No accountability for Abu Ghraib
-
Tuesday, April 26, 2005


CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS are rightfully outraged that the Army has cleared senior military officials of any wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq, but they shouldn't be surprised. It seemed clear from the start that punishment would be aimed at a small group of low-ranking soldiers for abusing captives, not at those top officers who approved rules regarding prison interrogation practices.

After all, it took nearly a year after the shocking photographs of American military officers abusing naked Iraqi prisoners first appeared for military leaders to issues new rules regarding treatment of prisoners. By clearing four of the five officers overseeing prison operations in Iraq during the scandal -- as the Army inspector general did last week -- the Pentagon has heightened the impression of a whitewash.

Army officials have defended their investigation into the humiliation and torture of the prisoners. But previous investigations detailed a virtual collapse of the command structure at Abu Ghraib. Is no one to be held accountable for that?

The only Army general officer recommended for punishment for the prison abuses is Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who headed the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq. Her attorney has said that she will fight any charges because she's been unfairly cast as the "scapegoat for this entire situation.'' Given that the inspector general report exonerated Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez of any criminal misconduct even though Sanchez approved the use of severe interrogation practices that led indirectly to some of the abuses, Karpinski's claim certainly seems to have more than a ring of truth.

The Army is essentially closing the book on the Abu Ghraib scandal, but that won't make it go away. The photographs of prisoners in hoods, being threatened by attack dogs, are some of the indelible images of a "war on terror'' in which illegal actions, such as detaining prisoners without a hearing and authorizing torture, became standard operating procedure.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...&type=printable

Posted on Tue, Apr. 26, 2005





Generals get a pass on Abu Ghraib abuse

OUR OPINION: COMMANDERS SHARE BLAME FOR DETAINEE MISTREATMENT


If the generals aren't responsible for the conduct of U.S. troops in a combat zone, pray tell, who is? So far, only one brigade-level general has been reprimanded and five rank-and-file soldiers convicted in the shocking mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two other soldiers have courts-martial scheduled for next month. But a yet-to-be-released Army inspector-general's report apparently concludes that none of the top senior officers in Iraq should bear responsibility for the scandalous breakdown in military discipline and abrogation of U.S. prisoner policy.

Unacceptable outcome

The report concludes that neither Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former senior commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, nor his three senior commanders are liable for the abuses, according to sources. In other words, the most senior persons who are in a position to implement and supervise U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't responsible for an embarrassing failure in the actual execution of policy. This is unacceptable. It would be as if the captain of a ship were not held liable for crew members who beat up detainees held in the brig.

We're not looking for scapegoats here. Lt. Gen. Sanchez and his senior commanders are excellent officers with heretofore unblemished records. But the idea of senior military commanders not having to share responsibility for the actions of their troops violates fundamental principles of U.S. military organization. Generals are required to maintain effective command and control of their troops at all times. The military hierarchy dictates maximum control, and the Army's success depends on it.

Even if the commanders had no direct knowledge of soldiers' individual abusive actions against the detainees, they were responsible for providing resources for the troops -- including effective discipline and training -- and planning all details of the units' operations. With respect to U.S. intelligence gathering, the commanding officers were responsible for policy that described what interrogation techniques could be used or not used -- including dogs -- and what kinds and amounts of pressure were acceptable to get useful information from detainees. Given the political pressure from Washington to produce better intelligence, the commanders had a clear duty to define how that would be done and know how those orders were being carried out.

Congressional inquiry

The scandals at Abu Ghraib and other facilities have prompted the Joint Chiefs of Staff to propose an overhaul of the military's detention operations. An overhaul obviously is needed. But the Army inspector general's report mustn't be the last word on the scandal. Congress, which thus far hasn't had much to say about the issue, should pursue its own investigation of the abuse.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/...on/11488907.htm

The injustice of U.S. justice
Ailee Slater
Commentary Editor

April 25, 2005

I am a serious fan of the U.S. legal system. Those who stand accused of crime are innocent until proven guilty, citizens have a right to trial by jury and there are rules against cruel and unusual punishment. Of course, in reality, these staples of American justice don't always pan out so well. Genetic evidence indicates that more than a few citizens have been wrongly executed, police brutality and issues such as racial profiling are still present in many areas and access to a legal system that works for you depends more on your annual income than your innocence or guilt. However, the biggest problems plaguing the U.S. justice system right now are two intertwined factors: hypocrisy and patriotism.
Zacarias Moussaoui is a French citizen who was planning to fly a plane into the White House on behalf of none other than Osama bin Laden. After Sept. 11, Moussaoui never got a chance to complete his mission, and he now sits poised to be the only person prosecuted for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. If U.S. lawyers get their way, he will pay for that involvement with his life.

Moussaoui has been charged, in essence, with planning to hurt American citizens, and for this our government believes he should die -- a probable, acceptable conclusion of our government, until one considers the myriad of U.S. soldiers escaping even the most menial prosecution for their heinous crimes on foreign soil. The Bush administration is once again proving itself to be rampant with hypocrisy. You want harm against humanity, let me give you two words: Abu Ghraib. Is considering harm toward American citizens worse than actually harming an Iraqi life? Apparently so. Whereas U.S. citizens are people to be protected at the utmost cost, foreign citizens are acceptable casualties of war and the rash thinking that accompanies it.

Luckily, Human Rights Watch recommended this week that a special prosecutor be assigned to look into the role of senior defense officials within the Abu Ghraib abuses. Indeed, it seems obvious that any investigation into the questionable actions of subordinates should include an analysis of their superiors. Moussaoui is slated to receive the death penalty, so one can only imagine that the official under whom he was working (i.e. Osama bin Laden) would receive a sentence of at least the same magnitude if apprehended. If the United States is willing to sentence Moussaoui and bin Laden to death for conspiring to harm people, Donald Rumsfeld and then-commander of U.S. troops Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez should at least be investigated for their orders to use "painful stress situations" and myriad other tactics that broke the Geneva Conventions.

Perhaps Rumsfeld and Sanchez were too far up on the chain of command. Perhaps they had no idea their orders would be magnified to induce the horrific abuse at Abu Ghraib. But what about the other commanding officials who were physically present at the scene of the abuse? One, just one of those commanders was given any sort of reprimand. The other superior officers, Sanchez included, were relieved of blame for "mitigating circumstances," such as the fact that "U.S. military command was short of senior officers." I guess we're left to assume that lower rank officers thought putting prisoners into grossly inappropriate sexual positions with each other was the only way to bring in more army officials. The real mitigating circumstance is the U.S. government's apparent core belief that authorizing harsh treatment of prisoners and breaking international war codes is OK, as long as the welfare of America remains stable.

On the other side of this debate is a somewhat logical argument that the soldiers actually committing the abuse deserve the harshest punishment; after all, they were the human beings physically executing torture. But once again, to charge only these lower-level soldiers is hypocritical of the U.S. government. Rumsfeld, Sanchez and the other exonerated officials may have not personally tortured Iraqis; but, like the conspiring of Moussaoui, American officials' orders and planning still ultimately led to the abuse.

The United States should not operate itself legally under the pretense of patriotism; what benefits America is acceptable, what harms America is not. The ends should not justify the means, especially when those means are just a facade of national security based on homeland affiliation. Our country is in a state where "terrorism" is designated the ultimate evil and anyone working for terrorism is deemed worthy of the harshest treatment. Those working "against terrorism" (such as the officials in charge at Abu Ghraib) are granted extreme leniency because of their job description.

One of America's biggest buzz words is and has always been justice. Unfortunately, as a buzz word and in general, justice is being swiftly replaced by terrorism.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
aileeslater@dailyemerald.com The injustice of U.S. justice
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Date Subject Posted by:
04/25/2005 Good example of utter stupidity and... San Ant

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http://www.dailyemerald.com/vnews/display....5/426d043c7be5b

April 26, 2005
A Fine Christian Nation
Sex Trumps Torture and Murder
By DAVE LINDORFF

Philadelphia, Penn.

The public and media obsession with victims of Catholic priest abuse, which includes the hounding down of alleged molesters decades after the alleged incidents of abuse occurred, stands in stark and shameful contrast to the almost complete disinterest shown for tracking down the far more vicious abuse of prisoners by their American military or intelligence unit captors.

While the Catholic Church is regularly excoriated for covering up the abuse of altar boys, the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to cover up the crimes of its military officers as well as the civilian leaders who authorized torture, with scarcely any protest.
Yet viewed objectively, which is worse: higher-ups covering up an abuse scandal in which nobody died (at least directly), and which was perpetrated by individuals with psychological problems, or higher-ups covering up the deliberate, premeditated torture and even killing of people by individuals who were acting with the knowledge of and perhaps even under orders from those same higher-ups?

