Foreign Office's senior legal adviser there was nothing in law to prevent us obtaining and using material which had been extracted under torture provided that we had not ourselves done the torture.
"And MI6 said they found the intelligence useful. I was shattered and disillusioned."
The report, Still at Risk: Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, documents the growing trend among Western governments including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands of seeking assurances of humane treatment in order to transfer terrorism suspects to states with well-established records of torture. The report details a dozen cases involving actual or attempted transfers to countries where torture is commonplace.
"Governments that engage in torture always try to hide what they're doing, so their 'assurances' on torture can never be trusted," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
"This is a very negative trend in international diplomacy, and it's doing real damage to the global taboo against torture."
States that offer such assurances include some of the most abusive regimes in the world: Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan. Transfers have also been effected or proposed to Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Russia, and Turkey, where certain people - for example, suspected Islamists, Chechens, or Kurds - are singled out for particularly brutal abuse.
Torture is banned under international law and there are no exceptions, even in times of war or national emergency. The ban includes the absolute prohibition on transferring people to places where they face a risk of torture.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Council of Europe Commissioner on Human Rights, and the UN Independent Expert on human rights and counter-terrorism have all warned that the use of assurances is eroding the global ban on torture.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10120658
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