Clearly, where there was direction from the top, as we know was true in the case of torture of prisoners by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and other torture venues, and where the cover-up was directed by those same authorities, the crime is far greater.

And yet, we don't see nearly the public interest in this scandal, don't see nearly the media coverage, and even when, as happened this week, the top generals who oversaw the whole thing, and who helped try to cover it up, are exonerated by the government, there is little public outcry, as there was when the Roman Catholic Church tried to exonerate the bishops who covered up the sex abuse scandals in their dioceses.

The sex abuse in the Catholic Church, while outrageous, was the result of human frailty. No one organized it. No one defends it.
Compare that with American torture of captured enemy fighters and suspected terrorists. It was clearly organized‹there are memos all over the place, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA to senior commanders' offices in the field, authorizing, encouraging and even prescribing specific types of torture. It was conducted with the knowledge of senior officials, military and civilian. And once the horrors of the torture program were revealed, it was actually defended, not just on the street and in the media, but in the halls of government.

What a fine Christian nation we have become!

We are shocked, shocked when priests or ministers succumb to the temptations of the flesh, and we are outraged when senior clerics try to protect or cover up for the behavior of those spiritual leaders, but we remain largely untroubled by criminal behavior by our military and our government, even when it turns out to have been official policy, and we aren’t particularly bothered if the civilian and military leaders who established that criminal policy just cover up their misdeeds and punish a few lowly scapegoats.
Granted, the torture to some degree gets a free pass because the nation is swept up in a mind-numbing nationalism that has American flags sprouting with a frequency not seen even in China.

Yet there can be no doubt the double standard has as much to do with racism as with jingoism. If it had been white people being subjected to the kind of torture that was (and may yet be) going on at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, there would probably be far more public outrage than there has been, and more pressure to expose and punish those who authored the criminal policy. In contrast, it was ordinary (white) Americans who were victims of the priestly abuse, making it much worse in the public mind.

There was a country where this kind of mentality prevailed not that long ago. That country was Germany.


Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff04262005.html

After reading post 215 I feel appalled that only one lone female took the blame in the higher ranks for the abuse. Similarly one lone female, Lynn England, was the one that the media focused on at the height of the scandal because her photograph was perfectly posed, she was another scapegoat.

This administration are (I am sick of saying the word) disingenuous, and also completely cowardly, as bullies are. If they had dared to have a proper investigation Rumsfeld would be top of the list of the guilty parties. Since Mr Bush thinks he was such a brilliant defense secretary, he should also be blamed in part.

In the British camp Mr Geoff Hoon and Blair are the ones to blame. I hope they get voted out of office, but since people are greedy and always vote according to their pocketbook, or bank balance I am pretty sure they will weather the election and scrape in again.

This is sad - disgusting and pathetic journalism...

Abu Ghraib was a direct result of US policy in Iraq.

Seymout Hersh published an article with sources from the CIA stating that Rumsfeld advised President Bush that physical coercion and sexual humiliation would be used as interrogation techniques...Bush's response?

Who knows, but if Bush had said - no - you can bet Rumsfeld would have listened.

Sadistic as Bush is - see the smirk and Justin Frank's psychoanalysis in Bush on the Couch - you can believe he approved such torture as a part of his revenge...for 9/11 - even though those persons had nothing to do with it...

What is this paper? A mouthpiece for the White House?

Abu Ghraib Accountability
An overhyped story, not a whitewash.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/fe...ml?id=110006612

Wednesday, April 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

We'd have thought every American would be relieved to learn that 10 major inquiries, sworn statements from 37 high-level officials, and information gleaned from dozens of courts-martial and criminal investigations have cleared most senior civilian and military leaders of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib scandal and other Iraq prisoner abuses. Instead, the latest Army report reaching this conclusion has induced further cries of whitewash.

This wailing says more about the accusers than about any facts that have emerged in the year since the scandal broke. The media and Congressional Democrats flogged the Abu Ghraib story for months throughout the 2004 election year, with a goal of stripping the Iraq War of moral authority and turning President Bush into another LBJ. But now that their worst chain-of-command conspiracy hypotheses haven't panned out, they refuse to admit it.

Senator Ted Kennedy all but blew a gasket yesterday, essentially accusing both the U.S. military and Bush Administration of moral perfidy. "Our nation will continue to be harmed by the reports of abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the failure by top officials to take action, and the abandonment of our basic rules and traditions on human rights," he said. He even stooped to the moral-equivalence canard that some in the U.S. chose "to stoop to the level of the terrorists" and "deserve to be held fully accountable."

Unpacking so many falsehoods takes more space than we have. But let's review the speed and seriousness with which Abu Ghraib was handled, which does the U.S. military credit by any standard: The abuse reports went up the chain of command on January 13 last year; within a day an Army criminal probe had started. Two days after that, Central Command issued a press release notifying the world of that investigation; on March 20 it was announced in Baghdad that criminal charges had been brought against six of the soldiers involved. A month earlier, meanwhile, Major General Antonio Taguba had completed an internal investigation of what had happened. This is all before the infamous photos were leaked to the press one year ago this week.

Recall as well what Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits, the first of the Abu Ghraib offenders to face a court-martial, said in his sworn statement of the photographed abuses: "Our command would have slammed us. They believe in doing the right thing. If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay." No one has since proven otherwise. Convicted abuse ringleader Charles Graner tried the "just-following-orders" defense. But this January a jury of his peers in an Army court-martial rejected it, handing him a 10-year sentence.

The independent inquiry headed by former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger--whose Cabinet career included a stint in the Carter Administration--likewise concluded last summer that the Abu Ghraib abuses weren't related to interrogations at all. That should have put the nail in the coffin of the theory that high-level Bush Administration discussions about techniques for handling al Qaeda detainees somehow resulted in the abuses in Iraq.

Yes, there were abuses in Iraq beyond what was pictured at Abu Ghraib, but abuses happen in war and in civilian prisons too. No evidence has been produced to support allegations that the abuses were "systematic" or that they were inspired or condoned by superiors up the chain of command. As Mr. Schlesinger also noted, by any statistical measure--such as the rate of reported abuse incidents per detainee--treatment of detainees in the overall war on terror has been exemplary. In short, the so-called "torture narrative" that was so hyped by the media last year was entirely false.

Sometimes we wonder if proponents of this torture-cum-whitewash accusation have ever stopped to consider the improbable nature of the coverup they are now suggesting. Mr. Schlesinger and other investigators would all have to be lying. And where are the whistleblowers? There would have been a widespread outcry in the military if senior brass and civilians really were trying to shift blame for abuse onto the lower ranks.
Yet the only military people claiming that they are taking some kind of fall are the convicted Graner and the former Abu Ghraib Commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was blamed for weak leadership in the original Taguba report--which, by the way, remains a thorough and insightful account of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib.

The salient and remarkable truth here is that America has punished its own for the Abu Ghraib abuses; and it has done so even before Saddam and his henchmen have faced justice for the horrors they propagated in that same prison. More than a few good soldiers have had their careers tarnished by the media and Democratic innuendo that they somehow condoned human rights abuses. They deserve an apology. After all the evidence to the contrary, continuing to allege systematic prisoner abuse--and a coverup--by the U.S. military is itself shameful.

Here's where it started

Published on Tuesday, July 27, 2004 by the International Herald Tribune
Abu Ghraib Whitewash
Editorial

A week ago, John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was satisfied that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was keeping his promise to leave no stone unturned to investigate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison. A newly released report by the army's inspector general shows that Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them.

The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.

Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases but merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon were watching.

And it made no attempt to find out who had authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those "approach techniques" in the army field manual.

Even the report's release on Thursday was an exercise in misdirection, timed to be overshadowed by the 9/11 commission's report.

The Defense Department has consistently tried to stymie Warner's investigation. It "misplaced" thousands of pages from Major General Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib, the only credible military account so far. It stalled the completion of a pivotal look at army intelligence by two other army generals. And it ignored Senate demands for the Red Cross reports on American military prisons for months.

The Pentagon finally brought those documents to the Senate in the last two weeks, in a way that ensured they would be of minimal use.

Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite for the fight. Warner held only one hearing in the last month. We've always been skeptical that the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad apples" excuse.

The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis were tortured by American soldiers is a formal congressional inquiry, with subpoena power. A week ago, John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was satisfied that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was keeping his promise to leave no stone unturned to investigate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison. A newly released report by the army's inspector general shows that Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them.

http://www.gnn.tv/H01115


Britain Accused Over CIA's Secret Torture Flights
Thu, 10 Feb 2005 23:09:55 -0600Summary:
Critics point out that the US does not permit suspects access to lawyers. They liken the secrecy to that which is surrounding the network of secret detention centers operated by the CIA around the world in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, on US ships and on any number of locations that have not been publicly disclosed. But the planes used by the CIA have left a trail. The Gulfstream, then registered as N379P, was first spotted landing at Shannon airport, Ireland, in spring 2003. Its registration number, since changed, was logged by members of a peace camp. They only learnt that it was the rendition plane when they were later contacted by Swedish journalists investigating the torture of the two Egyptians. “It just looked like a civilian plane,” said Edward Horgan, 59, from Limerick, one of the witnesses to its landing.

[Posted By ShiftShapers]
By Stephen Grey and Andrew Buncombe
Republished from Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
UK airports are believed to be operational bases for two executive jets used by the CIA to carry out 'renditions' of terror suspects.
Britain’s intelligence agencies have been accused of helping America in a secret operation that is sending terror suspects to Middle Eastern countries where prisoners are routinely tortured and abused.

Since 11 September 2001, the CIA has been systematically seizing suspects and sending them, without legal process, not only to Guantanamo Bay but to authorities in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Human rights campaigners say the system, officially known as “extraordinary rendition” is a system of torture by proxy.

Britain maintains the main reason it will not deport prisoners being held without charge at Belmarsh prison is the fear they will be tortured or otherwise abused by their home country. But a series of cases has emerged which, critics say, exposes the Government’s dishonesty by suggesting information provided by Britain about its citizens and residents has led to the capture and eventual torture of Islamic terrorist suspects.

Britain is also an operational base for two executive jets regularly used by the CIA to carry out so-called “renditions”. One Gulfstream jet – used for taking prisoners to Egypt and Jordan from countries including Sweden and Indonesia – has called regularly at Luton, Glasgow, Prestwick and Northolt airports.

A Boeing 737 jet, used for the transfer of prisoners, passed through Glasgow airport on Monday morning on its way to Iraq. Both jets are white and unmarked, apart from their US civilian registration. Inquiries suggest they are owned by US companies that exist only on paper and which are almost certainly a front for the CIA.

Michael Ratner, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing several former prisoners who were “renditioned”, said: “It is a secret process. No one really knows what happens in the rendition process or in the gulag of secret CIA hellholes [where some prisoners are sent].”

One notorious rendition occurred in Sweden in December 2001 when a team of masked US agents arrived to transfer two Egyptian dissidents, both accused of terrorist involvement, to Cairo. Both complained later of torture.

But there is evidence that intelligence originating in Britain may have been behind the CIA’s involvement in the seizure of at least one of the Egyptians, an asylum-seeker named Mohamed al-Zery, who, after months of torture, was eventually cleared and freed.

Yassir al-Sirri, an Islamic activist living in London who is accused by Egypt and America of having al-Qa’ida connections, said that, in the weeks before his own arrest in London in October 2001, he had been in touch with Mr Zery, who wanted help with collecting information for his asylum claim.

Speaking to BBC Radio’s File on Four, Mr Sirri said that when British anti-terrorist officers raided his home, they took his computer and his fax records and those were passed to the Americans.

“Later in Sweden this man, Mr Zehry, was arrested and this information could only have come from the British authorities. They are completely responsible. It’s criminal,” Mr Sirri said.

Mr Sirri discovered later that, in the following weeks, many of his contacts around the world were seized. Mr Sirri, who runs an Islamic media center devoted to exposing any human rights abuses, had contacts with many families of prisoners.

Mr Sirri had been arrested over accusations he was involved in the murder of the Afghan leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, but he was cleared when a UK judge described him as an “innocent fall guy”. Efforts by both the US and Egypt to extradite him for alleged links to terrorism have failed.

In Stockholm, Kjell Jonsson, Mr Zehry’s lawyer, said he also believed that information passed by Britain was the only explanation for his client’s arrest and the involvement of American agents.

The practice of sending suspects abroad for coercive interrogation gathered pace after 11 September 2001, when a senior counter-terrorism officer, Cofer Black, openly admitted that after the al-Qa’ida attacks “the gloves came off’.

The procedure was supported by legal memos drafted by the White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, which claimed the Bush administration was not restricted by the Geneva Conventions when dealing with suspects from the so-called war on terror.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official involved in setting up the system, said: “The practice of capturing people and taking them to second or third countries arose because the Executive assigned the job of dismantling terrorist cells to the CIA.

“When the agency came back and said ‘where do you want to take them?’ The message was – ‘that’s your job’.”

Mr Scheuer claims there was legal oversight in every renditioning case and yet he admitted suspects were tortured.

“The bottom line is, getting anyone off the street who you are confident has been involved, or is planning to be involved, in operations that could kill Americans is a worthwhile activity.”

Just how many suspects have been subjected to renditioning is unclear.

Critics point out that the US does not permit suspects access to lawyers. They liken the secrecy to that which is surrounding the network of secret detention centers operated by the CIA around the world in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, on US ships and on any number of locations that have not been publicly disclosed.

But the planes used by the CIA have left a trail. The Gulfstream, then registered as N379P, was first spotted landing at Shannon airport, Ireland, in spring 2003. Its registration number, since changed, was logged by members of a peace camp. They only learnt that it was the rendition plane when they were later contacted by Swedish journalists investigating the torture of the two Egyptians. “It just looked like a civilian plane,” said Edward Horgan, 59, from Limerick, one of the witnesses to its landing.

American journalists have revealed the plane is formally owned by Bayard Foreign Marketing, which lists its headquarters as the address of a lawyer in Portland, Oregon. There is no evidence that Thomas Bayard, whose signature appears on documents filed with the local authorities, is a real person. When The Independent called the firm, there was nobody there, just an answering machine.

The allegations that Britain is co-operating with the “rendition” system are also bolstered by arrests in Gambia, west Africa, where four British residents were arrested and questioned by US agents in November 2002, apparently after a tip-off from British authorities.

Wahab al Rawi, an engineer whose family fled persecution in Iraq, was surprised to be questioned in Gambia by US agents when he had already been interviewed and freed by Britain’s security service, MI5, back in London.

They had been asking him about his family’s friendship with Abu Qatada, a radical Islamic cleric now in detention at Belmarsh prison. When Mr Rawi asked to see the British high commissioner, he said he was told: “Who do you think ordered your arrest?”

Though Mr Rawi was released, his brother Bisher and a business partner, Jamil al-Banaa, were picked up by the Americans, apparently in the Gulfstream. They are still being held in Guantanamo Bay.

Another case pointing to Britain’s involvement is the arrest of Martin Mubanga in Zambia. Last weekend, after being freed from Guantanamo Bay, he alleged his original arrest came after the involvement, and accusations made against him, of an MI6 officer.

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has also 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 suffered the most brutal torture. Information obtained from these interrogations ended up in MI6 reports that he received. “I was told by the Foreign Office’s senior legal adviser that 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,” he said. “And MI6 said they found the intelligence useful. I was shattered and disillusioned.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said Britain condemned torture but could not ignore intelligence from sources. “Without the sharing of intelligence, there would have been many more bloody terrorist attacks that would have gone ahead, like the plan to bomb a Christmas market in Strasbourg.

“If you have an agreement to work together against terrorism with another country then it’s obvious common sense that one has to have a certain amount of trust in that country and in the way it chooses to use that intelligence.”

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

And here is the rest...

The facts are there - but no one is looking - as usual!

New York Times editorial - March 11, 2005

Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed Again

It was good to learn yesterday that the military commander in Iraq has issued definitive rules about how to treat captives in American prison camps.

Unfortunately, that was about the only good news in the newest Pentagon report on prisoner abuse, actually a 21-page summary of a larger, classified study by the Navy inspector general of interrogation rules in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Just consider that it took more than a year after the military says it first learned of the nightmare at Abu Ghraib to issue the new rules. And don't ask what they are, because they're classified. The report spoke of the regulations approvingly. But its author, Vice Admiral Albert Church III, now director of the Navy staff, admitted yesterday that, well, he had not actually read them.

This whitewash is typical of the reports issued by the Bush administration on the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners at camps run by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Like the others, the Church report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers are to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers.

It conveniently ignores President Bush's declaration that terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Conventions and that Iraq is part of the war against terror. Mr. Bush later said the conventions would cover Iraqi military prisoners, but the Church report said military commanders in Iraq had never been given guidance on handling prisoners, a vast majority of whom were not soldiers. Still, the report tossed this off as merely a "missed opportunity." It overlooked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques for Guantánamo that violated the Geneva Conventions. It glossed over the way military lawyers who were drafting later rules were ordered to ignore their own legal opinions and instead follow Justice Department memos on how to make torture seem legal.

The Church report said that "none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater." Admiral Church and his investigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and threatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual humiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the perverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.

The Church report said assessing the personal responsibility of Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials had been the job of another panel headed by a former defense secretary, James Schlesinger. Well, not exactly. That group, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld, found "both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for Abu Ghraib. But the panel declined to name names.

Who will? Not the Pentagon, clearly. The Senate Armed Services Committee plans another hearing or two, but that's inadequate. Congressional leaders could open a serious investigation, but have shown no interest, although they are issuing subpoenas on steroid use by baseball players.

We're not holding out much hope that the White House will step into the breach because Mr. Bush has rewarded many of the officials responsible for the prison policies - one of them now serves as attorney general. Still, the only real solution is for Mr. Bush to follow the American Bar Association's advice and appoint an independent, bipartisan commission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/opinion/11fri2.html

Do you all think Abu Ghraib was much ado?

A whitewash of a whitewash! Whitewash squared.

I think it's time for a Whitewashergate investigation.

Except it won't get done by those white guys in Whitewashington. DC.

From Human Rights Watch:

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/04/27/usint10545.htm

April 28, 2005
Army, in Manual, Limiting Tactics in Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 27 - The Army is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that expressly bars the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, and incorporates safeguards devised to prevent such misconduct at military prison camps in the future, Army officials said Wednesday.

The new manual, the first revision in 13 years, will specifically prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, keeping them in stressful positions for a long time, imposing dietary restrictions, employing police dogs to intimidate prisoners and using sleep deprivation as a tool to get them to talk, the officials said.

Those practices were not included in the manual in use when the bulk of the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in the fall of 2003, but neither were they specifically banned.

Military investigations have faulted senior officials - including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq - for adding to the confusion by giving approval, and then rescinding it, for limited use of harsh techniques that went beyond what was allowed in the manual.

Accompanying the new manual, which runs more than 200 pages, will be a separate classified training document that will provide dozens of interrogation scenarios and go into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances.

As examples of the new rules, Thomas A. Gandy, director of human intelligence and counterintelligence for the Army, said interrogators questioning a prisoner in a small room could throw a chair against the wall in a fit of mock rage to frighten the captive, a technique called "fear up." But under no circumstance, he said, could the interrogator throw the chair at the prisoner or otherwise threaten him directly.

Army interrogators have never had such a set of specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

"It's going to be specific yeses and noes," Mr. Gandy, a career military intelligence officer, said in an interview. He provided details from the manual's final draft and emphasized that the document would require adherence to the Geneva Conventions, as does the current manual.

The interrogations manual applies only to Army forces, but the Army controls the vast majority of detainee operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mr. Gandy said there had been a effort to synchronize the Army's policies with practices of the other armed services.

The new manual would not govern interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency at its detention sites. But in a change, it expressly prohibits the C.I.A. from keeping unregistered prisoners, called "ghost detainees," at Army prisons like Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Gandy said the new document banned physical or mental torture, slapping or humiliation. But he declined to offer more examples of specific techniques that would be allowed, saying he did not want to tip off potential captives on what they could expect. "The key to interrogations is uncertainty and putting the guy on edge," he said. "We don't want to tell them where the edge is."

The revamped manual, titled "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of interrogation and detention policies and operations undertaken by the Army, and the military in general. The Army, for instance, has embarked on a systematic revamping of its training and doctrine for military police and intelligence officials.

The Army is planning to create 35 additional units specially trained in detention operations over the next three years. It is also preparing to add 9,000 military intelligence personnel, including 3,000 interrogators, case officers to run informant networks and other so-called human intelligence officials. Interrogators' final field exercise will last about 11 days instead of 5, Mr. Gandy said.

At Abu Ghraib, the American command in Baghdad has already instituted a new set of training standards. Newly arrived interrogators spend two weeks in orientation on policies and practices. Before they conduct interrogations on their own, they question prisoners in tandem with a more experienced interrogator.

All interrogators are observed during their questioning sessions to ensure they hew to the guidelines. Interrogators received mandatory refresher training every 90 days.

Mr. Gandy said the new manual would formalize practices that in some cases have been in effect in the field for months. Some details about the manual were first reported last month by The Baltimore Sun. Chapter by chapter, it tries to clarify ambiguities that military investigators say contributed to prisoner abuse in Iraq.

The manual, for instance, prohibits the military police from taking part in interrogations, but allows military intelligence personnel to debrief prison guards about their observations of particular prisoners. Some military police officers at Abu Ghraib said they were encouraged to soften up prisoners before questioning to help interrogators extract more information on insurgents.

The manual also calls for several safeguards, including requiring soldiers to report anything that appears to violate international treaties or standards of humane treatment.

Mr. Gandy said the new manual barred interrogators and other intelligence officials from posing as medics, journalists or chaplains to gain information from detainees. But they are allowed to use ruses, like falsely promising to free a captive in exchange for information, he said.

The manual is being approved by Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast, who commands the Army's Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. General Fast served in Iraq from July 2003 to June 2004 as the intelligence deputy for General Sanchez, and she played an extensive role in developing policies and practices for the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. An investigation by the Army inspector general recently exonerated her of any responsibility for the abuses.

Human rights groups reacted warily to reports of the new manual, in part because they have not seen a copy. "I've been nervous about this whole process," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The existing manual was clear. It was the exceptions that caused problems."

Last month, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III became the latest investigator to fault high-level American officials for failing to establish clear procedures for interrogating prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the most notorious abuses captured on video - those involving the military police at Abu Ghraib - did not involve interrogations, an independent panel headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger found last August that of 66 confirmed abuse cases up to that point, about one-third were related to the questioning of prisoners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/28/politics...print&position=

Mr Rumsfeld's first reaction was, I noticed, not that the photos and other evidence was disgusting and shameful, but that the person who let it get out was at fault. Did anyone else notice it?

In fact I have never seen him look truly sorry for what happened under his watch. It is as if he knows everything that is going on, and nothing surprises him. A better person would have resigned his post after that happened. But a better person would not have allowed it, by sending a clearer message to his subordinates that prisoners would have rights. Rights to visits, rights to seek legal counsel, and rights to be treated with dignity, as well as a day in court to make him know what he is supposed to have done wrong.

'Knowing the Bush Administration they'd form a commission to investigate and end up prosecuting and pursuing the media and the red cross who exposed the policies which led to Abu Ghraib and the abuses which occurred there....

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content?050214fa_fact6


OUTSOURCING TORTURE
by JANE MAYER
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07


On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man’s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.

During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of “the Special Removal Unit.” The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board.

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, “just began beating on me.” They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,” he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up,” he said. “You become like an animal.”

A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as “extraordinary rendition.” This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture.

Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it’s illegal,” he said. “Why, if they have suspicions, don’t they question people within the boundary of the law?”

Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition—becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, “an abomination.” What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects—people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants—came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms “illegal enemy combatants.” Many of them have never been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to obtain. “I’ve asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers,” he said. “They refuse to answer. All they will say is that they’re in compliance with the law.”

Although the full scope of the extraordinary-rendition program isn’t known, several recent cases have come to light that may well violate U.S. law. In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”

The Bush Administration, however, has argued that the threat posed by stateless terrorists who draw no distinction between military and civilian targets is so dire that it requires tough new rules of engagement. This shift in perspective, labelled the New Paradigm in a memo written by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, “places a high premium on . . . the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians,” giving less weight to the rights of suspects. It also questions many international laws of war. Five days after Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Vice-President Dick Cheney, reflecting the new outlook, argued, on “Meet the Press,” that the government needed to “work through, sort of, the dark side.” Cheney went on, “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

The extraordinary-rendition program bears little relation to the system of due process afforded suspects in crimes in America. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. This jet, which has been registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing, of Portland, Oregon, has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts.

The most common destinations for rendered suspects are Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects. To justify sending detainees to these countries, the Administration appears to be relying on a very fine reading of an imprecise clause in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (which the U.S. ratified in 1994), requiring “substantial grounds for believing” that a detainee will be tortured abroad. Martin Lederman, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, after eight years, says, “The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That’s not enough. So there are ways to get around it.”

Administration officials declined to discuss the rendition program. But Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan expert on terrorist interrogations who has consulted with several intelligence agencies, argued that rough tactics “can save hundreds of lives.” He said, “When you capture a terrorist, he may know when the next operation will be staged, so it may be necessary to put a detainee under physical or psychological pressure. I disagree with physical torture, but sometimes the threat of it must be used.”

Rendition is just one element of the Administration’s New Paradigm. The C.I.A. itself is holding dozens of “high value” terrorist suspects outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., in addition to the estimated five hundred and fifty detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Administration confirmed the identities of at least ten of these suspects to the 9/11 Commission—including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top Al Qaeda operative, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a chief planner of the September 11th attacks—but refused to allow commission members to interview the men, and would not say where they were being held. Reports have suggested that C.I.A. prisons are being operated in Thailand, Qatar, and Afghanistan, among other countries. At the request of the C.I.A., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally ordered that a prisoner in Iraq be hidden from Red Cross officials for several months, and Army General Paul Kern told Congress that the C.I.A. may have hidden up to a hundred detainees. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which established norms on the treatment of soldiers and civilians captured in war, require the prompt registration of detainees, so that their treatment can be monitored, but the Administration argues that Al Qaeda members and supporters, who are not part of a state-sponsored military, are not covered by the Conventions.

The Bush Administration’s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by élite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture’s ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas. Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, “shock the conscience” of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world.

“It’s a big problem,” Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, says. “In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with these people?”



The criminal prosecution of terrorist suspects has not been a priority for the Bush Administration, which has focussed, rather, on preventing additional attacks. But some people who have been fighting terrorism for many years are concerned about unintended consequences of the Administration’s radical legal measures. Among these critics is Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert who helped establish the practice of rendition. Scheuer left the agency in 2004, and has written two acerbic critiques of the government’s fight against Islamic terrorism under the pseudonym Anonymous, the most recent of which, “Imperial Hubris,” was a best-seller.

Not long ago, Scheuer, who lives in northern Virginia, spoke openly for the first time about how he and several other top C.I.A. officials set up the program, in the mid-nineties. “It was begun in desperation, ” he told me. At the time, he was the head of the C.I.A.’s Islamic-militant unit, whose job was to “detect, disrupt, and dismantle” terrorist operations. His unit spent much of 1996 studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, “We went to the White House”—which was then occupied by the Clinton Administration—“and they said, ‘Do it.’ ” He added that Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. “He told me, ‘Figure it out by yourselves,’ ” Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scheuer sought the counsel of Mary Jo White, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who, along with a small group of F.B.I. agents, was pursuing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. In 1998, White’s team obtained an indictment against bin Laden, authorizing U.S. agents to bring him and his associates to the United States to stand trial. From the start, though, the C.I.A. was wary of granting terrorism suspects the due process afforded by American law. The agency did not want to divulge secrets about its intelligence sources and methods, and American courts demand transparency. Even establishing the chain of custody of key evidence—such as a laptop computer—could easily pose a significant problem: foreign governments might refuse to testify in U.S. courts about how they had obtained the evidence, for fear of having their secret coöperation exposed. (Foreign governments often worried about retaliation from their own Muslim populations.) The C.I.A. also felt that other agencies sometimes stood in its way. In 1996, for example, the State Department stymied a joint effort by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to question one of bin Laden’s cousins in America, because he had a diplomatic passport, which protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement. Describing the C.I.A.’s frustration, Scheuer said, “We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn’t capture them because we had nowhere to take them.” The agency realized that “we had to come up with a third party.”

The obvious choice, Scheuer said, was Egypt. The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel, Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat, had a reputation for brutality. Egypt had been frequently cited by the State Department for torture of prisoners. According to a 2002 report, detainees were “stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water [and] sexually assaulted.” Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s leader, who came to office in 1981, after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists, was determined to crack down on terrorism. His prime political enemies were radical Islamists, hundreds of whom had fled the country and joined Al Qaeda. Among these was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician from Cairo, who went to Afghanistan and eventually became bin Laden’s deputy.

In 1995, Scheuer said, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that it had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally—including access to a small fleet of aircraft. Egypt embraced the idea. “What was clever was that some of the senior people in Al Qaeda were Egyptian,” Scheuer said. “It served American purposes to get these people arrested, and Egyptian purposes to get these people back, where they could be interrogated.” Technically, U.S. law requires the C.I.A. to seek “assurances” from foreign governments that rendered suspects won’t be tortured. Scheuer told me that this was done, but he was “not sure” if any documents confirming the arrangement were signed.

A series of spectacular covert operations followed from this secret pact. On September 13, 1995, U.S. agents helped kidnap Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt’s most wanted terrorists, in Croatia. Qassem had fled to Europe after being linked by Egypt to the assassination of Sadat; he had been sentenced to death in absentia. Croatian police seized Qassem in Zagreb and handed him over to U.S. agents, who interrogated him aboard a ship cruising the Adriatic Sea and then took him back to Egypt. Once there, Qassem disappeared. There is no record that he was put on trial. Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist who covers human-rights issues, said, “We believe he was executed.”

A more elaborate operation was staged in Tirana, Albania, in the summer of 1998. According to the Wall Street Journal, the C.I.A. provided the Albanian intelligence service with equipment to wiretap the phones of suspected Muslim militants. Tapes of the conversations were translated into English, and U.S. agents discovered that they contained lengthy discussions with Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy. The U.S. pressured Egypt for assistance; in June, Egypt issued an arrest warrant for Shawki Salama Attiya, one of the militants. Over the next few months, according to the Journal, Albanian security forces, working with U.S. agents, killed one suspect and captured Attiya and four others. These men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned airbase, then flown by jet to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. Two other suspects, who had been sentenced to death in absentia, were hanged.

On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in which it threatened retaliation against the U.S. for the Albanian operation—in a “language they will understand.” Two days later, the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing two hundred and twenty-four people.

The U.S. began rendering terror suspects to other countries, but the most common destination remained Egypt. The partnership between the American and the Egyptian intelligence services was extraordinarily close: the Americans could give the Egyptian interrogators questions they wanted put to the detainees in the morning, Scheuer said, and get answers by the evening. The Americans asked to question suspects directly themselves, but, Scheuer said, the Egyptians refused. “We were never in the same room at the same time.”

Scheuer claimed that “there was a legal process” undergirding these early renditions. Every suspect who was apprehended, he said, had been convicted in absentia. Before a suspect was captured, a dossier was prepared containing the equivalent of a rap sheet. The C.I.A.’s legal counsel signed off on every proposed operation. Scheuer said that this system prevented innocent people from being subjected to rendition. “Langley would never let us proceed unless there was substance,” he said. Moreover, Scheuer emphasized, renditions were pursued out of expedience—“not out of thinking it was the best policy.”

Since September 11th, as the number of renditions has grown, and hundreds of terrorist suspects have been deposited indefinitely in places like Guantánamo Bay, the shortcomings of this approach have become manifest. “Are we going to hold these people forever?” Scheuer asked. “The policymakers hadn’t thought what to do with them, and what would happen when it was found out that we were turning them over to governments that the human-rights world reviled.” Once a detainee’s rights have been violated, he says, “you absolutely can’t” reinstate him into the court system. “You can’t kill him, either,” he added. “All we’ve done is create a nightmare.”



On a bleak winter day in Trenton, New Jersey, Dan Coleman, an ex-F.B.I. agent who retired last July, because of asthma, scoffed at the idea that a C.I.A. agent was now having compunctions about renditions. The C.I.A., Coleman said, liked rendition from the start. “They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again,” he said. “They were proud of it.”

For ten years, Coleman worked closely with the C.I.A. on counter-terrorism cases, including the Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. His methodical style of detective work, in which interrogations were aimed at forging relationships with detainees, became unfashionable after September 11th, in part because the government was intent on extracting information as quickly as possible, in order to prevent future attacks. Yet the more patient approach used by Coleman and other agents had yielded major successes. In the Embassy-bombings case, they helped convict four Al Qaeda operatives on three hundred and two criminal counts; all four men pleaded guilty to serious terrorism charges. The confessions the F.B.I. agents elicited, and the trial itself, which ended in May, 2001, created an invaluable public record about Al Qaeda, including details about its funding mechanisms, its internal structure, and its intention to obtain weapons of mass destruction. (The political leadership in Washington, unfortunately, did not pay sufficient attention.)

Coleman is a political nonpartisan with a law-and-order mentality. His eldest son is a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan. Yet Coleman was troubled by the Bush Administration’s New Paradigm. Torture, he said, “has become bureaucratized.” Bad as the policy of rendition was before September 11th, Coleman said, “afterward, it really went out of control.” He explained, “Now, instead of just sending people to third countries, we’re holding them ourselves. We’re taking people, and keeping them in our own custody in third countries. That’s an enormous problem.” Egypt, he pointed out, at least had an established legal system, however harsh. “There was a process there,” Coleman said. “But what’s our process? We have no method over there other than our laws—and we’ve decided to ignore them. What are we now, the Huns? If you don’t talk to us, we’ll kill you?”

From the beginning of the rendition program, Coleman said, there was no doubt that Egypt engaged in torture. He recalled the case of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing who fled to Egypt. The U.S. requested his return, and the Egyptians handed him over—wrapped head to toe in duct tape, like a mummy. (In another incident, an Egyptian with links to Al Qaeda who had coöperated with the U.S. government in a terrorism trial was picked up in Cairo and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities until U.S. diplomats secured his release. For days, he had been chained to a toilet, where guards had urinated on him.)

Under such circumstances, it might seem difficult for the U.S. government to legally justify dispatching suspects to Egypt. But Coleman said that since September 11th the C.I.A. “has seemed to think it’s operating under different rules, that it has extralegal abilities outside the U.S.” Agents, he said, have “told me that they have their own enormous office of general counsel that rarely tells them no. Whatever they do is all right. It all takes place overseas.”

Coleman was angry that lawyers in Washington were redefining the parameters of counter-terrorism interrogations. “Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who’s been deprived of his clothes?” he asked. “He’s going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He’ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There’s no value in it.” Coleman said that he had learned to treat even the most despicable suspects as if there were “a personal relationship, even if you can’t stand them.” He said that many of the suspects he had interrogated expected to be tortured, and were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less, Coleman said. He had also found that a defendant’s right to legal counsel was beneficial not only to suspects but also to law-enforcement officers. Defense lawyers frequently persuaded detainees to coöperate with prosecutors, in exchange for plea agreements. “The lawyers show these guys there’s a way out,” Coleman said. “It’s human nature. People don’t coöperate with you unless they have some reason to.” He added, “Brutalization doesn’t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.”



The Bush Administration’s redefinition of the standards of interrogation took place almost entirely out of public view. One of the first officials to offer hints of the shift in approach was Cofer Black, who was then in charge of counter-terrorism at the C.I.A. On September 26, 2002, he addressed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and stated that the arrest and detention of terrorists was “a very highly classified area.” He added, “All you need to know is that there was a ‘before 9/11’ and there was an ‘after 9/11.’ After 9/11, the gloves came off.”

Laying the foundation for this shift was a now famous set of internal legal memos—some were leaked, others were made public by groups such as the N.Y.U. Center for Law and National Security. Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time. (A Yale Law School graduate and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, Yoo now teaches law at Berkeley.) Taken together, the memos advised the President that he had almost unfettered latitude in his prosecution of the war on terror. For many years, Yoo was a member of the Federalist Society, a fellowship of conservative intellectuals who view international law with skepticism, and September 11th offered an opportunity for him and others in the Administration to put their political ideas into practice. A former lawyer in the State Department recalled the mood of the Administration: “The Twin Towers were still smoldering. The atmosphere was intense. The tone at the top was aggressive—and understandably so. The Commander-in-Chief had used the words ‘dead or alive’ and vowed to bring the terrorists to justice or bring justice to them. There was a fury.”

Soon after September 11th, Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror. The lawyers classified these detainees not as civilians or prisoners of war—two categories of individuals protected by the Conventions—but as “illegal enemy combatants.” The rubric included not only Al Qaeda members and supporters but the entire Taliban, because, Yoo and other lawyers argued, the country was a “failed state.” Eric Lewis, an expert in international law who represents several Guantánamo detainees, said, “The Administration’s lawyers created a third category and cast them outside the law.”

The State Department, determined to uphold the Geneva Conventions, fought against Bush’s lawyers and lost. In a forty-page memo to Yoo, dated January 11, 2002 (which has not been publicly released), William Taft IV, the State Department legal adviser, argued that Yoo’s analysis was “seriously flawed.” Taft told Yoo that his contention that the President could disregard the Geneva Conventions was “untenable,” “incorrect,” and “confused.” Taft disputed Yoo’s argument that Afghanistan, as a “failed state,” was not covered by the Conventions. “The official United States position before, during, and after the emergence of the Taliban was that Afghanistan constituted a state,” he wrote. Taft also warned Yoo that if the U.S. took the war on terrorism outside the Geneva Conventions, not only could U.S. soldiers be denied the protections of the Conventions—and therefore be prosecuted for crimes, including murder—but President Bush could be accused of a “grave breach” by other countries, and be prosecuted for war crimes. Taft sent a copy of his memo to Gonzales, hoping that his dissent would reach the President. Within days, Yoo sent Taft a lengthy rebuttal.

Others in the Administration worried that the President’s lawyers were wayward. “Lawyers have to be the voice of reason and sometimes have to put the brakes on, no matter how much the client wants to hear something else,” the former State Department lawyer said. “Our job is to keep the train on the tracks. It’s not to tell the President, ‘Here are the ways to avoid the law.’ ” He went on, “There is no such thing as a non-covered person under the Geneva Conventions. It’s nonsense. The protocols cover fighters in everything from world wars to local rebellions.” The lawyer said that Taft urged Yoo and Gonzales to warn President Bush that he would “be seen as a war criminal by the rest of the world,” but Taft was ignored. This may be because President Bush had already made up his mind. According to top State Department officials, Bush decided to suspend the Geneva Conventions on January 8, 2002—three days before Taft sent his memo to Yoo.

The legal pronouncements from Washington about the status of detainees were painstakingly constructed to include numerous loopholes. For example, in February, 2002, President Bush issued a written directive stating that, even though he had determined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, all detainees should be treated “humanely.” A close reading of the directive, however, revealed that it referred only to military interrogators—not to C.I.A. officials. This exemption allowed the C.I.A. to continue using interrogation methods, including rendition, that stopped just short of torture. Further, an August, 2002, memo written largely by Yoo but signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argued that torture required the intent to inflict suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” According to the Times, a secret memo issued by Administration lawyers authorized the C.I.A. to use novel interrogation methods—including “water-boarding,” in which a suspect is bound and immersed in water until he nearly drowns. Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, told me that he had treated a number of people who had been subjected to such forms of near-asphyxiation, and he argued that it was indeed torture. Some victims were still traumatized years later, he said. One patient couldn’t take showers, and panicked when it rained. “The fear of being killed is a terrifying experience,” he said.

The Administration’s justification of the rough treatment of detainees appears to have passed down the chain of command. In late 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, photographs were taken that documented prisoners being subjected to grotesque abuse by U.S. soldiers. After the scandal became public, the Justice Department revised the narrow definition of torture outlined in the Bybee memo, using language that more strongly prohibited physical abuse during interrogations. But the Administration has fought hard against legislative efforts to rein in the C.I.A. In the past few months, Republican leaders, at the White House’s urging, have blocked two attempts in the Senate to ban the C.I.A. from using cruel and inhuman interrogation methods. An attempt in the House to outlaw extraordinary rendition, led by Representative Markey, also failed.

In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?” he said. “What were pirates? They weren’t fighting on behalf of any nation. What were slave traders? Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial, or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn’t deserve the protection of the laws of war.” Yoo cited precedents for his position. “The Lincoln assassins were treated this way, too,” he said. “They were tried in a military court, and executed.” The point, he said, was that the Geneva Conventions’ “simple binary classification of civilian or soldier isn’t accurate.”

Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”



A few months after September 11th, the U.S. gained custody of its first high-ranking Al Qaeda figure, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. He had run bin Laden’s terrorist training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, and was detained in Pakistan. Zacarias Moussaoui, who was already in U.S. custody, and Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, had both spent time at the Khalden camp. At the F.B.I.’s field office in New York, Jack Cloonan, an officer who had worked for the agency since 1972, struggled to maintain control of the legal process in Afghanistan. C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents were vying to take possession of Libi. Cloonan, who worked with Dan Coleman on anti-terrorism cases for many years, said he felt that “neither the Moussaoui case nor the Reid case was a slam dunk.” He became intent on securing Libi’s testimony as a witness against them. He advised his F.B.I. colleagues in Afghanistan to question Libi respectfully, “and handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He recalled, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’ ”

Cloonan’s F.B.I. colleagues advised Libi of his rights and took turns with C.I.A. agents in questioning him. After a few days, F.B.I. officials felt that they were developing a good rapport with him. The C.I.A. agents, however, felt that he was lying to them, and needed tougher interrogation.

To Cloonan’s dismay, the C.I.A. reportedly rendered Libi to Egypt. He was seen boarding a plane in Afghanistan, restrained by handcuffs and ankle cuffs, his mouth covered by duct tape. Cloonan, who retired from the F.B.I. in 2002, said, “At least we got information in ways that wouldn’t shock the conscience of the court. And no one will have to seek revenge for what I did.” He added, “We need to show the world that we can lead, and not just by military might.”

After Libi was taken to Egypt, the F.B.I. lost track of him. Yet he evidently played a crucial background role in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s momentous address to the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, which argued the case for a preëmptive war against Iraq. In his speech, Powell did not refer to Libi by name, but he announced to the world that “a senior terrorist operative” who “was responsible for one of Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan” had told U.S. authorities that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two Al Qaeda operatives in the use of “chemical or biological weapons.”

Last summer, Newsweek reported that Libi, who was eventually transferred from Egypt to Guantánamo Bay, was the source of the incendiary charge cited by Powell, and that he had recanted. By then, the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had passed and the 9/11 Commission had declared that there was no known evidence of a working relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Dan Coleman was disgusted when he heard about Libi’s false confession. “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq,” he said. “I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq. Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren’t any. The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.”

Most authorities on interrogation, in and out of government, agree that torture and lesser forms of physical coercion succeed in producing confessions. The problem is that these confessions aren’t necessarily true. Three of the Guantánamo detainees released by the U.S. to Great Britain last year, for example, had confessed that they had appeared in a blurry video, obtained by American investigators, that documented a group of acolytes meeting with bin Laden in Afghanistan. As reported in the London Observer, British intelligence officials arrived at Guantánamo with evidence that the accused men had been living in England at the time the video was made. The detainees told British authorities that they had been coerced into making false confessions.

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, told me that “the U.S. accepts quite a lot of intelligence from the Uzbeks” that has been extracted from suspects who have been tortured. This information was, he said, “largely rubbish.” He said he knew of “at least three” instances where the U.S. had rendered suspected militants from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Although Murray does not know the fate of the three men, he said, “They almost certainly would have been tortured.” In Uzbekistan, he said, “partial boiling of a hand or an arm is quite common.” He also knew of two cases in which prisoners had been boiled to death.

In 2002, Murray, concerned that America was complicit with such a regime, asked his deputy to discuss the problem with the C.I.A.’s station chief in Tashkent. He said that the station chief did not dispute that intelligence was being obtained under torture. But the C.I.A. did not consider this a problem. “There was no reason to think they were perturbed,” Murray told me.

Scientific research on the efficacy of torture and rough interrogation is limited, because of the moral and legal impediments to experimentation. Tom Parker, a former officer for M.I.5, the British intelligence agency, who teaches at Yale, argued that, whether or not forceful interrogations yield accurate information from terrorist suspects, a larger problem is that many detainees “have nothing to tell.” For many years, he said, British authorities subjected members of the Irish Republican Army to forceful interrogations, but, in the end, the government concluded that “detainees aren’t valuable.” A more effective strategy, Parker said, was “being creative” about human intelligence gathering, such as infiltration and eavesdropping. “The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties,” he said. “It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You’ll end up radicalizing the entire population.”



Although the Administration has tried to keep the details of extraordinary renditions secret, several accounts have surfaced that reveal how the program operates. On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm’s Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and Ahmed Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians’ clothes with scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits. As was reported by “Kalla Fakta,” a Swedish television news program, the suspects were blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons; according to a declassified Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet. Swedish officials have claimed that they received assurances from the Egyptians that Zery and Agiza would be treated humanely. But both suspects have said, through lawyers and family members, that they were tortured with electrical charges to their genitals. (Zery said that he was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.) After spending two years in an Egyptian prison, Zery was released. Agiza, a physician who had once been an ally of Zawahiri but later renounced him and terrorism, was convicted on terrorism charges by Egypt’s Supreme Military Court. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

Another case suggests that the Bush Administration is authorizing the rendition of suspects for whom it has little evidence of guilt. Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was apprehended in Pakistan in October, 2001. According to his wife, Habib, a radical Muslim with four children, was visiting the country to tour religious schools and determine if his family should move to Pakistan. A spokesman at the Pentagon has claimed that Habib—who has expressed support for Islamist causes—spent most of his trip in Afghanistan, and was “either supporting hostile forces or on the battlefield fighting illegally against the U.S.” Last month, after a three-year ordeal, Habib was released without charges.

Habib is one of a handful of people subjected to rendition who are being represented pro bono by human-rights lawyers. According to a recently unsealed document prepared by Joseph Margulies, a lawyer affiliated with the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School, Habib said that he was first interrogated in Pakistan for three weeks, in part at a facility in Islamabad, where he said he was brutalized. Some of his interrogators, he claimed, spoke English with American accents. (Having lived in Australia for years, Habib is comfortable in English.) He was then placed in the custody of Americans, two of whom wore black short-sleeved shirts and had distinctive tattoos: one depicted an American flag attached to a flagpole shaped like a finger, the other a large cross. The Americans took him to an airfield, cut his clothes off with scissors, dressed him in a jumpsuit, covered his eyes with opaque goggles, and placed him aboard a private plane. He was flown to Egypt.

According to Margulies, Habib was held and interrogated for six months. “Never, to my knowledge, did he make an appearance in any court,” Margulies told me. Margulies was also unaware of any evidence suggesting that the U.S. sought a promise from Egypt that Habib would not be tortured. For his part, Habib claimed to have been subjected to horrific conditions. He said that he was beaten frequently with blunt instruments, including an object that he likened to an electric “cattle prod.” And he was told that if he didn’t confess to belonging to Al Qaeda he would be anally raped by specially trained dogs. (Hossam el-Hamalawy said that Egyptian security forces train German shepherds for police work, and that other prisoners have also been threatened with rape by trained dogs, although he knows of no one who has been assaulted in this way.) Habib said that he was shackled and forced to stand in three torture chambers: one room was filled with water up to his chin, requiring him to stand on tiptoe for hours; another chamber, filled with water up to his knees, had a ceiling so low that he was forced into a prolonged, painful stoop; in the third, he stood in water up to his ankles, and within sight of an electric switch and a generator, which his jailers said would be used to electrocute him if he didn’t confess. Habib’s lawyer said that he submitted to his interrogators’ demands and made multiple confessions, all of them false. (Egyptian authorities have described such allegations of torture as “mythology.”)

After his imprisonment in Egypt, Habib said that he was returned to U.S. custody and was flown to Bagram Air Force Base, in Afghanistan, and then on to Guantánamo Bay, where he was detained until last month. On January 11th, a few days after the Washington Post published an article on Habib’s case, the Pentagon, offering virtually no explanation, agreed to release him into the custody of the Australian government. “Habib was released because he was hopelessly embarrassing,” Eric Freedman, a professor at Hofstra Law School, who has been involved in the detainees’ legal defense, says. “It’s a large crack in the wall in a house of cards that is midway through tumbling down.” In a prepared statement, a Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, said there was “no evidence” that Habib “was tortured or abused” while he was in U.S. custody. He also said that Habib had received “Al Qaeda training,” which included instruction in making false abuse allegations. Habib’s claims, he suggested, “fit the standard operating procedure.”

The U.S. government has not responded directly to Habib’s charge that he was rendered to Egypt. However, several other men who were recently released from Guantánamo reported that Habib told them about it. Jamal al-Harith, a British detainee who was sent home to Manchester, England, last March, told me in a phone interview that at one point he had been placed in a cage across from Habib. “He said that he had been in Egypt for about six months, and they had injected him with drugs, and hung him from the ceiling, and beaten him very, very badly,” Harith recalled. “He seemed to be in pain. He was haggard-looking. I never saw him walk. He always had to be held up.”

Another piece of evidence that may support Habib’s story is a set of flight logs documenting the travels of a white Gulfstream V jet—the plane that seems to have been used for renditions by the U.S. government. These logs show that on April 9, 2002, the jet left Dulles Airport, in Washington, and landed in Cairo. According to Habib’s attorney, this was around the same time that Habib said he was released by the Egyptians in Cairo, and returned to U.S. custody. The flight logs were obtained by Stephen Grey, a British journalist who has written a number of stories on renditions for British publications, including the London Sunday Times. Grey’s logs are incomplete, but they chronicle some three hundred flights over three years by the fourteen-seat jet, which was marked on its tail with the code N379P. (It was recently changed, to N8068V.) All the flights originated from Dulles Airport, and many of them landed at restricted U.S. military bases.



Even if Habib is a terrorist aligned with Al Qaeda, as Pentagon officials have claimed, it seems unlikely that prosecutors would ever be able to build a strong case against him, given the treatment that he allegedly received in Egypt. John Radsan, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, in St. Paul, Minnesota, who worked in the general counsel’s office of the C.I.A. until last year, said, “I don’t think anyone’s thought through what we do with these people.”

Similar problems complicate the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in March, 2003. Mohammed has reportedly been “water-boarded” during interrogations. If so, Radsan said, “it would be almost impossible to take him into a criminal trial. Any evidence derived from his interrogation could be seen as fruit from the poisonous tree. I think the government is considering some sort of military tribunal somewhere down the line. But, even there, there are still constitutional requirements that you can’t bring in involuntary confessions.”

The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, in Alexandria, Virginia—the only U.S. criminal trial of a suspect linked to the September 11th attacks—is stalled. It’s been more than three years since Attorney General John Ashcroft called Moussaoui’s indictment “a chronicle of evil.” The case has been held up by Moussaoui’s demand—and the Bush Administration’s refusal—to let him call as witnesses Al Qaeda members held in government custody, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (Bin al-Shibh is thought to have been tortured.) Government attorneys have argued that producing the witnesses would disrupt the interrogation process.

Similarly, German officials fear that they may be unable to convict any members of the Hamburg cell that is believed to have helped plan the September 11th attacks, on charges connected to the plot, in part because the U.S. government refuses to produce bin al-Shibh and Mohammed as witnesses. Last year, one of the Hamburg defendants, Mounir Motassadeq, became the first person to be convicted in the planning of the attacks, but his guilty verdict was overturned by an appeals court, which found the evidence against him too weak.

Motassadeq is on trial again, but, in accordance with German law, he is no longer being imprisoned. Although he is alleged to have overseen the payment of funds into the accounts of the September 11th hijackers—and to have been friendly with Mohamed Atta, who flew one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers—he walks freely to and from the courthouse each day. The U.S. has supplied the German court with edited summaries of testimony from Mohammed and bin al-Shibh. But Gerhard Strate, Motassadeq’s defense lawyer, told me, “We are not satisfied with the summaries. If you want to find the truth, we need to know who has been interrogating them, and under what circumstances. We don’t have any answers to this.” The refusal by the U.S. to produce the witnesses in person, Strate said, “puts the court in a ridiculous position.” He added, “I don’t know why they won’t produce the witnesses. The first thing you think is that the U.S. government has something to hide.”

In fact, the Justice Department recently admitted that it had something to hide in relation to Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer. The government invoked the rarely used “state secrets privilege” in a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Arar’s lawyers against the U.S. government. To go forward in an open court, the government said, would jeopardize the “intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” Barbara Olshansky, the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Arar, said that government lawyers “are saying this case can’t be tried, and the classified information on which they’re basing this argument can’t even be shared with the opposing lawyers. It’s the height of arrogance—they think they can do anything they want in the name of the global war on terrorism.”



Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.

At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.

Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.

Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.”

In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:

Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.


John Radsan, the former C.I.A. lawyer, offered a reply of sorts. “As a society, we haven’t figured out what the rough rules are yet,” he said. “There are hardly any rules for illegal enemy combatants. It’s the law of the jungle. And right now we happen to be the strongest animal.”

Detainee Questioning Was Faked, Book Says
U.S. Military Denies Staging Interviews

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 29, 2005; A21



The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.

Former Army Sgt. Erik Saar said the military chose detainees for the mock interrogations who previously had been cooperative and instructed them to repeat what they had told interrogators in earlier sessions, according to an interview with the CBS television program "60 Minutes," which is slated to air Sunday night.

"They would find a detainee that they knew to have been cooperative," Saar told CBS. "They would ask the interrogator to go back over the same information," he said, calling it "a fictitious world" created for the visitors.

Saar worked as a translator at Guantanamo from December 2002 to June 2003. During that time, several members of Congress reported visiting the base, but military officials said they do not know precisely how many toured it.

Saar also told CBS, and claims in his upcoming book, "Inside the Wire," that a few dozen of the more than 750 men who have been held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay were terrorists, and that little valuable information has been obtained from them.

A spokesman for the U.S. military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay operations, dismissed the allegation of mock interrogations.

"I can say that we do not stage interrogations for VIP visits at Guantanamo," said Col. David McWilliams. "I don't want to characterize or comment on what Sergeant Saar believes. He's written his book."

A Defense Department official familiar with interrogations said Saar would not be privy to interview strategies. He noted that interrogators often ask the same questions in separate sessions to check a detainee's account.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said she was "initially impressed" by interrogations she saw on a tour of Guantanamo Bay in February 2004 with members of the Homeland Security Committee. The delegation watched through mirrored glass as interrogators spoke in conversational tones and rewarded cooperative detainees with ice cream. Now, she believes, "we were duped."

"The amount and depth of the torture that's been alleged and corroborated leaves no doubt in my mind that what we saw was a staged interrogation," Norton said.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has led the legal challenge of detainees' imprisonment and alleged abusive interrogation techniques, said Saar's claims support lawyers' suspicions that the official tours of Guantanamo were phony.

"They couldn't show people what they were really doing, because what they were really doing was illegal and inhumane," Ratner said. "It's such a fraud. It reminds me of the special concentration camps set up in World War II. They would take the Red Cross there to see there was an orchestra and all sorts of nice things."

Saar also alleges in his book that he witnessed female interrogators use sexual humiliation and taunting in an effort to get detainees to talk. The general tactics he described were corroborated by Army officials, who have acknowledged disciplining two female interrogators for such acts. Numerous detainees have alleged they were victims of similar sexually suggestive interrogations.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2801639_pf.html

April 30, 2005
Young Reservist Strikes Plea Deal Over Abu Ghraib
By KATE ZERNIKE

Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the 22-year-old woman who became a vivid symbol of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, will plead guilty on Monday to reduced charges, her lawyers said yesterday.

Although the lawyers would not provide specifics about her plea agreement, two people close to the prosecution said she would face no more than 30 months in prison.

Private England, an Army reservist from West Virginia, became infamous in photographs from the prison as the woman holding the leash around the neck of a naked and crawling Iraqi detainee.In other photographs, she appeared grinning or giving a thumbs-up over a pile of naked detainees, her teeth clenching a cigarette.

The photographs, beamed out over the Internet from the prison, were published around the world last spring and reproduced on billboards in some Arab countries, setting off widespread outrage against the American military. They prompted Congressional hearings and 10 Pentagon investigations into accusations of abuse at American detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Since then, more than 130 soldiers have been punished for abusing detainees at detention centers or in the battlefield.

Private England had been facing 161/2 years in prison on nine counts of conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment and indecent acts, and was to begin her court martial on Monday at Fort Hood, Tex. Instead, said one of her lawyers, Capt. Jonathan Crisp, she will enter a guilty plea on seven counts and face a jury at a sentencing hearing.

Captain Crisp said that the reduced charges carried a maximum sentence of 11 years. But he said her defense team would present evidence that she has a history of mental health problems and learning disabilities. He said the lawyers would also present evidence that Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., another soldier, who military investigators said was the ringleader of the abuse, and who was her boyfriend at the time, was a corrupting influence on her.

Lawyers for Private England and prosecutors met yesterday afternoon to work out the details of the plea deal. "Considering where we were, we were pleased," Captain Crisp said. "It's a fairly good deal."

Dan Hassett, a spokesman for prosecutors at Fort Hood, said they could neither confirm nor deny any plea agreement until the hearing Monday. But others close to the prosecution confirmed the agreement.

Six other soldiers were implicated in the abuse seen in the photographs from Abu Ghraib; all seven were reservists with the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cresaptown, Md. Four have pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced punishments; one, Specialist Sabrina Harman, faces a court-martial next month . Mr. Graner was sentenced in January to 10 years in prison and dismissed from the military. He is in a military prison in Leavenworth, Kan.

The seven soldiers had defended themselves by saying they were simply following orders. Investigations showed that the detention center was chaotic and poorly run, and that rules on treatment of detainees were vague and chang